What a pity that Marion Davies, the lady who graces our cover this month, isn't around to know that at long last, 40 years after her death, people are finally beginning to say nice things about her. For years, people have joked about her talent (or lack of it), criticized her long-time relationship with the married publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst (they became known as the most famous unmarried couple in the world) and yowled over the fact that Hearst kept pouring money into ill-fated movie projects to insure Davies be a player in the film industry. According to legend, Miss Davies' career potential added up to a zero and, worse, she had so mesmerized the powerful publisher that he foolishly spent millions trying to promote a career which held no promise whatsoever. Such an assessment couldn't be further from the truth. What is true is that, quite unintentionally, Orson Welles started those fictions about Davies in his dazzling film Citizen Kane. It's never been a secret that Welles partially based "Kane" on the life- style and excesses of Mr. Hearst; unfortunately for Marion, Orson - like any good tale spinner - took great license in the way he portrayed the woman who captured Hearst's heart. In "Kane," the great man's mistress is a would-be opera diva who bombs out the first time she tries to sing in public; she also dumps The Big Man when times get tough. Further, she ends up penniless and pitiful. But the real-life saga of Davies and Hearst differed from the Welles version, something we'll be clearing up this month with the help of a fascinating original TCM documentary produced by Timeline Films, called Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies. You'll be able to learn the real story of Davies and Hearst, and it couldn't be more riveting. We're premiering the documentary on February 14, Valentine's Day, with two showings, one at 8 p.m. (ET) and another at 11 p.m. (ET), surrounded by 13 of Davies' features, offering ample proof that far from being a wash-out, she was a genuinely delightful talent with a great sense of comic timing - nothing whatsoever like that crass, sad-sack character in "Kane." (Welles, himself, later said, "The thing that saddens me about 'Kane' is what it did to Marion"). Off screen, she was also a charmer. "Marion Davies makes up for the rest of Hollywood," Tennessee Williams once said of her. It's not that life for her was in any way a breeze. She had, for instance, a stutter which plagued her except when she was speaking lines in front of a movie camera. She also drank much too much. She had a daughter by Hearst who, because of morality demands of the time, had to be raised as her niece. But Marion was also incredibly loyal to the man she loved and, far from being a gold-digger, more than once took out her own checkbook to financially help her money-strapped companion, one of those checks being for $1 million. Oh, yes, Marion Davies was definitely colorful enough to be the subject of a film. The point is that film was not Mr. Welles' Citizen Kane. By Robert Osborne