THE TIMES WE HAD: LIFE WITH WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST Marion Davies' Memoir

"He took a beautiful, warm-hearted girl and made her the best-known kept woman in America and the butt of an infinity of dirty jokes. and he did it out of love and the blindness of love…" So wrote Pauline Kael of William Randolph Hearst, one of the most extravagant men the world has ever seen, and Marion Davies, the charming, guileless comedienne with whom he fell in love. The wealthy publisher kept Marion as his mistress and idolized her for more than three decades. While his wife remained in the East, Marion reigned with him in the midst of incredible splendor at his estate in San Simeon. He launched her into an ill-fitting career of movie stardom, and before he was through she had made more than 45 films -- each of which received floods of publicity from his empire of newspapers. Here is the fabulous story, never told before, of Marion's life at the top during Hollywood's heyday, told in her own words! Before she died, Davies made an extensive series of tape recordings, which were discovered a year before this book was published. She talked freely about the years she shared with Hearst, about her career, about the charismatic world of glittering and talented celebrities who populated their life, and about the lifestyle they created, which made them one of the most notorious couples of their time. With becoming modesty, she says: "I was no actress." Through her commentary runs a mixture of gratitude and resentment toward Hearst, of awe and contempt, of warmth and frustration. There is arrogance, and there is love. She is refreshingly simple and direct. Her wit scathes. With countless photographs, never before published, recording the parties and people, the public and most private moments, and crowded with faces we instantly recognize, here is a love story, a Pygmalion story, the story of a woman exploited and fighting back by exploiting in turn, a fable of power, an idyll of Hollywood kings, bringing alive a unique time and place that will never be again.

THE book chronicling the high times in San Simeon. Don't even THINK about going to visit the amazing Hearst Castle before reading this one! It made MY trip (and my companions) much richer.
-Mark Bloomfield, Ballantine Sales