Charles Davies Lederer was an American screenwriter and film director. He was born into a theatrical family in New York, and after his parents divorced, was raised in California by his aunt, Marion Davies, actress and mistress to newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. A child prodigy, he entered the University of California, Berkeley at age 13, but dropped out after a few years to work as a journalist with Hearst's newspapers.

Marion Davies was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies fled the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl. As a teenager, she appeared in several Broadway musicals and one film, Runaway Romany (1917). She soon became a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies.