In 1900, Louella founded the Kendall Club, a young women's charity and social organization that attracted the daughters of several prominent Dixon families. She became known for bringing groups of her classmates to the new circular auditorium at Assembly Park during summers for the Chautauqua lectures. A series of traveling lectures and performances that lasted between three and seven days, the Chautauqua was held each summer in communities across the Midwest between the i88os and the 1930s. Performers ranged from serious political speakers to elocutionists and Shakespearean actors, and during the series' peak in the mid-19zos, Chautauqua performers and lecturers appeared in more than ten thousand communities in forty-five states.47
For Louella and the Dixon community, the Chautauqua was the highlight of the summer. After an afternoon picnicking on the banks of the Rock River, Louella and her friends entered the cavernous auditorium and sought out the front row of seats. Described at the time as "the finest and most completely adapted building for Chautauqua purposes on the continent," the hall at Assembly Park was an imposing circular structure, with its Soo-foot diameter and rho-foot perimeter.48 Popular speakers such as the fiery political orator William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt attracted thousands of visitors from throughout the region; when Roosevelt spoke in 1905, the 5,000- seat auditorium was filled. Though Louella recalled that she and her friends would often "giggle" at the lecturers, she later admitted that the oratory sparked in her an interest in public speaking.49
That interest found expression at Louella's high school graduation on June 4, 1901. As class speaker, Louella delivered the class prophecy and a speech titled "Great Men." It was a compelling speech, according to the Dixon Telegraph, on "our great men in every walk of life." Unlike many graduation orations, Louella's talk was given in a "most pleasing style."50 At the end of the ceremony, Principal Benjamin Franklin Bullard stood on the podium and announced that Louella Oettinger would one day become a great writer.51
At the time of her graduation, Louella still had dreams of becoming a re porter. Yet she knew that a career in journalism was nearly impossible for a woman. Though women had worked on newspapers since the American Revolution-in both the Revolution and the Civil War, women had taken over male editorial jobs when their husbands went to battle-gender discrimination and a traditional bias against working women kept female journalists from making long-term gains in the field. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were only a handful of female editors and columnists; the most famous, Margaret Fuller, edited the Dial literary magazine with Ralph Waldo Emerson and wrote literary reviews for the New York Tribune in the 184os. After the Civil War, when rising rates of female literacy led urban newspapers to cultivate a female audience, editors began hiring female writers to write "women's columns"-society notes, advice columns, and sections on cooking and fashion. By i88o, the U.S. census recorded z88 women in editing and reporting jobs, and by 1900 there were z,ooo female journalists, who constituted 7 percent of the profession. But with the exception of such celebrated stunt journalists as Nellie Bly and Winifred Black, who wrote sensationalistic exposes for William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, very few female reporters made it beyond the "women's pages."52 Arnold Bennett, author of an 1898 manual titled journalism for Women, echoed the prevailing attitude in the profession when he wrote that women made poor reporters because they were crippled by "a failure to appreciate the importance of the maxim that business is business" and were "unreliable as a class [since] the influences of domesticity are too strong to be lightly thrown off." They suffered from "inattention to detail" and a "lack of restraint in literary style," which would only be improved with intense "moral and intellectual calisthenics."53
Elementary school teaching was, by contrast, a traditionally female profession, and Helen encouraged Louella to take it up as a way to contribute to the family income. In the summer of igoi, Louella accepted a contribution from Julius Benedict, a distant German relative whose estate provided funds for "those of his kin in need of an education." That fall, she enrolled in a teacher education course at the local Dixon college.54 Founded in 1882', the Dixon Normal School and Business College, a coeducational institution with sixteen hundred students, was housed in an imposing three-story brick building on the outskirts of town. Louella lived with Helen and John in their new downtown home on First Street while she attended classes in English, history, and elementary education. Louella's college years seemed to have made little impression on her. She found her courses dull, was ambivalent about a career as a grade school teacher, and at twenty, she was being pres sured by Helen to get married. Although she was pretty-described by one local resident as a "slender, winsome brunette with dark eyes and dark hair"-she had few suitors. Over the summer, she had had a brief romantic fling with twenty-nine-year-old John Parsons, but it had lasted only a few months.
John Parsons, according to Louella, was the town's "matrimonial catch."55 John's mother, Christiana Dement, hailed from one of the oldest and most respected families in the area. Christiana's father, Colonel John Dement, had been one of the pioneer settlers of Dixon and a prominent businessman and politician who, according to one local history, was for "fifty years ... the most powerful" man in Lee County.56 John's father, Edwin C. Parsons, was one of the wealthiest landholders in Dixon.57 Selfish and spoiled, John had been groomed for a future in the military. When Louella met him, he had recently graduated from a military academy in Peekskill, New York, and was on his way to South Africa with the U.S. Army. After he left in September, Louella imagined she would never see him again.
Then, the following summer, he returned unexpectedly. John had been discharged from the army after contracting dengue fever, and after several months of treatment and recuperation, came back to Dixon to take a job with his father's real estate company. Like Louella, John, at thirty, was being pressured by his parents to marry. Not long after his return to Dixon he and Louella resumed their relationship.s$ By that time, Louella, still at college, had secured a part-time writing position at a local newspaper, the Dixon Star.
In 19oz, the Star's editor, the husband of one of Louella's close friends, hired her to work on the paper during her summer vacation. As a writer for the "society page" and the first female journalist in Dixon, Louella would report the latest happenings in Dixon's social circles-weddings, engagements, formal dinners. The pay was meager, only five dollars a week, and, following the convention of the day, her column was published without a byline. "Society Doings" appeared on the third page of the paper, next to the column "The Dixon Markets" ("hogs $6.3o a pound," it reported, "cow $2.50, lard eleven cents").
For "Society Doings," Louella immersed herself in Dixon social life and the local culture of gossip, taking the first steps toward her future Hollywood career:
The supper and dinner served by the ladies of the Lutheran church on Saturday in the church parlors was a decided success. The delicious menu promised by the ladies was served even to the smallest detail, and those who attended the dinner speak highly of the ladies' ability in the culinary art.
The silver wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Dennis McCoy ofTenth Street and Peoria Avenue was celebrated in a very fitting manner last night at their home. The evening was spent in a social way, card playing being the chief amusement.
Mrs. Paul Lord entertained today in honor of Miss Edwina Smith. A linen shower greeted the bride-to-be.59
As historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have concluded, both in the United States and around the world, gossip has traditionally been used by small communities for a variety of social functions-for entertainment, to create social bonds, and to reaffirm shared social values. As sociologist James West wrote in Plainville, USA, a pathbreaking 1945 study of social norms and practices in rural, small-town America, gossip reinforces the community's moral codes-by repeatedly gossiping about adulterers, for example, townspeople reaffirm the value of marital fidelity. It also enables residents to escape potential condemnation for their own misdeeds.
"People report, suspect, laugh at, and condemn the peccadilloes of others and walk and behave carefully to avoid being caught in any trifling missteps of their own," West wrote.60 According to sociologist Gary Alan Fine, we use gossip as a form of emotional release, to draw attention to ourselves, and, perhaps more than anything, as an excuse to engage in small talk with others.61
Historically, gossip has played an important role in small-town women's cultures. According to sociologist Melanie Tebbutt, the word gossip was originally used in seventeenth-century England to refer to the close female friends a woman invited to attend to her at childbirth. Withdrawal to the lying-in room created a female space where they excluded men and shared intimate secrets. Only in the nineteenth century, when childbirth was medicalized, did gossip lose its connection with women's birthing rituals and come to signify idle talk. According to Tebbutt, women have used gossip both to build emotional and social bonds with one other and to gain power and status within their communities. Lacking economic and political resources, many found gossip an important form of cultural capital that they could use to gain respect, attention, or leverage with powerful men.62
We don't know the extent of Louella's participation in Dixon gossip, or the scope and intensity of local gossip culture. We do know, however, since Louella implied it several times during her career, that she knew far more intimate gossip-news of romantic affairs, out-of-wedlock births, and other local "scandals"-than she was allowed to print in the Star. Hollywood gossip, she later claimed, was hardly different from Dixon hearsay. Just as movie celebrities embroiled themselves in extramarital affairs, the small-town "butcher might be flirting with the milkman's wife or the dry goods merchant [might] fall in love with the banker's wife," she explained in an article in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1934.63
The next summer Louella's responsibilities at the Star, circulation three thousand, expanded. Having proven herself as a writer and reporter, she was allowed to cover front-page news in addition to writing the society column. Evenings, she walked the streets of downtown Dixon, tattered notebook in hand, searching for news. Many years later she recalled her technique: "I took down day by day all I heard from the local storekeepers and the gossip mongers. Nine times out of ten, thanks to this gossip I knew what was going to happen the next day. In Hollywood I applied the same methods and became the best informed woman in the town."64 Anna Geisenheimer, owner of the local corset shop, recalled that Louella used a more direct tactic: she knocked on doors and asked for news. "When the coroner of Dixon gave her copy, he was a nice man," a reporter for the rival paper, the Dixon Telegraph, recalled, "and when he didn't she hated him."65
After Louella's first front-page story for the Star, about a young man who shot a bartender because he wouldn't serve minors, friends recalled that she walked "wide eyed about town," thrilled by her accomplishment.66 She later covered the trial, which was held in Dixon. The judge, a friend of the family, halted the proceedings when he saw Louella in court. "What are you doing here? This is no place for you," he said. When Louella told him that she was a reporter working for the Star, he replied, "You'd be better off in school." But she stayed and watched as the man was found guilty and sentenced to the penitentiary. Before he left for jail, he married his nineteenyear-old fiancee, and Louella was the only witness. Louella claimed that the story for the Star was later picked up by wire services and reprinted in Chicago. "I felt that I had reached the apex of my career at its very beginning," she recalled.67
Despite Louella's pleas, the Star was unwilling to hire her full-time, and reluctantly, following her graduation from college in 1903, Louella accepted a job at the Stoney Point School, a "country school" a few miles up the Rock River.61 At the end of the 1903-4 school year, she signed on for another term, and during the following school year continued to split her time between Stoney Point and her ongoing courtship with John Parsons.
Then, in the late summer of 19o5, Louella filed her resignation at Stoney Point and went with Helen to the local seamstress. They wanted a wedding gown, Helen told her, made of the finest white silk, the most expensive white lace, and hand sewn with "tiny, perfect stitches."69 Helen had learned to be frugal over the years, but this was no time to be cheap. On October 3r, Louella was going to be married.
Halloween 1905, Louella recalled, was a "bright, tangy" day. The air was cold, and the leaves descending from the maple trees were red and gold and crisp. Standing inside the library of the Parsons home on Everett Street, she could see them falling like rain and collecting in great messy piles on the lawn. In the distance there were clumps of berries clinging tightly to green bushes. She had tasted them once; they were, like that day, bittersweet.70
Inside the Parsons library, bittersweet berries had been strewn across the windowsills and bookcases for decoration, and a carefully arranged carpet of leaves surrounded the unlit fireplace. Dressed in her gown of white silk de chine, a pearl necklace, and with her long hair swept up atop her head, Louella descended the staircase to the strains of the Mendelssohn wedding march.7' Though the Episcopal wedding services were private-only John's and Louella's families attended-it had been preceded by several engagement parties. Louella was feted by her friends with a bridal shower at the Kendall Club. "Much merriment" was had, reported the Dixon Telegraph, when the young women presented the bride-to-be with a poem too naughty to be reprinted.72
Though Louella reveled in the attention, the marriage soon headed for disaster. Temperamentally, John and Louella were opposites. He was haughty, cold, and arrogant, while Louella was spirited, high-strung, and emotional. As Louella later recalled, they were "an ocean apart in points of view."73 They began fighting almost immediately. Although John was a "shrewd businessman," acquaintances remembered, he was an uncommitted and inattentive husband. "I don't think he did much of anything. He was a spoiled boy," recalled Dixon resident Sadie Mack.74 "John was a very intelligent man, but not one to make Louella very happy," remembered another neighbor.75
Not long after the wedding, Louella and John made plans to move to Burlington, Iowa, a town of twenty-four thousand that was 15o miles south east of Dixon. There John would manage the Parsons Block, a housing development owned by his father. The thought of being far away from her family and community terrified Louella. She awaited the day of departure with dread.
In December 1905, Louella and John arrived in Burlington and moved into the lower floor of a rented, two-story brick home downtown, in the North Hill neighborhood. She did not love her husband. She knew no one. It would be the darkest period of her life.
It was nothing like Dixon, and Louella knew it the moment she arrived. Perched on rock bluffs high above the Mississippi, Burlington had an austere and forbidding appearance. Early residents had quarried rock from the hillsides to build homes, churches, and schools and to pave streets and alleys. The streets were crooked, curving out of sight around hillsides and bluffs, disappearing over hilltops or at the river, or angling off around unexpected corners. While guidebooks described the layout as "quaint," to Louella this cold and labyrinthine town was hell hewed in stone.76
Since the 184os, Burlington had been a ferry and steamboat port on the Mississippi. During the second half of the nineteenth century, it was also home to flourishing brewing, packing, railroad, and lumber industries and to the three pork-packing establishments that had earned the town the nickname "Porkopolis of Iowa." Although the population by the early 19oos consisted mostly of Germans, Irish, and Swedes who had migrated to Burlington to develop its industries, the social and cultural leaders of the community were Burlington's early settlers, Anglo-Saxon Protestants from New England, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Bringing their elite culture with them, they formed literary and musical societies and built opulent mansions, many of them on North Hill.77 Described by an 1869 guidebook as the "fashionable, tiptop, bon ton, aristocratic, elegant, creme de la creme part of the city," North Hill had "aristocratic pretensions uncommon in a typical easygoing Midwestern community."78
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sp; Yet parts of North Hill were overrun with weeds, the North Hill park was in shambles, and in some sections the streets were ungraded and unpaved. While Burlington's elite made their homes on North Hill, so did laborers, clerks, printers, mechanics, and machinists, which led to class tensions.79 North Third Street on North Hill was home not only to a working- and middle-class neighborhood but also to a business district with several saloons, grocers, clothing shops, and theaters. Here stood the Garrick Theater, described in ads as a "high-class vaudeville theater," and the Grand Opera House, which boasted a marble foyer, 225 upholstered opera chairs, and a "grand entrance" finished in "oiled black walnut, Queen Anne fresco and tessellated pavement, iron steps, [and] heavy push doors" and lit with a "magnificent eighteen jet chandelier."80
The Parsons rented a home next door to the opera house, and immediately Louella made a name for herself by creating what one neighbor described as "sanitation problems." Burlington resident Lloyd Maffitt recalled that "she didn't keep the garbage cleaned off the back porch and the neighbors raised hell. She had all the gall of a brass monkey." Eventually, this led to eviction by the city81
But even before the garbage scandal, Louella had a "bad reputation," remembered Margaret Clark, who lived down the street. She was "young and she just didn't fit into the Burlington life. She made a lot of boners and they made a lot of fun of her." Dixon was a relatively easygoing community with few of Burlington's stark socioeconomic divisions. Ill equipped to handle her new social environment, Louella tried to fit in with the elite and failed miserably. One of Louella's most embarrassing social gaffes, according to Clark, was her poetry reading. "She used to come over and read poetry she'd written." Her work was "perfectly terrible, but she was awfully polite about it."82 In response to the criticism, Louella begged John, who was well read, to teach her about art and literature, and he instructed her to "study Thomas Hardy very carefully."83 But in spite of her self-education, her neighbors still considered her "dull and stupid" and "mousy."84 In general, recalled resident Margaret Smith, Louella and John were social "nonentities."85
The First Lady of Hollywood Page 3