“Sober citizens should be sent to Siberia.”
Marion Davies was perhaps most famous for her real-life role as the mistress of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, whom she nicknamed “droopy drawers.” The queen of Hollywood social life in the ‘20s and ‘30s, she starred in over fifty films, all but the very first financed by Hearst. Her biggest hit was When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922); and her best known film remains Going Hollywood (1933) with Bing Crosby. Refusing to act in more than a few films per year, Davies was equally famous for throwing epic, costumed theme parties: Cowboys and Indians, Civil War, a circus-themed party complete with merry-go-round. Although Davies freely admitted to starting her affair with Hearst as a gold-digger, she stayed because she fell in love. In fact, after decades of being lavished with Hearst’s money, when his empire started to crumble she wrote him a check for $1 million. Davies was devastated by her caricature in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. It turns out “Rosebud” was not a sled at all, but rather Hearst’s nickname for her clitoris.
THE GIRLS WANTED DETAILS—immediately. Actress sisters Norma and Constance Talmadge and screenwriter Anita Loos, the founders of a makeshift Tuesday-night girls club, had learned that their newest regular, fun-loving Ziegfeld dancer Marion Davies, had a story to tell.
The previous night, Davies had attended a party hosted by the country’s richest mogul, William Randolph Hearst. Correction: She had been personally invited to attend a very small party hosted by Hearst at one of his many residences. Davies, a goofy winsome blonde with a stutter, entered the party assuming that one of Hearst’s friends must have taken a shine to her, or perhaps to her girlfriend. But then Hearst himself approached her. It seems he had seen Davies in a stage show and was very impressed.
In private, Davies had made no secret of her desire to follow her mother’s advice and marry a wealthy man. Her most ardent admirer at the time was the millionaire publisher of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. But here, now, flirting with her, was the infinitely more wealthy, more famous (and more married) newspaper publisher. She freaked. She became anxious and awkward, then tried to soothe her frazzled nerves with champagne. The trouble was that no amount of liquor could ease her anxiety, try as she might. And instead of calming her nerves, it unsettled her stomach. She simply became an extremely frazzled girl who needed to throw up. Badly.
The trouble was that no amount of liquor could ease her anxiety, try as she might. And instead of calming her nerves, it unsettled her stomach. She simply became an extremely frazzled girl who needed to throw up. Badly.
Obviously, Davies couldn’t let Hearst know about this. So instead of asking for the bathroom, she snuck into the nearest doorway. It was a study, but Davies didn’t have the luxury of choice now. She vomited behind some corner pillows. Mortified, she covered up her gift with the pillows, didn’t say a word, and left.
Well, she thought, so much for ever seeing Hearst again.
THE GRAND DAMES all loved champagne. It was the beverage of choice for generations of leading ladies, from Marion Davies to Ginger Rogers to Elizabeth Taylor. Which is not to say champagne was just for women (after all, Bogart drinks it in Casablanca).
If nothing else, the Mimosa provides a ready excuse to drink in the morning. It was Marion Davies’s cocktail of choice, perhaps because the orange juice hid the alcohol from her somewhat teetotaling lover, William Randolph Hearst.
The problem is, the Mimosa has been woefully cheapened in recent decades, with restaurants using poor quality orange juice—the most important element in the recipe being “freshly squeezed.” And Davies, a woman who once had a bar built in 1560 transported from Surrey, England, to her Santa Monica beach house, would never have skimped on the ingredients.
IF THE HOLLYWOOD PR machine was turning its celebrities into America’s new royalty, San Simeon (nicknamed “the Ranch” by its owner) was their palace. William Randolph Hearst built the palatial estate in the early twenties and lived there with his longtime lover, actress Marion Davies, in an open affair for more than three decades—Hearst’s wife and kids were in New York.
It is hard to overstate the splendor that was and in some ways still is San Simeon, 250,000 acres along the shimmering coastline between Los Angeles and San Francisco. As Coleridge wrote, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasuredome decree.” And San Simeon was indeed a pleasure dome, director Orson Welles in fact changing the estate’s name to Xanadu for his film Citizen Kane, which was based in part upon Hearst. Characterized by biographer Richard Meryman as a “Medici gone mad,” the newspaper tycoon spent twenty-six years building the estate, eventually bankrupting himself. Designed by architect Julia Morgan, the castle is a hybrid of different historical styles (Spanish Revival, Gothic, Greco-Roman), described as a cross between the Palazzo Uffizi and the Hippodrome.
Over a mile of pergola encircles the hill, Hearst desiring the hedges be high enough for a “tall man with a tall hat on a tall horse.” This from a man who once spent $12,000 on a planting of daphnes. In addition to a landing strip, stables, and a beach house, the grounds included what was once the world’s largest private zoo, complete with zebras, giraffes, and ostriches. In addition, all the produce eaten at the Ranch was farmed and the meat and poultry raised on site.
Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, made the Ranch a film-industry mecca with her extravagant, often themed costume parties. Guests arrived at nearby San Louis Obispo via Hearst’s private train car and were then shuttled to the Ranch in limousines. Each visitor had a dedicated servant. Sometimes a premade costume waited in their room.
The other significant Hollywood estate noted for its parties, the Pickford/Fairbanks home Pickfair, could not come close to approaching the opulence. At San Simeon you could sleep in Napoleon’s bed (in a guest room, no less) and wonder if Josephine had graced it before you. There were three main guesthouses, totaling over 10,000 square feet, which could house over seventy-five guests. There were picnics, horse rides, and even campouts, complete with bonfires, sing-alongs, and grand tents pitched over wooden floors where cowboys would sing and Spaniards dance. The indoor pool featured approximately 800,000 gold-leaf tiles, installed over the course of three years. There was a ten-foot high-dive (this is indoors, remember) and a skylight cut into the ceiling (the tennis courts were directly above) to let in sun. The famous Neptune outdoor pool held 345,000 gallons of water and featured marble colonnades with a Greco-Roman temple at one end. No slide; perhaps that seemed excessive.
Over the decades guests would include such international stars as Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart, and Joan Crawford. World leaders would also visit: Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill among them. It was a grand time at the Casa Grande (as the main house was called). Hearst was, in fact, not a strict teetotaler. True, he had sworn off hard liquor as a young man at Harvard, but he enjoyed wine quite a bit. His wine cellar stored up to 10,000 bottles, of which 3,000 still remain. He loved beer, too, in particular, German lager and Irish stout.
If there were limits put on liquor, it was out of Hearst’s concern for Davies, who by most accounts was a cheerful alcoholic with an adorable stutter. If known drinkers were on the weekend’s guest list—and there never seemed to be a shortage (Flynn, Gilbert, Mankiewicz, Grant, Niven, etc.)—Hearst would make sure they had not smuggled in a private stash. But the house itself was not too stingy with booze. Cocktails were served in the Assembly room from 7–9 p.m., an enormous chamber designed to resemble an Italian palazzo hall. During dinner, held in a room Hearst called “the Refectory,” only wine was served. The guests were seated at two long seventeenth-century refectory tables with Hearst and Davies in the middle. The tables were only three feet wide, perfect for conversation, and part of being a good guest (and securing a return invitation) was to be engaging.
Certainly, anyone who got embarrassingly drunk would not be invited back. And some say the drinks were watered down and that eventually the cocktail hour was reduced to just ten minutes. But after dinner, guests retreated to the billiard room, men and women alike, Hearst being quite modern in this way. Cigars were lit and after-dinner drinks served. Often a movie would be screened in the private theater, equipped with fifty lodge seats covered in silk damask. Perhaps a new release from Hearst’s film company Cosmopolitan Productions, such as The Patsy or Show People, and likely starring Davies. The original screen was designed to be lowered down through the floor into the basement, to make room for stage performances by celebrity guests. All alcoholic beverages were cut off at 1 a.m., but cold beer remained on tap in the kitchen throughout the night.
Even so, Davies responded to the house rules by hiding bottles of gin in the tanks above various toilets, and visiting girlfriends were expected to spend much of their time in “the Salon”—the downstairs bathroom. Eventually, the sprawling estate somehow became too constricting, and Davies had Hearst build her a palace of her own in Santa Monica. Called simply “the Beach House,” though anything but simple, the property was an enormous thirty-four-bedroom ocean-front Georgian estate also designed by Julia Morgan. It would one day become a hotel.
Unfortunately, independence was not to be sobriety’s best advocate. Davies was so devoted a drinker that Dorothy Comingore, who just played a character based on her—Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane—went on to become a lifelong alcoholic. Even late in Davies’s life, after Hearst had passed away and San Simeon was quieted, Davies’s occasional parties still offered a glimpse of lost Hollywood, of true glamour and excess. One of her final blowouts, after Hearst’s death and close to her own, involved 700 guests, 40 cases of champagne, 80 pounds of beef tenderloin, 50 pounds of caviar, a roman sarcophagus to chill the champagne, and rosebushes with hundreds of gardenias pinned to them. Why gardenias, nobody knew.
Davies walked downstairs an hour late, wearing $750,000 worth of jewelry. She loved hosting parties, she said, because “then no one can tell me to get out.” It was an attitude in keeping with her lover’s heirs. Because as time has shown, the Hearst family also has little interest in telling people to get out—at least in regard to San Simeon. The estate was generously donated to the state of California in 1957, not long after Hearst’s death. A historic park, it is now open to the public year around, offering daily tours that cater to over one million visitors a year.
WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST so enjoyed German lager and Irish stout that he kept a cold keg of each on tap in the kitchen of San Simeon at all times. In addition to liking the taste of stout, he believed the beverage offered health benefits, once even recommending it to his architect Julia Morgan when she became ill. There may be something to Hearst’s thinking. Guinness long ran advertisements with the slogan, “Guiness Is Good for You.” And it may just be true: in recent years, a study by the University of Wisconsin has found that Guiness contains antioxidants.
Legendary carouser Errol Flynn was also a proponent of the medicinal qualities of stout (that being perhaps the only belief he shared with Hearst). Flynn’s attitude was summed up pithily in his declaration, “Guinness Stout is good for the gonads.” After four wives, two statutory rape charges (he was acquitted), and countless starlets, groupies, and prostitutes, at age fifty Flynn would die in the arms of a sixteen-year-old. Turns out, it was a heart attack that killed him (as was the case with Hearst), while his gonads remained intact.
Healing properties aside, the Half and Half is worth a try. Please note: while it is sometimes also called a Black and Tan, the Half and Half is made with lager, not ale.
