Postscript
November 2005 Issue

The Man Who Ate Hollywood

A giant of a man, Marvin Davis lived a giant life. Rocky Mountain wildcatter turned Hollywood mogul, he treated Twentieth Century Fox as his personal playground, broke all the rules (even his own), and, when he died last year, left his family warring over what may be a vanished $5.8 billion fortune.

Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara, covered in chinchilla and diamonds, on a night out in 1995. By Paul Schmulback/Globe Photos.

Marvin Davis was the biggest human being I ever met, and not just in size, though at six feet four and 300-plus pounds he was certainly that. Davis was big in every way. In 2000, when I interviewed him for Golf Digest—one of the rare interviews he ever granted—he sat elevated above me behind a massive desk on a pedestal in his vast, peach-colored chandelier-lit office in Fox Plaza, the 34-story office building on the Avenue of the Stars in Century City, California. Davis’s desk was a replica of the Denver oil baron Blake Carrington’s on Dynasty, the 1980s TV series, which was said to have been inspired by Davis back when he dominated Rocky Mountain oil. Davis had built Fox Plaza—which was featured in Die Hard, the 1988 Bruce Willis movie—later sold it for a $50 million profit, then bought it back for $253 million, only to sell it again for an $80 million profit.

“We’ll talk about golf, O.K.?” he said, in his huge, gravelly voice, while simultaneously keeping his eye on dual market-watch screens. That was our deal—to talk about golf only. Not about his game, in which he gambled for thousands of dollars, but about how he’d snatched up Pebble Beach, the exclusive Northern California golf resort, along with the Aspen Skiing Corporation, as part of the deal when he bought Twentieth Century Fox for more than $700 million in 1981 and how, nine years later, he’d sold Pebble Beach alone to the Japanese for $840 million. Then, during the market collapse in Japan, Davis almost bought the resort back for a fraction of the cost. He proudly showed me a picture of him on the course at Pebble Beach—so enormous that the club in his hands looked like a toothpick. “I never fall in love with any asset,” Davis said. “But that one I came closest to. That’s why I tried to buy it back.”

The less he revealed, the more I wanted to know: how this giant of a man, then 74 and less than five years away from death, had conquered various industries, drilling or participating in an estimated 10,000 oil and gas wells to become “Mr. Wildcatter,” snapping up Twentieth Century Fox mostly with other people’s money, buying the Beverly Hills Hotel for $135 million and promptly flipping it for a $65 million profit, and dazzling Hollywood with parties so ostentatious they made everyone else’s look bland. In 2004, the year of his death, Forbes ranked him the 30th-richest individual in America, with a net worth of $5.8 billion. Yet he somehow managed to avoid ever having his story fully told. “It’s an amazing story,” his friend former president Gerald Ford told me. Yet when I suggested to Davis that we forget about golf and talk about him, the interview was over. He had another appointment, he said. As I headed out the door, he shouted that he’d get back to me, which, I later discovered, was what he told everybody.

Like Blake Carrington, Marvin Davis spawned a dynasty with Barbara, his wife of 53 years: two sons, John, a Hollywood movie producer, and Gregg, a Houston oilman; three daughters, Nancy and Dana, who live in Los Angeles, and Patricia, who lives in New York. Of his 14 grandchildren, the most visible is Brandon Davis, frequently in the gossip columns owing to his relationship with Mischa Barton, star of The O.C.

Like the Carringtons, the Davises are a dynasty at war. On September 13, a year after Marvin’s death, a 169-page lawsuit was filed by his eldest daughter, Patricia. “This is a case about greed, theft, and betrayal,” the lawsuit begins, “a case about how Marvin Davis, who was one of the wealthiest men in America, systematically stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the trust created for his oldest daughter, Patricia Davis Raynes, to finance his own business interests, the business interests of his two favored sons, and a lavish lifestyle for himself, his wife Barbara Davis, and his other children. Acting out of greed, spite, and malice, Marvin Davis and his close cohort of co-conspirators abused, isolated, and stole from Patricia because she dared to question Marvin Davis, and dared to leave Los Angeles for New York to live her own life. Patricia’s brothers and sisters knew about, took advantage of, and greedily accepted the benefits from the wrongful, illegal acts of Marvin Davis, Barbara Davis, and their coterie of advisers and sycophants.”

The suit, filed by Boies, Schiller & Flexner, the firm of David Boies, who represented Al Gore in the Florida-recount case, seeks unspecified damages against Barbara Davis, her four other children, and a series of advisers: Leonard Silverstein, a family attorney; Kenneth Kilroy, president and chief operating officer of the Davis Companies; Grace Barragato-Drulias, chief financial officer of the Davis Companies; the law firm of Buchanan Ingersoll P.C.; and others. When Patricia, now 53, turned 21 in 1973, she claims, she was entitled to begin receiving millions from a trust fund set up for her in 1967 by her paternal grandparents, Jack and Jean Davis. “Instead of distributing the trust property to Patricia when she turned twenty-one, Marvin forged Patricia’s signature on new trust documents,” the lawsuit reads. “To keep control of Patricia’s trust property, Marvin coerced Patricia by threats and acts of violence, to sign still other documents that perpetuated his control of her property.” For more than 30 years, as her sole trustee, Marvin defrauded his eldest daughter, the lawsuit contends, in a variety of ways, including stealing, commingling, profligately spending, and taking enormous salaries as trustee. “Marvin repeatedly told Patricia that she was worth over $300 million, that she was a ‘very wealthy girl,’ and that she would never have to worry about anything,” the lawsuit reads. Around July of 2002, however, according to the suit, “Patricia complained yet again to Marvin that she needed to have her trust assets available to her.… Marvin responded dismissively, telling Patricia that if she was unhappy, he would buy out her entire trust for $10 million.… By Marvin’s own reckoning … Patricia’s trust had earned over $170 million in profits by 1995, in addition to over $42 million in original capital.… Nonetheless Silverstein, at Marvin and Kilroy’s direction, undertook to draft documents that falsely calculated the value of Patricia’s trust as only $10 million, imposed on her trust significant liabilities as a result of Marvin’s self-dealing transactions, and split up her trust assets among Marvin, Barbara, John, and Gregg. These documents were never shown to Patricia until after she became trustee of her own trust, months after Marvin had died.”

Patricia, who is married to New York real-estate developer Martin Raynes, has three children and resides in Southampton and Manhattan. An avid horsewoman, she is often in the society columns. She and her husband made headlines in 1994, when their friend Vitas Gerulaitis, the tennis star, died of carbon-monoxide poisoning while sleeping in a bungalow on the Rayneses’ Southampton estate. In 1991, Martin Raynes declared bankruptcy. Several years later, he and Patty sold some properties, including their $14 million apartment on Fifth Avenue to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

A few days after Marvin’s death, according to the lawsuit, Patricia suffered the final indignity. She says she was told that her billionaire father had actually died broke, leaving, according to the complaint, a hopelessly entangled estate with at least one loan secured by his palatial Beverly Hills home, the Knoll, which Barbara soon sold for a reported $46 million and then moved into two bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Asked to respond to the claims in Patricia’s lawsuit, Michael Sitrick, chairman of Sitrick and Company, longtime Davis family spokesman and public-relations counsel, stated, “The family is both shocked and saddened by this action. They are confident that claims in the complaint will be proven untrue and that Patty’s lawsuit will be shown to have no merit. The family is hard-pressed to understand Patty’s bitterness toward them, given the tens of millions of dollars she has received over the years.” He also said, “While we are not going to respond to the complaint on an allegation-by-allegation basis, we reiterate that the family is confident that claims in the complaint will be proven untrue and that Patty’s lawsuit will be shown to have no merit.” Asked if Patricia consulted with the family before filing the lawsuit, Sitrick responded, “There were a number of discussions between other family members’ counsel with Patty’s counsel. The families’ attorneys told them they believed the allegations had no merit. Unfortunately, Patty filed the lawsuit anyhow.” Asked if Mr. Davis’s estate was as financially precarious at the time of his death as Patricia claims, Barbara Davis responded through Sitrick, “If that was the case, then one would have to ask why Patty would file the lawsuit.”

Where did the billions go, if they are gone? They probably went to feed Marvin Davis’s gargantuan lifestyle.

‘He was always fun,” says Jackie Collins, the novelist. “He was Marvin! He would try to intimidate people. His first question would be: How old are you and how much money do you have? I think he liked me because when I met him and he asked me that I said, ‘Fuck off, Marvin!’ ”

Marvin’s father, Jack Davis, came to America from London in 1917, as a teenager. A fireplug of a man, he joined the British Navy after having been denied a college scholarship because he was Jewish. He took up boxing in the navy and eventually wound up in New York.

Taking “any jobs to survive,” according to his brother, Charles, Jack Davis eventually managed to connect with some salesmen in the garment industry. Soon he was working as a $200-a-week buyer for a store in New Jersey, and he went on to found the Jay Day Dress Company, specializing in cheap dresses. He married a beautiful New York blonde, Jean Spitzer, and on August 31, 1925, they had a son, Marvin, followed four years later by a daughter, Joan.

Jay Day occupied two floors on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, and by the late 1940s, Jack was shipping 200,000 dresses a month, to mom-and-pop stores as well as to J. C. Penney. He had a regular table at ‘21,’ an apartment on the Upper East Side, and a chauffeured Cadillac. His son attended the prestigious Horace Mann School for Boys, in Riverdale, New York. “Marvin looked like a movie actor—tall, blond hair, blue eyes,” says Richard Bienan, his best boyhood friend. “He looked like a young Marlon Brando,” according to another friend, Joan Levan.

“I’ll hand you the money as I make it,” Marvin Levan, Joan’s husband, remembers his friend Marvin Davis telling him during weekly crap games. “He was the high roller, and I was, like, his treasurer. He always won.”

“Marv the Suave,” as he was called in the Horace Mann yearbook, grew up in his father’s flashy world of schmattes, salesmen, and gamblers. Then, sometime in the late 1930s, Jack Davis began to move from dresses into oil. Marvin glimpsed his future in Miami, while vacationing with his family at the Roney Plaza Hotel, a getaway favored by garment-industry entrepreneurs. One day, when a swimmer was seen in danger of drowning offshore, two men jumped in to save him: Jack Davis and a person named Ray Ryan, from Evansville, Indiana, who shortly thereafter presented Jack with the gamble of a lifetime.

Ryan was the ultimate high roller. According to the journalist Herb Marynell, he was one of the greatest cardsharps who ever lived. A confidant of celebrities, politicians, and mobsters, he called Texas oil baron H. L. Hunt, whom he had supposedly fleeced of several hundred thousand dollars on a cruise to Europe, his “pigeon.” His friends included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Clark Gable. A primary developer of Palm Springs, he became partners with the actor William Holden to create the Mount Kenya Safari Club, whose members included not only John Wayne and Bing Crosby but also, allegedly, high-ranking members of organized crime. In 1977, Ryan was blown up in his Lincoln Continental in an alleged Mob hit.

In addition to being a gambler, Ryan was a wildcatter, an independent oilman searching for oil outside of known deposits, leasing mineral rights, lining up investors, and drilling oil wells on a “third for a quarter” deal, meaning that each investor paid one-third of the cost and got one-fourth of the interest—leaving the wildcatter with a one-fourth interest in the well for his promotional efforts. In 1939, when Evansville was in the midst of an oil boom, Ryan found an investor to lease acreage for $10,000 and struck oil in 20 locations, which poured out 3,000 barrels a day. After reportedly raking in $350,000, he sold his lease on the land for another $250,000 and created the Ryan Oil Company. There was big money to be made in oil, Ryan told Jack.

“As luck would have it, Jack not only hit one well but two in a row,” says Richard Bienan. “He hadn’t a clue as to what he was doing, but he was the luckiest guy alive,” says Dallas investor Alan May. Jack got many of his friends in the garment business to invest in oil wells, and in 1939 he founded the Davis Oil Company, in partnership with the Ryan Oil Company. When Marvin was a young man, he worked on oil rigs and in other parts of the business. Meanwhile, his father went west with a war chest of funds from his dress business. He dazzled Denver. “Listen, this was before television was around very much,” says a veteran Colorado oilman, “and he knew all the current jokes first, and he told them extremely well. He knew famous people, people outside the oil business, and the head of every corporation in town.” Jack drilled an extraordinary number of dry holes. “It was right out here in the Denver-Julesberg Basin,” the oilman remembers. “Nobody had ever done that before, and then the next year he drilled the same number and didn’t hit anything again.”

After graduating from New York University in 1946, Marvin moved to Evansville, Ray Ryan’s hometown, to work in company management. He expanded operations into Texas, then Oklahoma, returning to New York in 1949 as manager of oil activities for his father. One Sunday at the bar in the Madison Hotel, Marvin asked Bienan about an Adelphi College student they both knew. Her name was Barbara Levine, and her father was a lawyer. “If you ever stop taking her out, I’d like to,” Davis said, and Bienan surrendered her phone number. Marvin and Barbara were married in July 1951 and honeymooned at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Barbara would become Marvin’s rock. “The only thing that was non-negotiable was his family,” says the actress Suzanne Pleshette.

In the early 1950s, Marvin left New York to live in the oil patch for good. Not in Texas, where the state railroad commission stifled production with its restrictions. “They let you produce wells seven days a month,” he later said in a deposition. Davis went to Denver to check on a well and promptly fell in love with the town. “I called my wife in New York and told her to come out,” he said.

They had one child by then, Patricia. Marvin set up shop in a tiny office in the Denver Petroleum Club building and was soon as facile with men and money as his father. Dwarfing Jack, Marvin was often seen bursting from the red leather booths of the Palace Arms in Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel, where oilmen lunched from silver trays.

“I took on an 80-well deal from Amoco on the east side of the Denver-Julesberg Basin,” he told a gathering of famous wildcatters in Houston in 2003. “Cheap wells, $7,000 a well, shallow. I drilled 80 straight dry holes.… I figured there’s no oil left in the United States! So every Sunday I took the kids—we used to drive to the supermarket, get our goodies for the week—and we stopped at the gas station to get the car filled. I took the nozzle, put it in the car, and it didn’t work.… And my wife looked at me, in her nice, little way, and said, ‘You can’t even find oil in a gas station!’ ”

“I went up to Marvin’s office, and I was telling him how badly I felt … and he says, ‘Aw, that’s all right, Tommy, I made $5,000 off each one of them,’ ” recalls Tom Yancey, then manager of Amoco’s Denver land department. “I thought, I’m not going to worry about Marvin anymore. He promoted the hell out of every well he drilled. He had more partners—he had ’em coming out of the gumpus [ass].”

Marvin had too many partners, in fact, says Yancey. “Sometimes over 100 percent— more money from investors than it cost to drill the well.” If a well was a dry hole, “normally it wasn’t going to cost him anything,” says Yancey. When Davis was later asked if he ever told investors that there were ways to make money even on a dry hole, he said, “Absolutely not.”

Then he hit, in areas where the major oil companies feared to go, one well, then another, until the Rocky Mountain states, West Texas, and the Gulf Coast were riddled by Davis’s fork. Later, in Hollywood, he would regale his celebrity guests with stories of his first strike, casting himself as the James Dean character in Giant, “saying it came shooting up, and it went all over him, and how exciting it was,” says Jackie Collins.

davis oil tops list in wildcat well drilling, read a Rocky Mountain News headline. He was in the right place at the right time. opec had twice caused oil-price shocks in the major Western industrialized nations, which made domestic oil prices soar. “The prices went up dramatically from 1973, when the price was about $3.50 a barrel,” says Fort Worth oilman Charles Simmons, who provided services for Davis’s wells. “By the end of ’73 it was $8.50. Sometime in 1975 it was $14, and that’s when the boom started in a big way.”

By the late 1970s, Davis had gobbled up much of Denver, including the 22,000-acre Phipps Ranch, where he planned to build a housing project; instead he flipped it to a developer for a $14 million profit. He bid $12.5 million for the Oakland A’s, but the deal collapsed when the team couldn’t sever its lease in Oakland. He founded Metro National Bank and became a major Denver developer. By 1980, according to court records, the Davis Oil Company, with regional offices in New Orleans, Houston, Midland, and Tulsa, had more than 400 employees and expenses of $20 million a year.

To support his overhead, Davis went after more investors. “He’d put his big arm around you and say, ‘I’m going to take care of you! I’m going to take care of your kids!’ ” says one. “Only when it was over and you’d lost some money did you realize Marvin really thought of himself as a conduit between his friends and the U.S. government. Why should they pay taxes when they could drill the money with him?”

“We were out of the White House and we had to make a living, and Marvin, in his generous way, said, ‘You ought to invest,’ ” remembers Gerald Ford, who moved to Denver with his wife, Betty, in 1977. “Well, it turned out that it was very successful. The interesting thing was, two or three years after the initial investment, Marvin told us to sell, but we didn’t, and we were smarter than Marvin. The children are still getting income from that investment.”

“He was tough, very tough,” remembers Dallas oilman Bill Saxon, who knew Davis for 30 years. “Davis Oil Company deals would come what we call fairly ‘loaded,’ which means they had a lot of promotion in them, which is profit to his company going in.… He always operated the well and used his drilling rigs, which were subject to whatever price he wanted to charge. And he also had a pipe-and-supply company, so he supplied all the pipe, which is almost half the cost of the well. We were always overcharged, which made it tough to deal with him.”

“We got an elephant!,” Davis would exclaim to his investors, and he insisted that they were earning returns well above industry averages. The only thing Davis was reserved about was speaking with the press. In the basement of Denver’s U.S. District Court, however, are the remains of a five-year lawsuit, AE Investments, Inc. v. Davis Oil Company, Marvin Davis et al., in which he and his strategies spring to life.

Between 1981 and 1982, A.E. Investments, a subsidiary of insurance giant Aetna Life & Casualty, invested $168 million in Davis Oil. The wildcatter seduced them, Aetna’s officers later insisted in court documents, urging them to trust him, promising that he put their interests before his own, even though he said he himself was investing about $150 million in his 1981 drilling program. In February 1981, Aetna invested $15 million. In May, the first “discovery” of oil was made, after which Davis flew to the company’s office in Hartford, Connecticut. He was “hot,” he said, and the oil patch was so hot that he encouraged Aetna to pony up another $100 million, explaining that its original $15 million wasn’t nearly enough to do justice to the program’s potential. Aetna came up with $60 million more. By late 1981, Davis suggested that the company throw in an additional $75 million, assuring the officers that the program was going great and that the “majors,” or big oil companies, were eager to invest, so Aetna had better beat them to it.

By then, according to court papers, Aetna was in 98 exploratory wells, which Davis assured them had a success ratio of 34 percent, almost double the national average. For 1982, Aetna committed another $30 million. “He would call and tell me, ‘Oh, Don, we’ve got the biggest strike here! You’ve got to come out and see it with your own eyes!’ ” remembers Donald Conrad, Aetna’s C.F.O. at the time.

But oil didn’t gush. Only expenses and hidden costs did, amid charges of kickbacks, according to court records, with Davis pocketing cash from side deals with suppliers. Aetna eventually sued, claiming that Davis Oil was designed to “drill as many wells as possible and then make money for its principal officers, even if the company found no oil.” In part, the lawsuit reads, “After nine years, AEI has received only $60,316,605 in revenue from an investment that cost $182,377,981. Fully 188 out of 204 wells operated by Davis Oil Company lost money.”

Davis offered to buy back the properties for $50 million, shaking hands with Aetna’s officers on the deal. Then, through his lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, Davis called Aetna’s bluff. The deal was off and Aetna could sue, Davis said, although he doubted that would happen, because it would be an “embarrassment” to the insurance giant.

Six years after the suit was filed, however, on the day before the trial was to begin, Davis folded. “He settled on the courthouse steps for essentially what we were charging because he didn’t want the negative publicity,” says Conrad.

Davis had already had problems with the federal authorities. In 1979 six F.B.I. task forces, looking into $2 billion worth of industry overcharges in the oil business, claimed that Davis, as the head of Summit Transportation Company, had reclassified old oil as new oil to avoid price controls and reap illegal profits. Edward Bennett Williams worked his magic. Davis had to pay only a $20,000 civil penalty, while Summit was slapped with a $3 million fine and forced to pay $17 million in refunds.

Neither the lawsuit nor the federal indictment slowed Davis down one bit. By the early 1980s he was flying from his Denver mansion, which had a bowling alley and a staff of 12, to his homes in Vail, Palm Springs, and New York, first on his Gulfstream II, later on his Boeing 727.

“One time I asked him, ‘Marvin, how do you always know when to sell?’ ” remembers Charles Simmons. “And he said, ‘There is always a time to get off the train.’ ” That time came in the fall of 1980.

William Wilder, then C.E.O. of Hiram Walker and its oil-production subsidiary, Home Oil Company, walked into Davis’s office seeking to increase his company’s investment in oil and natural gas. “It was a very steamy time in the oil-and-gas market,” Wilder tells me. The company had enlisted Morgan Stanley to scout out oil opportunities, and the investment firm had suggested Davis Oil. Wilder remembers Davis telling him he had a good reason for considering a sale.

Davis had recently undergone minor surgery for skin cancer on his lip. “He said he was dying of cancer,” says Wilder. “He only had a year to live. That’s why they wanted to sell the properties.”

Up for grabs were 830 wells and 767,000 exploratory acres stretching from Wyoming to Louisiana, which Hiram Walker calculated could yield 8.8 million barrels of oil and 106 billion cubic feet of natural gas. Wilder says that with Davis that day was Ray Kravis, the oilman father of financier Henry Kravis, of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. He told Wilder that Davis would be calling for tender offers from Shell, Exxon, and Chevron. “It was supposed to be a bidding contest,” Wilder says. “Whether it was or not, who knows?”

The deal was announced in January 1981. The purchase price: $630 million. By early 1982 the bottom had dropped out of the oil-and-gas market and Wilder was at Hiram Walker’s annual meeting announcing that the reserves in the Davis wells were 20 to 25 percent less than anticipated and that the company might take a markdown of roughly $145 million after taxes. “We will know in about a month if we have a case of misrepresentation,” Wilder was quoted as saying in The Wall Street Journal, which prompted Davis to threaten a slander suit.

“They claimed that Marvin had misled them, that the properties weren’t worth but half or so of what he’d sold it for,” says oilman Charles Simmons. “Marvin said, ‘I never said what it was worth. You offered me this amount of money, and that’s what I took.’ ”

Davis was by no means at death’s door. He had simply played a winning hand, raking in $630 million worth of chips, which he planned to parlay into something fun, he said. “At my stage of life … I’m not going into anything unless there’s a little fun in it.”

‘You made a great sale,” Ira Harris, the mergers-and-acquisitions wizard at Salomon Brothers, remembers telling Davis. “Now I’ve got a great buy for you.”

“What?” asked Davis.

“Twentieth Century Fox,” said Harris.

Davis was infatuated with Hollywood. He had had his first taste of it at his Palm Springs vacation house, where he and Barbara entertained Gary Morton and his wife, Lucille Ball. He had a screening room in his house in Denver, and he owned a real theater, University Hills Cinema, where his kids occasionally worked at the concession stand. Davis listened eagerly as Harris extolled the potential of Fox. “I love it!” he said. “I wantit!”

Fox was in turmoil, embroiled in an internal war between its chairman, Dennis Stanfill, and its vice-chairman, Alan Hirschfield. According to a 1981 account in the Los Angeles Times, “Intrigue at the studio had been worthy of a 17th-century French court: power plays, corporate backstabbing, careful fence-sitting.” Fox was also rich. Aside from its film and TV businesses, the studio owned an extensive film library, the 63-acre lot in Century City, a record-and-publishing division, movie theaters in Australia and New Zealand, a home-video operation in Michigan, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, and two top-of-the-line resorts, Pebble Beach, in California, and the Aspen Skiing Corporation, in Colorado.

At a fall 1980 meeting of the board, it was determined that the company stock was, at about $35 a share, grossly undervalued, by a third or a quarter of what it should have been, according to Alex Ben Block’s book Outfoxed. Fearing a leveraged buyout, Stanfill sought to take the company private, and when his efforts failed, according to Hirschfield, “it was like hanging out a for sale sign.” Fox was, in Wall Street terms, “put in play,” ripe for a takeover.

“Don’t be cheap. Don’t pussyfoot. Make a rational bid to preclude a bidding war,” Edward Bennett Williams told Davis, according to The Man to See, by Evan Thomas. Davis quickly made a written offer, of what would amount to $60 a share, which Williams delivered to Stanfill, who stood to make $7 million on his shares alone.

As always, Davis set up the deal with minimum financial risk to himself. He split off Fox’s real-estate holdings, then dealt in Aetna. The insurance giant paid him $183 million for a 50 percent interest in Aspen, Pebble Beach, and the Fox studio lot. Then Davis turned to commodities trader Marc Rich, who, with his partner, Pincus “Pinky” Green, had contacted Davis in 1980 to invest $50 million in his drilling program.

“How did it turn out?,” Rich’s C.F.O., Peter Ryan, was later asked in a deposition. “Not well,” he replied. Of the 100 wells they had an interest in, 72 had been dry holes. However, Rich agreed to take one-half of the Fox investment and to let Davis keep all of the voting power.

According to Outfoxed, Continental Illinois National Bank granted Davis unlimited credit on the Fox deal, which would amount to $550 million. Davis kept his partners and credit arrangements confidential, which led the Fox board to believe that he was buying the studio on his own and would make few changes—even though he had reportedly made a handshake deal to sell off Fox’s movie and TV operations to MGM’s Kirk Kerkorian.

For Davis the deal was a poker game, and at the last minute he balked. “The day before the board meeting, Davis backed off with cold feet, as he had done on other deals in the past, and would do in the future,” says Ira Harris. “It took Ed Williams and me a couple of days to bring him back to the table.”

“Let’s go!,” Davis barked at a meeting in New York, according to his publicist at the time, Lee Solters. “Marvin, how could you blow a deal like this?,” Solters remembers asking Davis in the hallway. But the deal wasn’t dead. By stalling, Davis only made the Fox board more eager to sell. “I think they folded once the elevator doors closed and we went downstairs,” Solters says today.

Back on his plane to Los Angeles, Davis dug into a massive spread he had dispatched his driver to collect at the Carnegie Deli, on Seventh Avenue. “I thought he bought half the store,” says Solters.

The Fox board and shareholders were surprised by Davis’s last-minute revelation of his network of secret partners and credit. But at a meeting in the Scottish Rite Auditorium, in Los Angeles, on June 8, 1981, they nevertheless voted to sell Davis the studio and its assets for a reported $722,082,160.

Marvin Davis had made the deal of a lifetime, one that would change his life, move his family, and make him famous.

‘As a welcome, they took over a huge soundstage and had a party, inviting the industry to come and meet Marvin Davis,” says Solters. “And I had to stand next to him when the cars pulled up and tell him who was coming up the walkway.… From the side of my mouth, I’d say, ‘Here comes Norman Brokaw, William Morris honcho,’ and he would say, ‘How are you, Mr. Brokaw?’ My God, he loved it. There is no word in the dictionary. He loved it!”

Davis was formally introduced to Hollywood at a Friars Club roast, attended by Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, Ginger Rogers, and a slew of comedians. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed watching him eat a Buick,” said Milton Berle. Jan Murray said Davis was “the only man alive who wears Orson Welles designer jeans.” Gary Morton said that someday Davis’s footprints would be in cement at Grauman’s Chinese. “They won’t be as big as John Wayne’s, but they’ll be deeper,” he said.

“Go see Porky’s!,” Davis roared, referring to Fox’s universally panned raunchfest, one of the biggest hits of the year.

Hirschfield recalls, “I think it was confirmed later by Marvin that he had really looked at Fox as a real-estate deal.” But the world of movies enchanted him.

Davis took on the management of the studio himself. When Stanfill tried to fire the head of the studio’s television unit, Harris Katleman, for $2,500 worth of questionable expenses on a trip to a television festival in Monte Carlo, Davis was shocked. For him, a dispute over expenses was no cause for termination. Besides, Katleman was successfully selling shows to the networks. So in the end Katleman stayed and Stanfill quit, filing a breach-of-contract suit which was reportedly settled for $4 million.

Davis moved into Stanfill’s office, and he tore down the wall separating executives from staff in the commissary so that all of Fox could watch him at his favorite pastime: lunch. He rented a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel for $1,000 a night and began flying to L.A. with Barbara on his jet every Thursday night and returning to Denver Sunday evening. Every Friday he would gather all department heads, and the machinery of a major studio would grind to a halt as they attempted to teach him the movie business.

“He knew zero, zippo,” says Katleman. “He’d show up at the studio on Friday, and it would be chaos,” says Hirschfield. “He’d say to me, ‘I don’t want to look at any pilots—just tell me how we do,’ ” says Katleman. “We were No. 1 for television shows, and Alan Alda had an option to do MASH* again. I told Marvin, ‘It’s been going on for seven years, and we’re going to have to pay him $200,000 an episode.’ Marvin said, ‘Wait a minute! You’re paying this guy 200 grand?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’ And he said, ‘Replace him!’ I said, ‘Marvin, you can’t replace him! He’s a star.’ And he says, ‘Oh, come on, there’s lots of actors you can get.’ I said, ‘We just sold the rerun rights to every episode that Alda makes, and we’re getting $20 million.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s a good deal!’ ”

In Davis’s first interview as the head of Fox, he told the Los Angeles Times that President and Mrs. Reagan had recently complained to him about excessive sexuality in films. He said the president had suggested that he produce films that implied, instead of showing, sex, in the style of the great 1940s director Ernst Lubitsch. “Lubitsch?,” Davis said he had asked Reagan. “Who the hell is Lubitsch?”

On his first day at the studio, Davis asked, “Who actually makes the movies?” Sherry Lansing, he was told. “Send him in,” Davis said. When Lansing, the first woman to head production at a major American studio, entered Davis’s office, he barely looked up. “No, I don’t need any coffee now, honey,” he said.

“No, no, no. I’m Sherry Lansing, and I’m the head of Twentieth Century Fox,” she said. “And he looked at me and said, ‘No, I want Jerry Lansing,’ and I said, ‘Marvin, I’m Sherry Lansing, and I’m the one who runs the studio.’ And he said, ‘A girl?’ And I went, ‘Yeah, a girl.’

“That was the beginning of what would be a wonderful relationship of mutual respect,” says Lansing, whom Davis began calling Dollface.

Another woman at Fox was Davis’s daughter Patricia. For about a year she worked for no pay in the New York office.

It didn’t take Hollywood long to begin kissing Davis’s ample behind. “You got money, you own a studio, you want to make movies, they find you,” says Hirschfield. “He’d meet them at parties, or dinner, and he’d say, ‘I want to do pictures!’ He didn’t understand that’s like giving a blowtorch to an arsonist. If you tell somebody in Hollywood, ‘I want to make a movie with you,’ they go crazy. Sherry would get a call; I’d get a call.

“He brought in the director Billy Wilder, and we actually gave him an office at the studio,” Hirschfield continues. “I’d say, ‘Marvin, I’m not going to make a movie with him,’ and he said, ‘No, he wants an office; he needs a place to hang out.’ My attitude was: It’s your company—you do what you damned well please.”

He filled the Fox board with his pals—Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, Art Modell. Fox became his playground, where he’d have lunch in the commissary with Mel Brooks, the two of them “convulsing” in laughter, Hirschfield says, or bring in Diana Ross just so that he could meet her.

Ever the clotheshorse, Davis had everything custom-made. One day when Katleman went into Davis’s office while he was having a shirt fitting, Davis shrieked at his shirtmaker, “Give the kid a dozen!” Hirschfield adds, “This was like a candy store. He liked to kibitz. The problem was, we were busy—this is a business, not a country club—and he’d pull people out for two-hour meetings.”

“One of the very first screenings was for Marvin to see Taps,” remembers Lansing. The film, about a military school, starred Timothy Hutton and featured the young Tom Cruise and Sean Penn. Norman Levy, executive vice president of marketing, wanted to hedge Fox’s risk by selling off part of the movie. Davis had to make the final call.

“That’s what I love about him—he was a fan. He didn’t wait for anybody else to have an opinion,” Lansing says. “He stood up and said, ‘I love this movie! I’m not selling a single part of it. In the oil business, we dig a hole and we place our bet. That’s what I believe in, and I’m placing a 100 percent bet on this movie.’ ”

Happily for Davis, Taps was a hit.

Davis never forgot that his real business was the oil business, and soon his two worlds merged. Katleman says that he and Hirschfield asked Davis to cut them into a deal. “O.K., the next field I draw, I’ll let you boys in,” Davis said. It wasn’t long before he had an investment opportunity. “I proposed putting in a certain amount, and he said, ‘No, that’s too much money for you,’ ” says Katleman, who anted up the amount Davis suggested, as did Hirschfield and Levy. So did George Lucas, who was on the Fox lot doing Return of the Jedi, and many others. “He said, ‘I’m putting Lucas in the oil business,’ and I said, ‘Make sure the damned thing hits, because we’ve got a lot at stake with this guy,’ ” remembers Hirschfield. As always, it was a third-for-a-quarter deal, with Davis getting his quarter free.

marvin davis hits oil in wyoming was an August 1983 headline in The Denver Post. “He called me Square Deal, and he said, ‘Square Deal, you really hit it!’ ” says Katleman. “ ‘We hit our wildcat!’ ” Katleman asked him what a wildcat was. “He said, ‘You’ll find out when the checks come in,’ and they were astronomical, every month. I got back my entire investment in three months.”

Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger also got in on the action. “He invited me to participate on the board of Twentieth Century Fox, and then suggested that some of the board fees could be converted into investments in the oil business,” says Kissinger, who invested his $50,000 annual fee and more. “I think I barely broke even,” he recalls.

When a second investment opportunity came around, Davis expanded his circle of investors to include Fox stars. “He’d put his arm around the actor John Ritter and say, ‘Do you want to invest in oil?’ And John would think, Here’s one of the best-known oil people in the world, and he’d say, ‘Sure,’ ” says Katleman. But that round wasn’t a bonanza. “We drilled 12 dry holes and lost our entire investment.”

One Fox executive declined Davis’s invitations. “Oh, often he called me in, as he did the other executives, and said he would take our money, put it in the oil business, and double and triple it,” says Sherry Lansing. “But I’m an extremely conservative person, and I never did any of that.”

Meanwhile, Davis’s silent partner Marc Rich was impatient to develop their properties. One Christmas, Davis dispatched Hirschfield to squire Rich, his wife, Denise, and their daughters around Aspen. “Marc said, ‘Could you help us with lift tickets? I’ve had to wait in line a long time,’ ” Hirschfield remembers. “I said, ‘Marc, you own half the place!’ ”

Davis’s liquidation of Fox’s assets may have been going too slowly for Rich, but it was moving forward. Within months of the takeover, Davis and Rich had sold the studio’s interest in its Coca-Cola bottling plant. Next they sold the record company and the music-publishing division as well as the foreign theaters and real-estate holdings. Davis merely refinanced the company’s debt, which by 1984 would balloon to $430 million. Rich had reportedly been eager to convert his Fox shares to voting stock so that he would have an equal say with Davis in the studio. But in 1983, Rich and his partner, Pincus Green, were slapped with federal charges of evading $48 million in taxes, racketeering, and illegally trading oil with Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis.

Then one day Rich vanished. According to The Man to See, Edward Bennett Williams was standing in Davis’s office when he heard that his client was on the lam. “They just stopped a plane at Kennedy airport!,” Davis told Hirschfield.

Hirschfield says Davis had persuaded Williams, against his better judgment, to represent Rich. Now, after refusing to turn over documents to a grand jury and being fined about $20 million, Rich had attempted to have two steamer trunks of those documents smuggled out of the country on a Swiss Air plane, which was stopped at J.F.K. airport by federal authorities. “Somebody must have tipped the government,” says Hirschfield. “That’s why Eddie went ballistic, screaming at Marvin, ‘How could you do this to me?’ ”

After Rich was in exile in Zug, Switzerland, the U.S. Justice Department froze all of his assets, including his half of Fox, but agreed to sell Rich’s interest in Fox to Davis. According to his contract with Rich, Davis had the right of first refusal on any sale of Fox shares, and he was able to snap up Rich’s 50 percent for $116 million, a fraction of even the bargain-basement price of $700-plus million that he had originally paid for the company.

While Davis never indulged in liquor or starlets, he had a serious weakness. “He was the poster boy for everything you shouldn’t eat,” says Hirschfield, “steaks, eggs, bacon, dripping with fat.” Davis kept a stash of 30 spare ties in his office to replace food-splattered ones. “He always used to say he never trusted people who didn’t eat,” says Hirschfield. “Going to a restaurant with him was a production. It was like royalty walking in.”

Davis favored Matteo’s, an Italian restaurant on Westwood Boulevard. “He never could decide, so he’d order three appetizers and three entrées and three desserts,” recalls Jacquelin Jordan, the widow of the owner. Once, for a Fox board meeting, Davis ordered a meal of all nine courses for everyone, Jordan says, “and sent his secretary over with 14 bottles of Pepto-Bismol, telling her to put one at each place setting.”

Wolfgang Puck’s Spago arrived in Los Angeles in 1982, and Marvin and Barbara became regulars. The staff would spring into action and have everything pre-prepared for Davis and his party. “I went to lunch with him at Spago, and all of the food arrived immediately,” says Michael Caine. “I went, ‘Jesus Christ! How do they know what you’re going to order?’ He said, ‘They have the whole menu ready.’ ” A special throne-like chair was designed for him by Puck’s then partner, Barbara Lazaroff. At Matteo’s, Mortons, and Mr. Chow, Davis’s security team would deliver in advance an extra-wide leather armchair to accommodate his girth.

Davis also loved luxury and show, and soon he found the mansion of his dreams. It was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the then largest single-family house in Los Angeles: the Knoll, a 45,000-square-foot mansion with 11 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms, built in 1955 for oil heiress Lucy Doheny Battson. Once the home of producer Dino De Laurentiis, it was now owned by Kenny Rogers. “It was 11 acres in the middle of Beverly Hills—nothing else like that,” Rogers says.

Rogers had starred in the film Six Pack at Fox shortly after Davis’s arrival, and he and Davis played golf together. Rogers’s hit song “The Gambler” (“You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em”) could have been Davis’s theme song. “I had about $100 million in real estate when interest rates were 22 percent,” says Rogers. “I had a farm in Georgia, a building on Sunset, my recording studio. I was head over heels. The carry on the Knoll was killing. I had to unload that property.”

Davis was one of very few potential buyers. “He had come to a party one night, and there were about 400 people around,” says Rogers. “He just fell in love with it, but Marvin negotiates for everything.” On numerous visits, Rogers remembers, Davis would say, “I want to look at it, but I don’t think I can pay that price!”

Once Rogers was worn down, Davis stopped by again. “He said, ‘Kenny, I’m going to pay your price. But I’m going to do it my way.’ ” Rogers had paid $13.5 million and spent about $4 million in improvements. “He wanted to give me $18 million as a cash payment on closing, with $4 million in a balloon note to be paid in three years with no interest.”

“Well, Marvin, you’re going to screw me one way or another,” Rogers says he told him playfully.

“That’s how I make my living,” Davis said, laughing.

The most shocking section of the current lawsuit charges that Davis coerced Patricia into signing a new trust document that would perpetuate his control over her finances:

*In March 1990, without disclosing his true intentions, Marvin invited Patricia to come home for a visit and to attend that year’s Academy Awards ceremony, on March 25. Once Patricia arrived in Los Angeles, Marvin invited her into his office, where he insisted she sign the Revocation of Trust Agreement and Assignment of Trust Assets. Upon seeing the complex legal documents that Marvin gave her, and realizing that she did not and could not understand them on her own, Patricia suggested that she should

show them to an attorney in New York before signing them. Marvin refused to permit her to do so. Instead of allowing Patricia to consult with counsel or any other independent adviser, Marvin would only permit Patricia to speak to his employee, defendant Kenneth Kilroy. Although Patricia told Kilroy that she did not want to sign the documents, but wanted to show them to a lawyer in New York, Kilroy pressured Patricia to sign, telling her that he had never seen Marvin so upset.

When Patricia continued to resist signing, Marvin threatened her. Marvin told Patricia that if she refused to sign or simply insisted on showing the documents to an attorney, Marvin would never permit her to see her mother, brothers, or sisters again, that he would make Patricia’s life “a living hell,” that he would make the lives of Patricia’s own family “a living hell,” and that he would tie her up in court for the rest of her life.…

Marvin backed up those emotional and financial threats with the additional threat of violence.… Marvin had a quick temper and had struck Patricia in the past. Still Patricia refused to sign the trust documents without consulting a lawyer first. Over the course of several days, Marvin continued to pressure Patricia to sign the trust documents, and continued to refuse to allow her to consult with any independent person. At the Davis family home, Marvin and Patricia argued in Marvin’s bedroom. Marvin struck Patricia, and continued to beat her until Barbara eventually interceded. Barbara did not, however, resist Marvin’s efforts to force Patricia to sign the trust documents; in fact, Barbara pressured Patricia as well, telling Patricia that she should “just sign, you can always change it later. I’ve changed mine.”*

Patricia signed the documents. Asked recently if Marvin was ever physically abusive to Patricia, Barbara Davis responded through the family spokesman, “Absolutely not!”

The Davises unveiled the Knoll at Christmas in 1984, beginning a nonstop party where the pair would preside over a court not seen in Hollywood before or since. “Of course, the chatter was ‘Who is going to get an invitation, and who isn’t?’ ” says former supermodel turned entrepreneur Cristina Ferrare. “You waited in a long line to get past security, and drove up this very long, winding, tree-lined driveway.” Michael Caine adds, “I’d never been in a house with a dual carriageway drive, where there was a line down the middle.”

“It took your breath away,” Ferrare continues. “Massive trees with a bazillion twinkling white lights.… Two huge standard poodles sitting next to the entrance.… And Barbara and Marvin were in the massive entry hall, speaking to each and every person, with a Rockefeller Center–size tree and violinists from the L.A. Philharmonic on the mirrored winding staircase.”

For later Christmases, skaters would carve patterns on an ice rink out front, the Radio City Rockettes would high-kick down the stairs, and “Streisand would come out to do an impromptu performance for which she had rehearsed for three days with music producer David Foster [a longtime Davis friend],” says Laugh-In creator George Schlatter.

“The restrictions Marvin put on Barbara were as simple as ‘Whatever you say, darling,’ ” says Schlatter. “If you weren’t at her Christmas party, you’d better be out of town. They also had Fourth of July parties, western barbecues, where they’d give everybody squirt guns, delivered by white-gloved butlers on silver trays. At one point, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and George Bush were all at their Christmas party at the same time.”

“Hanging on the back of our chairs were these fabulous stockings with every kind of imaginable toy in them,” says Suzanne Pleshette. “I still have every music box and every Christmas decoration from every party. I don’t even put out a tree anymore—I just pile it all into the shape of a tree.” Another Davis party tradition was soon born: goody bags, filled with luxury items and certificates for services, which grew so huge over time that they had to have wheels on them.

“Marvin was the last figure to unite in one evening all the stars at any time, no matter how diametrically opposed they were,” says George Hamilton. “He could get anybody and everybody there. It was the last real power Hollywood had, that people would come up under any circumstances, and it was always in excess, in excess of everything. People in Hollywood, who were used to going home at 10:30, were still there when people like Elton John were still coming on.”

“ ‘O.K., now, I know everybody wants Don to say a few words,’ ” Schlatter says Davis would say at almost every event, and Don Rickles “would stand up and demolish the biggest names in the room, especially Marvin.”

“He was huge in many ways,” says Davis’s best Hollywood friend, Sidney Poitier, adding that when the pack had left another side of Marvin would emerge, the art-lover, the history buff, “who would watch the History Channel like some people watch CNN.” Poitier accompanied Davis to Wimbledon and on golfing expeditions. “I got that there was a little boy in him,” he says.

For New Year’s, the Davises would jet off to Aspen. A hundred of their friends would arrive on Davis’s plane or their own planes, which were met by a string of limos. “The Davis family would command about a third of our rooms and suites, and get everyone settled according to their desired pecking order, including Gregory Peck, on occasion,” says Eric Calderon, the general manager of the Little Nell Hotel, which Davis built. “Key was ensuring that the full-size extra refrigerator in the Davis pantry was fully stocked with shrimp and bananas.”

“Oil barons and movie moguls and Donald Trump—they all came with their own security,” says Schlatter. “Every night Davis would buy out a different restaurant. Marvin would sit at the base of the gondola at the Little Nell, and we’d say, ‘Marvin, what are you doing?,’ and he’d laugh and say, ‘I’m counting lift tickets … $35, $70.’ Then, on Sunday, they’d be gone, this caravan, back to Tinseltown, leaving Aspen devoid of stars.”

Back in L.A., everything, for Marvin and Barbara, led up to the Carousel of Hope Ball, the biannual event that became “the flagship of all charity events,” says Schlatter. The proceeds funded the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes, where 25 full-time physicians treat more than 5,000 patients annually. The ball began in Denver in 1978, three years after the Davises’ daughter Dana was diagnosed with diabetes.

“Barbara called me and said, ‘Our baby has diabetes,’ ” Davis once recalled. “I said, ‘So, get it fixed.’ ” But they discovered that diabetes couldn’t be fixed, and that, if not treated quickly, Dana could be threatened with anything from blindness to amputation. Davis decided that if he couldn’t fix diabetes he’d fund the treatment of it, donating an initial $1 million to create the center and launch the Carousel of Hope Ball.

The ball grew so large that a galaxy of stars was annually on display, so many boldfaced names that some newspapers limited coverage to those names alone. “One year, Andrea Bocelli was the newest biggest thing, because we’d already had Plácido Domingo the year before, right?” says Schlatter. But Bocelli was in Italy. No matter: when it came to charity, Barbara never heard the word “no.” “Oh, Marvin will send a plane,” she said. “So we arranged to meet him in a hotel room to videotape his half of a duet with Celine Dion,” says Schlatter, who then pieced the two stars together on a screen so that it looked as if they were in the same room.

Always, at the apex of the evening, Davis would rise from his chair and announce, according to Schlatter, “ ‘Tonight’s evening raised X number of dollars, and I would be pleased to match it.’ The place would go crazy. Are you nuts? Because it would be like a $3 or $4 million donation.” The Davis family says most of the expenses for the ball, which has raised more than $70 million since its inception, are underwritten.

‘I hit a well, I get 15 calls, people congratulating me,” Davis once said. “When I was in the movie business, you make a great picture, everybody hated me!”

As a mogul, he hit more dusters than gushers, with such hits as Romancing the Stone and Cocoon offset by such misses as Rhinestone and Six Pack. “He had a lot of wonderful paintings on his walls,” says Michael Caine, recalling Davis taking him past the Knoll’s Impressionist masterpieces. “And he said, ‘Let me show you the most expensive picture I ever bought.’ And he showed me a photograph of Sly Stallone and Dolly Parton in Rhinestone. He said, ‘That picture cost me $19 million.’ ”

According to the Los Angles Herald Examiner, Fox lost almost $36 million in fiscal 1984, while doubling its long-term debt. Davis felt he needed to slough off some of the debt and find a creative partner.

Barry Diller ran Paramount, whose films in the early 80s included Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flashdance, two Star Trek features, Terms of Endearment, and Trading Places. He was widely considered the young genius of the entertainment business.

“Marvin Davis called me and asked if there were any conditions that I would become the C.E.O. of Fox,” Diller remembers. Thus began a grand seduction, with the 300-pound mogul, trying to be discreet, driving over to Diller’s house in his Rolls-Royce to court him, playing “the role of tycoon, the entrepreneurial charmer.” Finally, Diller succumbed, on one condition: he would have complete control. Davis couldn’t speak to any member of the Fox staff other than Diller.

“Call them the Odd Couple,” read a Los Angeles Times story. “Call them the barracuda and the bear. Or their deal, as one insider does, the Stalin-Hitler pact.”

The deck was stacked against Diller from the start. “Within 30 days, [Davis] essentially reneged on the deal we had made, which was to provide financing for the studio,” says Diller, who quickly discovered that the studio’s financial situation was much different than Davis had described. “It became clear that the company owed $600 million. The banks wouldn’t extend it any further.” Diller pressed Davis for the new equity he had promised to put into the company, but Davis stalled, he says, and suggested that Diller call Michael Milken for a $250 million junk-bond loan, which would be Diller’s, not Davis’s, responsibility. In the end, Diller drove to Davis’s home in Palm Springs to face him down and demand the float that Fox desperately needed.

“This man actually wrote a piece of paper with me—my little naïve person—and signed it,” says Diller. “So I go to him and say, ‘O.K., Marvin, as you know, the banks won’t lend us any more money. We need equity in the business. You have to put up $100 million, because otherwise the banks are not going to go any further.’ He said no. I said, ‘But you agreed!’ And he just stared at me, literally saying, ‘You fool. What are you going to do now?’

“You have to put in $100 million,” Diller says he told Davis. Again, Davis said no. “And I thought, Oh my God, what am I going to do? I realized what he’d done, which is, he set me up. Thirty days into this, my options were horrible. I could hardly go back to Paramount.

“I said, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to sue you for fraud.’ ”

But he didn’t have to, because an unlikely white knight soon appeared.

Owning 100 percent of anything wasn’t Davis’s style. “He said, ‘I don’t want the risk,’ ” remembers Hirschfield. “Then he says to me one day, ‘What about Rupert Murdoch?’ ”

“Marvin, in my opinion Rupert Murdoch is the smartest person who has ever been in the media business, the greatest futurist and strategist,” Hirschfield says he told Davis. “He’ll eat you for lunch.”

“Nobody eats me for lunch!,” Davis said with a laugh.

“That’s true as a matter of size,” said Hirschfield. “But he’ll end up with the company if you sell him 50 percent.” Davis insisted, and Hirschfield arranged lunch for the two moguls at ‘21,’ in New York, where, he remembers, Murdoch talked about strategy and synergy while Davis ate his steak. “I can work with this guy,” Davis said afterward.

But once he had sold 50 percent, Davis discovered, Fox wasn’t fun anymore. He may also have been running low on cash. “With the value and return from his Denver oil, real estate, and banking holdings sagging, Davis lacked the cash to keep financing Fox’s movie budget,” according to Business Week. Now Diller was running the show. “ ‘From now on, I’m the fiduciary here,’ ” Diller remembers telling Davis. “ ‘Which means you can’t charge expenses to the company unless your 50 percent partner agrees to each of them.’ Essentially that was my relationship with Mr. Davis. It certainly did not end well.”

Then came Metromedia, and Davis wouldn’t bite. On the plate was the future of Fox, a nascent fourth network: seven big-city TV stations owned by entrepreneur John Kluge. Finessed by Diller and Murdoch, Kluge consented to sell for $2 billion, which Davis said was too much. “According to Murdoch, Davis suggested that they flip a coin to see which of them should buy the other out of Twentieth Century Fox,” writes William Shawcross in his biography Murdoch. “Murdoch said he accepted the challenge but Davis then backed out.” Davis eventually agreed to sell his 50 percent to Murdoch for $575 million if he could retain Pebble Beach and the Aspen Skiing Corporation. But once the contracts were drawn up, Davis stalled.

“I called him and said, ‘Why aren’t you signing these papers?,’ ” Diller says.

“I’ll get around to it,” Davis replied.

“I said, ‘You’ll get around to it Friday, because I’ve had it!,’ ” Diller says.

“O.K., you can come and pick up the papers at my house on Saturday morning.”

On Saturday morning Diller drove up to the Knoll. “I got out of my car, and he came out of the house with the papers in his hand,” Diller remembers. “He hands me the papers and he goes, ‘You sure made me some money, kid!’

“I was speechless,” Diller continues. “If I had been in my car, I would have run him over. But I was so happy to be done with it. I got back into my car and drove down the driveway, and that was the last time I think I spoke to Marvin Davis.”

He’d sold his studio and most of its satellite assets, but the gambler still had two major cards to play, Pebble Beach and the Aspen Skiing Corporation.

First on the block, the only asset that he said he’d ever truly loved: Pebble Beach. Davis had polished the jewel of golf resorts by adding a new course and a hotel, but by the late 1980s residents were noticing cutbacks. It was time to sell.

Luck delivered the perfect patsy: Minoru Isutani, the leader of the 1980s Japanese golf bubble, who was searching the globe for the perfect place to build a replica of Pebble Beach—until he discovered that he could buy the real thing. “He knew the property well and mentioned a price,” Davis told me. The price—about $840 million—was roughly $115 million more than Davis had paid for all of Fox only nine years earlier, but Isutani had a plan to make the numbers work: even though Pebble Beach was a public golf course, he would sell 1,000 memberships at $750,000 each.

Later, drowning in debt and warring with the area’s residents and ecologists and the California Coastal Commission, Isutani was asked why he had ever thought he could privatize the world’s most famous public golf resort. “We repeatedly asked Mr. Marvin Davis if there would be any objection,” Isutani told the San Francisco Examiner. “He said there would be no objection.”

Isutani went broke, and Davis had a chance to buy Pebble Beach back at a fire-sale price. But by then he was selling, not buying. It was 1993 and he unloaded what was left of the Aspen Skiing Corporation. “He immediately started tearing the company up and selling off bits and pieces,” says 92-year-old former company president D. R. C. Brown, lamenting the vanishing assets, including a resort in Colorado, two Canadian ski operations, and a Spanish ski resort. In the 1980s, Davis had sold 50 percent of the ski corporation itself to the Lester Crown family of Chicago. In 1993 the Crowns bought the other half.

Marvin Davis now began his third act, as a takeover artist. A pattern emerged: Davis in headlines announcing a takeover, followed by a rocketing stock price, followed by Davis’s unloading his shares for a supposedly enormous profit. The types of companies he pursued ranged from entertainment (CBS, NBC) to hotels (Resorts International), to airlines (Northwest, United, Continental), to condoms (Carter-Wallace, manufacturer of Trojans). He actually did buy several companies, including Spectradyne, a Texas-based firm that provides cable-TV movies to hotels. He paid $635 million, most of which was put up by Prudential Insurance Co.

At the end of 1986, for $135 million, Davis also bought the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he and Barbara had honeymooned, winning a bidding war against the Sultan of Brunei. “As soon as the sultan lost it, he approached Davis,” says Seema Boesky, who with her sister had sold the hotel to Davis. Within a year Davis flipped it to the sultan for a $65 million profit.

In 1989, Davis’s appetite for deals and meals came together. The Carnegie Deli had always been his touchstone, a temple of mile-high sandwiches. He lined up investors including Jackie Collins, John Madden, and Don Rickles to open the $4 million Beverly Hills Carnegie. “Crank it up! I’ve put too much money in this thing!” he admonished the restaurant designer, according to The New York Times, insisting on opening without a trained staff or a liquor license. At the grand opening, he and Barbara sliced a six-foot salami while Carol Channing lowered a huge Styrofoam matzo ball into a giant bowl of chicken soup. “Did you eat there?” asks the New York Carnegie’s owner, Sandy Levine. “He didn’t buy our product! He put the name up, and he bought crap! You can’t fool the people!” By 1994 the West Coast Carnegie had closed its doors.

In 1993 the Davises attended Wimbledon, then flew to Nice. They were being chauffeured in a gold Cadillac limo, snaking through traffic to the Eden Roc hotel on the Cap d’Antibes with two security cars behind them, when they were suddenly blocked by two Renaults and surrounded by four masked gunmen, who forced them to turn over $10 million in jewels and $50,000 in cash. As Davis recalled the incident to Schlatter, Barbara told the gunmen trying to undo her necklace, “I understand you’re just doing your job. Don’t break the clasp. Let me get it for you.”

Patricia Raynes’s lawsuit describes her father’s endless takeover attempts like this:

In the last 20 years of his life, Marvin Davis, acting on behalf of the Davis Family Trusts, repeatedly made unsuccessful offers to purchase airlines, media companies, and television networks, hotels, sports franchises, and gaming interests, and real estate, among others. By 1990, Marvin’s reputation for looking, but not buying, was so well established that Forbes magazine reported that he had been nicknamed “the Tirekicker.” In truth, Marvin, John, Gregg, and others who participated in Marvin’s expensive bids to buy large companies, never intended to buy those companies. Rather, they were only trying to create the illusion that Marvin controlled a vast financial empire in order to benefit John’s and Gregg’s own businesses, to inflate Marvin’s and Barbara’s egos, and to generate millions of dollars in improper fees.

… In each case, Marvin caused the Davis Family Trusts to spend substantial sums, cumulatively in the tens of millions of dollars, on investment bankers, attorneys, and other advisers, and billed Patricia’s trust for at least a proportionate share of those expenses, if not more. … Ultimately, as a result of his looting, waste, and dissipation of trust assets, Marvin lacked the financial resources to close the deals that he was bidding for, but pursued them anyway, further wasting trust assets in futile, self-aggrandizing expenditures … to maintain the fiction that Marvin, John, and Gregg Davis were major financial players in oil, real estate, gaming, technology, and entertainment.

In late 2002, a headline in Acquisitions Monthly magazine read, davis returns from the wilderness. The new blockbuster deal was his $20 billion offer for Vivendi Universal Entertainment. The Paris-based conglomerate’s assets included Universal Studios in Los Angeles and its theme parks, as well as music and TV divisions.

By then Davis was ill and had lost 130 pounds. “He knew he had to have some surgery, and he kept putting it off and putting it off,” says Gerald Ford. “And the longer he put it off, the more serious the surgery became, and it was sad to see him disabled.”

“Shortly before he passed away, my wife and I were in L.A., and I told her about this house I had owned,” remembers Kenny Rogers. “We were driving by the gate, and I saw all of my same gardeners when I was there, so I asked them, ‘Do you think Marvin would mind if we drive up?’ And Barbara came down and said, ‘Marvin’s upstairs. He’d love to say hello.’ So I went upstairs, and he was in a hospital bed. He didn’t look good, but he had great spirits. He was laughing. Then the phone rang, and he picked it up, and when he put it down he said, ‘I just made a bid for Vivendi. I don’t think I’m going to get it.’ ”

The company went to General Electric.

Patricia’s lawsuit charges that Marvin’s offer was rejected for a simple reason:

Vivendi rejected Marvin’s bid, characterizing its financing and structure as “dubious and unattractive.” In pursuing Vivendi alone, Marvin caused the Davis Family Trusts to spend tens of millions of dollars on investment bankers, attorneys, and other advisers.

When Davis died, Hollywood sent him off royally at the Westwood Memorial Park, the final resting-place of, among others, Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote. Stevie Wonder and Carole Bayer Sager sang “That’s What Friends Are For,” and any cracks froze in Don Rickles’s throat. At the end David Foster played “Goodnight, Irene,” the ballad Davis always insisted end each late night at the Knoll.

In a town that doesn’t care where you come from but only what you become, Davis died a legend, a star.

His daughter’s lawsuit describes his end in less romantic terms:

*Beginning around 1993, Marvin Davis’s health began to fail. He developed diabetes, had a tumor on his spine, suffered from heart disease and near-fatal bouts with pneumonia and sepsis, was confined to a wheelchair, and relied on bodyguards and nurses to bathe him.…

Marvin Davis died on September 25, 2004, in the presence of his wife and five children.…

A few days after Marvin’s death, Barbara Davis told Patricia—contrary to what Patricia had been told her entire life—“you’re poor, Patty. You’re poor.” Barbara then stated for the first time that there were not billions of dollars, that in fact, there was “no money.” Marvin had left nothing in his will. The next day, Patricia’s brother John and sister Dana spoke to Patricia privately, informing her of what they had known for a long time: Marvin had looted the trusts, and had spent hundreds of millions of dollars that did not belong to him. If Patricia hoped to recover any of the small fraction of her wealth that was left, John told her, she would have to hire an attorney. The other family members already knew of Marvin’s misconduct and had already hired lawyers of their own.*

The story is not over by a long shot. On the front page of Patricia’s lawsuit, in capital letters, are the words “jury trial demanded.”

The magazine published a postscript to this article in the November 2009 issue.

Mark Seal is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.