FOR JAYJO MCFADDEN:
11/19/1924 - After celebrating his 44th birthday (11/16/1880) aboard newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst's yacht, "Oneida," silent film maker (he will be responsible for making over 800 films), Thomas H. Ince, known as the "Father of the Western" dies at his home in Beverly Hills, California, of heart failure after bringing on an acute bout of indigestion by ignoring the peptic ulcers he is prone to by consuming salted almonds washed down by flutes of champagne (despite Prohibition being in full swing and not ended until the 18th Amendment is repealed on December 5, 1933). Or did his ending come in a more sinister fashion at the hands of jealous Hearst or someone else on the boat?
Ince - 1922
Thomas Harper Ince is born on November 16, 1880 to English immigrants John E. Ince and Emma Ince in Newport, Rhode Island. The middle son of three male siblings and a daughter, Ince's father is former "powder monkey" in the British navy that leaves that country's service when his ship docks in San Francisco. The transplant finds work in America as a reporter and a coal miner before shifting to the east coast in 1887 when Thomas is seven-years-old. Becoming involved in the Manhattan world of entertainment , John works as an actor and musical agent, while Mrs. Ince, sister Bertha, Thomas, and his brothers, John and Ralph, all work as actors too. Thomas makes his Broadway debut at 15-years-old in revival of the 1893 play, "Shore Acres." More work soon follows as Thomas plays child roles for several local stock companies while also spending time as an office boy for theatrical manager Daniel Frohman and starting an unsuccessful vaudeville company called "Thomas H. Ince and His Comedians." In 1907, Ince meets actress Elinor "Nell" Kershaw and the two will marry on October 19th (the couple will produce three children). Ince's directing career begins in 1910 when he fortuitously has a chance encounter in New York City with former acting pal, William S. Hart (soon to become the foremost Western star of silent films), who gets his friend a job at the Biograph Company with his future partner, director D. W. Griffith. Impressed with the young actor and his willingness to take on whatever role is needed in front of or behind the camera, Ince is made a production coordinator at Biograph, a position which quickly leads to his orchestrating several films for Carl Laemmle's (the future founder and owner of Universal Pictures) Independent Moving Pictures (IMP). Later in 1910, when a director at IMP is unable to complete work on a small feature film, Ince convinces Laemmle to let him finish making the silent movie. Off and running, Laemmle sends Ince to Cuba to make one-reel shorts with IMP's newest stars, Mary Pickford and Owen Moore (Ince's first contract is for three months of work at $150 a week). Tired of trying to make movies (his favorites are Westerns and stories about the American Civil War) while hiding daily from Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company trust which is trying to corner the market on the American production of films, in September of 1911, Ince takes a position with the New York Motion Picture Company (NYMPC) co-owned by actor-financier Charles O. Baumann and actor-writer Adam Kessell Jr. Finding out that the pair has recently established a West Coast studio, named Bison Studios, located at 1719 Alessandro Avenue (now Glendale Blvd.) to produce Westerns out of Edendale, California (now Echo Park, California), Ince convinces his two new associates that he should go out west to manage the fledgling operation. Shortly thereafter, Ince, accompanied by his wife, his cameraman, a property man, and leading lady Ethel Grandin, moves to Southern California where he begins changing the way silent motion pictures are made. 
Cowboys & Indians
Revolutionizing the film industry with concepts that are still being used over 100 years later, Ince not only creates Hollywood's first major studio, but also manipulates the methodology in which movies are manufactured, introducing to the craft the "assembly line," filmmaking with individual departments under department heads that report to executive producers and producers on multiple films, while the producers report to the studio chief, Ince. Model in place by 1913, Ince's changes to the way films are produced allows his studio to go from making one two-reel movie a week, to having his associates produce three two-reelers a week (many of them Westerns, in 1913, as director/producer, Ince will create more than 150 two-reel movies) ... written, filmed, edited, and assembled with a finished product being delivered for distribution seven days later, just in time to fulfill the public's demand for more of the new entertainment. No longer behind the camera himself, by the end of 1913, Ince is supervising department heads and letting others like Francis Ford and his brother, John Ford, William Desmond Taylor, Reginald Barker, Henry King, Frank Borzage, and Fred Niblo craft their films, while also "discovering" or making into stars on screen talents like William S. Hart, Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Three fires, the last taking place on July 4, 1922, eventually destroy Inceville, but by then, Ince has relocated to what will become Culver City, on a journey that will have the filmmaker leaving NYMP, partnering with D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett to form the Triangle Motion Picture Company (named not for the threesome, but for the aerial view of studio that is built at 10202 West Washington Blvd., and eventually becomes Lot 1 of MGM Studios and is now Sony Pictures Studios), selling his portion of Triangle to Griffith and Sennett in 1918, and starting a new studio, Thomas H. Ince Studios, on 14 acres of real estate at 9336 West Washington Blvd., after helping Adolph Zukor form Paramount Pictures (where my namesake grandfather and his brother once worked for years) ... eventually the property will be bought by Cecil B. DeMille, becomes RKO Pictures by 1928, becomes the home of Desilu Productions in 1957, and is now Culver Studios after being sold Sony Pictures Entertainment in 1991. His films distributed by MGM and Paramount, his style of film production copied by the other Hollywood studios, and failing in several attempts to place his movies in marketplaces across the country, by the end of 1924, Ince can feel his power within the film industry starting to slip away and the studio head enters into negotiations with another major player in the business with the object of making and distributing the movies of the man's mistress. The man of course was the legendary millionaire newspaperman, William Randolph Hearst.
Born on January 3, 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, Marion Cecilia Douras becomes the youngest member of the family (she follows three sisters, Ethel, Rose, and Reine, and older brother, Charles) of New York City lawyer and judge Bernard J. Douras and his wife, Rose Reilly. Growing up near Prospect Park region of Brooklyn, Marion is educated at the Sacred Heart religious convent on the Hudson River (and for awhile, a convent in Tours, France), but quickly grows cold to her studies and the supervision of the institution's Catholic nuns (and it doesn't help that she is mercilessly teased for having a stutter). As soon she gets the chance, she leaves school to pursue a dancing career, while changing her last name to Davies (following the example of her sister, Reine), and at the age of seventeen makes her debut in Philadelphia as the star chorine of the 1914 production of the musical-comedy, "Chin-Chin," which takes her to Broadway by October of the same year. On the "Great White Way" she is an instant sensation and follows her initial hit with successes in "Nobody Home," "Miss Information," and "Stop, Look and Listen," which in turn lead to her signing a 1916 featured performer contract to appear in the "Ziegfeld Follies," and when she isn't performing, she also has a lucrative career as a model for magazine illustrators Harrison Fisher and Howard Chandler Christy. Her stutter however prevents her from getting lines of dialogue in Ziegfeld's productions, but her beauty and dancing keep her employed, and the source of interest to the horde of werewolves that prowl Broadway nightly, including one with a huge wallet to back up his lusting fantasies, business magnate William Randolph Hearst.
The Model
1921 Movie Poster
The Hearst Yacht, Oneida
Parsons
Marion's Funeral
The Inces At The White House - 1922
William S. Hart
Laemmle
Arriving in Southern California, Ince discovers that his new "studio" isn't much more than "a tract of land graced only by a four-room bungalow and a barn," a situation the New York transplant immediately begins resolving. Settling on a 460-acre tract of land conveniently called Bison Ranch at the point where Sunset Blvd. and Pacific Coast meet at the coastline, renting the location by the day until he is able to buy the location in whole in 1912 (he also leases 18,000 acres of Palisades Highlands between Santa Monica and Malibu that will one day become Universal Studios), Ince builds the studio of his dreams which of course is unofficially dubbed "Inceville" (before morphing into the Triangle Pictures Corporation, which in turn, will eventually become the headquarters of MGM when some of the operation is transferred to Culver City to escape the occasional winds, sands, and fog). The first of it's kind, the studio will feature silent stages, an assortment of structures, from humble cottages to large mansions, mimicking the style and architecture of different countries, production offices, film printing labs, a commissary large enough to serve meals to hundreds of workers, dressing rooms, prop houses, elaborate sets, 300 cowboys and cowgirls, 600 horses, cattle, bison, and other livestock (kept in the surrounding hills where Ince also raises feed and garden produce), offshore beyond the breakers is a full-size brigantine suitable for conversion to a variety of sailing vessels, and a whole Sioux tribe (200 in all) living in teepees. While the Indians, cowboys, and assorted workmen live at the studio, actors, actresses, and other personnel come to the grounds by taking red trolley cars to the Long Wharf at Temescal Canyon and then riding buckboards to wherever they are required with everything lorded over by Ince from the confines of either his production office or from his mansion atop a nearby hill above his creation.
Seaside Inceville (1919)
More Studio
The Ince Mansion
Revolutionizing the film industry with concepts that are still being used over 100 years later, Ince not only creates Hollywood's first major studio, but also manipulates the methodology in which movies are manufactured, introducing to the craft the "assembly line," filmmaking with individual departments under department heads that report to executive producers and producers on multiple films, while the producers report to the studio chief, Ince. Model in place by 1913, Ince's changes to the way films are produced allows his studio to go from making one two-reel movie a week, to having his associates produce three two-reelers a week (many of them Westerns, in 1913, as director/producer, Ince will create more than 150 two-reel movies) ... written, filmed, edited, and assembled with a finished product being delivered for distribution seven days later, just in time to fulfill the public's demand for more of the new entertainment. No longer behind the camera himself, by the end of 1913, Ince is supervising department heads and letting others like Francis Ford and his brother, John Ford, William Desmond Taylor, Reginald Barker, Henry King, Frank Borzage, and Fred Niblo craft their films, while also "discovering" or making into stars on screen talents like William S. Hart, Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Three fires, the last taking place on July 4, 1922, eventually destroy Inceville, but by then, Ince has relocated to what will become Culver City, on a journey that will have the filmmaker leaving NYMP, partnering with D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett to form the Triangle Motion Picture Company (named not for the threesome, but for the aerial view of studio that is built at 10202 West Washington Blvd., and eventually becomes Lot 1 of MGM Studios and is now Sony Pictures Studios), selling his portion of Triangle to Griffith and Sennett in 1918, and starting a new studio, Thomas H. Ince Studios, on 14 acres of real estate at 9336 West Washington Blvd., after helping Adolph Zukor form Paramount Pictures (where my namesake grandfather and his brother once worked for years) ... eventually the property will be bought by Cecil B. DeMille, becomes RKO Pictures by 1928, becomes the home of Desilu Productions in 1957, and is now Culver Studios after being sold Sony Pictures Entertainment in 1991. His films distributed by MGM and Paramount, his style of film production copied by the other Hollywood studios, and failing in several attempts to place his movies in marketplaces across the country, by the end of 1924, Ince can feel his power within the film industry starting to slip away and the studio head enters into negotiations with another major player in the business with the object of making and distributing the movies of the man's mistress. The man of course was the legendary millionaire newspaperman, William Randolph Hearst.
Triangle Studios Front Entrance
Movie Poster
Executive Building - Thomas H. Ince Studios
William Randolph Hearst Sr. is born in San Francisco on April 29, 1863 to 42-year-old Missouri millionaire mining engineering George Hearst (he of the famous South Dakota Homestake Mine ... an underground gold mine that will produce more than 40 million troy ounces of gold during its lifetime from 1876 to 2001, a value of more than $79,368,000,000 in 2022 dollars) and his 21-year-old wife, philanthropist and suffragist, Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson. Recovering from the odious two years of time he spends at Harvard goofing around (among his escapades, he will have pet alligator he names "Champagne Charlie" and he will smuggle a donkey into one of his professors' room with a label on the animal that reads "Now there are two of you!"), before getting expelled for sponsoring huge beer parties in Harvard Square to sending pudding pots converted to chamber pots to his professors with a picture of each teacher deep inside, Hearst takes over his father's newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, in 1887. Extremely successful, the paper becomes a communication stepping stone for the newspaperman to expand across the country, adding newspapers in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and other population centers, diversifying into book and magazine publishing (among them, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Harper's Bazaar), radio station ownership, and extensive real estate ownership of properties in New York City, California, and Mexico, along with maintaining timber and mining rights inherited from his father. And somehow he also finds time at the age of forty to marry a 21-year-old New York City chorus girl named Millicent Veronica Willson in 1903 (the couple will be married until Hearst's death in 1951 at the age of 88, a union that will produce five children); a marriage that becomes "in name only" once the newspaperman falls in love with another chorus girl, this one named Marion Davies (changed from her birth name of Marion Cecilia Douras) in 1916.
At Harvard
Millicent
Marion
Born on January 3, 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, Marion Cecilia Douras becomes the youngest member of the family (she follows three sisters, Ethel, Rose, and Reine, and older brother, Charles) of New York City lawyer and judge Bernard J. Douras and his wife, Rose Reilly. Growing up near Prospect Park region of Brooklyn, Marion is educated at the Sacred Heart religious convent on the Hudson River (and for awhile, a convent in Tours, France), but quickly grows cold to her studies and the supervision of the institution's Catholic nuns (and it doesn't help that she is mercilessly teased for having a stutter). As soon she gets the chance, she leaves school to pursue a dancing career, while changing her last name to Davies (following the example of her sister, Reine), and at the age of seventeen makes her debut in Philadelphia as the star chorine of the 1914 production of the musical-comedy, "Chin-Chin," which takes her to Broadway by October of the same year. On the "Great White Way" she is an instant sensation and follows her initial hit with successes in "Nobody Home," "Miss Information," and "Stop, Look and Listen," which in turn lead to her signing a 1916 featured performer contract to appear in the "Ziegfeld Follies," and when she isn't performing, she also has a lucrative career as a model for magazine illustrators Harrison Fisher and Howard Chandler Christy. Her stutter however prevents her from getting lines of dialogue in Ziegfeld's productions, but her beauty and dancing keep her employed, and the source of interest to the horde of werewolves that prowl Broadway nightly, including one with a huge wallet to back up his lusting fantasies, business magnate William Randolph Hearst.
The Model
The Dancer
Seeing the still teenage Marion perform in the "Follies" at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York City, Hearst is almost instantly infatuated by the beauty, though she is at first cool to the millionaire, who proceeds to spend every evening of the next eight weeks in a front row seat, gazing at the dancer. He secretly also arranges for her to be photographed at a New York City studio as a Japanese geisha and white clad American bride. At first, Davies is terrified of the attentions she receives from Hearst, but eventually, she warms to the older man when the two become intimate by the end of the year while Mrs. Hearst is on one of her frequent solo trips to Europe. 1916 also finds Marion making her screen debut modeling gowns in a fashion newsreel, which she follows up by starring in a movie she also writes, "Runaway Romany" (the film is directed by Marion's brother-in-law, producer George W. Lederer). Shows and modeling and silent movies alternating, by 1920, Marion appears on the stage for a final time in "Ed Wynn's Carnival," before becoming a full-time screen star with her career managed by her wealthy lover, Hearst. Always on the lookout for opportunities to enhance Marion's standing in the world of entertainment, Hearst (he will spend over $7,000,000 promoting his mistress, money worth $142,000,000 in 2022 dollars, 21-year-old Marion's first contract gives the actress $500 of her 58-year-old lover's lucre a week) forms Cosmopolitan Pictures in 1918. Seventeen movies released by the time 1924 begins and Hearst and his mistress are relocated to Southern California, looking for more projects for Marion and reliable distribution of the product produced (previously, Paramount Pictures, Samuel Goldwyn Productions, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer have been used), the millionaire newspaperman enters into discussions with Ince to form a partnership with International Film Corporation. On Saturday, November 15, 1924, Hearst meets with Ince at the studio head's new palatial home on thirty acres of land above the Beverly Hills Hotel in Benedict Canyon (the property will be called Dias Dorados, "Golden Days," and feature a main house built in a California Mission style with 35 rooms, 10 bathrooms, and 11 fireplaces (later it will be discovered that the home also includes secret passages and peep holes for observing the occupants of the guest rooms in their beds) ... and a projection room for screening movies made to look like a pirate ship) where the men discuss the news of the day, home building (Hearst has just begun work on a Central Coast home in San Simeon, California that will be called La Cuesta Encantada, the Enchanted Hill, but known by most people as the legendary palace, Hearst Castle), and their upcoming partnership. Mixing business with pleasure, Hearst asks Ince to join him and a handful of guests that evening on his yacht (Oneida, a beautiful steam vessel 220 feet in length bearing valuable artwork and luxurious accommodations) for final discussions of their partnership, maybe some deep sea fishing between Los Angeles and San Diego, and a celebration of film maker's 44th birthday on Sunday. There is just one small problem though, Ince has to appear at the Saturday night premiere of his latest film, "The Mirage." Hearst's solution to the issue though is to convince Ince to take the night train down to San Diego after the premiere where he can join the yacht's celebrants on the journey back to Los Angeles. Fix agreed too, by midnight on Saturday, Ince is aboard the coast train heading south to San Diego.
Dias Dorados
Arriving in San Diego on Saturday morning, Ince boards a waiting port tender that transports him to where Oneida is anchored in the harbor. Greeted by Marion Davies, wearing a white captain's billed cap and holding a large bouquet of colorful birthday balloons in each hand, the producer is shown to his room before joining Hearst's and Davies' guests, a group which includes the most famous comedian in the world, "The Little Tramp," 35-year-old actor Charlie Chaplin, 30-year-old actress and screenwriter Signe Auen, 29-year-old stage and screen actress Aileen Pringle, 28-year-old film actress Margaret Livingston (rumored to be Ince's mistress), Marion Davies' sisters, Ethel and Reine, and Marion's niece Pepi, 60-year-old British romance novelist Elinor Glynn, licensed physician, screenwriter, and the 43-year-old head of Hearst's Cosmopolitan Productions, Dr. Daniel Carson Goodman (licensed, but non-practicing at the time), and 43-year-old New York-based Hearst reporter, Louella Parsons. A fun cruise of the California coast soon becomes something else when Ince, celebrating both his 44th birthday and his imminent partnership with Hearst, ignores his doctor's recommendations on items not to consume for the sake of the filmmaker's peptic ulcer condition, and indulges in an unhealthy amount of rich food topped off with flutes of bubbling champagne and salted almonds at dinner, bringing on a bout of indigestion so acute that Ince is taken to shore, accompanied by Dr. Goodman, and put on a train to Los Angeles for medical treatment. The train ride only makes it to Del Mar however (a journey of only twenty miles), where as Ince's condition worsens, the studio head is checked into the town's Stratford Inn where he is watched over by Goodman, local doctor Truman A. Parker, and a nurse named Jessie Howard. The trio is discharged from watching over Ince when his wife Nell arrives in Del Mar (along with the couples' oldest son, William), and with another car ride, the producer is placed in his bed at his Benedict Canyon mansion, where his care becomes the responsibility of Dr. Ida Cowen Glasgow (Ince's personal physician). There, on the morning of Wednesday, November 19th, surrounded by his wife, brothers, and children, weakened by his stomach issues, Ince suffers a massive heart attack and dies. The death easily explained, a few days later after his funeral, Ince's remains are cremated and his ashes are scattered by his family in the Pacific Ocean (on the day before Christmas) while the people aboard the yacht all seem to become very reticent about discussing the mogul's death before getting on with their lives.
Greeting Ince
Headlines
Rumors of an alternate tale of Ince's "indigestion" begin almost immediately and linger to this day. In the other reality, the real cause of Ince's death is murder in the form of the studio head being mistakenly shot by an insanely jealous Hearst, who believes he is killing Marion's paramour (not as secretly as they might like, the two have been seeing each other off-and-on for over a year), Charlie Chaplin, or the death is caused when the publisher's potshot misses Chaplin and hits Ince instead, or the killing takes place when Chaplin and Hearst fight over the newspaperman's bejeweled derringer, and when the weapon is discharged in the men's tussle, the bullet fired accidentally hits the birthday celebrant. And there is talk that Ince is killed by Livingstone for raping the young actress when the two first meet, intimacy that will eventually lead to Davis and Hearst adopting the little girl the actress gives birth to) Seemingly backing up the bullet version of Ince's death are some of the actions of the yacht's guests afterwards ... Hearst's papers falsely claim that the events took place at San Simeon rather than off San Diego, Chaplin at first claims he wasn't even on the yacht the weekend of Ince's death and claims in his biography that Ince died at San Simeon and the death took place two weeks later than the mogul's death certificate reads), as does Louella Parsons as she maintains she wasn't even in California at the time. And adding it's weight to the shooting death tale for a day, the Hearst rival LA Times runs a headline that reads, "Movie Producer Shot on Hearst Yacht!" (the headline is gone by the time the paper's evening edition is published). The San Diego District Attorney, Chester C. Kempley, announces he is launching an investigation into Ince's mysterious death, but drops the matter after interviewing only Dr. Goodman, Dr. Parker, and nurse Howard (she will state that the death was caused by "bad liquor") , saying he is satisfied that no criminal activity took place related to Ince's death. But if that is the case, why does Chaplin's longtime valet and secretary, Toraichi Kono, tells his wife that he saw the producer removed from the yacht bearing a still bleeding wound to his head, and the story soon is being spread by the Beverly Hills Japanese domestic workers of numerous Hollywood luminaries. Though not on the yacht at the time, Davies' nephew, Charles Lederer, will pass on the murder tale to director Peter Bogdanovich (and he also hears the tale from Orson Welles) when he is making his movie about the fatal yacht party, 2001's "The Cat's Meow," and writer Glyn will later claim that everybody aboard the yacht was sworn to secrecy about what happened, and in some cases, bought off with large cash payments or other goodies (and suddenly from 1924 on, a good way NOT to be invited to Hearst Castle for a weekend of partying with William and Marion is to bring up Thomas Ince's name). Though she has money of her own from her own family and Ince's death (she will sell Dias Dorados to Universal studio head, Carl Laemmle, in 1927 for $650,000 ... a total of roughly $10,000,000 in today's dollars) Nell Ince is said to flee to Europe after her husband's death (she actually goes seven months later) and uses her secret "hush" assets to build a seven story manor on Franklin Avenue called Chateau Elysee (among its residents will be Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant), and across the street, an apartment building called Villa Carlotta (Marion Davies will have an apartment there for a time, as will Louella Parsons, who gets to reside in the penthouse unit, the building's only two-story abode).
Chaplin & Kono
Livingston
Chateau Elysee
Villa Carlotta
Though she at first claims to not even be in California during the yachting party, newspaper columnist Louella Parsons is most certainly a member of the celebration off San Diego, works for William Randall Hearst, and seemingly benefits greatly from keeping her mouth shut about Ince's death. Born Louella Rose Oettinger in Freeport, Illinois on August 6, 1881, the 43-year-old Parsons writes her first movie gossip column for the Chicago Record Herald in 1914, and begins working for Hearst in 1918 when the businessman buys the Chicago paper. Moving to New York City, she then writes for another Hearst newspaper, the New York Morning Telegraph, and comes to the millionaire's attention when she publishes an interview with Marion Davies (heaping praise on the former showgirl, the two women will become good friends afterwards and in 1923, Parsons will sign on with Hearst to become the $200-a-week motion-picture editor of the New York American, where her continuing praise of Davies leads to a new cultural catchphrase due to Parsons ongoing use of it in almost every one of her columns ... "Marion never looked lovelier." After Ince's death, Parsons will be a founding member of the New York Newspaper Women's Club, make Palm Springs a popular resort for Hollywood stars after she spends months there battling tuberculosis, take her gossip column to the radio in the 1930s, appear in bit parts in a number of films, and becomes known as the "First Lady of Hollywood," for the make-or-break power she wields in her column, a column which at it's height will be read by over 20 million people a day, appears in over seven hundred newspapers around the world, and lasts until December of 1965. A huge success, but for the rest of her life (she dies of arteriosclerosis in Santa Monica nursing home on December 9, 1972 at the age of 91) and beyond, there is speculation that Parsons makes good, thanks to Hearst's support because she never admits to being on the yacht when Ince dies, and never writes about the subject in her gossip column; while additionally years later, being one of the most vocal critic's of Orson Welles's 1941 fictional take on the newspaper mogul's life, "Citizen Kane."
Parsons, Davies, Hearst, Chaplin, Valentino
Citizen Kane
All the players now gone for many years and Ince's body cremated, the mogul's death is officially ruled heart failure ... and perhaps that is exactly what happened. At the funeral service of Ince on Friday, November 21, 1924, the filmmaker's body lays in his open coffin for viewing for an hour and no one reports any bullet wounds (along with family, attending the service will be Davies, Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and comedian Harold Lloyd ... noticeably absent is Hearst). Tired of repeatedly being questioned about events on his yacht in November of 1924, Hearst years later will state to a journalist, "Not only am I innocent of this Ince murder, so is everybody else!" While Ince's widow will frustratingly complain, "Do you think I would have done nothing if I even suspected that my husband had been the victim of foul play on anyone's part?" Indeed ... and yet, why does Parsons write about coming to power as a gossip queen based on a "gruesome story," but never elaborates on details of that story, while legendary silent film director, W. D. Griffith will say of the matter in public, "All you have to do to make Hearst white as a ghost is mentioning Ince's name. There's plenty wrong there, but Hearst is too big to touch." And there is actress Lita Grey, Chaplin's second wife (she is 15 and pregnant when the couple secretly marry in Empaime, Sonora, Mexico in 1924), who will glory in later years in telling the story supposedly told to her by Chaplin, on how the actor almost died aboard Hearst's yacht in 1924. Pick the reality you prefer, no one but God and his ghosts will ever know for sure what took place, but if your choice is for sex, murder, and conspiracy, along with numerous articles and discussions on the Internet, one can explore those scenarios in the 1996 novel, "Death at San Simeon" by Hearst's granddaughter, former kidnap victim Patricia Hearst and writer Cordelia Frances Biddle, the 1999 film about the making of "Citizen Kane," "RKO 281" (in which screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz is depicting telling Orson Welles about Ince's death), premiered in Los Angeles in 1997, there is playwright Steven Peros' take on the yacht, the play "The Cat's Meow," and the 2001 movie version of the play directed by Peter Bogdanovich (he is told the murder story while interviewing Orson Welles) and starring Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies, Edward Hermann as Hearst, Cary Elwes as Ince, and Eddie Izzard as Chaplin.
Movie Poster
As for the trio of celebrities at the center of the rumors, Charlie Chaplin will go on making movies, both silent and speaking, until 1967, be kept from re-entering the United States in 1952 because of his association with the Communist Party and personal peccadillo's involving his taste for teenage girls in his bed, wins three Academy Awards (two honorary and one for the music he composes for the movie, "Limelight"), receives a long standing ovation (12 minutes in length, the longest ovation to date in Oscar history) from the audience at the Academy Award ceremonies of 1972 after his triumphant return to the United States after an absence of 20 years, and dies in his sleep after suffering a stroke at his home in Switzerland on Christmas Day of 1977 at the age of 88. Hearst will continue with his many ventures until things go south for him during the 1930s and his bankruptcy (he is in debt for millions and can't pay the interest on the many loans he has taken) is narrowly avoided. His health failing, Hearst will die in the Beverly Hills mansion he shares with Davies on August 14, 1951 at the age of 88 after suffering a heart attack. Davies, the #1 film star in 1924, will go on making movies until 1937, hosts with Hearst, gatherings for Hollywood luminaries and the elite of the world at their Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and San Simeon residences, helps keep Hearst solvent by giving the newspaperman monies she collects from selling off real state, jewelry, and artwork she has acquired over the years, marries a sea captain in Las Vegas after Hearst's death (by this time she is a raging alcoholic that drinks from the time she awakes until she falls asleep at night ... her marriage to the sea captain will last until her death, although she twice files for divorce from the man), gives massive sums of money to various charities, and dies as a result of malignant osteomyelitis (a bone infection) in Los Angeles in 1961 at the age of 64 (she will leave behind an estate valued at $20 million, equivalent to $195,857,461 in 2022); her funeral at Hollywood's Immaculate Heart of Mary Church will be attended by a who's-who of movie makers that includes "America's Sweetheart," actress Mary Pickford, Pickford's third husband, actor Charles "Buddy Rogers," silent comedian Harold Lloyd, movie star Glenn Ford, Clark Gable's last wife, actress Kay Williams, and Olympic swimmer and Tarzan actor Johnny Wiessmuller.
Dinner At Hearst Castle - Chaplin, Writer George Bernard Shaw, Marion, MGM Studio
Boss Louis B. Mayer, And Actor Clark Gable
Hearst And His Dog Helen
At San Simeon
Mostly forgotten now, under strange circumstances, revolutionary pioneering movie mogul, Thomas Harper Ince, passes away in Beverly Hills at the age of 44 on November 19, 1924.
Ince
