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Top of the pile
80
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
73/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Lara Gabrielle
Publisher:
University of California Press
Date:
September 27, 2022
For many decades, Marion Davies's story has been a source of fascination to the public. From her humble days in Brooklyn to her rise to fame alongside press baron William Randolph Hearst, her story seems like a modern fairy tale. Gossip columnists and fan magazines have tried to capture her unique story for over one hundred years, and biopics and documentaries have tried to incorporate her story into countless screenplays. Amid the interest, the real Marion Davies has been largely hidden. Due to her wariness of strangers and the press, she shied away from interviews and trusted very few with the details of her own unusual life story. Through Gabrielle's archival research, and letters, notes, tapes, and interviews of Davies with family and friends, a woman emerges of enormous strength and resolve.
What The Reviewers Say
An entertaining, first-rate biography that necessarily serves, like it or not, as a corrective to Hollywood myth.
A deeply researched and fair-minded biography of Davies’s life and movie work.
Sparkling.
Scrupulously researched.
