"The Cat's Meow"

Sex and intrigue on a Hearst yacht as Peter Bogdanovich probes the rot and glamour of old Hollywood.

By Charles Taylor

Apr 12, 2002 | Whatever its faults -- and there are plenty -- "The Cat's Meow" is just about the only movie to give Marion Davies a fair shake. Davies is infamous in show-biz history as the former Ziegfeld Follies girl who became the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. She was the woman Hearst lived with until his death and for whom he built both a movie studio and the vast "Hearst Castle" in San Simeon, Calif., but she is far better known as a rumor or a joke than as an actress.

When Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles conceived the character of Susan Alexander Kane in "Citizen Kane" -- the no-talent singer who winds up as a barfly, not even a has-been but a never-was -- they were defining the public image of Davies that has predominated for 60 years. Others have followed suit, notably Tim Robbins in "Cradle Will Rock," where the characterization of Davies (played in that movie by Gretchen Mol) as a drunk gold digger is just one of the movie's tossed-off smears, so casual it's as if Robbins is saying she doesn't even deserve to be considered a real person.

The truth about Marion Davies is a lot more inconvenient. When Hearst's empire neared collapse in 1937, the so-called gold digger bailed him out by hocking nearly a million dollars worth of the jewelry he gave her. After he died, she moved out of San Simeon and sold her stock in the Hearst empire to Hearst's sons.

So it's odd that a movie that treats her decently is just as grounded in gossip. The plot of Peter Bogdanovich's "The Cat's Meow" has to do with the mysterious 1924 cruise upon Hearst's yacht attended by the likes of Charlie Chaplin, novelist Elinor Glyn, Louella Parsons and the producer Thomas Ince, who died a few days after the cruise. Ince's death has been the subject of speculation ever since, fueled by the fact that none of those present ever talked about it.

What possibly happened on that yacht is a great, juicy subject for a movie, one that has the heat of gossip going for it. Bogdanovich was probably aiming for something like "Sunset Boulevard," hoping to put the rot and glamour of Hollywood side by side on the screen. But if you've ever sat through one of Bogdanovich's costume pictures (like "Nickelodeon"), you know what to expect. "The Cat's Meow" plays like an idea for a scandalous masquerade ball rather than a movie. Bogdanovich is so tickled by his own naughtiness that he hasn't bothered to shape the scenes, and as usual, his sense of comedy is both antic and flat. (That's why Ryan O'Neal was the perfect Bogdanovich actor; he always thought that to be funny you had to act funny.)

The actors, for the most part, sink under the weight of their characters' rococo personas. Joanna Lumley, under a pound of pancake as Elinor Glyn, is like the cruise's sardonic funeral director. Jennifer Tilly's ditz routine is all wrong for Louella Parsons, the Hearst movie reviewer who, shortly after the cruise, signed an unprecedented lifetime contract with Hearst, forever raising suspicion that the newspaper magnate was buying her silence. Tilly doesn't find the connection between Parsons the dumb bunny and Parsons the calculated schemer who served as Hearst's most loyal lap dog and his most ferocious attack hound. The actors who do good work are sunk by Bogdanovich's inept direction. Eddie Izzard is physically wrong for Charlie Chaplin, stocky instead of diminutive, and his earthiness misses the cultivated hauteur Chaplin affected. But he does suggest the overweening narcissism of the man, the conviction that life owed him something.

The actor most hurt by the direction is Edward Herrmann as Hearst. Herrmann has the tycoon's ungainly awkwardness; he's a big man uncomfortable in his body. He plays his lumbering stature against Hearst's emotional insecurity. Herrmann does some very daring things, especially in the scenes where Hearst is heartsick because of Davies' imagined infidelity. The married Hearst, engaged in a scandalous relationship (his wife, who was a devout Catholic, refused to give him a divorce) was also keenly worried about his public image. That he loved Davies isn't in doubt. Neither is the fact that his attempts to make her respectable ruined her career.

Herrmann embraces that contradiction. He isn't afraid to appear pathetic, and he comes up with moments of neediness that feel almost too private to watch. But Bogdanovich, the movie buff, friend and confidant to Orson Welles, can't bring himself to show any sympathy for Hearst. To him Hearst is Charles Foster Kane, the powerful hypocrite who deserves whatever he gets. Herrmann winds up as little more than a character witness for a stacked jury.

Luckily, Bogdanovich can't do much to Kirsten Dunst. With her pearly, kiddish luminescence, those dimples and easy smile, Dunst gets the canny cheerfulness that Marion Davies radiated on-screen. When, dressed in a sporty sailor suit, she executes a little mock salute, she taps right into the spirit of Davies the wised-up cutup you see in her best movies. And there's no embarrassment in her most private scenes with Herrmann. She simply erases the age difference between them. The sight of the huge Herrmann attempting to bury himself in Dunst's slight, slim body, pouring out his fears as she comforts him, is touching. These moments are striking because in them, this couple is at last allowed to express their love for each other without ridicule.

Next Page: In Davies' one and only film now available on video, an entrancing glimpse of what might have been

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