Marion Davies at Santa Monica: The Other Julia Morgan Building

In nineteen twenty-six, William Randolph Hearst commissioned the architect Julia Morgan to design a beach compound on the Santa Monica shore for his companion Marion Davies. Morgan was simultaneously building Hearst Castle at San Simeon. The woman was busy.

The compound she designed here consisted of five Georgian Revival buildings, the centerpiece a mansion with one hundred ten rooms, fifty-five bathrooms, thirty-seven fireplaces, and a heated saltwater swimming pool one hundred ten feet long. The construction cost was three million dollars. Hearst spent four million more furnishing it. There were crystal chandeliers from Tiffany, a ballroom said to have been imported from an eighteenth-century Venetian palazzo, rooms paneled in gold leaf. It was, in material terms, the Santa Monica counterpart to the Castle up the coast.

From nineteen twenty-nine until nineteen forty-two, the estate was the center of Hollywood's social world. Charlie Chaplin came. Winston Churchill came. The film industry's most powerful figures gathered here, in a compound owned by the most powerful press baron in America, at parties hosted by his companion, the actress who had made herself indispensable to both the social machinery and the man who ran it.

Davies was more than a hostess. She was a skilled comedian, a competent businesswoman, and by most accounts the more genuinely warm presence in the relationship. The estate reflected Hearst's wealth and power. What it reflected about Davies is a more complicated question.

Almost nothing survives. The pool is still here. The North Guest House is still here. The rest was demolished. The site is now the Annenberg Community Beach House. If you are standing at the edge of that pool, you are standing in the only piece of Julia Morgan's Santa Monica compound that the twentieth century did not erase.