Beauty’s Worth

[No. 71 in Exhibition]

MARION DAVIES was in the Ziegfeld Follies when she met William Randolph Hearst.  She became his mistress and remained so until the great man died in 1951.  Hearst was determined to make her a star, and he founded Cosmopolitan Pictures to produce her films.  By 1919, her movies were being distributed by Paramount.  Beauty’s Worth (1922) is one of eleven under this arrangement.  Davies was not Susan Alexander Kane, the mediocre fictional counterpart that Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles conceived for Citizen Kane.  Davies was a genuinely funny actress who did good work, who remained loyal to Hearst, no matter that he had foolishly insisted on putting her in grand and serious roles.