Q242416

Biography

Marion Davies (born Marion Cecilia Douras; January 3, 1897 – September 22, 1961) was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies left the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl. As a teenager, she appeared in several Broadway musicals and one film, Runaway Romany (1917). She soon became a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies. While performing in the 1916 Follies, the nineteen-year-old Marion met the fifty-three-year-old newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and became his mistress. Hearst took over management of Davies's career and promoted her as a film actress. Hearst financed Davies’s pictures and promoted her career extensively in his newspapers and Hearst newsreels. He founded Cosmopolitan Pictures to produce her films. By 1924, Davies was the number one female box office star in Hollywood because of the popularity of When Knighthood Was in Flower and Little Old New York, which were among the biggest box-office hits of their respective years. During the zenith of the Jazz Age, Davies became renowned as the hostess of lavish soirees for Hollywood actors and political elites. However, in 1924, her name became linked with scandal when film producer Thomas Ince died at a party aboard Hearst's yacht. Following the decline of her film career during the Great Depression, Davies struggled with alcoholism. She retired from the screen in 1937 to devote herself to an ailing Hearst and charitable work. In Hearst's declining years, Davies remained his steadfast companion until his death in 1951. Eleven weeks after Hearst's death, she married sea captain Horace Brown. Their marriage lasted until Davies's death at 64 from malignant osteomyelitis (bone cancer) of the jaw in 1961. By the time of her death, her popular association with the character of Susan Alexander Kane in the film Citizen Kane (1941) already overshadowed Davies's legacy as a talented actress. The title character's second wife—an attractive but untalented singer whom he tries to promote—was widely assumed to be based upon Davies. However, many commentators, including writer–director Orson Welles, defended Davies's record as a gifted actress and comedienne to whom Hearst's patronage did more harm than good. In his final years, Welles attempted to correct the widespread misconceptions the film had created about Davies's popularity and talents as an actress.

== Early life and education == Marion Cecilia Douras was born on January 3, 1897, in Brooklyn, the youngest of five children born to Bernard J. Douras, a lawyer and judge in New York City, and Rose Reilly. Her father performed the civil marriage of socialite Gloria Gould Bishop. She had three older sisters, Ethel, Rose, and Reine. An older brother, Charles, drowned. His name was subsequently given to Davies's nephew, screenwriter Charles Lederer, the son of Davies's sister Reine Davies. The Douras family lived near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Educated in the Sacred Heart religious convent near the Hudson River and later a religious convent near Tours, France, Davies was uninterested in her academic studies and very unhappy as a child supervised by Catholic nuns. Her family was close friends with architect Stanford White, and Davies grew up learning about the Evelyn Nesbit sex scandal. Davies struggled with her stutter as a child, and convinced her mother to let her leave school early due to the torment of her classmates and teachers. As a teenager, Marion left school to pursue a career as a showgirl. When her sister Reine adopted the stage name of Davies after seeing a real estate billboard advertisement, Marion followed suit.

== Career ==

=== Early career on stage and in film ===

Davies worked as a chorus line dancer starting with Chin-Chin, a 1914 musical starring David C. Montgomery and Fred Stone, at the old Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia. She made her Broadway debut starring in the show at the Globe Theatre on October 20. She also appeared in Nobody Home, Miss Information and Stop, Look and Listen. When not dancing, she modeled for illustrators Harrison Fisher and Howard Chandler Christy. In 1916, Davies was signed as a featured player in the Ziegfeld Follies. However, she encountered difficulties with her career as a Ziegfeld girl, as her persistent stammer prevented her from pronouncing any lines. Consequently, she was relegated only to dancing routines. While working for Florenz Ziegfeld, a cavalcade of admirers pursued her sexually. She came to loathe young college men: "The stage-door-Johnnies [sic] I didn't like. Especially those who came from Yale." During one infamous show starring Gaby Deslys, rowdy undergraduates from Yale pelted Davies and other chorus dancers with tomatoes and rotten eggs to show their displeasure with the performance. While dancing in the Follies at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York City, the teenage Davies was first observed by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who was seated in the front row of the audience. Recalling this first encounter, Davies indicated she was afraid of Hearst initially:

[Hearst] always sat in the front row at the Follies. The girls in the show told me who he was. They said 'Look out for him—he's looking at you. He's a wolf in sheep's clothing'...He sent me flowers and little gifts, like silver boxes or gloves or candy. I wasn't the only one he sent gifts to, but all the girls thought he was particularly looking at me, and the older ones would say 'Look out'. Hearst purportedly went to the Follies show every night for eight weeks solely to gaze at Davies. Without Davies's knowledge, Hearst clandestinely arranged for an intermediary from Campbell's Studio to invite her to be photographed in ornate costumes such as a Japanese geisha and a virginal bride. While the photos were being taken, Davies realized Hearst secretly was present in the darkness of the photography studio. Terrified, she fled to the dressing room and locked the door. However, Hearst abruptly departed without introducing himself. After months passed, they saw each other again in Palm Beach, Florida, but Hearst's wife Millicent Hearst was present. They did not become intimate until sometime later. After making her screen debut in 1916, and modelling gowns by Lady Duff-Gordon in a fashion newsreel, Davies appeared in Runaway Romany (1917), her first feature film. Davies wrote the film, which was directed by her brother-in-law, producer George W. Lederer. She continued to alternate between stage and screen until 1920 when she made her last revue appearance in Ed Wynn's Carnival.

=== Hearst and Cosmopolitan Pictures ===

In 1918, Hearst formed Cosmopolitan Pictures and asked Davies to sign a $500-per-week exclusive contract with his studio. After she signed, 21-year-old Davies and 58-year-old Hearst began a sexual relationship. Using his vast newspaper empire and Hearst Metrotone Newsreels, Hearst decided to promote Davies on an enormous scale. His newsreels touted her social activities, and a reporter from the Los Angeles Examiner was assigned the full-time job of recounting Davies's daily exploits in print. Hearst expended an estimated $7 million on promoting Davies's career (equivalent to $156,770,833 in 2025). Soon after, Hearst—who was still married to Millicent Hearst—moved Davies with her mother and sisters into an elegant Manhattan townhouse at 331 Riverside Drive, at the corner of Riverside Drive and W. 105th Street. Hearst ensured that, "Marion's new abode was nothing less than a palace fit for a movie-queen—especially since the queen would frequently be receiving the press on the premises." Cecilia of the Pink Roses in 1918 was her first film, backed by Hearst. He next secured Cosmopolitan's distribution deals, first with Paramount Pictures, then with Samuel Goldwyn Productions, and with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. During the next ten years, Davies appeared in 29 films, an average of almost three films a year. One of her best known roles was as Mary Tudor in When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), directed by Robert G. Vignola, with whom she collaborated on several films. The 1922–23 period may have been her most successful as an actress, with both When Knighthood Was in Flower and Little Old New York ranking among the top three box-office hits of those years. She was named the number one female box-office star by theater owners and crowned "Queen of the Screen" at their 1924 Hollywood convention. Other hit silent films included: Beverly of Graustark, The Cardboard Lover, Enchantment, The Bride's Play, Lights of Old Broadway, Zander the Great, The Red Mill, Yolanda, Beauty's Worth, and The Restless Sex.