And the Rest Is History by Marlene Wagman-Geller Page B

merely dollars deep.
    In his eighth decade, Hearst rebounded financially, and the couple returned to the castle. In their evenings in the home, they sat together in their screening room, where tears came to William’s eyes as he watched Marion’s movies. In the morning she woke up to poems he had penned for her; a cherished one ended, “But no beauty of earth is so fair a sight / As the girl who lies by my side at night.”
    In 1951, the unthinkable happened once more; Hearst had run out of time. In failing health, he was taken to his Beverly Hills home to be near medical care. His mansion’s bedroom was emptied of all the treasures he had spent a lifetime acquiring; they all remained at the only place Hearst cared about, the home on the Enchanted Hill. His only personal effect was a photograph, on a desk beside his massive canopied bed, of Marion, who had been his faithful companion for thirty-four years. On it she had written a quotation from Romeo and Juliet : “My bounty is as boundless as the sea / My love as deep; the more I give thee / The more I have, for both are infinite.”
    Citizen Kane’s final whispered word, “Rosebud,” held the elusive key to the life of the prince of publishing. Hearst departed the world with no recorded last words; however, if he had, there is no doubt which name would have been on his lips.
    Postscript
    When Hearst passed away, his body was flown to San Francisco. The funeral was fittingly ornate; however, Marion Davies was barred from attending by Millicent and her children. Hearst was entombed with his parents at Cypress Lawn Cemetery outside San Francisco.
    Marion died in Hollywood in 1961 of cancer of the jaw. Her funeral was attended by former president Herbert Hoover, Bing Crosby, Mary Pickford, Mrs. Clark Gable, and Joseph Kennedy. Patricia Lake was later buried beside her. She was Marion’s niece; there are persistent rumors that she was the daughter of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst.

15
    F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre
    1918
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    S cott and Zelda, after nine decades, remain the golden couple of a golden age, their romance immortalized in Fitzgerald’s flawless prose. They serve as legends of their era, the embodiment of the triumph and tragedy of the Roaring Twenties, dwelling, for a time, this side of paradise.
    Zelda Sayre was born in Montgomery, Alabama, into a prominent family; her father was a justice of the supreme court of Alabama. Her indulgent mother named her after a gypsy princess from a romance novel; it was to prove an apt moniker. She had an unappeasable appetite for attention; for example, the teenager (the antithesis of Southern propriety) wore a tight, flesh-colored bathing suit to fuel rumors that she swam nude. Not surprisingly, she and her childhood friend Tallulah Bankhead left Montgomery with no shortage of gossip. Her high school yearbook encapsulated her philosophy : “Let’s think only of today and not worry about tomorrow.” Even the imaginative girl could not have envisioned what a roller coaster her tomorrow would hold when her life merged with a self-proclaimed romantic egotist.
    Zelda’s destiny, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, was born into an Irish Roman Catholic family in St. Paul, Minnesota. A disinterested student, he dropped out of Princeton to enlist in World War I, hoping the experience would provide material for the novels he aspired to pen. Ironically, his stint in the army introduced him to the passion that would drive his books, many of which were to become American classics.
    The first time Zelda met Scott was when he was stationed at Camp Sheridan and received a coveted invitation to an exclusive country club, where he saw a “golden girl.” She was swaying to the song “Dance of the Hours,” and the twenty-one-year-old first lieutenant was mesmerized. He asked her to dance,