PIERCE ARROW POSTER

These days the cars are sleeker and the furs are sometimes faux if the mistress is a vegetarian, but many mistresses expect - and get - expensive presents.  Their keeper may not be wealthy and they may still be self supporting, but a little luxury is a lot.

MATT RIDLEY : THE RED QUEEN : ON BLOND HAIR

page 294 of Matt Ridley's book THE RED QUEEN

... That blond hair on a woman has been considered by Europeans more beautiful than brown or black has long been noted. In ancient Rome women dyed their hair blond. In medieval Italy fair hair and great beauty were inseparable. In Britain the words fair and beautiful were synonymous. ... Blond hair in children is a fairly common gene among Europeans ... So when a mutation arose in the not so distant past ...for that blondness to last into adulthood but not beyond the early twenties, any men with a genetic preference for blond women would have found themselves marrying only young women... They therefore would have left more descendants and a preference for blond hair would have spread...  Hence, gentlemen prefer blondes.

WAS PATRICIA LAKE MARION DAVIES DAUGHTER?

Obituary Revives Rumor of Hearst Daughter : Hollywood: Gossips in the 1920s speculated that William Randolph Hearst and mistress Marion Davies had a child. Patricia Lake, long introduced as Davies' niece, asks on death bed that record be set straight. LA TIMES ARTICLE  link here!

Indeed, the skeptics have a point. All the proof Lake had to offer were countless stories and a suspiciously familiar nose and long face. Whatever the truth, Lake undeniably led a glamorous life at the center of one of Hollywood's most enduring rumors, at a time when the star system flourished, the incomes were fabulous and the lifestyles opulent and uninhibited.

"She lived her life on a satin pillow," Lake said fondly after his mother's death. "They took away her name, but they gave her everything else."

THE GREAT ZIEGFELD

Marion Davies was a Ziegfeld girl... a lot of the girls had "Stage Door Johnny's, Sugar Daddys... some became mistresses, some became wives.

MARION DAVIES ON W.R. HEARST

"I thought the least I could do for a man who had been so wonderful and great, one of the greatest men ever, was to be a companion to him."

-Marion Davies from her memoir "The Times We Had."

FEATHERS IN MY 1920's HAT

MARION DAVIES STAR : HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME

EXCERPT FROM MARION DAVIES' "THE TIMES WE HAD"

Page 18 hardback

"He used to call up my mother and ask if he could come for dinner.  And we'd sit around afterwards and listen to the radio or play cards or something silly like that.  It got to be a very friendly affiliation.

He told my father that he was in love with me, and my father said, "It's up to her.  She went on the stage of her own volition, and her life is in her own hands.  Her career, what she wants to do, whatever my daughter decides - it's all right with me."

And my mother felt the same way.

W.R. said he would try to get a divorce, and he did try.  He spent hundreds and thousands of dollars trying.  But there was the Catholic religion, and I think his wife felt that it said, "I will not accept a divorce,"  But instead it says, "If you are divorced, you cannot get married again in the Catholic church."

Page 20

"They were estranged before I met him - W.R. was fifty-eight when we me - and he was lonely.  That is why he would go to the shows, and the girls would think he was a wolf.  But he was not."

(Marion was about 14 or 15 when they met.

The Times We Had - Life with William Randolph Hearst by Marion Davies was published by the Indianapolis/New York publisher Bobbs-Merril Company, Inc. in 1975.

CHIN DEEP IN FURS : 1920'S FASHION