The Moving Bungalow: An MGM Vignette

In 1924, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was formed through a three-way merger. One of their first champions was William Randolph Hearst, whose Cosmopolitan Productions moved to MGM from Paramount. Although Cosmopolitan films had many different personalities in them, the most frequent star was Marion Davies, Hearst's Mistress. To celebrate the move to MGM, Hearst commissioned a palatial dressing room to be built for his star. This dressing room ended up becoming a fourteen-room house nicknamed The Bungalow. It was Marion's domicile at MGM for the next ten years. In 1934, Hearst pulled away from MGM when they refused to cast Marion in the film Marie Antoinette. Hearst moved his base of operations to Warner Bros., and the bungalow came too! They pulled it out of the ground and transferred it to the Warner Brothers lot. When Marion retired from films in 1937, the relationship with Warner Brothers ended, and the bungalow was moved again, this time to the Fox lot where it remained for the next two years until it made its final move to a area of mansions in Beverly Hills where it still stands to this day.