One of the paper's strong suits was its motion picture coverage. The daily Herald carried two movie columns: "Reel Facts," a short column that dispensed news and tidbits of personal information about Chicago film actors, and "In the Picture Players," a daily film review. The Sunday Herald also ran two features about movies, "News of the Players" and "Gossip of the Photo Theaters," as well as serialized short stories based on the plots of Essanay films. When Louella returned to the Herald office a second time, hoping to convince Keeley to hire her, she found that the publisher had not budged. The paper already had too many movie columns, he replied. How about a Sunday feature on screenwriting? Louella asked. Again Keeley shook his head. Louella then resorted to more desperate measures.
"I was young, and .... pretty," Louella recalled. So when she flirted with him, "Mr. Keeley was quite intrigued."53 Louella's column for the Herald, "How to Write Photo Plays," debuted on December zo, 1914. It was the first of a weekly series on screenwriting slated to last through the spring of the following year.
Featuring a large picture of a slim and beautiful Louella with short dark hair and intense, deep-set eyes, the feature took up nearly an entire page of the Sunday magazine section. The photo of Louella was stunning; her prose, unfortunately, was not. Envisioning herself a schoolroom "scenario teacher" and her readers her pupils, she filled her column with haughty platitudes:
DON'T say after you have been to the moving picture show: "I can write a story every bit as good as the one we just saw." Aim high and say to yourself: "I can and I will write a better story than the one I saw tonight."
DON'T get discouraged over the amount of postage you have spent on worthless scripts.
DON'T read over our lessons hurriedly without absorbing the contents, and expect results. Apply yourself and study hard.
DON'T ask your teacher to read your work, or try to telephone her for as- sistance.54
Despite the cliched prose, the series was a success. After a few months Louella had nearly five hundred regular readers, who sent her letters asking for advice about both their scripts and their personal matters. "Obey your mother by all means. Mothers have a way of knowing what is best for us, and if she does not want you to write any more letters to your favorite movie actor, do as she says," Louella counseled a young woman.55
The screenwriting column, however, was only a part-time job, and throughout the winter of 1914 Louella continued her work at Essanay, waiting for the day when the axe would finally fall. Meanwhile, the studio continued to go downhill. As film studios began producing longer, more sophisticated dramas that drew on literary material, Essanay's repertoire of cowboy films and slapsticks were going out of vogue. When Louella tried to tell Spoor that historical costume pictures, such as Adolph Zukor's famous 1912 production of Queen Elizabeth, were the wave of the future, he laughed and continued making his comedies and Westerns. "You're not as smart a girl as I thought you were," he told her.56
In mid-December, Louella, Harriet, and Helen left Chicago to spend Christmas in Dixon. After leaving Helen and Harriet in Dixon, Louella traveled alone to Burlington to visit her friend Adeline Moir. Over dinner one night Moir introduced her to a handsome and eligible bachelor named Jack McCaffrey, a forty-year-old steamboat captain who made a living piloting ships up and down the Mississippi. The son of Irish immigrants who had settled in Louisiana and eventually become prosperous plantation owners, McCaffrey had quit his studies at Northwestern University to pursue an adventurous life on the river. After several years working on boats and at odd jobs, he eventually bought a home in LeClaire, Iowa, not far from Burlington, and from his base in LeClaire continued his steamboat work. He had acquired many friends and clients in Burlington, including Adeline's father, Alexander Moir, who had once employed him.57
Adeline Moir remembered McCaffrey as "handsome and very intelligent." He was well educated and well spoken, and according to many acquaintances, he bore a strong resemblance to Franklin D. Roosevelt.58 "He had a marvelous personality," recalled another neighbor. "He was one of the sweetest and one of the kindest people I have ever known."59 He had also gained a reputation in the area for his skills as a captain, and it was rumored that he was the first to have piloted a riverboat down the Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic coast to New York.60 When Louella met McCaffrey, the attraction was instant, and the spark quickly became a flame. By the time she left Burlington, she and McCaffrey were deep in the throes of a passionate romance.
Back in Chicago, Essanay's prize catch, Charlie Chaplin, did not work out as expected. When he arrived at the studio during the first week of January 1915, he was instructed by an office boy to go to the first floor, where "the head of the scenario department, Miss Louella Parsons, ... will give you a script." "I don't use other people's scripts, I write my own," he snapped.' The studio eventually relented and allowed Chaplin to use his own material, but the seeds of an unhappy relationship had been sown. Chaplin left Essanay in late 1916, just as the studio was heading toward bankruptcy.
By that time, Louella was long gone. After convincing Keeley to hire her full-time, Louella quit Essanay in January 1915. In addition to the Sunday screenwriting feature, Louella would now write a daily column, "Seen on the Screen," that combined film reviews with tidbits of gossip about film stars. A precursor to her Hollywood column, it would inform Chicago's movie fans and film industry employees of the latest news from the nation's film studios.
The parting from Essanay was bittersweet. She had loved her work, grown attached to her colleagues, and gained tremendous respect for George Spoor, a "kind, generous" employer whom she would praise for decades. But she was ecstatic about her new job at the Herald and deeply in love with Jack McCaffrey, who less than a month after their initial meeting had proposed marriage.
On January 9, 1915, Louella and McCaffrey took a train to Crown Point, Indiana, the infamous "marriage mill" of the Midwest, where weddings were performed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without a waiting period. After a brief civil wedding, they picked up Harriet from Chicago and traveled to McCaffrey's parents' plantation, Hermione, near Tallulah, Louisiana. Harriet stayed at Hermione while Louella and Jack honeymooned in New Orleans. According to Martha Sevier, McCaffrey's niece, Harriet became immediately fond of her stepfather and even wanted to change her last name to McCaffrey, but Louella forbade it.62
When the couple returned to Hermione, the McCaffreys offered Jack a lucrative job as a manager on the plantation. McCaffrey accepted immediately, without telling Louella, and when she found out, she exploded. "She wouldn't have any of it, she wouldn't even think about it," recalled an acquaintance, Katharine Ward. "She couldn't tolerate the country. She just couldn't put up with the small town stuff. She was just not going to have it."63 McCaffrey agreed to return to Chicago and share the Magnolia Street apartment with Helen and Harriet.
This was a poor decision. Helen had known nothing about the elopement, and Louella had never introduced her to McCaffrey. The day after the wedding, a friend of Louella's from the Herald, planning to run the news in the paper, called Helen for a comment. "Did you know your daughter was married at Crown Point today?" he asked. "Married! Well I should say not!" Helen screamed over the line before hanging up. Infuriated, the reporter ran the story of his conversation with Helen in the Herald, and the story was reprinted in the Dixon Telegraph the following day.64
Helen then called the Telegraph editor and demanded a retraction of the story, which eventually appeared in early February 1915. "Some weeks ago the Chicago papers carried stories of the marriage of Miss Louella O. Parsons to Jack Murray McCaffrey. The articles were copied in the Dixon papers and from their tone led one to believe the wedding had been rather an elopement, but such was not the case," the Telegraph lied. "The fact that Mrs. McCaffrey was writing under the name of Louella O. Parsons in the Chicago Herald made it desirable to keep her marriage from becoming public and the affair look like an elopement."65 In late January Helen sent out cards
announcing the wedding, to make it appear that the event had been planned, but by then everyone in Dixon knew what had really happened.
Though Louella and McCaffrey loved each other, the marriage was destined to be turbulent. Louella "made a lot more money than he did," recalled a friend from Chicago. "And she started buying clothes and this and that for him, he just didn't like it. "66 There were also disputes about Louella's friends. Louella often dragged McCaffrey to the movies in the evening, or to Beverly Bayne's apartment to spend time with the "Essanay gang." But McCaffrey felt uncomfortable around Louella's movie star friends and thought them a bunch of pretentious snobs. He had little interest in movies and thought them "frivolous" and "boring."
As winter turned to spring and spring to summer, the truth about Jack McCaffrey became clear. Though he was good-hearted and genuinely in love with Louella, and though he grew to care deeply for Harriet and even warmed up to Helen over time, he was slow, relaxed, quiet, and unambitious. And he was uncomfortable socially and unpretentious. He would not have fit well in Hollywood. Ultimately, he was not a good match for Louella.
FOR YEARS, Louella boasted that she was the first movie gossip writer in the country. Like much of what she claimed about herself, this was exaggerated. She was not the first journalist to write about film stars. Fan magazines were flourishing by 1915, and the Chicago Tribune had two movie writers, Kitty Kelly and the pseudonymous "Mae Tinee," who reviewed films and occasionally commented on actors' personal lives and careers. Also, Louella's column, initially, was hardly a gossip column. In its first two months, "Seen on the Screen" read more like the business column in a film trade journal. "Alfred Hamburger announces he has taken over the Williard Theater on Fifty first Street," ran a typical item.'
While local theater owners, actors, and film distributors appreciated the column's focus, fans protested. They could care less about contracts and mergers; they wanted to know about the stars. In response to angry letters from readers, Louella began writing about actors' offscreen lives-what they did at home, what they ate, who they romanced, what they wore.
She was not the first writer for the mainstream press to address these topics. By 1915, Literary Digest, Sunset, and the New York Times, among other publications, ran occasional features on film actors. Nor was Louella the first to write a celebrity column in a major newspaper. Since the late nineteenth century, newspaper society columns had chronicled the exploits of stage stars, politicians, and other famous figures. But by writing a daily column exclusively devoted to motion pictures and by extending the existing celebrity journalism tradition to film stars, Louella pioneered a new journalistic format and started a new chapter in the history of American celebrity.
Celebrity journalism emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century with the growth of the mass-circulation press. By 1900 there were over a dozen daily papers in New York, and nearly as many in other major East Coast cities, with circulations that approached a million copies per day. In an attempt to personalize the news and make stories vivid and accessible to readers, papers adopted a style of human interest journalism that, in the words of publisher S. S. McClure, conveyed "a realistic portrait of the human personalities involved."2 Unlike news stories, which focused on the professional activities of such well-known politicians and businessmen as Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, and John D. Rockefeller, human interest pieces discussed the private lives of the rich and famous.
These "personality" pieces, with their focus on the subjects' "real selves," reflected new conceptions of selfhood that emerged in the late nineteenth century. According to celebrity historian Charles Ponce de Leon, the rise of cities and the spread of market exchange in the nineteenth century led to a realization of the artificial nature of human interaction. In the marketplace, one could be duped by an artful seller, his or her true intentions masked beneath a carefully crafted performance. The same held true in all forms of human interaction. Thus the rise of the notion of a "performing self": our public "roles" disguise true identities beneath the mask.3
Actors, who played with the distinction between authenticity and artifice, soon became icons in a culture that had come to see role playing as a metaphor for life. Theater actors were the most common subject of nineteenthcentury personality journalism, and theater gossip columns in newspapers, such as Alan Dale's widely read column for the Hearst syndicate, promised to reveal the real lives of actors. Dale, one of the most popular theater critics in the country in the early twentieth century, had pioneered a style of celebrity journalism in which he described actors' backgrounds and personalities in interview fashion. He wrote his columns as if he were chatting with actors and foregrounded his role as an active participant in the conversations. In Dale's columns, readers learned as much about Dale's personality as about the subjects of his sketches.
Dale's revelations-about actors' home lives, marriages, and personal histories-were gossipy but hardly scandalous. In r89o, Harvard Law professor Louis Brandeis had written an influential article in the Harvard Law Review decrying gossip and calling for a legally enforceable right to privacy.4 In response, the New York Daily News publisher Joseph Medill Patterson set down a rule that would be adopted by most major metropolitan newspapers: "no private scandal or private love affairs" were to be reported unless they came to trial in a divorce action, thus becoming part of the public record. Yet sensationalistic pieces, particularly about theater stars, often made the press. Georgia Cayvan, one of America's popular leading ladies of the 189os, was named by a New York paper as the other woman in an 1896 divorce case. When actress Sarah Jewett had to undergo treatment for nervous disorders, the New York Sun printed rumors of opium use.'
The theater was well-enough entrenched in American culture to withstand these attacks. But when Louella began writing for the Herald, the movies were young and, to many, morally questionable. In November 1907, the Chicago City Council passed a movie censorship ordinance that granted the general superintendent of police the authority to issue permits for film exhibition. Permits could be refused if the superintendent deemed the film "immoral or obscene."6 Louella recalled that each Friday, "censorship day," the censor board went to the Essanay studio's Argyle Street headquarters and screened the studio's releases for the week.7 Films declared objectionable had to be edited or in some cases refilmed, at great expense to the studio. The board was meticulous and efficient; in one year alone, it deleted over fifty thousand feet of film.' Meanwhile, a commission conducted a study to determine the effects of the cinema on Chicago's schoolchildren. When the results confirmed that motion pictures were significantly and undesirably influencing children's values and social outlook, the commission urged even more stringent censorship, of "all motion pictures in the city based on the negative effects on children."9
Far from being an isolated attack, the outcry over movies in Chicago was part of a larger battle waged across the nation. Declaring motion pictures a grave social problem, reformers urged local and state governments to regulate films. In response, Pennsylvania created the first state film censorship board, in 1911, followed by Ohio in 1913. The success of these measures led to a movement for federal censorship, and in 1914, the Reverend Wilbur Crafts, superintendent of a Protestant-led reform group called the International Reform Bureau, pressured Congressman Dudley Hughes of Georgia to introduce a bill creating a federal censorship board that would ban films that were declared "obscene, indecent, immoral, or [that] tend[ed] to corrupt the morals of children or incite[d] to crime." The bill ultimately failed, but, during its wellpublicized two-year debate, censorship bills were introduced in Iowa, Maine, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, and by 1918 a total of twenty states were considering similar measures.10
Meanwhile, sociological treatises added academic fuel to the reformers' ire. Jane Addams wrote in her 1909 Spirit of Youth and the City Streets that the movie theater had become a "house of dreams" in which children were taught "cruel illusions" about life-romantic "absurdities which will certai
nly become the foundation for their working moral codes and the data from which they will judge the proprieties of life."" That children lacked the emotional capacity to distinguish between the screen and reality was a common theme brought up by anticinema activists. Likening movies to a drug that rendered viewers passive and impressionable, several psychologists and sociologistsmost famously, Harvard University professor Hugo Munsterberg, author of the 1916 study The Photoplay: A Psychological Study-depicted children as helpless victims, pliable and passive surfaces upon which films could leave their tainted imprint.'2 Young women were considered particularly vulnerable to the cinema's corrupting effects, and critics feared the influence of suggestive scenes on female virtue.13
The reformers' attack on the cinema reflected deeper social anxieties, as film and cultural historians have amply documented. The middle-class, Angle, Saxon opponents of the cinema were part of a dying social order, a nineteenth-century Protestant society fast giving way to the industrial, secular, ethnically heterogeneous commercial culture taking root in the nation's cities. The reformers feared, quite rightly, that motion pictures, with their powerful emotional and visual appeal, were supplanting the nation's traditional sources of social and moral authority. As revealed in many of the sociological studies on film and youth, children were more deeply influenced by the cinema than by religious teachings or classroom education; mass culture had replaced the school and the church. The criticism of female cinema attendance reflected anxieties over young women's increasing sexual and economic freedom. Young working women often used the movie theater as a site, free from parental supervision, to engage in romantic and sexual encounters and to show off the fashionable clothing styles that signified their independence. Controlled largely by Jewish entrepreneurs, the movies seemed to symbolize the end of Victorianism and the fall of the Protestant elite. 14
The First Lady of Hollywood Page 6