Media mogul William Randolph Hearst can be cast as a hero or a villain of the 20th century, and plenty of writers have taken a stab at pinning down his legacy definitively. But one of the lesser remembered aspects of Hearst's life was his abandonment, in 1917, of his wife, Millicent, and their five sons, to spend the rest of his life with actress Marion Davies. One quirk of this arrangement is that Millicent never consented to a divorce from her husband, and while this scandalous state of affairs might have sunk a less powerful person, Hearst's ability to manipulate the vast media empire he owned protected him, and allowed Marion's life and career to flourish on the West Coast.
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