Star Quality

Orson Welles did a number on Marion Davies in Citizen Kane, and he knew it. The fictional relationship between newspaper publisher Charles Foster Kane and his mistress, Susan Alexander, was widely assumed to be based on the real-life relationship between newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst and Davies, his mistress of more than three decades.

In the film, however, Alexander is a screechy blonde shopgirl whom Kane tries to mold into an opera star, with disastrous, humiliating results. Davies was also blonde, but that’s where the resemblance ended.