On the night of August 13th, 1951, two women in two cities were waiting on the same dying man. In a house on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, Marian Davies was given a sedative and fell asleep. He died at ten minutes to ten the next morning, and his sons had his body taken away without waking her. She woke to an empty house.

“I couldn’t even say goodbye,” she remembered. On the other side of the country in New York, the woman who had been his wife for forty-eight years was getting ready to fly west and bury him. About fifteen hundred people would fill a cathedral in San Francisco for the funeral. Only one of the two women would be there.

So, which of them had really had him? In 1897, on the stage of the Herald Square Theater on Broadway, two sisters rode out as bicycle girls in a musical called The Girl from Paris. Their names were Millisent and Anita Wilson. Their father George and their mother Hannah were vaudevillians.

The girls had grown up in the theater and danced as a pair. Out in the audience sat a very rich young man. William Randolph Hearst was the son of a California senator whose fortune had come out of the mines, and he owned a newspaper called the New York Journal. He was in his thirties.

The records disagree about her age. One puts her at sixteen and him at thirty-three in 1896; another makes her fourteen and him thirty-four. Either way, she was a teenager in the chorus and he was a rich man nearly twice her age. He asked her out.

Years later, Millisent remembered how that news landed at home. “When he asked me to go out with him,” she said, “my mother was against it. ” She set one condition: Anita had to come or Millisent couldn’t go. So the courtship had three people in it.

The writer Victoria Kastner says Millie liked to choose the restaurant—Sherry’s or Delmonico’s—somewhere with a lovely meal. Hearst would take both sisters out walking, one on each arm, which people thought was quite scandalous. It went on for six years, chaperoned and patient, and it ended at the altar. On the 28th of April 1903, they were married at Grace Church in Manhattan.

She was twenty. He was nearly twenty years older. His mother did not come. Phoebe Apperson Hearst had spent years steering her son away from actresses and opera singers, and now he had married a girl from the chorus line.

According to Kastner, Phoebe did not meet her new daughter-in-law until long after the wedding. She sent an emerald brooch and waited to see why marry at all. The biographer David Nasaw puts it without decoration: “Everybody thinks that Hearst marries Millisent Wilson because he needs to be more respectable, and it’s true. ” Nasaw goes on: “He decides that Millisent can be perfectly respectable-looking, and any wife is better than no wife.

” If that was the bargain, she kept her side of it. From the moment she marries W. R. , Nasaw says, Millisent sheds her show business background, her chorus girlfriends, to become a New York society matron.

Her husband sat in Congress from 1903 to 1907. He ran for mayor of New York in 1905 and for governor in 1906. Everywhere the candidate went, Millisent was by his side. The campaigns wore him thin, and she wrote to his mother about it.

“The work and worry about the papers and campaign and everything broke Will down,” she told Phoebe. “I think we shall have to go someplace where there are no papers. ”

There was no such place for a Hearst. The papers were the fortune, and the fortune was the life.

Instead of a townhouse on Fifth Avenue, he chose an apartment on the Upper West Side at a building called the Clarendon. In April of 1908, the family moved into the top three floors—thirty rooms at a rent of $24,000 a year. In 1913, refused permission to change the building as he wished, Hearst bought it outright for about a million dollars by one account, $950,000 by another. The architect Charles E.

Burge carried the apartment down through the eighth to the eleventh floors and crowned it with a mansard roof and a giant skylight. Inside, a Gothic hall rose three stories, tall enough for the largest tapestries money could find. This was Millisent’s stage now, and it was a better one than Herald Square. Husband and wife did not want the same things from New York.

Millisent wanted in. She craved acceptance from the city’s elite, and she wanted her boys raised as proper gentlemen. Her husband could not be bothered. Kastner explains why: “Will was always an outsider.

So he was always very scornful of East Coast society, which he felt was modeled on European aristocracy and was an utter waste of time. He was much more interested in what people did than in their pedigree. ” Nasaw puts the man in three sentences: “He’s a New Yorker who grew up in the West. He’s a San Franciscan who went to school at Harvard, and instead of gravitating towards respectable society, holds it at arm’s length.

” So the vaudevillian’s daughter set out to win the very drawing rooms her husband scorned, and she largely did it on her own. He was at his newspapers or traveling from one part of his empire to the next. The sons came steadily. George was born in April of 1904.

William Randolph Jr. followed in January of 1908, and John in September of 1909. On the 2nd of December 1915, there were twins, Randolph and David. To Phoebe’s surprise, the chorus girl had proved very good at being a respectable wife, and once the grandsons came, Phoebe warmed to her.

Millisent was building a public life of her own as well. In 1915, she sat on the New York State Commission for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco and served as chief official hostess at the New York Pavilion. When America went to war, Mayor John Purroy Mitchel made her chairman of the Mayor’s Committee of Women on National Defense. The committee ran a canteen, enlistment drives, and rallies, and handed out coal, milk, and ice to families who needed them.

She raised money for rebuilding France and for French orphans. She ran programs to help the troops overseas and to care for the wounded when they came home. At one of the parties for servicemen, she met a young lieutenant named Richard Berlin. She liked him, and she found him a job after the war.

Decades later, he would be running her husband’s company. By the time the twins were born, the Hearst marriage looked finished in the best sense of the word—complete and on display. The wife was respectable. The sons were healthy, and the apartment on Riverside Drive was one of the wonders of New York.

But the chorus line had not gone anywhere. In 1916, there was a new girl dancing in the Ziegfeld Follies, a girl from Brooklyn with a noticeable stammer. Marian Cecilia Doris was born in Brooklyn on the 3rd of January 1897, the youngest daughter in a magistrate’s household. Her father, Bernard J.

Doris, was a lawyer and a magistrate. Her mother was Rose Riley Doris. The family was, in the words of the writer Lara Gabrielle, “kind of lower middle class. ” Gabrielle adds one more fact about the father: “Her father was an alcoholic.

” There were older sisters, Rose, Rae, and Ethel, and they had already found a way out. They went on the stage and took a new surname for it—Davies. The youngest followed them. She was bright, Gabrielle says, but she had a very noticeable stutter.

It made school a misery. She was bullied by the other children and by the teachers, too. The stammer helped push her out of the classroom early. By thirteen, she had left school.

Dancing was the one place her mouth did not matter. She studied with the Russian ballet dancer Theodore Kosloff. She posed for illustrators, among them Howard Chandler Christy. From the pony line, she rose to the Follies of 1916.

She later called those days the happiest time of her life. “I was surrounded by show business,” she said. “I loved it. ” Gabrielle sees it clearly: for a girl like Marian at the turn of the century, the chorus was an avenue to a higher class, a way for women to marry well, and her mother pushed it.

Yet Gabrielle adds a line that tells you a great deal about the woman to come: “Marian never felt that she was a star. ”

The films came almost by accident. In 1917, she wrote and starred in a picture called Runaway Romany, directed by her brother-in-law, George Lederer, and paid for by a boyfriend, the publisher Paul Block. Looking back, she was merciless about her own talent.

“I couldn’t act,” she said, “but the idea of silent pictures appealed to me because I couldn’t talk either. ” Somewhere in these years, William Randolph Hearst began to notice her. The accounts do not agree on when. Some place it in 1915, some at the Follies of 1916, and some date the real romance to 1918.

The method at least is on record: he sent things. “He sent me flowers and little gifts like silver boxes or gloves or candy,” Marian recalled. “I wasn’t the only one he sent gifts to, but all the girls thought he was particularly looking at me. ”

One account puts a stage and a date on that first look.

In 1915, right after Millisent had given birth to the twins, Hearst was in his usual seat in the second row of the Globe Theater, watching a new Irving Berlin musical called Stop! Look! Listen! In one number, “The Girl on the Magazine Cover,” a huge copy of Vogue filled the stage, and a line of chorus girls stepped out of it into the song and dance.

One of them was the eighteen-year-old Marian Davies. Hearst was fifty-two, and by that telling, he was transfixed. It was entirely in character: “W. R.

was always attracted to performers,” Kastner says—”outgoing, extroverted people, talented people, and that especially went for show girls, actors. ”

There is one more early meeting, and Marian told it herself. By her own account in her memoir, when she and Hearst met again at Palm Beach, his wife was there, too. It is the only occasion found in the record when both women were present at once.

He was in his fifties now, married with five sons. She was about nineteen. The writer Gary Kamiya draws the line between the two women in one stroke: “The same impulses that led Hearst to choose Millisent,” he says, “led him to then choose another extremely young woman. ” Here was another beautiful girl from the chorus line, almost a generation on.

Hearst was not sold on Marian as a screen actress at first. He went to see Runaway Romany, in which she played a rich man’s daughter kidnapped by gypsies. Gabrielle describes what he saw on the screen: “She has a glow to her, that charm, that beauty. Not even just physical beauty.

Something about the way she gave herself to the camera caught him completely. ” And so he went to Marion, Gabrielle says, and said to her, “I would like to make you a star. ” He had the means to do it. He owned newspapers and magazines, and he knew exactly how to make a name.

In 1917, by one account, he gave her a production company of her own and a generous contract. Another account dates the company, Cosmopolitan Productions, to 1919. Her contract paid $500 a week. On the stage, by her own telling, she had been getting forty-five or fifty.

He did not simply pay for the pictures. He ran them. He controlled the scripts, the casting, and even the hairstyles. He was always at the studio, and he loved to watch her work.

He tried, by one account, to stop her kissing her leading men. Kastner puts it plainly: “He wanted her to be another Mary Pickford, the sweet, innocent queen of the silent screen in a field picking daffodils or something. ” The trouble was that Marian was funny. Kastner calls her the first screwball comedian before Carole Lombard.

She was a natural mimic, Kastner says, who did “absolutely hilarious impersonations,” and she was always the scapegrace, the little troublemaker. Then Kastner sums her up: “She was a beautiful woman who was hilarious, and that is a tremendous combination. ” Gabrielle sees the problem from his side: Hearst saw her as “this saintly angel. He thought that comedy was beneath her.

” The man who adored her wanted her to be solemn and sacred. The woman herself wanted to make people laugh. Hearst was also jealous, intensely. When Marian was on her own in Hollywood, she entertained Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin, and the Los Angeles gossip papers printed what they liked.

Hearst often hired spies to follow her and report back where she had been. Chaplin, by one account, seemed particularly smitten. So the second woman entered his life the same way the first had—from the chorus, with presence and a promise. The difference was what he promised.

Millisent had been offered respectability. Marian was offered fame, and fame for a Hearst meant his own newspapers. Within a few years, the name Marian Davies would be printed so often in so many of his pages and on so many of his billboards that the public would begin to resent it, and his wife would begin to read it. For a few years, the double life fit inside a single city, with the wife on Riverside Drive and the girl in Midtown.

Nasaw draws the map: “For years he carried on an affair and a marriage. Marian he saw at his apartments overlooking Bryant Park in New York City, while on the west side his wife lived at the Clarendon. ” Then he adds the sentence that hangs over the next decade: “Whether Millisent knew or asked, we don’t know. But his double life went on.

” Two sets of rooms on one island. In one, a Gothic hall three stories high and five small sons. In the other, a young actress with a stammer and a production company. The man moved between them, and for a while, the island held both.

The pictures were the engine. Cosmopolitan turned out film after film with Marian’s name above the title—forty-six of them in the end, from 1919 to 1937. Hearst reportedly spent more than $7 million on publicity for her, a sum one estimate puts at about $130 million in modern money and another higher still. In 1922, she played Mary Tudor in When Knighthood Was in Flower, and it became the first million-dollar picture ever to turn a profit.

All of it came from the same fortune that paid for Riverside Drive. Hearst had formed Cosmopolitan Productions in March of 1919 with the producer Adolf Zukor, and he wanted twenty-four major films a year. For Knighthood, in the summer of 1922, the Viennese designer Joseph Urban built whole city blocks of Paris, a Gothic cathedral, and the Tower of London. There were 3,000 extras.

The budget was $1. 5 million—at the time, the most expensive film ever produced. Zukor worried about the cost, and Hearst dismissed his concerns out of hand: “Very good pictures, like all very good products, cannot be made hastily any more than they can be made cheaply. ” Then he sold it with everything he had.

650 billboards went up, and electric signs dominated Times Square. The picture became one of the highest-grossing productions of the year, and the reviews were rapturous, especially for its star. Marian felt the weight of it. “The publicity went too far,” she said later, “and it hurt her career.

” The name was everywhere, “and people got so tired of the name Marian Davies,” she said, “that they would actually insult me. ” One reader paid closer attention than most. In 1921, Millisent noticed an expansive piece of publicity about a Miss Marian Davies, the star of an upcoming Hearst feature. She got in touch with her husband’s editors.

She demanded that all advertising be distinctly on picture, not on star. In nine words, the wife told her husband’s newspapers to sell the film and stop selling the girl. That same year, she made something of her own. In 1921, she founded the Free Milk Fund for Babies to give free milk to New York’s poor.

By one account, it began with milk stands in Hamilton Fish Park and on the Lower East Side. It would run for decades, and it would carry her name long after the films carried Marian’s. There was still a family to keep up, and for a time they kept it up beautifully. In the summer of 1920, Hearst made an hour-long home movie called The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, a spoof of the popular Western serials.

Millisent played the beautiful damsel in distress. Her husband, mounted and waving a lasso, rode to save her from a band of marauding bandits. Kastner describes the man away from the camera: “In spite of Hearst’s newspapers being these lightning rods of political controversy, in person Hearst deplored controversy. He didn’t like arguments.

He didn’t like scenes. He didn’t raise his voice. He had a courtly kind of Victorian way of talking, and he made requests rather than demands. ” He was a man who would go a long way to avoid an argument in his own house.

Over Christmas of 1922, he could not avoid one. On the 30th of December, Millisent gave a holiday party at the Clarendon for the young friends of her eldest son, George, home from school and college. The newspaper report of that merry reunion made no mention of George’s father. Somewhere in those same holidays, the son who became William Randolph Hearst Jr.

watched his mother take off her wedding ring and throw it on the floor. “If this is all you think of our marriage,” she yelled, “keep it! ” It is the one shout of hers that has come down to us, and it came down through a son. A ring is a small thing to throw on the floor of that great apartment.

It must have sounded very small indeed. He hated scenes, and this was a scene. Hearst explained himself later, by Kastner’s account, in words that sound almost wounded: “I’ve tried, as a matter of fact, to do everything I can for Mrs. Hearst.

I want her to be happy, and I can’t imagine that she’s happy in this situation any more than I am. ” He meant it, she says, “very lightly. ” He also had no intention of giving anything up. The island could not hold both households for long.

Bryant Park and Riverside Drive were too close, the billboards too large, the wife too sharp. A man who hated scenes needed more distance between his two women than a few miles of Manhattan. So he looked west to a hilltop on the California coast, where he and his architect had begun to build around 1919. By 1922, three years after Hearst and Julia Morgan first wandered around that barren hillside, the outlines of the castle had taken shape—a reimagining of a Spanish village with two soaring towers and guest houses set out for the views.

Nasaw says Morgan never once told Hearst, “That’s impossible. It can’t be done. ” There was room out there for a castle and for a whole second life to go with it. The marriage would go on.

It would simply go on with a continent inside it. At Christmas 1925, the whole Hearst family slept for the first time in the great house on the hill at San Simeon. Six years on, the main house, Casa Grande, was ready enough to hold a family holiday, and the family came—the wife and the sons together under one enormous roof. After that holiday, the record says simply, Millisent went back to New York.

By some accounts, she had been the first hostess of the hill and had even helped Morgan with the design. Those accounts are thin and come from later retellings, but they would explain a detail the house still keeps: when she did come to San Simeon in later years, on what the castle’s own history calls her rare visits, she stayed in a set of rooms called the Dós Suite—a guest’s rooms, grand and borrowed. From 1926, the hostess of the castle was Marian Davies. The dates of the break are blurred, as the dates of a marriage coming apart usually are.

Some sources fix the arrangement in 1926, the year the liaison with Marian became public. Others see the distance opening years earlier. One later account puts the formal separation as late as 1929. What changed in those years was less a date than a shape, and Nasaw describes the shape exactly: “Eventually, Millisent decided that she was going to be Mrs.

Hearst, and they decided to keep the marriage together by keeping a continent between them. ” There it is—the whole arrangement in one image, a marriage held together by three thousand miles of America. Nasaw goes on: “They moved into a pattern where Millisent would stay in the East. Hearst would buy her her own estate in Sands Point, one of the grandest estates on Long Island.

Marian would move into San Simeon, except September. In September, Hearst and Marian would go East. Millisent would come West and entertain her friends during September. And then they’d switch sides of the continent again.

” Think of it as a timetable. For most of the year, the wife held New York and the companion held California. Then for one month, the two women passed each other somewhere in the middle of the country, like trains on a single track with a siding, and each took up residence in the other’s half of the map. It did not always run smoothly.

Once when Hearst left San Simeon for Los Angeles, he came back to find that his wife had packed up and gone home to New York. She described the routine to Charlie Chaplin, and her account is the most exact picture that survives of what those visits felt like from her side of the table. “When I arrive, he’s always sweet and charming, but never stays more than a few hours. And it’s always the same routine.

Some urgent business matter needs his immediate attention in Los Angeles, and we all pretend to believe him. And of course, we all know he returns to join Marion. ” There is no self-pity in it. There is something closer to amusement—the dry voice of a woman who has watched the same small play many times and knows every line before it is spoken.

Hearst saw the other side of her, and he wrote about it to his attorney: “Whenever I do see her, something that I do or do not say throws her into a fury which results in the most distressing scenes imaginable. In fact, distressing does not describe the painfulness of these furies. And there is nothing to be done in the face of these tempestuous scenes but to flee from them as fast and as far as possible. ” For a man who owned property on both coasts and a castle in Wales, as far as possible was a very long way.

The two portraits sit side by side and do not contradict each other. To Chaplin, Millisent was the wife who saw through the excuses and kept her temper. To the lawyer, Hearst described a wife who did not keep it at all. Very likely both were true on different days.

A woman can laugh at a routine in company and still rage at it in private. Hearst, for his part, talked about ending it. “Hearst talks about how he really wants to get a divorce,” Lara Gabrielle says. “There is nothing to the relationship with Millisent anymore.

But Millisent valued very much her position as Mrs. Hearst. ” The position was hers, and only she could give it up. What kept the whole thing quiet was the trade Hearst knew best: the press barons of the day happily sold scandal about everyone else, but they had an unspoken agreement that their own private lives were off limits.

His papers did not print the story, and the mainstream press kept away from it too. The gossip papers in Los Angeles were another matter. The man who had built a fortune out of other people’s secrets kept his own behind a gentleman’s agreement and a continent. Inside the family, the silence had its own vocabulary.

Decades later, one of Hearst’s great-grandsons, Steven Hearst, remembered how the other woman was spoken of when he was a boy. “She was referred to as M. D. when I was a kid, and I thought maybe there was somebody in the family who was a doctor.

I didn’t know who M. D. was, and I wasn’t going to ask my parents about it. ” Kastner puts the sons’ position plainly: “His sons felt tremendous loyalty to their mother, and they were embarrassed at this relationship about which Hearst was so open.

” There is also a story, repeated in many popular accounts, that Millisent herself never used Marian’s name at all and referred to her only as “the woman. ” No contemporary document confirms it, and it may be no more than a good line that attached itself to her. If she did say it, it would fit the woman who wrote to the editors about the star. Gary Kamiya says it simply: “It’s hard to think of another major American popular figure who essentially lived apart from his wife and with his mistress.

” Hearst was running a second household in daylight, with guest lists, and it was a household that needed a woman at the head of the table. Hearst could spend money and he could build, but he could not fill a castle with laughter by himself. For that he needed the girl from the Follies. So the continent was divided, and each woman was handed half of it.

Millisent had New York, the sons, Sands Point, and the name. Marian had the castle, the coast, the studio, and the man. Each of them now had a kingdom to run, and each would run it very well. On the 20th of December 1927, three princes were on the guest list for dinner at the Clarendon.

The Hearsts were giving a dinner before the Yale-Nickerbocker charity ball, and for once the husband sat at his wife’s table. Five years earlier, the newspaper report that described her holiday party for George’s friends had made no mention of George’s father, and that small absence became a pattern of her parties for years to come. The hostess was always there. The host often was not.

And still the invitations went out, and still they were accepted. Her kingdom had three capitals. The first was the apartment at the top of the Clarendon with its Gothic hall and its tapestry room. The second, from the autumn of 1927, was a castle on Long Island Sound.

The third was the one she built with her own hands out of milk. The castle came from a woman who knew all about building a place in society. Beacon Towers at Sands Point had been put up around 1918 by Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, a Gothic fantasy of a castle. Alva abandoned it after just seven years, in 1925.

In the autumn of 1927, Hearst bought it for his wife for $400,000. By some accounts, it was renamed St. Joan’s Castle. There is an old tradition, repeated in a recent documentary, that F.

Scott Fitzgerald had it in mind when he imagined Jay Gatsby’s house. Millisent did not leave it as Alva had built it. Histories of the house still credit its reshaped exterior to Mrs. Hearst’s alterations of about 1927.

There is a story carried in earlier accounts of her life that after the work was done, she gave a dinner dance there for about 2,000 guests, with Ethel Barrymore and Winston Churchill among them. The number may have grown in the telling. The picture is right either way: a former bicycle girl from Herald Square was now giving parties in the castle a Vanderbilt had built. In town, the Clarendon kept her calendar full.

In the early 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt came to her table as guest of honor several times. On the evening of the 15th of April 1931, she gave a supper party at the Ritz Tower on Park Avenue for the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. In February of 1934, at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach, she brought Grand Duke Dmitri, the Duchess of Sutherland, and Lord Adair to a birthday fundraiser for President Roosevelt. Three princes, a grand duke, a duke and a duchess, a Roosevelt, and a ballroom of two thousand, if the story holds.

The hostess had come a long way from the stage door, and every name on those lists had accepted an invitation from her. The milk was her real power. The Free Milk Fund for Babies, founded in 1921, needed money every year, and Millisent found it in places a society matron was not expected to look. The fund set up prize fights at Madison Square Garden in exchange for a share of the ticket sales.

In July of 1924, Time magazine reported that one bout had raised $75,000 for it. Over the years, there would be benefits at the Metropolitan Opera, appeals on the radio, Christmas parties for the children. Years later, in 1940, she would sign a contract with a New York radio station for the milk fund fight. The politicians noticed.

In August of 1923, Time reported that the men of Tammany Hall had looked at her as a possible candidate. “Mrs. Hearst is popular,” the magazine wrote, “much more so than her husband. ” Her name was put forward for Congress.

Her reputation as a giver often outshone his reputation as a publisher, and it was entirely her own. When the Depression came, she went to work. In 1933, she took an office on East 57th Street to direct the New York side of Eleanor Roosevelt’s canteens for unemployed women. The First Lady joined her at many of her events.

The causes ran the length of a long list: benefits for crippled children and for unemployed girls, for the New York Women’s Trade Union League and the Democratic National Committee, for the Christmas fund of her husband’s own Journal, and for the village welfare of Port Washington on Long Island. The president’s wife and the publisher’s wife worked side by side through the hungry years. Here, the two halves of the marriage pulled in opposite directions. In 1932, Hearst had thrown the full weight of his papers behind Franklin Roosevelt.

By 1933, he had turned on him. He told his editors to call the New Deal the “Raw Deal,” and in his pages the president became “Stalin Delano Roosevelt. ” Meanwhile, his wife was running the First Lady’s canteens out of her own office in New York and bringing a grand duke and a duchess to the president’s birthday fundraiser in Palm Beach. The husband attacked the White House in print.

The wife worked beside it in person. The record does not say what either of them made of that. The writer Greg Young admits his first instinct is to pity her. “Part of me, my instinct is to pity Millisent in this situation,” he says.

“Because you see Hearst and you’re like, well, he’s just going to do what he’s going to do because that’s what he’s been doing his whole life. ” Then he corrects himself: “But for Millisent, there actually were some benefits to remaining in this marriage with Hearst. Millisent forged a path of her own here. And realizing that’s what she needed to deal with, she decided to build something on top of it for herself and for her sons.

” On top of it—that is the right phrase. The marriage was the foundation, cracked as it was, and she built on it anyway. The name gave her the doors. The money gave her the houses.

The sons gave her a reason. What she put up on top of all that—the dinners, the fund, the friendships with presidents’ wives—was hers. There was one rule in her kingdom that nobody needed to write down. As the New York historian behind the Daytonian in Manhattan archive puts it: “The thought that Millisent Hearst would allow the other woman into 137 Riverside Drive is outrageous.

” The other woman had a castle of her own. These rooms would never be one of her addresses. So the wife’s half of the continent turned out to be a full life. It had a castle on the sound and a palace in the sky, a cause that put milk into the hands of the poorest mothers in the city, and a guest list that ran from Tammany to royalty.

Its one empty chair was at the head of the table. In the autumn of 1929, a single guest would sit at both ends of this marriage within a month. In late September of 1929, Winston Churchill crossed into what he called “the domain of Marian Davies. ” He wrote to his wife, Clementine, from the castle at San Simeon on the 29th of September.

At Los Angeles, he told her, the party had passed into Marian’s domain, “and they were all charmed by her. She is not strikingly beautiful nor impressive in any way, but her personality is most attractive. ” She worked all day at her films, he wrote, and retired to her palace on the ocean to bathe and to entertain in the evenings. He summed up his host’s life in a phrase that has been quoted ever since: “two magnificent establishments, two charming wives, complete indifference to public opinion, oriental hospitalities.

” He was a guest. He was being polite. Even so, he counted two wives and did not pretend there was one. Marian’s kingdom had two capitals as well.

One was the castle on the hill, and the other was the house on the beach. At San Simeon, she and Hearst shared the Gothic Suite on the third floor of Casa Grande—two bedrooms and a private sitting room beside the Gothic Study where he worked. Another early account places them in the Celestial Suite up in the bell towers, but the castle’s own history puts them in the Gothic rooms, and the guides walk visitors through them still. Elsewhere in the same house was the Dós Suite, kept for the wife on her rare visits.

A first visit began the night before. Guests in the late 1920s took the overnight train from Los Angeles and were met by chauffeurs for a ninety-minute drive over rough dirt roads. On the way up the hill, they passed kangaroos, camels, American bison, ostriches, emus, reindeer, and antelope. Around the main house stood three guest houses—Casa del Mar, Casa del Sol, and Casa del Monte.

The smallest had ten rooms and the largest eighteen. Nasaw is clear about whom all this was for: “Marian was probably one of the most popular people in Hollywood. And Hearst wanted to make his young love happy. So in order to get her out of Los Angeles, out of Hollywood, to San Simeon, he made San Simeon the greatest resort that anyone had ever been to.

”

He ran it like a commanding officer. On the long trail rides, Kastner says, he had to lead. You didn’t ride ahead of him, and he would ride the guests right into the ground. Douglas Fairbanks avoided them entirely.

“It was like a military parade,” he said. Evenings began with cocktails at seven or eight in the Assembly Room. One of the old seats along the wall, taken from an Italian church, was hinged as a door to the elevator from Hearst’s private rooms, and the host would step out through the paneling as if from nowhere. The days on the hill had their own clock.

Guests had the mornings to themselves. Hearst and Marian came down an hour or so before dinner for a buffet lunch. At dinner, about nine, at the long refectory table, Hearst sat in the middle and Marian directly across from him. After dinner, there was a film, very often one of hers, and it often ran until about one in the morning.

Then he would go up to the study to work, and she would often sit with him there, and they went to bed around four or five. Most of the film people at that table, the same account says, were her guests rather than his. Hollywood came up the hill because Marian was there. There were rules.

Liquor was rationed. Guests could not keep it in their rooms, and before dinner the allowance was, as one account recorded it, just one cocktail. Another account allows two. The wine flowed like glue at dinner, Nasaw says.

The rule was there partly because of Marian: she drank, and he worried about it. The rule was also broken often. The actor David Niven later admitted that he had smuggled drinks to her. Carole Lombard described their method: “Marian and I head right for the little girl’s room.

That’s one place Hearst can’t get at us. ” There was one more rule, a strange one for that house: Hearst, Kastner says, really frowned on conjugal relations between unmarried guests. The host who lived on the hill with a woman who was not his wife would not have unmarried couples sharing a bed under his roof. Yet the tenderness was real.

The actress Ilka Chase watched the two of them at the screenings, sitting close together in fur coats, and said they looked like the big and baby bears. A friend of Marian’s put the whole relationship into one sentence: “She held his peace of mind in the hollow of her hand. She knew it. And yet she never took advantage of it.

”

The house on the beach was her own stage. Hearst felt the Beverly Hills house he had bought for Marion was too small, so he gave her a mansion overlooking the ocean at Santa Monica. Construction began around 1926 on a row of lots at 415 Palisades Beach Road, and it was finished by the end of the decade. It was called Ocean House.

It had about 110 rooms by one count, 118 with 55 bathrooms and 37 fireplaces. It cost $3 million to build and another $4 million to furnish. A swimming pool 110 feet long, lined with Italian marble and filled with heated seawater, was crossed by a marble bridge in the Venetian style. Thirty-two servants ran it.

The actress Colleen Moore called it the biggest house on the beach, and nobody argued. The actress Louise Brooks visited in 1928 and set down a single ordinary day: there were twenty people to lunch; forty more were added in the afternoon to swim in the Venetian pool of white marble. Every year on Hearst’s birthday, Marian gave a costume ball there. One year it was a Forty-Niners party.

Another was a children’s party, with Clark Gable as a Boy Scout and Joan Crawford as Shirley Temple. At an early American party, Hearst came as James Madison. At a favorite movie star party, Gary Cooper came as Fu Manchu and Groucho Marx as Rex the Wonder Horse. Marian herself, by one report, called the place a white elephant.

She could laugh at it, and she could fill it, and for years she did both. Then, less than three weeks after Churchill wrote that letter, the other half of the marriage claimed its turn with him. On the 18th of October 1929, he was guest of honor at the Clarendon, three thousand miles away. Millisent served dinner at a long table banked with flowers in the Tapestry Room, and afterward there was dancing in the gallery.

So within a single month, one of the most famous men in the world had eaten at both tables of the Hearst marriage. He had been charmed by the companion on the coast, and he was entertained by the wife on the river. He had seen two households, two hostesses, and one fortune paying for both, and he had called it exactly what it was. That same autumn, the American stock market crashed.

Hearst was not especially worried at first. Most of what he owned was land and buildings, and he believed the fall was a correction that was long overdue. The companion’s kingdom, though, rested on her pictures. They were beginning to cost more than they earned, and the new talking pictures were about to ask a girl with a stammer to speak.

In 1924, when Cosmopolitan moved west to Hollywood and joined forces with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hearst built Marian a dressing room with fourteen rooms—a bungalow the size of a house—and the man who adored her was always at the studio watching her work. It was a gift and a cage at once. He chose her scripts, her casting, and even her hairstyles, and he steered her towards sweet heroines. Kastner says it in one line: “He didn’t want her hit in the face with a custard pie or a bottle of seltzer water.

He wanted another Mary Pickford. ” Gabrielle explains the devotion behind the control: “Hearst wanted Marian built up. He wanted Marion to have the best. He wanted her to be seen by others the way he saw her.

”

When she was allowed to be funny, she was very funny. The Patsy in 1928 finally gave her room for comedy, and show people often called it her finest picture. The film historian Kevin Brownlow, looking back across the whole silent era, called her “arguably the best female comedian on the screen. ” Orson Welles, of all people, would later say much the same.

Then the pictures learned to talk, and the girl who had once joked that silent films suited her because she could not talk either had to face a microphone. Lara Gabrielle tells a story from those months. Marian went to see The Singing Fool with Al Jolson, began to cry in the dark, and whispered to the friend beside her, “I’m ruined. I’m ruined.

” Nasaw does not soften it: “She couldn’t speak two sentences without getting stuck, and she was absolutely convinced her career was over. ” As the movies began to talk, Hearst hired the best speech therapists and voice coaches in the universe. Her friend, the writer Adela Rogers St. Johns, never forgot those lessons.

“As long as I live, I will remember when she was trying to learn to talk. ” After a morning with the coaches, Marian would come downstairs and announce, “I’m not going to go any further with this. ” Hearst would not let her stop. Irving Thalberg at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gave her a screen test, and she went home sure it had been a disaster.

Then the call came: “Your screen test was brilliant. ” When Hearst ran the test in the theater at San Simeon, she remembered, he started to cry. “My God, it’s marvelous. ” Her first talking picture, Marianne, came out in 1929.

She found that she could control the stammer in front of the camera. It was a quiet victory over the thing that had pushed her out of school. Away from the cameras, she was building something of her own as well, and it rhymed with what the wife was doing in New York. In 1926, Marian started a day nursery for children in Los Angeles.

In 1928, she built a clinic on Mississippi Avenue. In 1932, she set up a foundation to keep it going. On one coast, the wife was putting milk into the hands of the poorest mothers. On the other, the companion was paying for a children’s clinic.

The real trouble was money. By the early 1930s, seven of Marian’s previous nine films had lost an average of $175,000 each. Hearst did not even blink at the figures. He remained her steadfast champion, still fixated on every part of her career.

She had a few small victories of her own. For Five and Ten, in 1931, she asked for Leslie Howard as her leading man rather than Clark Gable. Later, Gable made Cain and Mabel with her in 1936 as a favor. She lost those fights.

The role of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet went to Norma Shearer. So did Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and so did Marie Antoinette. In 1935, after eleven years there, Hearst moved Marion and her company to Warner Brothers. She made her last four pictures there.

The final one, Ever Since Eve, came out in 1937. She was about forty years old, and she never made another. Her drinking was the shadow over those years. On the hill, the one-cocktail rule still stood, and still she found her way around it, with Niven’s help and Lombard’s.

A close friend described the pattern: “When the drinking had got bad, he used to have to watch her pretty closely. She would go along quietly for some time, and then suddenly this would all break loose. ” Nasaw describes the smuggling: her girlfriends packed their suitcases with a hidden compartment and a bottle for Marian, and her liquor was hidden in the ladies’ rooms where Hearst would not go. Why did she stay?

She was not without means. In time, she owned property of her own—the desert in Palm Springs and buildings in Manhattan. She could have left and lived very well. Nasaw is clear that she knew the one thing she wanted was not coming: “Marian knew that Hearst would never marry her for a variety of reasons, including laws that would have given Millisent half of the estate.

” But she made her choice. She wanted W. R. She gave her own answer to a close friend, and it may be the most honest sentence either woman left behind: “I started out a gold digger,” Marian said, “and I ended up in love.

” The actress Lita Grey, who knew her, later reported Marian speaking even more plainly about the man. He gave her, Grey remembered her saying, “the feeling I’m worth something to him. But he’s kind and he’s good to me, and I’d never walk out on him. ” It survives secondhand through Grey, and it should be read that way.

It sounds like her all the same. She could sound breezy about the arrangement. “Why should I run after a streetcar when I’m already on board? ” she said.

“What difference does it make if he’s married to someone else? He’s with me. ” Kastner, who repeats the line, adds four words of her own: “But she did care. ”

There is a temptation to see Marian in these years as the one who lost everything for love, and Millisent as the one who kept everything by refusing it.

The truth was more even than that. Marian had the man’s company every day. She had the castle full of friends and the beach house and her own money and her own clinic. What she did not have was any standing at all in law.

When he died, she would have no claim on his body or his funeral. There was one more thing she did not yet know she would need. By the middle of the 1930s, the great Hearst fortune that had paid for the bungalow, the beach house, the castle on the sound, and the apartment on Riverside Drive was running out. The man who never blinked at a loss had been spending far more than he had for a very long time.

In the spring of 1937, he would celebrate his birthday with a circus. Within months, the bill would come due, and it would be the companion—the woman with no claim on him at all—who reached for her checkbook. In April of 1937, Hearst turned seventy-four, dressed as a ringmaster at a circus party at his companion’s house on the beach in Santa Monica. The theme of the night was “The Greatest Show on Earth.

” Clark Gable came as a cowboy. Henry Fonda and his wife came as clowns. Cary Grant arrived as a trapeze artist. To reach the party, the guests crossed a special gangway, and as they crossed, a burst of air puffed up the ladies’ skirts.

A full-size carousel borrowed from the Warner Brothers lot carried the revelers round in circles. Presiding over all of it, in a gaudy ringmaster’s coat, was the most powerful publisher in America. It was a fitting costume, as one documentary observes, for a man whose career had often resembled a three-ring circus. It was Marian’s house, and his birthday was the night she marked every year with a costume ball.

It was also the last great circus of a fortune that was already running out. The trouble had been building since the crash. On the 29th of October 1929, the stock market lost $14 billion in value. That winter, Hearst began a $2 million renovation of Wyntoon, and his editors received a cable: “Chief would like all papers to avoid use of the word depression as much as possible.

” Within a few years, he had cut $7 million from his payroll across the country, and he cabled his man in London: “We have all just been run over by a steamroller here in America, and feel pretty much flattened out. ” Debt was nothing new to him. In December of 1922—the same holiday season as the ring on the Clarendon floor—his corporate treasurer had written to him, “We are absolutely at the end of our string in manipulating finances. ” Chase National Bank dropped him as a customer a few months later.

He climbed out by selling small bonds to his own readers—$12 million worth by 1924. Nasaw sums up the habit of a lifetime: “Hearst had always been in debt. Always, always, always, always. He was one of the richest men on earth, but he always spent more than he could, and he borrowed the difference.

”

The Depression had driven off the advertisers. His advertising revenue fell 15% in 1930 and 24% in 1931. He had gone on buying anyway—art and land and buildings and papers—as if the money would always come back. By 1937, the bill was beyond paying.

By the figure most often given, he was some $126 million in debt. Another account lists $78 million owed to the banks and in overdue dividends, and $9 million more to the Canadian paper mills, which had stopped shipping him newsprint until he paid. His papers and magazines had lost tens of millions of readers. His rivals were calling his flagship in New York, the Journal-American, “the Vanishing American.

” Kastner describes the slide: “He had incorporated in the ’30s to try to get out of the personal responsibility of the finances, but things began to get quite cataclysmic. ” And still, while his advisers worked on a rescue, he quietly spent $200,000 on antiques and another $200,000 on real estate. The reckoning came on a train. In May of 1937, Hearst, Marian, and a few others boarded a train east to meet the creditors.

On the way, he sent a wire to Julia Morgan: “Stop work entirely at San Simeon. ” Then he turned to Marian and said, “I guess I’m through. ” Nasau tells what she did next in a few plain lines: “Marian comes into his rail car and pulls aside one of his chief advisers and said, ‘I’ve called my lawyers and I can lend the chief a million dollars. ‘ And Hearst says, ‘No, never.

Won’t do it. ‘ By the time he gets to New York, he realizes he has no choice but to take Marian’s money. ” He hands over control to a bank executive. A court ordered the reorganization of his company, and control passed to a trustee.

The founder of the largest media empire in the country became, in effect, a salaried employee, with his own pay cut by the usual account to $500,000 a year. Time magazine put it without mercy: “At age 75, the bad boy of U. S. journalism is just a hired editorial writer who has taken a salary cut.

”

Within a single season, the man who had bought a real castle in Wales was living on a wage and selling his treasures by the floor. The cuts reached the hill first. Much of the staff at San Simeon was let go. The animals in his private zoo were sold, and the first to go was the elephant, who walked off to the Los Angeles Zoo.

Wyntoon, his mother’s estate in the Northern Woods, was deeded over to the corporation. Hearst began paying rent on the castle he had built. A cousin who visited found him a “pathetic, broken man. ” Then the art.

There was far too much of it to sell the usual way. One of his advisers, Kastner says, warned that putting it all through the auction rooms would be like emptying an oil tanker with an eyedropper. So they took over the fifth floor of Gimbels department store in New York—the floor that normally sold sportswear for men and boys—and filled it with Egyptian statues and Renaissance tapestries, and sold it off like a fire sale. The great collector was reduced to a department store.

Years before, he had written to his sons that success was a frame of mind and that they must focus on the objectives, not the obstacles. In the spring of 1937, the obstacles had him surrounded. Throughout his ordeal, as one documentary puts it, the one person Hearst could rely on was Marian. She had done something nobody expected of a kept woman.

To raise the money, she sold her jewelry. She sold her stocks and bonds. She wrote Hearst a check for $1 million. One telling makes it two steps—the check first, and then, when that was not enough, the jewelry.

She also arranged a second loan of $1 million from Patterson. Jewels were what the world assumed a kept woman was paid in. In 1937, Marian turned hers into money and gave the money to him. The jewels that were supposed to show what she was worth to him became the proof of what he was worth to her.

The wife, meanwhile, kept her own work going. Her milk fund ran on prize fights and benefit nights and on her name. It was the strangest balance sheet in the whole story: the companion, with no legal claim on him at all, put her own money in to save him. The wife, with every legal claim, appears nowhere in the record of his rescue.

He was seventy-four, ruined on paper, and grateful. He began to think about what he owed the woman who had saved him, and about the one thing he had never been free to give her. Whether he could give it was not up to either of them. It was up to the woman on Riverside Drive.

Shortly after the million-dollar check, Hearst proposed something radical. It was time, he said, for him and Marian to marry. He was seventy-four. She was almost forty.

After two decades, it seemed as though the moment had finally come. For it to happen, his wife had to agree. And for once it looked as if she might. In 1937, the record shows, Millisent sought a divorce.

Lara Gabrielle tells the next part from Marian’s side: “In the late ’30s, there is a divorce agreement from Millisent. There was just no more to it. Millisent was finally done. So W.

R. and Marian find a person down in Mexico who is willing to marry them. They go down to Mexico and they’re waiting for the divorce agreement to become official, come through. ” Picture it: a man of seventy-four and a woman of almost forty waiting in Mexico for a call from New York that would let them do the one thing they had never been allowed to do.

They get a call at the last minute. Gabrielle goes on: “Millisent has thrown Cosmopolitan magazine into the divorce agreement. ” Cosmopolitan was one of his magazines. It was also the name he had given to Marian’s film company.

She had insisted on it as part of her property settlement, and by the usual account, the divorce fell through over that one demand. Hearst would not give her the magazine. “Hearst cannot reconcile the fact that his business life and his personal life are now coming together,” Gabrielle says, “and he makes the decision to not go through with the divorce. Can you imagine what that did to Marion?

She disappears. Nobody knows where she is in those days that she’s gone. And finally, she shows back up again. And she had been on an alcoholic bender.

And from then on, she’s never really the same. ”

The accounts differ on who in the end said no. In one version, Millisent made a demand she knew he could not meet, and so kept the marriage by pricing it out of reach. In another, she was genuinely finished and named a fair price, and it was Hearst—faced with handing a piece of his empire to his wife in order to marry his companion—who walked away.

Both can be true at once. What the record shows is the outcome: there was no divorce in 1937, and there never would be. Faith played its part. Kastner says that Millisent was Catholic, and that made it doubly unacceptable.

Nasaw adds that Hearst himself had a reason never to marry Marion: the laws that would have given Millisent half of the estate. Kastner sees a kind of courtesy on Hearst’s side as well: “Hearst didn’t want to create a situation where Millisent received the social opprobrium of being a divorcee. ” A divorce was unacceptable, especially in the society where Millisent was. She describes what followed as a kind of limbo: “So they lived on in this compromised way, but it was an awkward thing for her to remain Mrs.

Hearst with people knowing about Marian Davies. ”

Kastner’s verdict on the whole arrangement is the saddest line in the record: “I think Hearst thought that it would work out fine for everyone, but really in a way it didn’t work out fine for anyone. ” Hearst had organized his whole life around never having to choose. In 1937, he was offered a choice with a price on it, and he did not choose.

So the woman who had thrown her ring on the floor at Christmas fifteen years before and told him to keep it kept the marriage instead. It is hard to read her motives across that much time. Perhaps it was faith. Perhaps it was pride.

Perhaps it was the plain arithmetic of a wife in New York, where a marriage could not be put aside without her consent. Whatever the reason, the name stayed hers. Marian went back to the hill and to him. The drinking got worse.

A waiter at San Simeon remembered that it was not unusual for Mr. Hearst to ask her to be taken from the table. She stayed anyway, and she gave her own reason: “I thought the least I could do for a man who had been so wonderful was to be a companion to him. ”

Then the houses began to go, one after another, on both sides of the continent.

The Clarendon went first. The rooms at the top of Riverside Drive stood empty from 1938. The New York Times later wrote, after the Hearsts left, “He for California, she for the East Side. ” The building was lost in foreclosure to the Mutual Life Insurance Company.

On the 7th of April 1940, Mutual Life announced that it was being altered into smaller suites. The great apartment where Churchill had been guest of honor and Eleanor Roosevelt had dined was carved up. Beacon Towers followed. By one account, Hearst surrendered it to a New York bank in 1940 to satisfy the mortgage.

By another, it was sold in 1942. Either way, it did not survive the war. In 1945, Alva Belmont’s castle—Millisent’s castle—was pulled down. In 1941, the young Orson Welles released Citizen Kane, a film about a newspaper tycoon and his wife, a no-talent singer called Susan Alexander.

Most people read the tycoon as Hearst. Most people read the singer as Marian. His mother was in it, too, and Nasaw says she was played “just as a witch. ” The Hearst papers refused to review the film or to carry its advertising.

Nasaw says the women were what enraged Hearst: “What made Hearst angry was that the three most important women in his life, his mother, his wife, and Marian Davies, were caricatures. Marian became Susan Alexander, a no-talent opera singer with the most irritating, grating voice in movie history. ” The wife on the screen was a caricature, too. But it was the singer the public fastened onto, and the singer they took for Marion.

Decades later, Hearst’s grandson put the result plainly: “Most of what people think about my grandfather is really Citizen Kane. ” He told his own children, he says, that it would take another hundred years before his grandfather fit into history properly. Gary Kamiya found one true thing in the film’s portrait of the tycoon: “He’s got everything, but in some ways, what does he have? He’s a very, very isolated human being.

”

It was a cruel joke of the kind only memory can play. The real wife of William Randolph Hearst was in New York running a charity and giving dinners, and the legend left her in the background. The woman the film turned into a no-talent singer was the companion who had just handed him a million dollars. Hollywood remembered Marian and remembered her wrong.

It forgot Millisent almost completely. The beach house in Santa Monica would be sold in the middle of the decade. The companion’s kingdom, like the wife’s, was shrinking to a few rooms. By 1947, of all the houses the fortune had built for the two women, only one would matter, and it was not a castle.

It was her house on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, closer to a hospital. On the 2nd of May 1947, a car carried Hearst and Marian down the hill at San Simeon for the last time. Early that year, he had suffered what seemed to be a mild heart attack, and they decided to move closer to a hospital. So they were moving to her house in Beverly Hills.

As they drove away, Marian looked across at him and saw tears running down the old man’s face. “We’ll come back, W. R. ,” she told him.

“You’ll see. ” They never did. The years just before had been kinder than anyone expected. After Pearl Harbor, Hearst and Marian retreated inland to Wyntoon in the Northern Woods.

“It’s the war that saves the Hearst empire,” Nasaw says. Newsprint was rationed, the papers were thin and cheap to print, and circulation climbed as readers followed the fighting. By the end of the war, the company was healthier than it had been in decades, and Hearst had repaid Marian her million dollars. Back on the hill, they kept their routines.

They dressed for dinner each night in the refectory and watched the newest film in the theater. In 1945, the two of them owned seventy-three Dobermans. When his favorite, a dog named Gandhi, died, Hearst held a funeral for him with the staff in attendance. Kastner, looking back over the whole story of that hill, says it held “this passionate love that he had for Marian Davies.

” It held another romance, too, she says: “the platonic romance of creativity that he had with Julia Morgan. ” And for all the hundreds of guests who had passed through, it was striking how few of them, if any, had really known him. “There’s this kind of enigma. ” Kamiya says very few people got close to him.

Marian was one of the very few. He was eighty-four. For more than twenty years, the hill had been the center of his life with her. The house on North Beverly Drive was large by any ordinary standard and small by his.

The records cannot quite agree on the number—seventeen or nineteen rooms—but they agree on what it became. One description has it as an H-shaped mansion on 3. 7 acres, bought for $120,000. It was the house of a sick old man.

The two of them had spent twenty years filling castles with guests. Now, as Marian put it later, they quieted down. The beach house went in those same years. Ocean House, with its marble pool and its hundred and more rooms, was sold in the middle of the decade for about $600,000, though the sources disagree about the year.

Hearst kept working. Nasaw describes a man in his middle eighties who still read every one of his newspapers from cover to cover each day and wrote to his editors again and again to say, “This is not right. This is not right. ” He was, as Kamiya puts it, a newspaperman to the day he died.

Age caught up with him anyway. He was watched over by nurses and attendants and by Marian. Near the end, he worried about Marion more than anything. She kept up a cordial relationship with his sons, but he feared she would be cast aside once he was gone, so he set about making sure she would not be.

He gave her the deed to the house on Beverly Drive. By one account, he also quietly gave her a controlling interest in his company. On the 5th of November 1950, he signed an agreement that would matter a great deal. It made Marian the sole voting trustee of the Hearst Corporation’s stock—all 100,000 common shares and his 170,000 preferred shares, alongside the 30,000 preferred shares she already owned herself.

The agreement was separate from his will. It sat beside it, quietly waiting. Of those last years, one small detail survives through his biographers. In his final days, by one telling, Hearst left handwritten notes of affection under her door each night.

The man who had spent his life writing editorials for millions wrote his last ones for an audience of one. On the 13th of August 1951, he dictated his last letter of the day and went to sleep. Marian had found it harder and harder to keep her composure as he weakened. That night, she was especially distraught, and someone gave her a sedative.

She slept. At ten minutes to ten on the morning of the 14th of August, William Randolph Hearst died. He was eighty-eight. His sons acted at once.

Without waking her, they had his body removed from the house. By the time Marion woke, he was gone, and the house was empty. She remembered that morning for the rest of her life. “I was alone,” she said.

“I loved him for thirty-two years, and now he was gone. And then I couldn’t even say goodbye. ” In another telling of the same memory, she put it even more simply: “For thirty-two years I had him, and they leave me with his empty room. ”

Thirty-two years.

It was her own count. She had come to him as a girl from the Follies, and she was now a woman of fifty-four. She had nursed him, sat up with him, saved his company with her jewels, and played hostess to half the world on his behalf. She had the run of his castles and his heart.

She did not have the right to keep his body for a single morning. Kastner reads the sons’ haste for what it was: “Everyone had got along well enough while Hearst was alive. But the alacrity with which the boys acted afterwards showed that they had not been fond of Marion. ” For a quarter of a century they had lived with an arrangement that embarrassed them.

Now it was over, and they moved before anyone could argue. This was the night at the start of the story seen whole. The companion asleep on a sedative in Beverly Hills. The body leaving the house.

The house empty when she woke. And somewhere in New York, the wife hearing the news that she was now a widow. Millisent did not wait. As Nasaw tells it, she flew out from New York.

The body was going north to San Francisco, to the city where he had been born. The wife was going west to meet it. And the woman who had spent thirty-two years beside him was staying exactly where she was, behind drawn blinds, with his little dog. Grace Cathedral stands on Nob Hill in San Francisco, a short walk from the house where Hearst was born.

In August of 1951, it filled for him. On the 16th of August, guards stood at the doors of the Cathedral Chapel where his body lay in repose. About 1,500 people came. The governor of California was there, and the mayor of San Francisco, Elmer Robinson, was there.

Time counted notables from publishing, screen, stage, and public affairs—what Nasaw calls Hollywood royalty and political royalty. Bishop Carl Morgan Block, the Episcopal Bishop of California, conducted the service without a sermon or a eulogy. Instead, he read a poem that Hearst had written for his papers in 1941. During the service, the Hearst newspapers stopped their presses for a few minutes.

Afterward, twenty-two black limousines carried the mourners to the cemetery at Colma, and the casket was set down before the marble-columned mausoleum where his parents lay. 1,500 mourners, twenty-two cars, a few silent minutes in the press rooms he owned, and not a single word of praise from the pulpit. At the center of it was his widow. Time magazine, reporting the service, did not print her name.

It called her “his widow” and noted that she had been “almost a stranger to him for his last twenty-nine years. ” During the service, she walked slowly around the casket. It is the one moment in the whole story when Millisent stood beside him in public at the end, and it was hers by right. She had not shared his house for a quarter of a century, and now she took her place at the head of his mourners.

Whatever the people in the pews knew about the house in Beverly Hills, nobody in that cathedral could question her right to stand there. The years of keeping a continent between them, the Dós Suite, the parties with an empty chair, the ring on the floor, the call to Mexico—all of it came down to this. She was the wife, and the wife buries her husband. Nasaw finishes the picture: “The only one who’s missing is Marian.

Marian probably could have gone if she wanted to, but she knew she wasn’t welcome. She stayed home. ” The day after his death, she sat behind drawn shades in the house on Beverly Drive with his dachshund Helena beside her. She told a nurse she had thought about going to church, but that she would just stay here alone.

“He knew how I felt about him,” she said, “and she knew how he felt about me. ” On the day of the funeral, then, the marriage was exactly what it had been for twenty-five years. The wife stood in public in San Francisco among the governor and the mayor and the film moguls. The companion sat in private in Beverly Hills with a small dog and the drawn shades and most of the state between them.

Then came what Time magazine called Hearst’s bombshell, and it landed in Marian’s lap. The will itself was what anyone would expect. It left the great Hearst fortune to his widow, his five sons, and to charities. But the voting agreement signed the previous November said something else entirely.

For a few weeks, the woman left out of the funeral voted 100,000 common shares and 170,000 preferred, with 30,000 more of her own. And those votes controlled a company worth, by Kastner’s estimate, well over $100 million—a company that fourteen years before had been $80 million in the red. Kastner says it plainly: “For a brief period, Marian actually was the chief employer of the Hearst Corporation. ” Time quoted her explanation: “After all, they’re half of W.

R. ” She did not hold on for long. On the 30th of October 1951, she gave the rights up. Time magazine reported that the Hearst heirs signed an agreement with her.

The accounts disagree on exactly how. By the version Kastner tells, and that many retellings repeat, Marian sold it all back to Mrs. Hearst for $1, legal tender. Time, writing that same autumn, reported that she turned her rights over to the estate’s trustees and became a consultant to the company for life.

Either way, control went back to the estate and the family, and the price in the version most people remember was a single dollar. “And what she was saying is, I don’t need the money,” Kastner says. Then she adds what she thinks the old man had meant by it: “I think what Hearst was saying in giving her such a bequest was how incredibly important she had been in his life. ”

The next day, October 31st, Marian married for the first and only time.

She was fifty-four. Her husband was Horace Brown, a captain in the Merchant Marine, almost a decade younger, and the ceremony was held at the El Rancho Vegas in Las Vegas, eleven weeks and a day after Hearst died. Guests, it was said, looked twice when the couple came into a room: Brown was a heavy man, with the same sloping nose and the same close-set blue eyes as Hearst. Marian told people, by one account, that Brown was a cousin of Hearst’s.

His own family denied it. She filed for divorce from him in 1952 and again in 1954, and withdrew both times. At the company, the name of the woman who had saved it went silent. “The Hearst Corporation then, for a period of years, bans the name Marian Davies,” Nasaw says.

“It is not uttered. It is not spoken. ” Control passed to a board of thirteen trustees—five from the family and eight from among the executives. One of the men who ran the company in those years was Richard Berlin, the young lieutenant Millisent had once found a job for after the First World War.

William Randolph Hearst Jr. , the boy who had watched his mother throw her ring, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1956. So the wife had the funeral and the family. The companion had her memories, a husband who looked like the man she had lost, and a single dollar.

Each of them now had years still to live, and each would spend them in her own way—the way she always had. Marian Davies had ten years left, and she spent a good part of them on a clinic for sick children in Los Angeles—the clinic she had started herself in the 1920s. On the 6th of November 1952, the University of California at Los Angeles took it over, and she gave $1,900,000 to keep it going and to build it up. In 1960, she said that the clinic was “the real joy of my life.

” In 1960, during the Democratic convention, Joseph P. Kennedy rented her house in Beverly Hills and worked from it on his son’s behalf. When he learned she was dying, he had three cancer specialists flown in to see her. On the 20th of January 1961, she made her last public appearance at John F.

Kennedy’s inauguration. She died on the 22nd of September 1961, in Hollywood, of cancer of the jaw. She was sixty-four. More than 200 mourners came to her funeral.

She left an estate of about $20 million. She was buried in the Doris family mausoleum at Hollywood Forever, under her father’s name. Fourteen years later, her own account of her life with Hearst was published, put together from tape recordings she had made, under the title The Times We Had. The foreword was written by Orson Welles, the man whose film had done her the most harm.

He wrote that she had been “one of the most delightfully accomplished comedians in the whole history of the screen. ” It was an apology of a kind, and it came after she was gone. In the same pages, he called her “the precious treasure of his heart for more than thirty years. ”

Millisent outlived her husband by twenty-three years.

She kept at the work that had always been hers. In December of 1949, there had been a Milk Fund Christmas party. In December of 1959, the toy manufacturers gave her their annual award for service to children. Around the middle of that decade, the Metropolitan Opera gave a gala performance of Don Giovanni for the Free Milk Fund for Babies.

Her papers, now kept at the Bancroft Library in California, still hold the real estate files for her properties in New York, Florida, and Georgia. She had founded the Milk Fund in 1921, and nearly forty years later, the work still carried her name. She died in Manhattan on the 5th of December 1974, at the age of ninety-two, and was buried in the Hearst Mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Earlier that year, her granddaughter Patricia had been kidnapped.

Time magazine later reported that Millisent was never told. What survives is uneven. The Clarendon was cut into ordinary apartments. Beacon Towers is gone.

Ocean House had a stranger fate. Its new owner opened it as a beach club on the 30th of May 1948, the Sand and Sea Club, at $1,000 a year, and by December it was a hotel. In July of 1956, its contents were sold at auction, and that same year the great house was torn down. Its guest house and its long marble pool survive on the sand at Santa Monica, open to the public since 2009.

The castle at San Simeon survived nearly whole. In 1957, the Hearst Corporation gave it to the state of California, and it opened to the public the following year. Both halves of the marriage are still there under one roof. There is the Gothic Suite where the companion lived with him for twenty years, and the Dós Suite where the wife slept on her rare visits.

So which of them had him? On a Christmas floor in 1922, Millisent had told him to keep the ring. In the end, it was she who kept the marriage. She kept the name, the sons, the funeral, and the law on her side.

She built a cause of her own on top of a broken marriage and ran it for decades. Marian lost everything the law could have given her. She never had the ring, never had the name, never had the right to keep him for one morning after he died, never had a place at the funeral, never had the company for more than a few weeks. What she had instead was him.

The late lunches, the films after dinner, the long nights in his study, as their guests remembered them. Thirty-two years. You can weigh it however you like. You can stand in the castle and think of the wife who once packed up and went home to New York while he slipped away to Los Angeles.

You can stand by the marble pool in Santa Monica and think of the companion who filled that house with guests and was not allowed to say goodbye. Each woman got the half of one man that the other could never have, and each paid for her half in full. Marian said it best herself, in words that might stand for both of them: “I was very happy the way we were. I had great respect for him, and he had respect for me.

We were together, and that was all that mattered. ”

On a night in August 1951, one of them was asleep in Beverly Hills, and the other was in New York, about to become his widow. Both of them, in their different ways, had been his wife.