It isn’t every day you are asked to review the biography of your grandfather’s mistress.
Time tends to soften the intensity of family wounds. A dutiful grandson, I’ve always had the greatest regard for my grandfather. As a little boy, I spent summer vacations at San Simeon, his castle in Central California. It seemed like a marvelous Disneyland, with sun-filled gardens, a compound on the scale of a hilltop Spanish village, an amazing art collection, and grand architecture—which meant nothing to me then, except that it was something impressive, extraordinary, rare; and the garden smelled very good.
I knew that my dad, one of five sons (W.R. Jr., widely known as Bill Hearst), had reservations about Marion Davies. I came to believe, as a young adult, that three of my uncles who were younger than Bill had even more disdain for her. Once you reach a certain age, if your parents’ marriage breaks up, you are a little more able to understand the complexities of human relationships.
But if you are a younger child of the family, it may feel like a terrible betrayal: of your parents by each other and, perhaps, by your parents of you. I didn’t grow up with any personal impression of the Hearst-Davies affair; it was an unspoken subject, until I went to see the film as a college
