Poster Saturday. December 1919

The December 1919 Coca Cola calendar, which featured actress Marion Davies.

Davies was an early, and talented, silent movie actress who would make the cross over to talking pictures. She was already the mistress of the married William Randolph Hearst at the time of her appearing on this calendar and indeed Hearst founded Cosmopolitan Productions specifically to back her career. Unusually for such relationships, Davies remained Hearst's mistress until his death and married for the first and only time shortly after that.

Davies isn't well remembered as actress today due to her unfavorable depiction in Citizen Kane, a fictionalized treatment of Hearst's life.  The film remains a great film to this day but it is fiction,  not a biography, and Davies isn't treated fairly in it.  Even efforts by the movies major star and producer Orson Welles failed to suffice to retrieve her image, something no doubt made more difficult by her long running illicit relationship with Hearst.

Hearst and Davies are widely believed to have been the parents of Patricia Lake, who was maintained to be Davies' niece during Davies' lifetime and was passed off as the daughter of a less successful acting sister.  Lake was also an actress and her true parentage, if that is her true parentage, was only revealed on her deathbed.  Lake bore a striking resemblance to Davies.

Marion Davies

Davies was the daughter of a New York lawyer whose original last name was Douras.  She was educated in a Catholic convent school and returned to her Faith prior to her death.