The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  In reality, Louella's work was far more intelligent and competent than her critics gave her credit for. Though her prose was often ponderous-in a typical column from 1915, she gushed that the actress Lillian Gish was "so delicate and pink and golden in her coloring that the word ethereal seems to fit her more nearly than any other term I have heard applied to her"-she was an excellent reporter.42 Though she often relied on personal connections and studio press releases for information, she also did a good deal of footwork on her own. By the end of her first year, she had honed an approach to news gathering that was resourceful, shrewd, and, given the conventions of the era, highly unladylike. She sneaked into the theaters attended by stage and screen stars, loitered for hours in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel, a popular hangout for actors, and eavesdropped in bathrooms. She learned to push through crowds of screaming fans to interview actors and to dash off thousand-word columns in an hour or less. In 1916, when the famed stage actress Doris Keane fainted onstage during one of her Chicago performances, Louella, who was in the audience, pushed her way backstage and "overheard the doctor say something about a visitation from the stork."43 She dashed to the Herald office to print the exclusive story. As a reporting strategy, Louella frequently adopted a guise of absentmindedness: she often looked distracted and stared into the distance when she spoke. Stars, she discovered, were more likely to speak candidly when they thought she was not listening. Louella worked constantly, often twelve or fourteen hours a day, and spent late nights in the Herald office typing the next day's copy. She read film trade journals and fan magazines from cover to cover and scoured local publications for movie news.

  Louella was not only honing her reportorial skills and her knowledge of film but also developing her talents as a critic. Each month she was invited to dozens of film premieres, and by the end of her tenure at the Herald she had earned a reputation as an accomplished film reviewer. Not one to mince words, Louella never hesitated to write scathing reviews, even if it meant attacking her Essanay friends. "The story itself was complicated, unconvincing, and highly improbable," she wrote of Essanay's production of The Opal Ring. "What a shame perfectly good energy had to be wasted. "44 Her comments were regularly reprinted in trade publications, including the nationally circulated journal Moving Picture News; excerpts from her reviews also appeared in the fan magazines Motion Picture and Photoplay. Though Louella would become famous for her celebrity reporting, many of her Chicago readers told her that they valued her criticism as much as her gossip.

  She was also forging connections with the leaders of the burgeoning film industry. No longer the haphazard, chaotic business it had been in the Essanay days, by 1915 it had transformed into a sophisticated, well-organized, and powerful multimillion-dollar industry. According to the New York Times, it was the fifth most important industry in the United States, behind agriculture, transportation, oil, and steel.45 During her years at the Herald, she met Carl Laemmle, head of the Universal studio; independent producer Louis B. Mayer; and theater chain owner Marcus Loew. Through them, she met Adolph Zukor, head of the Famous Players studio and future president of the Paramount Studio; Sam Katz, later an executive at Metro-GoldwynMayer in Hollywood; and Samuel Goldfish, manager of the Jesse Lasky Film Company, who eventually changed his name to Samuel Goldwyn .46 To these executives, Louella was an important ally, and her column a major source of local publicity for their productions.

  Once, Louella diverged from movie reporting when Keeley gave her a "sob sister" assignment. Sob sister journalism had begun in the late nineteenth century when women reporters, most famously Winifred Black of the Hearst papers, were assigned to report in a sensationalistic, dramatic style on trials, disasters, and other emotionally charged events. The most famous examples of this journalism stemmed from the Harry Thaw-Stanford White murder trial of 19o7, during which writers Dorothy Dix, Ada Patterson, and Nixola Greeley Smith gained national exposure for their stories. Though criticized for its sensationalism, sob sister writing launched many of the best female journalists of the early twentieth century.47

  In July 1915, the Eastland a ferry on Lake Michigan, capsized, killing eight hundred passengers, and Keeley sent Louella to interview the victims' families. "In the beginning I approached these small houses with reticence," she remembered. "But the eagerness of the people who were of the poorer classes to tell their stories made me forget myself. There is a curious, morbid desire to talk among people who have had trouble, and their willingness to tell me little intimate stories of their loved ones was one of the most touching things I have ever encountered."48 She came back to the office with tears streaming down her cheeks. Years later, she still believed that the story, which appeared on the front page of the Herald, was one of the best she ever wrote.

  Meanwhile, Louella's personal life was becoming increasingly difficult. McCaffrey spent most of his time on different steamship jobs and was rarely at home. Moreover, Louella's relationship with Helen had become tense. Still angry about Louella's elopement, Helen also hated the fact that her daughter was writing about the "despised and ridiculed movies."49 (When Louella landed her job at Essanay, Helen had told her, "When you go to church tomorrow, you needn't say that you are working in those movies. Just say you're writing for a living, and that won't be untruthful.")50 To make matters worse, Helen was suffering from diabetes.

  Louella's relationship with her own daughter, Harriet, was equally problematic. Now in elementary school, Harriet resented the time that Louella lavished on her work and took solace in books. Louella tried to soothe her with gifts and parties; on an occasion Harriet recalled many years later, Louella invited the famous cowboy actor William S. Hart to dinner, making Harriet "the most popular io-year-old on Magnolia Street. "5' Louella even managed to get a picture of Harriet into a fan magazine. Harriet frequently went to Dixon during the summers, and Rae Shepard, a Dixon resident who was Harriet's age, remembered one time when Harriet asked her to go to the bookstore with her. "She said her mother had written her and told her [Harriet's] picture would be in a movie magazine that month. I was sure Harriet was wrong. Well, we did get the magazine-and there was Harriet's picture. She was sitting in a big chair with a book in her lap.... It was almost like Harriet was a celebrity," Shepard recalled.52 These small offerings, however, were poor substitutes for time spent together, and Louella's intense commitment to her work continued to disappoint Harriet. Louella even had the gall to let work interfere with her daughter's birthday parties. On the girl's fourteenth birthday, Louella "ruined" her party, Harriet recalled, by dashing out to write the breaking story of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford's elope- ment.53

  In November 1917, Keeley sent Louella to New York to cover her first film industry conference, a nationwide meeting held by the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America. Keeley had given her an expense account, which Louella managed deftly. "With shudders I blew $35 for a black dress that I considered a symphony of sophistication and gaily charged it to `room service'!" she recalled. During the trip to New York, she visited Fort Lee, New Jersey, home of a large complex of film studios that housed the Fox, Metro, World, and Goldwyn film companies. At Fort Lee, she renewed her contacts with actresses Alice Brady, Mae Marsh, Theda Bara, and Ethel Clayton, and lunched with Lewis Selznick, head of the World Film Company, whose young son David, she recalled, was "wearing knee pants."54 Years later, Louella would remember that conference as a turning point in her life, when she first became aware of her power and potential as a writer. "Always a ham at heart," she recalled, "I felt every eye in the place was on me as I registered `Miss Louella Parsons, columnist, Chicago, Ill."' At last, "I felt I had come into my own."55

  She returned to Chicago thrilled by the "wondrous movie ball," the marble lobby of the Astor Hotel, and the "rushing, hurrying crowd."56 But when she returned to the Herald the mood was somber: the paper had been sold. Reporters made frantic phone calls, counted the dollars in their savings accounts, and cursed the name of the villain who had purchased thei
r beloved Herald-William Randolph Hearst.

  A flamboyant, controversial, eccentric multimillionaire, the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst was one of the most important figures in American mass media. Born in San Francisco on April 29, 1863, to Phoebe Apperson Hearst, a former Missouri schoolteacher, and George Hearst, a miner from Missouri who fell into riches when he unearthed a silver lode, Hearst grew up surrounded by wealth, prestige, and privilege. Determined to use the family's riches for "uplifting" purposes, Phoebe Hearst regularly whisked young Willie off to Europe for grand tours of the continent's finest art and culture. At home in San Francisco, he lived in a palatial mansion, studied with private tutors, and was spoiled rotten.

  After an unsuccessful stint at Harvard that resulted in his expulsion (always a practical joker, Hearst had clowned himself out of school), Hearst took over a failing newspaper in 1887 that his father had acquired, the San Francisco Examiner. To boost circulation, Hearst transformed the paper by using large illustrations, wild, trumped-up stories, and screaming headlines. He sensationalized the news, he explained, because "the public is even more fond of entertainment than it is of information."57 The Examiner quickly became famous for its stunt journalism, and in one of the paper's most famous stunts, Hearst had a reporter jump ship in the San Francisco Bay and timed how long it took for the Coast Guard to arrive. When the rescue ferry showed up over three minutes later, long enough for a person to drown, the Examiner turned it into a front-page story blasting the Coast Guard for its inefficiency 58 In another instance, Hearst reporter Annie Laurie was ordered to dress in rags and faint in the street for an expose on the city's treatment of indigent women. By the r89os, the Hearst press set a new standard for sensationalism and entertainment value in journalism, forcing its competitors to adopt similar practices.

  In 1895, Hearst took his carnivalesque style to New York. He purchased the New York journal, the paper famously accused of starting the SpanishAmerican War in 1898. When Hearst sent reporter Frederick Remington to Cuba to cover a possible native insurrection, Remington wrote to say that "everything is quiet. There is no war." Hearst replied, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."59 The warmongering journal hyped the tensions in Cuba so mercilessly that it pushed public opinion to support military intervention.

  Since his days at Harvard, Hearst had harbored political aspirations. In 1903, he successfully ran for U.S. senator from New York and later, unsuccessfully, for mayor and governor of New York on "trust-busting" campaigns. In the spirit of the Populist and Progressive movements of the day, he argued that trusts in the milk, electricity, and railroad industries were fleecing Americans of their hard-earned wages and called for reform. Meanwhile, as he decried the exploitation of workers by money-hungry capitalists, he continued to build his wealth and a vast publishing empire. By 19zo, Hearst owned twenty-two daily newspapers, six magazines, two syndication services, and a film company, in addition to ranches, mines, millions of dollars of New York real estate, and a priceless collection of European art.60

  Hearst was not entirely to blame for the Herald's ill fortunes. The newspaper's finances had always been shaky, and in 1916 Keeley committed an embarrassing blunder that only hastened the paper's demise. In an attempt to boost circulation, Keeley persuaded a professor of sociology, made famous after he had been caught in an affair with the wife of a prominent manufacturer, to write a series of articles on whatever topic he chose. The result was an embarrassing series about sex-about man's "great passions" and "basic urges"-that essentially hammered the nails in the coffin. Keeley sold the paper to Hearst at a loss, costing his backers an estimated three million dollars. Disgusted with journalism, Keeley spent the rest of his life as vice president of public relations for the Pullman Company.61

  Most of the Herald employees assumed that they would lose their jobs. But in late 1917, Hearst executive Arthur Brisbane announced that Hearst planned to keep the best writers and reporters for the new publication, to be named the Herald Examiner. Rather than relieve the panicked reporters, the announcement threw them into a quandary. They needed their jobs, but like most Americans at the time, they despised Hearst.

  In 1917 Hearst was, in the words of one biographer, "an object of national detestation."62 America had just entered the world war, and Hearst was rabidly anti-interventionist and, by some accounts, pro-German. Throughout the country in 1917, images of Hearst had been burned in effigy, and in many cities Hearst publications were boycotted. In one of the most famous acts of anti-Hearst propaganda, the New York Tribune, a longtime opponent of Hearst, released a six-part series that accused Hearst of being a German sympathizer and a traitor to his country. The pamphlets were published under the title "Coiled in the Flag-Hears-s-s-t."63

  Richard Henry Little took Louella to a window and pointed to a milk truck. "See that milkman?" Little asked. "Well go take his job-do any damned thing, but don't ever work for Hearst!"64 But Louella was uninterested in politics or the war; she needed an income, and she was determined to keep her job. One evening she spotted Arthur Brisbane in the Blackstone Hotel, where she was waiting to interview an actor, and she asked him whether she might be able to continue "Seen on the Screen" on the new Her- aldExaminer. Brisbane, a fiercely intimidating man with a perpetually dour expression, responded without hesitation. Claiming that there was not enough "serious" interest in the movies, he barked that there was no need for Louella on a Hearst paper: not now, not next year, and most likely never. Louella's last installment of "Seen on the Screen" appeared on April 30, 1918.

  Again Louella's life was at a crossroads. After looking in vain for a reporting job in Chicago, she began considering the possibility of moving to another city. But she was unsure. Frozen with indecision, she waited in Chicago while her bank account dwindled. Photoplay editor James Quirk offered her a token assignment, an article about the impact of the movies on the war effort. "Propaganda," which appeared in September 1918, praised D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World as the most "effective ammunition aimed at the Prussian empire."65 For the piece, Louella received a generous twenty-five dollars, but it was hardly enough.

  Meanwhile, New York loomed as a possibility. D. W. Griffith introduced her to a press agent who offered her a job as a publicity writer at New York's Pathe film studio.66 John Flinn, a friend who was a publicist at the Famous Players studio, mentioned that a New York newspaper, the Morning Telegraph, might be looking for a movie columnist. Despite the offers, she remained unconvinced, reluctant to move more than a thousand miles east, until one day at the bank she saw Mary Gish, mother of actresses Lillian and Dorothy. "How can you hesitate for a moment when New York offers so much wider opportunity for your talents?" Mrs. Gish asked. Struck by the simple truth in her words, Louella bought train tickets, went home, and announced to Helen and Harriet that they would be moving the following week.67

  The departure was torturous. "I couldn't see through the tears that blinded my eyes as the train pulled away from the familiar landmarks," she later wrote. Louella could not bear to leave this "lush, rowdy" town where she first saw success, and in her heart, she never really did. Over thirty years later, she claimed, she was still waving good-bye .61

  LOUELLA OFTEN WONDERED WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED if she had moved to Los Angeles instead of New York. By 1918, Hollywood, which produced over three quarters of American films, was fast becoming the nation's movie capital.' In the new empire of sun, citrus, and celluloid, reported the newspapers and fan magazines, former mechanics and waitresses were transformed into glittering screen idols, sometimes literally overnight. While the newly minted film stars played out their real-life fantasies in their sprawling mansions, automobiles, and nightclubs, a cast of supporting characters-studio technicians, set and costume designers, publicists, and editors-made more modestly comfortable lives in the stuccoed bungalows and pastel-hued apartment buildings that lined the streets. In 1905, only five thousand residents called Hollywood home; fifteen years later, thanks to the film
industry, the population had risen to over thirty-six thousand.2

  Still, in 1918, New York was probably the better choice for the up-andcoming film columnist. The executive offices of most studios were headquartered in New York, which meant that all major decisions concerning production and distribution were issued from the East, and many of the screen's most popular actors, who had started their careers on Broadway, continued to live and act in New York. With a population of over five million and over three hundred movie theaters, the city was the nation's most lucrative venue for film exhibition.3

  New York was also the center of the American press. After the making of women's garments, publishing and printing was the city's second largest industry, and by 192o New York boasted over a dozen major daily newspapers, ranging from the slightly scandalous Telegraph to the stately New York Times. When Louella arrived in New York, the newspaper industry was at its peak. Between 1918 and the mid-192,os, before the advent of radio, daily newspa pers were one of the most, if not the most, popular source of news and entertainment both in New York and across the nation. Rapid urbanization, mechanical improvements in newspaper printing, and rising literacy levels in the late nineteenth century had contributed to the tremendous growth of the newspaper medium. By 19zo over 40 percent of American city dwellers subscribed to a daily newspaper, the highest subscription rate in the history of the American press. New York alone produced 15 percent of the nation's newspapers, and in 1919 the city's publishers churned out papers at a rate of one copy for each of New York's five million residents.4