Marion Davies was a movie star of the early 20th century who is better known than she might have been because of her romantic entanglement with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Entanglement is perhaps the wrong word; their relationship was a long-lasting and genuinely romantic affair. But Davies was destined to bear the label of being Hearst’s mistress, for the tycoon could not persuade his wife to divorce him, and the morals of the time demanded the diminishment of the couple’s relationship and of Davies’s reputation generally.

She began her career as a promising light comedienne who starred in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1916, but Davies’s universally acknowledged talent was as one of Hollywood’s most glamorous and popular hostesses. She and Hearst held spectacular parties at the mansion he built for her in Santa Monica, on the coast of California. Many of these involved fancy dress, and most of the stars of the time were pictured in outfits of varying absurdity as they drank their way into the early mornings, a charming chronicle of a golden cultural age.

Unfortunately for Davies, she had more than the prevailing morality to contend with as she partied on: her biggest enemy turned out to be the Hollywood boy-wonder director Orson Welles. Everyone knew that his cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane was roughly based on the story of the megalomaniac Hearst. By extension, observers also drew parallels with the secondary characters.

That made Susan Alexander, the shrill and talent-free singer whom Kane foolishly and fruitlessly tries to turn into an operatic sensation a depiction of Davies, whose own career was extensively promoted by Hearst. The similarities persuaded audiences to neglect the dissimilarities: in the film, Alexander is picked up on a street corner by Kane, charms him with her everywoman qualities (“she was a cross-section of the American public,” recalls Joseph Cotten’s Leland), and goes crazy in Kane’s fortress Xanadu, piecing together jigsaws in her husband’s fusty reliquary.

Davies, by contrast, was sophisticated, smart and already famous when Hearst fell for her. She suffered with the advent of the talkies (“Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.”) Yet she continued, with Hearst’s help, to make several sassy comedies that proved her worth.

Welles was actually mortified by the calumny that he had inflicted on Davies – so much so that he contributed a foreword to her posthumously published autobiography The Times We Had. Davies, he wrote, “was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen. She would have been a star if Hearst had never happened. She was also a delightful and very considerable person.”

All of this is history now, but it has been vividly brought to life in recent months in Santa Monica itself, the site of all that revelry, thanks to a bold new project. Walk along the city’s beach northwards, towards Malibu, and you will once more hear people revelling among the very grains of sand that Goldwyn, Gable and Chaplin once felt under their feet.

Most of Davies’s 110-room mansion was demolished long ago, but the guest house – itself as grand as a mansion – remains and today acts as the focal point of the Annenberg Community Beach House. Thanks to a $27.5m grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the site has been turned into a space open to the public so that all can enjoy an ambience that was once the privilege of the beautiful few.

There is beach volleyball, of course, the magnificent original marble pool, $10 yoga classes, a café on the beach and tours and exhibitions on the house’s history. A modernist, eco-friendly building has replaced the original mansion, and can be rented out for special events. There has yet to be a wedding reception in the centre’s first few months, but it surely won’t be long before couples choose to imbibe part of the Marion Davies story in their nuptial festivities, scarcely aware of the irony.

And this is the remarkable thing: the woman who became known as one of the 20th century’s most notorious “other” women has been fully restored to respectability by a society that once looked down on her. She is even fighting back against that Wellesian slander: staff at the centre are fiercely defensive of Davies’s talents, and the notice in the entrance pointedly talks of an “under-appreciated” actress.

It helps that Davies, even in her own lifetime, was dedicated to charitable causes: she helped found a children’s clinic at UCLA that still bears her name. But the point remains, that a figure on the wrong side of a moral divide that some still recognise is now effortlessly assimilated as part of a cultural heritage story. Hearst may not have been granted his divorce, but his greatest love affair resounds through the ages.

Grab a pair of Rollerblades next time you are in that part of the world, and glide down to the Annenberg beach house. Here is a world that was once reserved to the elite, thrown open to the public at large; and where the term “mistress” is treated with the disdain it deserves. Hypocrisy has been cast aside in the cloudless Californian skies, and that “cross-section of the American public” basks happily in the sunshine.

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden