Marion Davies, Fay Wray & Hedy Lamarr: Hollywood's Most Misunderstood Women
Three books, three actresses, one theme: the real stories behind the Golden Age's most persistent myths. In this video I review three biographies that each set out to correct the record on women whose public image was shaped by everyone but themselves.
Lara Gabrielle's "Captain of Her Soul: The Life of Marion Davies" (University of California Press, 2022) is the product of a decade of research, archival digging, and interviews aimed at pulling Davies out from under two long shadows: her relationship with press baron William Randolph Hearst, and the false, endlessly repeated comparison to Susan Alexander, the untalented mistress-turned-opera-singer in "Citizen Kane." Gabrielle shows a fiercely independent comedienne who navigated a speech impairment, negotiated her own contracts, and built a genuine philanthropic legacy — a "captain of her soul," in her own words, rather than anyone's puppet (Lara Gabrielle, Mercury News).dokumen+1
Victoria Riskin's "Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir" (Pantheon, 2019) is a different kind of correction — a daughter's loving, clear-eyed dual biography of her mother, the actress forever remembered as the object of King Kong's affection, and her father, the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind "It Happened One Night" and "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town." Riskin interweaves personal memory with real Hollywood history, tracing her parents' lives through the silent era, the Depression, World War II, and the blacklist, and giving Fay Wray in particular far more dimension than the "scream queen" label ever allowed (Los Angeles Times, LAPL).lapl+1
And then there's Hedy Lamarr's "Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman" (1966) — the strangest case of the three. Marketed as Lamarr's own uninhibited memoir, it was in fact ghostwritten by Leo Guild and Cy Rice, who packed it with fabricated, salacious content Lamarr herself later called "fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous and obscene" — she sued the publisher over it. It's a fascinating, messy artifact precisely because it shows how thoroughly a woman's real story (including her work as a co-inventor of frequency-hopping technology) could be hijacked and rewritten by other people, even in a book carrying her own name.
Taken together, these three books are really about the same fight: who gets to control a woman's story, and what it takes — sometimes sixty years later — to take it back.
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