THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW
One of Hollywood’s greatest scandals is about to be re-enacted on a luxury superyacht in Auckland Harbour. A man died - but was it murder or misadventure? Co-creator Laura Irish, who plays a silent film starlet in the show, says that’s for the audience to decide.
It’s November 1924. American media baron Randolph Hearst, one of the wealthiest people in the world, has invited a few close friends out on his deluxe yacht, the Oneida. Exactly who is on board has been disputed. Charlie Chaplin is supposed to have been there, but that’s never been officially confirmed. So was Elinor Glyn, a steamy romance novelist who popularised the idea of the “It” factor. Louella Parsons, the famous gossip columnist, claimed she was in New York at the time. Except she wasn’t.
Hotshot film producer Thomas Ince, known as the “Father of the Western”, was negotiating a deal with Hearst, who invited him on a weekend cruise and threw a party for Ince’s birthday. The official story is that Ince left the boat severely ill and died a few days later. [Ince, who had peptic ulcers, is said to have suffered acute indigestion after consuming salted almonds and champagne; the cause of death was recorded as heart failure.]
The whispers about what really happened were scandalous! Apparently Hearst had caught Marion Davies, his long-term mistress, with Charlie Chaplin and shot at him — either accidentally hitting Ince in all the kerfuffle or mistaking him for Chaplin. It was the Prohibition era and one of the reasons there might have been a cover-up is that Hearst didn’t want people to know he had illegal booze on his boat. And Chaplin was already in the middle of a scandal of his own, because he’d got his 15-year-old co-star pregnant.