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David Fincher’s new film Mank follows the rocky, boozy road to the great cinematic masterpiece that is 1941’s Citizen Kane. Though it’s a troubled male-genius narrative centered on Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), the oft-forgotten screenwriter who fought to claim cowriting credit on the film, the person whose legacy was forever cemented by Citizen Kane is, of course, its director and star Orson Welles. And though Welles has plenty to be proud of when it comes to Kane, there is one regret about it that followed him for the rest of his life.
In 1982, just three years before his death, Welles reflected on Marion Davies, the Hollywood actor who allegedly inspired Citizen Kane’s talentless blonde opera singer, Susan Alexander Kane. “It seemed to me to be something of a dirty trick and still strikes me as something of a dirty trick,” a regretful Welles said. “What we did to her.” Welles also wrote the foreword to Davies’s posthumously published 1975 memoir, The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst, in which he tried to set the record straight.
Though Charles Foster Kane was indisputably based largely on Davies’s partner, William Randolph Hearst, the truth about Marion and Susan is much more complicated. Fincher gets at that in his film, showing Davies—as portrayed by a top-of-her-game Amanda Seyfried—as she truly was. A rare Hollywood star who successfully made the transition from silent film to talkies, Marion Davies was also a canny producer, dry-wit, universally beloved hostess, and, by all accounts, a clever businesswoman. But thanks in large part to Citizen Kane, Davies has long been misremembered.
Below, get to know the real Marion Davies—who, thanks to Mank, is getting another crack at the legacy she deserves.
THE ZIEGFELD GIRL
Long before she met Hearst, Marion Davies had a head for business and branding. Born in New York as Marion Cecilia Elizabeth Brooklyn Douras, Marion and her sisters changed their name to the anglicized Davies after seeing it splashed across a billboard advertisement. (Her mausoleum in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery reads “Douras.”) Davies pursued a career as a model, showgirl, and ultimately joined the Ziegfeld Follies. But she had an early passion for motion pictures and wrote her own script for what would be her first feature film, 1917’s Runaway Romany, which was directed by her brother-in-law George Lederer. In Mank, it’s George’s son, Charles (Joseph Cross), who reintroduces Herman to his aunt Marion.
Publishing giant William Randolph Hearst (portrayed in Mank by Charles Dance) was already in his late 50s when he first set his sights on a teenaged Davies while she was appearing in the Follies. He quickly formed Cosmopolitan Pictures, signed Davies to an exclusive contract, and began an affair with her that would last the rest of his life. Hearst was married and would remain so—but while he was puritanical about the love lives of others (he reportedly wouldn’t let unmarried couples share a room when they came to stay at his sprawling Hearst castle), he unashamedly and publicly shared his life with Davies.
THE HOLLYWOOD STAR
Hearst took a controlling, suffocating interest in Davies’s film career—and here, according to most, is where it all went wrong for the gifted performer. “Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen,” Welles wrote in the foreword to her memoir. “She would have been a star if Hearst had never happened.” In fact, Marion Davies was a star for a time, appearing in films opposite the likes of Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Leslie Howard.
In order to speed along Davies’s ascent, Hearst entered into a distribution deal with Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), offering the latter’s studio chief Louis B. Mayer (played by Arliss Howard in Mank) the full strength of his media empire in exchange for roles for Davies, but he and Davies disagreed on what kind of parts she should play. She fancied herself a comedian; he preferred her in more serious and dramatic roles. Still, the MGM deal, combined with Davies’s inherent talent and Hearst’s full-court media blitz, shot several Davies films to the top of the box-office charts in 1922 and 1923.
Though it’s impossible to tell how much of Davies’s success is owed to Hearst (probably plenty), her rapid stumble from stardom is usually laid directly at his feet. Davies survived the transition from silent films to talkies, despite struggling offscreen from a stutter. (“I couldn’t act,” Davies quipped in her memoir. “But the idea of silent pictures appealed to me because I couldn’t talk either.”) But Hearst’s machinations overexposed her as he aggressively pushed stories about her into his company’s newsreels. He also founds limits to his influence at MGM, when, as portrayed in Mank, Davies lost the coveted role of Marie Antoinette to Norma Shearer (Jessie Cohen), who just happened to be the wife of MGM’s top producer Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley).
Hearst stormed out of his MGM deal in a snit—and, yes, just as she does in Mank, Davies had to pack up the enormous 11-room bungalow, which served as her dressing room, in pieces and drive it over to Warner Brothers. In the late 1930s, after a reportedly troubled run at Warner Brothers, Davies officially retired from acting.
THE HOSTESS
The more enduring role Marion Davies played in Hollywood was as a charming hostess at both the many soirées she and Hearst would throw at his castle in San Simeon, California—and the wilder nights she would host herself a few hours down the coast, at the Ocean House mansion Hearst bought for her in Santa Monica. Actor David Niven, who wrote revealing Hollywood memoirs in the twilight of this career, is a surprising font of intel on the inner workings of the Davies/Hearst shindigs. He referred to the robust Hearst as a “friendly avocado,” but described Davies as “always warm and gay. Even in repose she seemed about to burst out laughing.”
According to his own biographer, Sheridan Morley, some of Niven’s more colorful anecdotes should be taken with a grain of salt. But there’s bountiful photographic evidence to back up Niven’s account that, as in the final San Simeon scene in Mank, Davies and Hearst were fond of elaborate costume parties:
Virginia Madsen, who played Davies in the 1985 TV movie The Hearst and Davies Affair, was able to consult with Davies’s stand-in, Vera Burnett, and others who knew the San Simeon hostess firsthand. Masden was dazzled to learn that the quick-witted Davies was the only one who could keep up with Charlie Chaplin in a game of charades. “I couldn’t believe some of the stories people had,” Madsen said during a 1985 interview. “No one ever said a bad word about her. [William Hearst’s wife] Millicent Hearst could have harmed Marion if she’d wanted to, but as far as I know, even she never said a bad word against Marion, and Marion never said a bad word against her.”
THE DRINKER
If Davies had an apparent flaw, it was her fondness for alcohol—and here, as depicted in Mank, may be where the alcoholic Herman Mankiewicz and the charming movie star truly bonded. Mankiewicz was a fixture at the Hearst/Davies parties, but by all accounts the shindigs at San Simeon weren’t exactly wild affairs. Hearst wasn’t fond of hard liquor and set his guests a firm pre-dinner limit before allowing beer and wine with the meal. Niven evocatively wrote that the drinks at cocktail hour “flowed like glue.” According to The Guardian, “anyone who managed to get drunk—Errol Flynn and Dorothy Parker were two lucky ones—would return to their rooms to find their bags packed and a car waiting to take them to the station.” This attitude helps explain Hearst’s extreme disgust at Mank’s drunken display in one of the closing scenes of the film.
But Davies not only hosted much wilder parties of her own at the Ocean House estate (where Niven and Flynn rented a cottage known as “Cirrhosis-by-the-Sea”)—she disobeyed Hearst’s drinking rules in his own castle. One story goes that Davies dropped her gin flask out of her purse at dinner and when the smell became apparent to their guests, Davies quipped to Hearst: “How do you like my new perfume?”
SUSAN FOSTER KANE
“What did Marion ever do to deserve this?” Tom Pelphrey’s Joe Mankiewicz asks after reading brother Herman’s script in the third act of Mank. “It’s not her,” Oldman’s character responds. He swears again to Seyfried’s Davies: “It was never meant to be you.”
Welles claimed the same thing in real life. “We had someone different in the place of Marion Davies,” he said in that 1982 interview. He doubled down in the foreword he wrote for Davies’s memoir, saying that Susan had been inspired by an actual woman—one who was not Davies: “It was a real man who built an opera house for the soprano of his choice. And much in the movie was borrowed from that story. But that man was not Hearst…to Marion Davies she bears no resemblance at all.”
It’s true that you don’t have to look very far to find other, more convincing inspirations for Citizen Kane’s poor, tone-deaf Susan, whom Charles Foster Kane supports with the full strength of his wealth. In 1929, Chicago business magnate Samuel Insull built the Civic Opera House for his songbird of a wife, Gladys. Roger Ebert, meanwhile, named another singer, Ganna Wolska as the inspiration for Susan on his DVD commentary for Citizen Kane. Wolska’s wealthy husband, Harold Fowler McCormick, had attempted to use his fortune and media influence to battle New York Times headlines such as “Mme. Walska Clings to Ambition to Sing.”
Susan does, however, have qualities associated with Davies—like an obsession with jigsaw puzzles. Davies was so famously fond of puzzles that one time, according to The Guardian, “a skilled carpenter and painter [was] brought in to make a perfect replacement for a tiny lost piece.” The Mank anecdote about “Rosebud” being Hearst’s nickname for a certain part of Davies’s anatomy might also have some basis in reality.
Though Davies and Mankiewicz shared a friendship, it is very unlikely that she ever visited him personally to beg that he shelve his Citizen Kane script, as she does in Mank. Hearst virulently opposed the film and effectively used everything in his arsenal to suppress both its theatrical run and its award season bid—but Davies reportedly claimed to have never even seen it.
THE BENEFACTOR
Hearst always made sure to provide Davies with her own income, whether as the president of his Cosmopolitan Pictures, by putting her on the payroll at MGM, or via the enormous amount of property he put in her name. So when Hearst’s lavish spending caught up with him, it was, in fact, Davies who bailed him out. “They were going to foreclose on [Hearst Castle] and Marion sold her jewelry and liquidated stocks and she gave him a million dollars—in the 1930s that was an enormous amount of money—so that he could keep the ranch,” Victoria Kastner, Hearst Castle historian and author of Hearst Ranch: Family, Land and Legacy, said in a 2013 interview. “She actually convinced another girlfriend to give him another million dollars.”
Davies, ever the wise investor, sold her Ocean House in 1945 during a property tax dispute; it is now known as the Marion Davies Guest House. All this means that Davies had plenty of her own money when Hearst died and left her much of his fortune. She “sold her inheritance for $1 back to Hearst Corporation. She didn’t keep it.” Kastner said. “There could have been a court fight, but basically what Marion was saying was, ‘I didn’t do this for money.’ Hearst wanted to be sure she was okay and taken care of when he was gone, but she gave back the inheritance. It really is a love story, you know?”
THE FAITHFUL LOVER
The story of Davies and Hearst, a teenage showgirl and a filthy rich middle-aged businessman, is older than Hollywood itself. But by most accounts, Davies truly was devoted to Hearst until the very end of his life. Sure, there were rumors of affairs, the most high-profile involving her charades partner Charlie Chaplin. That rumor, and an even more unseemly and unsubstantiated one involving the sudden death of producer Thomas Ince on Hearst’s yacht, comprise the plot of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow, starring Kirsten Dunst as an effervescent and philandering Marion Davies to Eddie Izzard’s Charlie Chaplin.
But even according to Charlie Chaplin’s own wife, Lita Grey Chaplin, Davies was loyal to Hearst. She stayed with the magnate until he died, in 1951. In My Life With Chaplin, Grey Chaplin recalled a revealing conversation she once had with Davies: “God, I’d give everything I have to marry that silly old man,” the actor told her. “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.” According to Virginia Madsen, the feeling was mutual: “She even saved the shavings from his pencil sharpener…. And he loved her and wrote her love letters and poems. Their love was real.”
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