Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [41]
Hearst had wooed Marion Davies, then a Ziegfeld girl, by pressing diamond wrist-watches into her hands when they met. Despite succumbing to this method of courtship, Davies was utterly unpretentious, funny, warm and generous—the kind of woman whose diamond-and-onyx cigarette case was held together by a rubber band. Hearst, who was becoming obsessed by the movies, fell in love with her and insisted on promoting her film career even though she protested, stuttering charmingly, that she had no talent for acting; in fact she was a gifted comedienne. Hearst’s Catholic wife would not agree to a divorce, but Davies didn’t mind not being able to marry WR, or Pops, as she called him. “Love doesn’t need a wedding ring . . . Why should I run after a streetcar when I was already aboard?” She would prove her devotion to Hearst by saving him from financial ruin in the late 1930s.
Weekend house parties at San Simeon were as famous as dinners at Pickfair. As many as fifty guests spent their days playing tennis, swimming, riding around the estate or admiring WR’s private zoo. Hearst was an old-fashioned host. When Jean Harlow came down to dinner in a dress Hearst considered too revealing, he asked Marion to tell her to change. Harlow returned to the dining room pointedly wearing her coat.
As a teetotaler, Hearst frowned on excessive drinking. The first cocktails of the day were served at 6 p.m., and although Marion gathered friends in her rooms for surreptitious drinks, people who made the mistake of bringing their own flasks would find them emptied by the butler who unpacked their bags. Each guest at San Simeon was permitted two cocktails, no more.
For all his stuffiness, Hearst could be endearingly childlike. One night his feelings were hurt because he hadn’t been included in a game of charades. “Well,” said the actor Jack Gilbert, “we’ll play a charade on our own, and act out the word ‘pill-box’—I’ll be the box and you can be the pill.” WR rushed out of the room, slamming the door: “I don’t want to play your old charades.” On other, happier occasions he would get up and tap-dance with the most “charming gaucheness.”
Hearst was powerful enough—and his friends were loyal enough—to suppress the Ince affair when news of his death became public. Some years later Elinor Glyn insisted that all the rumors were lies, and that Ince had left the boat and died of heart problems following acute indigestion which he had refused to have treated because he was a Christian Scientist. Chaplin said that he had not attended the boating party at which the death was alleged to have occurred, but that Glyn had told him Ince had died of a heart attack. To this day no one knows what really happened because the only witness who might have spoken out, the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, accepted a lucrative job from Hearst when she stepped ashore and never spoke of the incident again. The matter was not investigated by the police.
At last even Washington found it impossible to ignore scandals of this magnitude. Fears about Hollywood’s corruption of America and American values were compounded by the knowledge that the film industry was created and run principally by ambitious, innovative Jewish and Catholic immigrants including (to name producers and directors alone) the Polish Warner brothers, Louis Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Adrian Zukor and Sam Goldwyn. In this xenophobic era, nothing could have made Hollywood seem more threatening.
In 1922 the U.S. president Warren Harding’s staunchly Presbyterian former campaign manager, Will Hays, was created first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (at an annual salary of $100,000) and charged with imposing codes of morality both on movies that were made and on the stars performing