The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  Helen weathered the humid summer of 1881 at home alone, while Joshua worked at the store. In early August, she went into labor. Alone in the parlor at the time, she shouted through the open window for help, and a neighbor, Luella Bixler, rushed in and delivered the child. To thank her, Helen named the baby girl Louella Rose.'2 Healthy, husky, and loud, little Louella entered the world screaming.

  In the next five years, both Louella and the Oettinger Star Store flourished. In 1885, Joshua and Eli relocated the business to a larger and more centrally located building on Stephenson Street, and a third Oettinger brother, Lewis, migrated to Freeport to manage another branch of the store, called Famous Clothing, on the other side of town.13 The prosperity enabled Joshua and Helen to move from Clark Street to a more expensive residence next to the store, and Joshua joined the Masons. "The Oettingers were respected and well thought of," recalled one Freeport resident, though they were known around town as a "Jewish family." In a town with only a few Jewish families, and possibly with an anti-Semitic climate, Joshua and Helen, eager to be accepted into the social mainstream, attended the local Episcopal church with the Stines.14

  In May 1886, a second child, a boy named Edwin, was born to Joshua and Helen, and not long afterward, they sold their interest in the Oettinger store to Eli and moved thirty miles south, to the town of Sterling. Hoping to strike out on his own, Joshua thought that Sterling, a growing rural community without a successful clothing store, would be an ideal place for an independent venture. In 1888, he purchased a failing clothing store, and within a year he made it prosper.15 Louella's early years were solidly middle class.

  It is difficult to know whether Louella remembered that period in her life: the years in Freeport, Eddie's birth, the move to Sterling, and the family's growing fortunes. She was aware of the tensions between her mother, who was "hiding deep-rooted frustration for the theater and an innate love of drama," and her father, an "ambitious" man who was cold and reserved.16 When Louella was almost seventy, she remembered a day in 1886 when Joshua took her to Chicago on a business trip. The big city excited and impressed her, she remembered, but it was the kindness of her father, who uncharacteristically doted on her for the entire journey, that she would cherish all her life. "In all the years and the many things that have happened to me, that memory is still fresh in my mind," she wrote.17 Such a day, when she could bask in the undivided attention of her father, would never come again.

  Sometime in the winter of 1897, Joshua's health began to fail. Though only twenty-nine, he suddenly seemed an old man-wheezing, feverish, so drained of energy that he was often unable to walk. In spite of his condition, described by one observer as "only little less than invalid," Joshua forced himself to work. With the help of a young assistant, David Lingel, Joshua opened the store each day, waited on customers, and meticulously calculated his accounts. Buoyed by "an indomitable will power," a local newspaper later claimed, "he was rarely absent from business." A "quiet, unobtrusive man, courteous in his bearing, loyal in his friendships, and honorable in his dealings," Joshua was "highly esteemed" by all.18 Beneath the placid demeanor, however, was a man who was deeply depressed, terrified of his worsening health, and intensely afraid of death. By Louella's seventh birthday in 1888, it was clear he was suffering from tuberculosis.

  On the afternoon of Saturday, May 24, 1890, Joshua was in the store, figuring the books and waiting on customers. It was not a particularly difficult day, but when he closed the store that evening he was quivering and exhausted, and he collapsed on the floor. Lingel, the store assistant, carried Joshua the short distance to the Oettinger home, where he lay in bed, half conscious, for the rest of the night. On Sunday morning came hope-for a moment, it seemed he had regained awareness-and a telegram was dispatched to Eli in Freeport alerting him to Joshua's fatal condition. When Eli arrived in Sterling that evening, it was too late. Joshua had slipped back into delirium, and by two the next afternoon, he had gone completely unconscious. At seven o'clock, Joshua Oettinger, age thirty-three, was killed by "abscesses of the lungs," reported the Sterling Gazette.'9 He passed away much as he had lived: quietly, without complaint, feeling little pain.

  On Wednesday, May z8, Joshua's body was placed on the 1:55 train for Freeport, where it arrived two hours later. The remains were taken from the train by Joshua's Masonic brothers and carried by a horse-drawn hearse to the city cemetery. The following day, Helen returned to Sterling and announced her intention to sell the store.20 Telegrams were sent, visits made, and by the end of the year Helen had sold the business to Joshua's stepbrother Gus, who had recently migrated from Pennsylvania. With her earnings from the sale of the business plus the two thousand dollars' worth of life insurance Joshua had carried with the Masons, Helen packed up the Sterling home and moved Louella and Eddie back to Freeport.

  Those who expected to see a somber widow were shocked to see Helen in remarkably high spirits. Joshua's death seemed to embolden her, enabling her to unleash the passionate theatricality she had suppressed while living with her cold and steely husband. Immediately Helen bought a large house with a turret at the corner of North Van Buren and Monterey Streets and fur nished it with velvet curtains, a piano, and oil paintings. She purchased for herself a wardrobe that would have put even the most sophisticated Chicago belle to shame: a traveling suit of thick Russian red broadcloth, a black silk dress with yellow ostrich trimming, several silk tea gowns and evening dresses, a heavy gold-colored coat, bonnets with matching gloves, and a collection of faux diamond jewelry.21 She threw parties and teas, splurged on expensive china and silverware, and installed electric lights in the parlor.22 Perhaps most extravagant were the trips to the theater in Chicago. With a small suitcase, her best traveling outfit, and Louella in tow, every few weeks Helen boarded the morning train headed east. She claimed that the plays were an important part of Louella's education, but her friends knew better. It was Helen, of course, who was stagestruck.

  The first play Louella watched was Cyrano de Bergerac, with matinee idol Richard Mansfield in the starring role. Too young to understand the plot, she sat quietly in the darkened house and delighted in the bright colors onstage. At home in Freeport, Louella and Helen were regular patrons of the opera house, and when she was eight or nine, Louella put on her own plays for neighbors. After she and Helen went to a performance of Cousin Kate in Chicago, Louella reenacted it in the barn behind the house.23

  If plays alerted Louella to the magic of storytelling, books turned her into a believer. Each night Helen read Louella the classics-Black Beauty, Treasure Island, Little Women-and before long Louella was hooked. When she learned how to read, she raided the public library. Helen urged the librarian, her good friend Harriet Lane, to monitor the girl's reading and keep her from borrowing any "trash." An attempt to borrow Madame Bovary was promptly thwarted, though Louella claimed that she later obtained a copy of the book from a friend. During the 189os, dime novels were all the rage among boys, and when Eddie brought home a few tattered copies, Helen erupted into a fit-"This trash!" she shouted-and ordered Louella to burn them. Louella agreed but not before sneaking off to her room and reading as many as she could.24

  Louella read dozens if not hundreds of books during her years in Freeport-Last of the Mohicans, The Three Musketeers, Gulliver'cTravels-but her favorite, and the one that impressed her most deeply, was a story called Editha's Burglar by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Published in 1888, when Louella was seven, the book tells the tale of a London girl named Editha, a spunky, bright seven-year-old who, like Louella, was a voracious reader. In the story Editha's father is a newspaper editor, and Editha spends her days in his library, "reading papa's books and even his newspapers." "She was very fond of the newspapers," Burnett wrote, "because she found so many curious things in them."25 Louella, seeing herself in the heroine, read the book over and over again, often staying up past her bedtime. In her first attempt at "writing," she copied the entire text into her notebook and fantasized that she had composed the novel hers
elf. 26

  In the winter of 189i, a year and a half after Joshua's death, Helen married John Edwards, a thirty-three-year-old traveling candy salesman. Though he had come from one of the well-off pioneering families of neighboring Lee County, John, who worked for the Kranz Confectionery Company, lived alone in a rented room on North Van Buren Street, down the block from Helen. On the afternoon of December 15, 189i, in her "elaborate and elegant" parlor, Helen Stine Oettinger, in a bright red dress "cut princess style with jet trimmings," wed John Edwards, who was "faultlessly attired in the conventional black and supremely happy," reported the Freeport Daily journal.27 Later that evening, the newlyweds boarded a train to Chicago "for a brief bridal tour." Louella and Eddie stayed with their fifty-one-year-old grandmother Jeanette, a stocky, gray-haired woman who spent hours in a rocking chair reading, sucking on gumdrops, and dispensing cliched tidbits of wis- dom-"the proof of the pudding is in the eating," "don't count your chickens before they've hatched"-to her grandchildren. Underneath the matronly appearance lay a youthful spirit and a will of steel.28

  Jeanette Wilcox was a native of Freeport and one of its finest amateur historians. Born in 1840, she was eighteen when presidential contenders Lincoln and Douglas held their famous debate in Freeport. With baby Helen in her arms, Jeanette had sat in the front row and listened as the candidates argued the pressing political matters of the day-secession, states' rights, slavery. Like most of the women there, she fell head over heels for Douglas, with his "fine manners and Southern chivalry."29 But when Lincoln, following the debate, stopped to kiss Helen, Jeanette's allegiances changed. From that moment, she became not only an "out and out Lincolnite" but also a serious student of American politics and history. Jeanette, who had taught herself how to read, inundated Louella with tales about "the Great Emancipator, as well as other colorful information that is not in history books," Louella recalled. For a contest at the local grammar school, the River School, Louella enlisted Jeanette's help for an essay on Lincoln that won first prize. The teachers who praised Louella never knew that Jeanette had written most of the paper.30

  When the famous humanitarian and Chicago settlement-house founder Jane Addams visited Freeport, Jeanette took Louella to meet her. "I was so excited," Louella recalled, "I could only stare at her."" Addams was one of many "great women" whom Louella learned about as a child. Influenced by women's suffrage activists who lectured in Freeport during the r87os, Jeanette was a strong supporter of women's rights. She taught Louella about the writer Louisa May Alcott, the Civil War nurse Clara Barton, and Nellie Bly, the most celebrated female journalist of the nineteenth century.32 Bly had become famous in the i88os as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. In 1889, as a stunt for the paper, she traveled around the world, alone, in seventy-two days, and subsequently became a national heroine. Headlines celebrated her feat, games bore her name, and songs were composed in her honor.33 Louella was so inspired by Bly that she began writing articles and short stories that she submitted to the Freeport paper, the journal Standard, which were promptly rejected.34

  Not long into their marriage, Helen and John began to quarrel over money. Unwilling to curtail her spending despite the family's dwindling bank account, Helen continued to spend lavishly on trips, furnishings, and clothes. Eventually compromises were made. The trips to Chicago continued, but Helen was forbidden to throw the lavish parties that had made her one of Freeport's best hostesses. Clothing and laundry expenses were similarly cut back. (An acquaintance from Louella's high school days remembered that she often wore the same dress to school, one with a visibly dirty collar.)35 Louella spent long hours in the local library after school and became a star student at Freeport High. Though she required the assistance of a tutor in math and chemistry, she excelled in the humanities, and the Freeport journal Standard frequently carried news that Louella Oettinger had earned first prize in yet another essay contest.

  Louella also spent hours roaming the downtown streets with her two best friends, nicknamed Twinkle and Blush. (Louella's nickname was Cherry.)36 Circus was a large part of the summer entertainment in Freeport, and Louella fondly recalled "circus mornings." Crowds waited for the band that was carried down the street on red-and-gold wagons and the steam calliope that brought up the rear. In between were animals and cages, and women riders in spangled tights atop glossy riding horses. Parades and torchlight rallies were cherished holiday events, as was a "special parade" on certain Sunday summer mornings, when geese kept by local families were let loose downtown to feast on garbage discarded in the street.37

  Although Louella enjoyed the simple pleasures of small-town life, by the time she was in high school she was bored. A bright, articulate, and intellectually curious teenager, she found few outlets for her budding literary ambitions and yearned for broader horizons. By the time she was in high school, she had decided to be a writer or a reporter. But no one, except her grandmother Jeanette, took her interests seriously.

  Louella grew up during a transition in American women's history, when the passive, corseted, midcentury Victorian female ideal, characterized by her sexual purity and domesticity, was slowly being challenged by the more modern and independent "new woman" who sought greater opportunities outside the home. By the r89os, over zo percent of college students were women, and thousands of young middle-class women were pursuing such acceptably "female" occupations as clerical work, social work, and teaching.38 But marriage and motherhood were still deemed a woman's primary goals, and working women were expected to give up their jobs upon marriage and devote their lives to domesticity. Women were also plagued by traditional assumptions about female intellectual inferiority. Despite the presence of a wellorganized women's suffrage movement and several well-known women writers, Victorian-era physicians had declared women so overtaken by their sex hormones that they were incapable of pursuing professional work or serious intellectual thought.39

  Louella dreamed of challenging the stereotypes. "I wanted to grow up as quickly as possible and to be hailed-if not as the best writer in Americaat least as the youngest and the most beautiful," Louella remembered. But a full-time literary career was considered a male aspiration, and her family and the Freeport community mocked her unladylike ambitions.40

  She expressed her anger and resentment with bragging and temper tantrums. By her own account, she lied frequently and made extraordinary and exaggerated claims about herself and her accomplishments. In general, she wrote in her autobiography, she was unbearable, caring "deeply and sincerely" about only herself. "Cold reason forces me to admit that I was not my favorite little girl-either in or out of fiction," she explained. "It is common ... to look back on the days of childhood as the happiest. I can't truthfully say the same of myself "41

  Sometime during Louella's first year in high school, John Edwards took what was left of his and Helen's assets and opened a small grocery on Stephenson Street. The venture soon failed, and by 1898, Louella's sophomore year in high school, John decided to move the family thirty miles south to Dixon, where he would resume his candy sales. His brother, Frank Ed wards, was mayor of Dixon, and most of the Edwards clan lived in nearby Amboy. John reasoned that proximity to his well-off kin would boost not only his family's morale but also their finances. John and Helen sold the house on North Van Buren, packed their furniture and belongings into a wagon, and took Louella and Eddie out of school.42 By the end of 1898 they were gone.

  "Dixon is not a town of much apparent prosperity," the English author Anthony Trollope wrote in 1862. "It is one of those places at which great beginnings have been made, but as to which the deities presiding over new towns have not been propitious." Surrounded by prairie and cornfields, "it had a straggling, ill-conditioned, uncommercial aspect."43

  By 1890, much had changed. Like Freeport, Dixon had gone from being a small frontier village in the 183os to becoming, by the turn of the century, a prosperous commercial center. Founded as an army command post, Dixon grew during the 184os and i85os as English, German, a
nd Irish settlers seeking livelihoods in mining and farming arrived from the East. A major stop on the Illinois Central Railroad on the banks of the Rock River, Dixon became an important transportation hub, and industry followed. In 1869 the Cumins and Noble Plow Company settled in Dixon; in 1875 the Becker and Underwood Flour Mill opened its doors; and in 1889 the town became the site of the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company, the largest condensed milk factory in the world. Thousands of workers came from nearby areas, and by 1900 the population had grown to ten thousand.44

  Buoyed by prosperity, Dixon experienced a period of civic and cultural expansion. In 1896, a town hospital was constructed; in 1898, a public library and a new county courthouse were built; and in 1899, the town embarked on its most ambitious project, a circular auditorium seating five thousand that would be the largest building of its kind on the continent. By the turn of the century, there were seven active churches, dozens of community and charity organizations, a town band, and a library with over four thousand books.45

  In 1899, John, Helen, Louella, and Eddie moved into an apartment on Second Street in the downtown commercial district. John took up a new job with the Bunte Confectionery Company, and thirteen-year-old Eddie started the sixth grade. Louella, at age eighteen, would have been a high school senior in Freeport, but the move to Dixon set her back. As a junior, Louella started classes at Dixon's South Side High School, affectionately dubbed "the White Brick School." As in Freeport, she excelled academically, and within a few months she had scored several academic prizes: an award for a recita tion of "The Wreck of the Hesperus," a prize for a paper on James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, and during her senior year, first prize in a contest sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution. For her essay, "When Is Revolution Justified," she was awarded busts of Washington, Lincoln, and Daniel Webster, which, in a well-publicized ceremony, she donated to the school .46 Though she was still temperamental and emotional, she nonetheless acquired a tight-knit group of friends by the end of her first year in Dixon.