The Whole Truth and Nothing But by Hedda Hopper

Author:Hedda Hopper
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781631681202
Publisher: Graymalkin Media
Published: 2017-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Sorting out fact from fiction can be harder on the constitution than separating milk from whipped potatoes in a cupful of vichyssoise. And when you succeed, the results may taste sharper than vinegar on the tongue. Let’s take the case of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst.

The newspaper tycoon, with a wife and five sons, and the golden-haired charmer from the Bronx shared many things in life—laughter, riches, tears, disaster; everything except his name. Mrs. William Randolph Hearst denied him the divorce he begged for, spurned his offers of millions and anything else she wanted. The legend is that W.R. found his golden-hearted girl when she was a mere sixteen, skipping around in Flo Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1917. Truth is, it happened some years earlier.

He was fifty years old, with a long, pale face and piercing blue eyes when he sat in the Globe Theatre and saw her dancing in the chorus of Queen of the Movies, directed by Julian Mitchell. She was then fourteen years old. It was January 1914.

A sister of hers was another of the six chorus girls. Marion Cecilia Douras—she changed the name to Davies later—wanted to be with her sister and work beside her. Neither her father, Bernard, nor her mother, Rose, objected. Her one obstacle was the Gary Society, whose inspectors supposedly saved young girls from a fate worse than death, meaning sin and exploitation in the theater, by seeing they didn’t dance in any chorus until they were at least sixteen years old.

She took her problem to a family friend, Pat Casey, who arranged it so that Marion would land the job, and he fibbed about her age. To all intent and purpose, she had reached the essential sixteenth birthday when she went into the show. On opening night Hearst was there with a companion, a judge. The next morning, from the Louis Cohen Ticket Agency, he ordered two seats in Row C for every performance of the show’s run, one for himself, the other for any friend who wanted to see the show. Or if no friend was available, the vacant seat was a handy place to park his hat.

Most of the cast had a hunch he had his eyes on Marion’s sister. But after a week or two he tipped his hand by sending a note to Marion inviting her to have supper with him in Delmonico’s. She took the note to Casey to ask: “What should I do? What could I possibly talk about to a man like him?”

“Accept the invitation,” answered Pat, “but be sure you always take a girl friend with you.”

Pat had some sound advice for another cute beginner in the same chorus line. This other sixteen-year-old was Al Jolson’s light of love. He had reached the point of promising to marry her when another beauty caught his eye and he married her, instead. The young dancer went to Pat with her troubles. “Keep quiet and let me handle it,” he said.

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