Like most studios, Essanay was inundated by fan-written screenplays, which arrived at the studio at a rate of about a hundred a day. In 1911, George Spoor decided to hire a full-time staff member to sift through the contributions and advertised in local papers for a "scenario editor." Immediately the studio was swamped with mail. Along with the usual volume of screenplays came hundreds of applications from frustrated novelists, unemployed playwrights, and former newspaper reporters, all eager to be hired for the editorial position. One of those applications was from Louella. Her resume, like most of the others, ended up in the trash.
One day over dinner Spoor's wife announced that she had met a young woman in the neighborhood who was ideal for the position. "Introduce her to me sometime," Spoor mumbled. "She's standing outside the dining room," Mrs. Spoor replied, and motioned for Louella to come to the table.'?
Maggie Oettinger, Louella's twelve-year-old-cousin, played with a girl named Ruth Helms, who lived next door to Spoor. When Louella found out that Ruth's neighbor was the head of Essanay, she begged the girl to introduce her to Mrs. Spoor, offering her movie tickets if she would make the introduction. Though George Spoor was less impressed than his wife with Louella's possibilities as an editor, Mrs. Spoor persuaded him to hire her. In the spring of 1911, Louella quit her job at the Tribune and signed on with Essanay as its chief scenario editor.'$
The job turned out to be a godsend. The generous income of twenty dollars a week enabled Louella and Harriet to move to an apartment on Magnolia Street, not far from the Argyle Street studio. Before long, Louella was saving a little each week and building a bank account; she was also reestablishing the emotional confidence she had lost in Burlington. She found her work creative and engaging, was thrilled by her position of authority, and for the first time in years, felt part of an intimate community. The sudden boost to Louella's ego allowed her to make friends, meet new men, and pour a prodigious amount of energy into her new career. She returned to Burlington that fall, and on September 29, 1911, Louella and John 19
Louella never admitted to the public how her relationship with John Parsons really ended. For the rest of her life, she insisted that she was widowedParsons, she claimed, died in World War I. Indeed, after marrying Ruth Schaefer in 1917, John Parsons enlisted in the army and died in 1918 of the flu.20 But he and Louella had divorced seven years earlier. During the early twentieth century, divorce was still considered a moral transgression, and divorced women often bore the stigma for the rest of their lives. Ashamed, Louella concealed her separation from Parsons from her friends and colleagues, and only her family and closest confidantes knew.
In late 1911, around the time of Louella's divorce, Helen and John Edwards also decided to separate. John Edwards left Dixon and returned to his hometown of Amboy, Illinois, where he lived until his death in 1931.21 Helen sold the house in Dixon and, for the next seven years, lived with Louella and Harriet in their apartment on Magnolia Street. Essentially Louella's housekeeper, she cooked, cleaned, and cared for Harriet while Louella was at work. During Louella's four years at Essanay, that was most of the time.
Like many men and women involved in early film, Louella told friends that she was working in a "studio," creating the nation's newest "art form." In reality, the Essanay Film Company was less a studio than a factory. Like "sausages," as one director dubbed them, movies were filmed hastily and carelessly and shipped out to exhibitors as quickly as possible. The studio's five harried directors rushed around the Essanay grounds in a frantic attempt to fill their quotas, which seemed to increase every week. Because films were so short-the typical film of 1911 averaged about fifteen or twenty minutesnickelodeon owners showed several during an evening's program. Moreover, to keep fans interested, they changed the program almost nightly. By 1911, when an estimated ten million Americans were attending movie theaters each week, the demand for films had become overwhelming.22
Louella's job, the first stage in the "sausage-making" process, was one of the most important. Each day she sorted through the scripts that came to the studio, found some promising ones, and sent twenty-five-dollar checks to the lucky writers whose works would be made into films. On her desk sat a row of boxes with the names of Essanay's directors, and Louella dropped the new scripts into the boxes randomly. "Directors might yell and moan over my choice of story, but when they were handed a play by me, they didn't have any other court of appeal," she recalled.23 Often the scripts required editing, and with fellow scenario editor Edward Lowe, Louella frequently added scenes, characters, or instructions for the cameraman. She recalled that she always tried to work in a bride as a character, since "there were a lot of white dresses in the wardrobe."24
A humorless "bluestocking," according to one Essanay employee, Louella was consumed by her work. She perpetually scribbled in a yellow notebook, walked around the studio grounds lost in concentration, and complained bitterly when actors talked loudly outside her office.25 Louella later claimed to have read more than twenty thousand scenarios during her years at Essanay.26 The manuscripts arrived "on wallpaper, bits of shoe box covers, and torn envelopes" and came from a diverse range of fans-from the "blacksmith, the janitor, and the college girl and boy," Louella recalled.27 In 1912 she purchased a script from an old woman from Waukegan, Wisconsin, only to discover that the woman had sold the same story to the rival Vitagraph studio. When Louella and George Spoor confronted the woman and asked if she had indeed sold the story to other studios, she smiled innocently. "I got it out of a magazine," she said, "and I have lots more of them if you are interested. "21 Essanay, which had already produced the film, was forced to destroy it, at a loss of several thousand dollars. For not confirming the script's originality, Louella almost lost her job.
When the day's mailbag failed to yield suitable scenarios, Louella took to the typewriter and wrote her own. Her scripts were often maudlin tearjerkers about death, betrayal, or failed romances, and some of them-she wrote over a hundred in all-depicted feminist themes. In a script called the Broken Pledge, three women pledge never to marry and instead remain independent; in 1915, it was turned into a film starring Gloria Swanson. Other scripts Louella wrote for specific actors, including the Essanay superstar Francis X. Bushman, who commissioned Louella to write several films that would showcase his athleticism and impressive physique.29 In 1912, Louella wrote a script titled Margaret's Awakening for an aspiring six-year-old actress. The child, who appeared in the film, was billed as "Baby Parsons."
Harriet's career in the movies, cut off by her enrollment in elementary school, lasted only a year. In both Margaret's Awakening and a subsequent film, The Magic Wand, she had starring roles. In The Magic Wand, Harriet played a loving child who hoped to save her poor, single mother from destitution with an imaginary magic wand. The performance rated mixed reviews. One critic called Harriet "wonderfully sweet," though other reviewers were less impressed. "A delightful and very promising situation was quite ruined by its treatment in this particular picture," Moving Picture World wrote. "The great trouble with the picture is the child player, who never for a moment forgot the camera and was quite wooden throughout."30 Back in Dixon they paid no attention to the critics; the town was overjoyed. "On Friday evening at the Dixon Opera House, Dixon people will have the opportunity of seeing pretty little Harriet Parsons taking a lead role in a play, The Magic Wand, written for the little girl by her mother," the Dixon Evening Telegraph announced in November 1912. "Little Harriet Parsons is said to be a clever little actress and her appearance will be of much interest to the Dixon people."31
Perhaps Louella's proudest accomplishment as a screenwriter was the 1912 script Chains. The film, about a convicted killer who marries his fiancee while awaiting execution, was based on Louella's front-page story at the Dixon Star, and it became one of Essanay's greatest successes. Featuring top stars Ruth Stonehouse, Francis X. Bushman, and Bryant Washburn, it was advertised as "one of the greatest, most powerful and tense dramatic studies ever offered by Essanay."32 O
n the eve of his engagement to a young woman, Ruth Keene, Harry Madden becomes entangled in a barn-loft card game with some "dissolute companions." When he detects one of the players cheating, Madden quarrels with him and kills the man with his own revolver. Afterward he hides in Ruth's home but is caught and sentenced to death. Ruth's "innocent love" prompts her to marry Madden in jail. Fan magazines gave the film glowing reviews; the trade journal Motography hailed it as a "masterpiece of dramatic construction. "33
Immersed in a whirlwind daily schedule of writing and editing, Louella was truly in her element. "I think," Louella told interviewers from Photoplay magazine, "that I have found my life vocation. "34
In her autobiography, The Gay Illiterate, Louella recalled her years at Essanay as among the most joyful in her life. "Those were the days before the war," she remembered, "overbrimming with excitement. The world was my oyster, and Chicago was providing the cocktail sauce."35
The "Essanay gang" was eclectic, to say the least. Actor Wallace Beery, a noisy drunk, chased starlets around the lot, Francis X. Bushman came to work in a lavender limousine, and the cross-eyed Ben Turpin was so homely and clumsy that it was comic. But they were brilliant, and between 1910 and 1915, they were movie pioneers. Along with their colleagues at Biograph, Vitagraph, Selig, Fox, and Universal, the major film companies of the period, the Essanay troupe built the artistic and technological foundations of the movie industry. The studio's performers developed techniques that would become the basis of film acting, and writers and editors like Louella lay the groundwork for modern screenwriting. Essanay's directors and cameramen pioneered a repertoire of cinematic devices that are now the foundation of modern cinematography, such as the fade-in and fade-out and the double exposure. In 1912, the studio brought out a "powerful battery of searchlights" to do some evening filming on the set of a feature, King Robert of Sicily, and was praised by trade journals for its pioneering work with night lighting.36
The atmosphere at Essanay was chaotic, and minor "emergencies" happened on a near-daily basis. In 1913, several reels of finished film were stolen from the studio and found inexplicably discarded in a nearby cement mixer.37 A Chicago policeman, not knowing that a train "holdup" in Highland Park was staged for a film, started down the track for the bandits and ruined 140 feet of film.38 Actors frequently quit the studio when they found more promising work on the stage; when this happened, Louella was often assigned to take their parts. When the wardrobe department ran out of clothes or the prop room fell short of furniture, Louella was dispatched back to her apartment for another dress, chair, or pair of shoes.
When Francis X. Bushman, the studio's top actor, won a "most popular star" contest run by the Ladies'World magazine in 1912, he received over seven thousand fan letters from women ranging from teenagers to grandmothers.39 Bushman hired three secretaries to respond to the letters, and he employed Louella as their supervisor. Her task was to ensure that "his" letters to the fans concealed the truth about Bushman's personal life-that he was married and had five children as well as a lover at the studio.40 Louella was also told to make sure that the letters were romantic but not too passionate; just enough to keep the fans interested. Once Louella became "too fervent" with her reply, she recalled, "and some woman came in all decked out in bridal array, ready to marry him." An angry Bushman instructed her to be "less per- sonal."41
During lunch hours, members of the company, many still in costume"queerly garbed figures, some of them old and wrinkled and grey-haired, some of them young and gay and vigorous," wrote the film trade journal Mo- tography-trouped down to the corner of Broadway and Winona for a working lunch at the Witt Food Emporium. "Jokes and gags are bandied about, this player is joshed and that one praised ... and a director over in the corner is busily explaining just the sort of costumes he wants for the Colonial drama he is going to stage the first of the week," Motography noted in 1913.42 After hours, many of the Essanay troupe congregated at Sternberg's saloon, on the corner of Argyle Street; others joined Louella, Francis Bushman, and actress Beverly Bayne at Bayne's apartment for long evenings of gin rummy and beer.43 Life and work were one as Louella and her Essanay colleagues immersed themselves in each others' lives and in the movies. In the end, it was much more than a job. As editor, screenwriter, costumer, accountant, secretary, and in a few instances, even a minor actress, Louella was exposed to virtually all aspects of motion picture production. Ten years later, as a result of the strict division of labor imposed by the studio system that dominated film production between the mid-19zos and late 1940s, this kind of immersion in the artistic, financial, and technical aspects of the filmmaking process would have been impossible. Louella worked at Essanay in one of the most intimate and stimulating environments in the history of American film.
And by 1914, her work had won her a national reputation. That spring, she was mentioned in an article in Motion Picture magazine on women screenwriters and appeared in a piece in the Saturday Evening Post, which called her a "short-story writer of note."44 Later that year she was the subject of a feature article in Photoplay magazine celebrating her accomplishments both as a writer and as a successful female professional.45 Indeed, Louella was one of a handful of women who had secured important jobs in motion pictures. As a result of the loose and informal structure of the early industry, and because filmmaking was not yet taken seriously as an art or business, women were able to rise to high positions that would later be inaccessible in the male-dominated studio system. Alice Guy Blache, head of her own film studio, produced more than three hundred movies between 1910 and 1914, and Lois Weber, in 1916, became Universal Studio's highest-paid director before forming her own independent production company. Jeanie MacPherson began working as a screenwriter for director Cecil B. DeMille in 1915, Anita Loos began writing for director D. W. Griffith in 191z, and Frances Marion was America's highestpaid screenwriter from 1916 through the mid-193os. According to some estimates, women screenwriters wrote nearly a quarter of Hollywood screenplays 46 between 1910 and the 1930s.
Louella's star was rising, and she was not modest about her success. In the summer of 1914, she returned to Dixon for a vacation and wired the Dixon Telegraph with instructions to announce her arrival. "Louella O. Parsons of Chicago," the Telegraph reported, had "made good" in the big city. As "scenario head of Essanay, every picture put out by the company is her selection and her position is one of the greatest responsibility and requires a brilliance of mind that is rare."47
When Louella returned from her trip, she found the studio in a panic. While she was away, someone had decided to balance the books for perhaps the first time in Essanay's history. What they found was terrifying. Though their films had been turning a profit, and the company had maintained its overseas market in spite of the European war, the studio was in trouble .4'All fingers pointed at Spoor and Anderson, who had mismanaged the studio's finances. Actors and directors rushed around the grounds cursing "S and A," whose bad business sense and poorly planned efforts to expand the studio had brought on the crisis.
In 1913, Spoor and Anderson spent $50,000 to construct a new studio in Niles, California, where the studio's cowboy films were shot. Later that year they built a new Chicago facility down the block from the existing studio on Argyle Street.49 These expenses would have been manageable had Anderson not decided to hire Charlie Chaplin. A rising comedic star who had worked at the Keystone film studio for $too a week, Chaplin, in 1914, had finished his contract at Keystone and was negotiating with Carl Laemmle of the Universal Studio when Anderson offered him a weekly salary of $1,2,50, plus a $io,ooo signing bonus. Chaplin accepted and Anderson was thrilled, but when Spoor learned about it, he was furious. Knowing that the studio could not afford Chaplin, Spoor tried unsuccessfully to break the contract. In desperation, Spoor then brought in an "efficiency man," Homer Boushey, to trim expenses around the studio. Boushey's first stop was Louella's office.
Louella hated Boushey, a dour, humorless accountant, and the feeling was mutual. Afte
r reviewing the account books in the scenario office, he declared that Louella was financially irresponsible: she had been buying too many scripts and sometimes paid up to $75 for a single manuscript. Not only were the expenses unjustified according to Boushey, but Spoor and Anderson were planning to phase out the scenario editor position and, like many film studios at the time, hire professional screenwriters. From this point on, amateurs who sent scripts received notes saying that, "in line with its policy of progress, the Essanay company has discarded the scenario from its business. The reason is that Essanay photoplays are beyond the scenario stage. The high art of production as standardized by this company cannot be sustained by mere sce- narios."50 Louella's days were numbered, and for the next few weeks she complained to her friends about the "stool pigeon" who was taking away her j ob.51
Strategically, one of those friends was Mary King, an acquaintance from the Chicago Tribune. An editor at the paper, as well as fiancee of its publisher, Joseph Medill Patterson, King took pity on Louella and arranged a meeting for her with James Keeley, publisher of the near-bankrupt Chicago Herald. King suggested to Keeley that Louella might write a movie column that would boost circulation for the floundering paper. Thrilled at the possibility of again working in journalism, in November 1914 Louella went downtown to the Herald office.
Keeley immediately gave her the brush-off. In light of the paper's financial troubles, he had little interest, he explained, in hiring a movie writer. A second-rate publication with a long history of money problems, the Herald had narrowly averted bankruptcy when Keeley, formerly an editor at the Tribune, purchased the paper in early 1914. Though Keeley's dream was to increase circulation by hiring well-known reporters and expanding the paper's news coverage, his financial backers-industrialist Samuel Insull and Sears, Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald-halted the plan. Instead, the Herald, circulation two hundred thousand, remained flimsy and undistinguished. In the words of one critic, it was as "dull as a church sermon."52
The First Lady of Hollywood Page 5