W.R. Hearst's Grandson Reviews A Biography On His Mistress

In this featured article on MARION DAVIES, I’ve brought you a review from W.R. Hearst’s grandson (Will Hearst) who founded the online journal – ALTA ONLINE.

Grandson, Will Hearst, reviewed Lara Gabrielle’s new biography (published in 2022), “Captain of Her Soul: The Life of Marion Davies.”

The book gives us an insider’s look into this leading lady’s life. However, the author steers away from too much salacious detail, but has clearly done deep research on the Hearst family from the viewpoint of Marion Davies.

W.R Hearst (the 1st) and Marion Davies below

william randolph hearst and his mistress marion davies

Below is most of the article from Hearst’s ALTA ONLINE review…

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https://www.altaonline.com/books/nonfiction/a40983928/marion-davies-will-hearst/

A new biography of the famous actress reveals her to be far more than the mistress of William Randolph Hearst.

BY WILL HEARST PUBLISHED: SEP 26, 2022

“It isn’t every day you are asked to review the biography of your grandfather’s mistress.

Time tends to soften the intensity of family wounds. A dutiful grandson, I’ve always had the greatest regard for my grandfather. As a little boy, I spent summer vacations at San Simeon, his castle in Central California.

It seemed like a marvelous Disneyland, with sun-filled gardens, a compound on the scale of a hilltop Spanish village, an amazing art collection, and grand architecture—which meant nothing to me then, except that it was something impressive, extraordinary, rare; and the garden smelled very good.

I knew that my dad, one of five sons (W.R. Jr., widely known as Bill Hearst), had reservations about Marion Davies (his mistress). I came to believe, as a young adult, that three of my uncles who were younger than Bill had even more disdain for her. Once you reach a certain age, if your parents’ marriage breaks up, you are a little more able to understand the complexities of human relationships.

But if you are a younger child of the family, it may feel like a terrible betrayal: of your parents by each other and, perhaps, by your parents of you. I didn’t grow up with any personal impression of the Hearst-Davies affair; it was an unspoken subject, until I went to see the film Citizen Kane as a college student in the late 1960s.

The movie seemed very glamorous.

And of course, it’s a riveting, legendary motion picture, though I thought some of the portrayals seemed overly dramatic. And Xanadu, the movie’s castle, seemed completely wrong from my own personal experience of San Simeon.

By my mid-20s, I had become a newspaper reporter, and a few years later I was a magazine editor working for Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone. I came across the Davies memoir from 1975, The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst.

Long in paperback, this testimony of Davies’s was sold for many years at the Hearst Castle gift shop. It’s not a real autobiography, more a lengthy interview—but it was the first time I heard her voice. Or began to understand that she, too, was a historical person with emotions, ambitions, and, of course, frustrations, along with a celebrated film career.

Now, finally, there is a deeply researched and fair-minded biography of Davies’s life and movie work: Captain of Her Soul: The Life of Marion Davies, by Lara Gabrielle.

In this book, Davies is not simply the consort of a famous man—she’s a working actress, someone with her own personality, judgments, and perspective.” – BOOK EXCERPT

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It’s continues…

“Gabrielle’s work offers a look at my own family’s mythology through the opposite end of the telescope: from the viewpoint of a woman who was part of my grandfather’s life—but who saw the world in different terms.

Davies was a remarkable person who should be known for her philanthropic generosity as much as for her movies. But her life story has been overshadowed until now by the great men who ruled the earth in her generation, industry, and epoch.

The author deserves special credit since this was a difficult subject that she took on with intense scholarly devotion. This biography is not merely a summer beach read but a careful examination, a precisely drawn work, so it’s an enormous adjunct to our understanding of Hearst and Davies’s era and the movie business back then.

Leaving aside the opinions of the Hearst family, Davies’s life story has been in the shadow of so much mythology.

One major overhang is the Orson Welles penumbra—i.e., the character of Susan Alexander Kane in Citizen Kane is a shallow and grasping woman who has no talent as an opera singer but has a boyfriend who can use his newspapers to promote her career. Welles wrote on more than one occasion that this was one of the few regrets he had about the film.

Sadly, the Susan Alexander character has become a substitute for the real Marion Davies. Welles felt he owed her an apology and wrote the foreword to Davies’s memoir, which was published posthumously. Seven years later, in 1982, he tried again to make amends for the conflation of Alexander with Davies: “It seemed to me to be something of a dirty trick and still strikes me as something of a dirty trick, what we did to her.”

As a film viewer, I always thought this was just one of the things that happen when you’re making a movie as opposed to writing history—so I admired Gabrielle’s effort to excavate the real Davies. It was a project facing a stiff headwind.

Another difficulty is the Hearst Castle tour guide problem—for almost 60 years, the standard spiel has tended to present some hybrid People magazine version of Susan Alexander.

The tired tourist is fed a hackneyed but lurid tale of extramarital adventures and lavish costume parties by the Neptune Pool. This version of Davies as a kind of party girl with no actual career of her own is another obstacle of mythology—a simpler, faster, easier snapshot to remember—and it corresponds to the dated pop culture view of actresses behaving badly with wealthy men.”