In Marion Davies’ posthumous memoir, “The Times We Had,” published in 1985 based on her audio recordings, she says, “I couldn’t act, but the idea of silent pictures appealed to me because I couldn’t talk either. Silent pictures were right up my alley, and that’s how I got all the bad notices.”

But despite minimizing her talent as she did throughout her life, Davies was one of the biggest stars of the 1920s and was named ‘Queen of the Screen’ alongside the ‘King’ Rudolph Valentino in 1923 by theater owners. Her film When Knighthood Was in Flower, released the previous year, was the most expensive movie made at the time and was a huge success at the box office, as was Little Old New York, released in 1923. In her career, she starred in 45 films of which 17 were talkies. She was always the star in all of them. In the Quigley Publishing Company’s annual poll of the Top Ten Money-making Stars, she was featured in four: 1921, 1923, 1924 and 1925. But she still maintained, “With me, it was 5% talent and 95% publicity.”

Davies had huge trepidation about making the transition from silents to talkies because of a persistent stutter. She says in her memoir, “I really wanted to give up when the talkies came in. I was all right in silent movies when I just had to make faces at the camera. But I wasn’t interested in silent films. It wasn’t really work. When the talkies began, I realized I had to work; I couldn’t stall around anymore. But even when I worked hard, I still wound up at zero. I had tried, anyway.”

Perhaps the reason Davies was insecure about her abilities was that her natural comedic gifts were not exploited fully by her paramour and Svengali, William Randolph Hearst, who micromanaged her career and controlled her image, determined to make her a serious actress, using the power of his newspaper empire and newsreels to promote her and her films. He often refused to let her act opposite handsome leading men and vetoed all onscreen embraces and kissing. He would even rewrite her scripts. He was said to have spent $7 million on her publicity throughout her career.

The two met when she was 19 and performing on Broadway as a Ziegfeld featured performer. Hearst was 53. They started an affair that would last 34 years. Davies says in “The Times We Had” that Hearst was desperate to marry her, but his Catholic wife refused to give him a divorce. She said it didn’t bother her that they weren’t married, though her friend Lita Grey (Charlie Chaplin’s second wife) wrote in her own memoir that Davis told her: “God, I’d give everything I have to marry that silly old man. Not for the money and security – he’s given me more than I’ll ever need. Not because he’s such a cozy companion, either… No, you know what he gives me, sugar? He gives me the feeling I’m worth something to him.”

Hearst set up Cosmopolitan Pictures in 1918 to produce the movies he picked for Davies, lining up studio deal for distribution with MGM, which got rights to film stories that appeared in Hearst’s publications. Hearst preferred to have her act in period movies like Buried Treasure (1921) with elaborate costumes and sets. She was making $10,000 a week at MGM, plus another $10,000 as president of Cosmopolitan Productions ($300,000 in today’s money), plus profits from her films.

Marion Cecelia Douras was born in Brooklyn on January 3, 1897, the youngest of five, all of whom went on the stage as teenagers. She first appeared in the musical Chin Chin in 1914, and continued her career on Broadway in various shows, including the “Ziegfeld Follies of 1916” when she met Hearst. By then she had changed her name to Davies. Ever ambitious, she then tried out for the movies. Her first silent was Runaway Romany in 1917 for which she wrote the scenario, but Hearst financed her second picture, Cecilia of the Pink Roses, the following year. Then Hearst moved Cosmopolitan and Davies to Hollywood and set her up in a Santa Monica mansion dubbed the Ocean House. Now the Annenberg Community Beach House sits on the 5-acre oceanfront site where Davies and Hearst built their $2 million home which boasted more than a hundred rooms and a marble swimming pool. The two became leading lights of the Hollywood social scene and hosted lavish parties for their movie friends such as Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and Greta Garbo.

Some of these friends were invited to join the couple on their yacht, the Oneida, in 1924, to celebrate the birthday of producer Thomas Ince. Ince reportedly took ill during the festivities onboard and left for Los Angeles, dying on the way. But rumors were rife that Ince did not die of a heart condition as the story was put out, but that Hearst shot and killed him by mistake, thinking he was aiming for Chaplin who he suspected of having an affair with Davies. There was no investigation, and the death remains a mystery to this day. It is telling, however, that gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who was one of the guests that day, was offered a lifetime position as head gossip columnist of Hearst’s newspaper empire because she kept mum about the scandal. She was reported to be making $500 a week (over $7,000 in today’s dollars).

Davies continued her movie career, still masterminded by Hearst, occasionally showing her irrepressible personality in comedies like Tillie the Toiler (1927), The Patsy (1928) and Show People (1928), the latter directed by King Vidor and showcasing Davies’ talent for impersonations. Her first talkie was in 1929, Marianne, of which she said in her memoir: “They asked me to do everything but stand on my head. I danced, I sang, I did Chevalier imitations in a French accent. I was dramatic and comic at the same time in my first talkie.”

This was followed by Not So Dumb the next year, again directed by Vidor. She worked opposite some of Hollywood’s most successful leading men in the next decade such as Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, William Powell, Leslie Howard, Ray Milland, Charlie Chaplin and Clark Gable, but her career didn’t stay at the same heights after the Great Depression that she enjoyed in the mid-1920s. In 1937, after one last picture with Robert Montgomery, Ever Since Eve, the 40-year-old Davies retired from the movies. She and Hearst moved permanently to Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California where she devoted herself to his care. Hearst had inherited the land around San Simeon from his mother and hired architect Julia Morgan to build La Cuesta Encantada (Enchanted Hill). The main house comprises 165 rooms, the gardens span 123 acres, the estate was built to showcase Hearst’s world-class art collection. Its construction was still not complete at the time of his death.

In 1941, upstart director Orson Welles released his Citizen Kane, a film widely seen as being based on Hearst and Davies’ lives. In the film, Kane was a newspaper mogul with an untalented but beautiful opera singer wife. When Hearst discovered he could not sue Welles, he once again used his media clout to try to bury the film. In this endeavor, he had the full cooperation of Parsons, who vilified Welles as a communist in her gossip columns. She threatened to expose RKO, the studio that made Kane, with stories of misbehavior by its executives, and even got the Radio City Music Hall premiere canceled. MGM, Warner’s and Fox refused to book the film into their cinemas. And the president of RKO was offered $800,000 by Louis B. Mayer, on Hearst’s instructions, to destroy all prints of the film. He refused. But Welles’ career never quite recovered. Citizen Kane is now regarded as probably the best film ever made in Hollywood, but at the time it made no money and received few good reviews, so powerful were Hearst’s efforts to discredit Welles. It was reported that Hearst was more upset with the comparison of the fictional character’s wife to Davies, though Welles denied that Susan Kane was based on her. In fact, he denied it again in the forward to Davies’ memoir which he was invited to write.

Throughout her career, Davies learned lessons from Hearst that she put to good use, such as investing in property and producing her own films. When Hearst suffered a reversal in his fortunes later in their relationship, it was Davies who wrote him a million-dollar check.

Hearst died of a heart attack in 1951 at their home in Beverly Hills. Davies was not allowed to attend his funeral by the family. She remembers him lovingly in her memoirs: “I liked to think that WR was at his happiest when he was with me. Companionship and love. That was our pact. I can’t say I was ever unhappy, not at all. It was a big, gay party, every bit of it.”

She married actor Horace Brown in Las Vegas 11 months after Hearst’s passing. That marriage was not a success and Davies repeatedly tried to divorce him to no avail.

Ten years after Hearst’s death, Davies died of cancer in Los Angeles at 64.

30 years after her death, upon the death of her niece Patricia Lake, it was revealed by Lake’s family that she was the daughter of Hearst and Davies, passed off as Davies’ niece to avoid scandal. It was revealed that Lake had spent long stretches at Hearst Castle and is seen in many of Davies’ home movies. She was financially supported by Hearst her whole life, and Davies left half her $20 million estate to her. Lake is interred in the same crypt at the Hollywood Forever cemetery as Davies.