The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  Away from the Telegraph, Louella participated in several professional women's organizations, including the Woman Pays Club, a group of female artists and intellectuals that included screenwriter Anita Loos, screenwriter Frances Marion, and Hearst reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns. Guests could attend the club luncheons at the Algonquin Hotel only when invited by a member, and if the guest was male, the woman-per the group's namepaid for the meal. "It is a women's club, you see," Louella explained to her Telegraph readers. "Object, feminism."23

  Louella also joined the New York Newspaper Women's Club, an organization founded in 19zz by female reporters, including Teddy Bean, who had covered the women's suffrage movement. Between 1911 and 19zo, feminists had picketed, protested, and marched on Washington to win the right to vote, an effort that culminated in the passage of the Nineteenth Amend ment, the women's suffrage amendment, in 192o. To cover the movement, newspapers had hired female reporters, giving them for the first time access to the newsroom in large numbers. When, following the amendment, the feminist movement began to disintegrate, many of the female reporters, without a beat to cover, were demoted to the society pages or in some cases lost their jobs. In response, several of the remaining women planned a group that would allow them not only to get together socially but also to fight for the rights of women journalists. On March 8, 1922, thirty-two women gathered together at the Hotel Vanderbilt and began the Newspaper Women's Club.24

  Martha Coman, a graduate of Stanford who was one of the first female reporters for the New York Herald, was the club's first president. Teddy Bean, Emma Bugbee of the Tribune, and Ann Dunlap of the American were officers; and Louella, Jane Grant of the New York Times, and Esther Coster of the Brooklyn Eagle were elected to the board of directors. The annual dues were twenty-five dollars, which for many of the women was a week's salary. The restrictive fees were intended to keep the group serious. "Make the club exclusive rather than inclusive and then it will serve a purpose," advised Hearst reporter Helen Rowland at the group's first meeting.25

  Indeed, the group was serious, with a feminist aim. Believing that a woman was fully capable of holding any job held by a man, the group pressured newspapers to hire more women and assisted female journalists in disputes with their employers. They also provided to potential employers a list of women who would be eligible for job interviews on short notice. In the mid-19zos, several of the members joined the Lucy Stone League, an organization devoted to the belief that women should legally keep their maiden names after marriage. The group also sponsored a tea to honor women journalists of the senior class at Columbia University and created a fund to assist unemployed newspaperwomen. The club's logo was fitting-a woman astride Pegasus with a quill pen in her hand, in place of a riding crop.

  At group meetings, typically held over lunch, the women dined, networked, shared stories, and planned their annual fund-raising celebration, a gala event to honor the city's most prominent newspaperwomen. The first one took place in April 1922, and by 1924 the annual Newspaper Women's Ball had become famous for its celebrity and socialite guests. Broadway actors and New York political figures regularly attended, as did many of New York's publishing elite, including the publishers William Randolph Hearst, Adolph Ochs, Cyrus McCormick, and Joseph Medill Patterson.

  In 1923, Louella became head of the club's social committee and planned the 1924 ball, held at the Hotel Astor. The following year, she coordinated the banquet and ball, held on the roof garden of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The club praised Louella's talent for planning, and in 1925 she was elected president of the organization. (Years later, club historians remembered her as one of the club's "more flamboyant" presidents, one who was "outspoken in broadcasting the new ground" she had covered in journalism.)26 The Newspaper Women's Club was an important resource for Louella, professionally and personally. The network of astute, energetic women gave her both connections in the newspaper and publishing world and much-needed emotional support.27

  By 1922, excerpts from Louella's Telegraph column were regularly reprinted in movie industry publications, including the trade journals Motion Picture Herald and Moving Picture World, and directors and producers began giving her cards and gifts in the hope of winning her favor. "My Dear Mrs. Parsons," Carl Laemmle wrote in a card to Louella in 1922, "I want you to know that a great many changes have been made in cutting and editing the film Foolish Wives. Many of these changes and eliminations were directly due to the constructive criticism printed in the Morning Telegraph." Some of the gifts arrived anonymously, which worried her. "Another box of candied fruit arrived without a card during the week from the Pacific Coast," Louella wrote. "In these days of poison one cannot be too careful. 1121

  In the summer of 192o, Louella rewarded herself for her hard work with a vacation to Europe. W. E. Lewis lent her the money for the trip, and her friend who accompanied her on the journey, the actress and director Olga Petrova, generously financed the steamship ticket to London. A cold, formal, and often temperamental woman originally from Britain, Petrova began to irritate Louella, and Louella, the quintessential tacky tourist (she constantly snapped photos and was "everything you have ever read about the typical American abroad," she admitted), soon annoyed her friend. After a fight, the two parted in London, and Louella traveled solo to Paris, where she arrived on the doorstep of the flamboyant former film actress Fanny Ward. Ward, whose apartment was the social center of the American expatriate community in Paris, threw a cocktail party to welcome Louella, but on the night of the party, the guest of honor never arrived: Louella spent the evening stuck in the elevator of Ward's apartment building. Louella's first European voyage, however, was not a complete disaster. On her way back through London, she met the British publisher Lord Northcliffe, who commissioned her to write an article on film for his magazine, The Picture Goer. And a London newspaper that interviewed Louella described her as "Queen of the American publicity writers." With suitcases full of souvenirs and an international reputation, Louella returned to New York to take up the fight against motion picture censorship.29

  Despite the growing popularity of film, the battle over film censorship continued. By 1918, Kansas City, Chicago, Seattle, Pennsylvania, and Ohio had created official film censorship boards, and several other states were considering similar measures. In response, theater owners circulated anticensorship petitions in their communities; actors on nationwide speaking tours rallied audiences against proposed censorship legislation; and directors and studio heads published anticensorship pamphlets to be distributed at movie theaters across the country. Like the rest of the film community, Louella took up the call to arms.

  "In various states a bill is about to be introduced into the legislature asking that a state censor board be appointed with power [over] the motion pictures to be shown at theaters in the state," Louella warned readers in 1919. "This bill, if passed, would be a menace to the very foundations of this government. Write to your congressman and speak freely to him and ask him not to vote for state censorship. It means having someone else decide for you what you want to see." Envisioning her column as a weapon in the anticensorship crusade, Louella lashed out against the "motion picture haters" who endorsed film regulation. Dr. Harry Bowlby, who urged the New York legislature to pass a "blue law" that would close movie theaters on Sundays, "is bitter against the film industry," Louella reported. "He feels the film men [have] no right to fight for their rights. Well the Reverend Bowlby has another thought coming. So long as the industry has any life or breath it will fight his interference. If he attempts to regulate what is obviously none of his business, he may expect retaliation and retaliation of the bitterest sort." Louella also praised directors and producers such as D. W. Griffith, who produced films so "pure and wholesome" that no censors' wrath could be incurred. At a 1921 luncheon in honor of director Charles Ray, Louella announced to the congregation of journalists and film executives that Ray's pictures were not only "invariably entertaining" but also "invariably clean." 30

&n
bsp; When prominent Protestant organizations in New York in 1920 convinced two state senators to sponsor a film censorship bill, industry leaders spared no expense to turn public opinion against the proposed legislation. The National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), the film in dustry's governing body, sponsored anticensorship rallies in several New York cities and even produced a short film, The Nonsense of Censorship, starring Douglas Fairbanks, that was exhibited in theaters throughout the nation. Their efforts were in vain. After the bill passed the state senate and assembly in February 1921 and was signed into law by Republican governor Nathan Miller in April, Louella and other industry supporters were promptly enlisted in a NAMPI campaign to force the law's repeal. That summer, NAMPI leader William A. Brady announced the creation of a "censorship committee" that would draft a bill to overturn the New York censorship law and that would plan an attack on proposed censorship legislation slated to appear on a Massachusetts referendum the following year. Louella was one of the twenty-four directors, editors, and studio representatives appointed to the committee. The prestigious group, which included D. W. Griffith, Photoplay editor James Quirk, and representatives from the Goldwyn, Famous Players, Selznick, Universal, First National, Fox, Metro, and International studios, began meeting regularly at the Hotel Claridge in mid-1921.31

  After a well-publicized incident that September in which the popular film comic Fatty Arbuckle was accused of raping a young actress at a wild party in San Francisco, religious groups pushed even harder for censorship laws, and NAMPI's work grew urgent. Louella attended the meetings diligently and with her male colleagues planned anticensorship films, slogans, and campaigns to redeem Hollywood's public reputation. But there was another, even stronger motivation behind her involvement in the NAMPI campaign. In the fall of 1921, Louella fell in love.

  By 1921, with McCaffrey gone, Louella actively sought romance at the many film industry conventions she attended for the Telegraph. During the conventions, she recalled, "[I] sat down close to the speakers' platform and [made] notes with far more of a flourish than the long, dry speeches warranted. But in the evening I went femme fatale." The black dresses and evening gowns on which she splurged were more than just for keeping up professional appearances. "There is nothing immoral about a whiff of perfume or the fact that a girl can dance well, given a partner who doesn't rip off her shoe buckles," she wrote. "Sometimes an attractive hat can get you in where angels fear to tread. Why not admit it-and make it pay dividends?"32

  "Louella was very popular with men," recalled Dorothy Manners, who became Louella's editorial assistant in the 1930s. With "lustrous" brown hair and a flawless complexion, she was "much more attractive than she was ever given credit for." Whether she had intended it or not, by late 1921 Louella had, in her own words, fallen "very deeply, very wholly, and very completely in love" with a powerful and charming married man who became, according to Manners, "the real love" of her life.33

  Peter J. Brady was a charismatic, well-spoken former printer and photoengraver who by the 192,os had become a powerful and well-connected New York labor leader. He was a Roman Catholic and the same age as Louella. As a child Brady moved with his parents from their native Ireland to New York. When his father died, the young Brady went to work as a newsboy and attended night school, where he took courses in photoengraving. After finishing school, he joined the photoengravers union and by 1913 had become first vice president of the Photoengravers' Union of New York and secretary of the Allied Printing Trades Council, which elected him president in 1916. Two years later, Brady was appointed by New York mayor John Hylan to serve as supervisor of the city record. As chairman of the Committee on Education of the New York division of the American Federation of Labor, Brady was also a frequent speaker on educational issues, and he testified regularly before government commissions on the need for greater funding for vocational training in public schools. By 192,o Brady was an influential and well-known figure in New York city politics.34

  The 192o election of Governor Nathan Miller, and his subsequent repeal of several pieces of pro-labor legislation, sent Brady and other union advocates on a tirade against the administration, which Brady described to the New York Times as "Governor Miller and his band of press agents." Particularly offensive to Brady and his colleagues was the Clayton-Lusk film censorship bill, which had passed into law with Miller's approval. Claiming that film censorship "had been used to delete films depicting brutal conduct by employers' hirelings and officers of the law against working people engaged in industrial disputes," Brady attacked the legislation and publicly urged its repeal. By September 1921 Brady had pledged to assist the NAMPI censorship committee in its fight against censorship, and in October he forwarded letters to the committee from several branches of the State Federation of Labor that similarly offered support. The law not only "imposed unfair tax" and unwarranted government interference on working people, Brady claimed, but also threatened their employment: by reducing film attendance, censorship would strip thousands of actors, musicians, and theater personnel of their jobs.35

  When Louella met Brady at one of the censorship committee meetings that fall, she was entranced. Tall and handsome with chiseled features and a boyish, dimpled smile, Brady possessed a good-natured, lively wit and a tal ent for oratory that made him a consummate politician and riveting public speaker. A devoted activist who was described by one colleague as having "indomitable will," Brady, like Louella, was tireless and thrived on challenge.36

  Louella's and Brady's mutual involvement in the anticensorship campaign brought them into frequent contact during the winter of 1921-2z. On March 16, 1922, they were guests at a dinner dance given in honor of the film industry's new "czar," the former postmaster general, Will Hays, who recently had been hired by the studio executives to clean up Hollywood's public image in the wake of the Arbuckle scandal. Louella attended as the guest of the actress Marion Davies, while Brady dined at the head table with Hays, former mayor Hylan and Davies's lover, William Randolph Hearst. The dinner featured a six-course meal, live entertainment by Broadway performers, and the screening of a unique film. Arriving guests were filmed by a crew of cameramen, and the footage was developed and printed in time to exhibit before the end of the evening. As a "guest of honor," Brady was featured in a close-up shot near the beginning of the movie.37

  Earlier that month, New Yorkers had seen another close-up of Brady, this one in Louella's column. On March iz,1922, Louella published a large photograph of Brady along with a full-length article praising him for being "one of the people whose vision is broad enough to see what will happen if we are suddenly surrounded by the iron chains of state and federal film regulation" and for "making organized labor go on record as being opposed to any form of censorship." A few weeks later she invited Brady to speak on the subject of public education at the Woman Pays Club. "Mr. Brady talked for fully three quarters of an hour, and it was interesting to note that not a member left her seat during the talk," Louella wrote. "Usually many of these busy women leave the table before the speaker has finished what he has to say." She was clearly infatuated.38

  Before long Louella's column was filled with news about Brady, whom she frequently described as an "active opponent of censorship" and a "servant of the great public." "The motion picture director's association is not willing to lie dormant when it comes to the grave issues of censorship," she wrote in the spring of 1922. "Because of this stand, Peter J. Brady was invited to address the directors at the association's rooms." Later, in April, she noted: "Peter J. Brady is the guest of honor next Tuesday at the [Theater Owners' Chamber of Commerce] luncheon." "Rita Weiman gave a party in honor of Mrs. Jesse Lasky. Among those who attended were Peter J. Brady." That spring, Louella and Brady began an affair that would last nearly seven years.39

  As Louella's love for Brady grew, and as the couple's meetings and rendezvous continued, Louella found herself tormented. As a Catholic and a public figure, Brady knew that divorce from his wife, Rose, was ou
t of the question. After a Washington, D.C., convention attended by both Louella and Brady (Brady was "attending the American Federation of Labor meeting, but slipped into the convention to hear Jimmy Walker's speech," according to Motion Picture News), Louella returned to New York and wrote a note to herself, which she inserted between the pages of her personal scrapbook. "WORRIES OF THE WEEK," she had written. "All week long I sobbed and sighed. "40

  "I wasn't happy. I couldn't be under the circumstances," she recalled. "There is no real happiness for a woman falling in love with a man who cannot get his freedom from another woman." In a world in which everything seemed to be going her way, true satisfaction was the one thing she could not have.41

  LoUELLA'S WORK ON THE Telegraph brought her into contact with some of the most fascinating and celebrated personalities of her day. She interviewed Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith, Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, and Cecil B. DeMille, discussed philosophy with Harry Houdini, and posed for a portrait by the amateur caricaturist (and renowned opera star) Enrico Caruso, whose unflattering sketch, Louella wrote, "punctured my girlish vanity."' She lunched at the Algonquin Hotel with novelist Fannie Hurst, danced with Rudolph Valentino, and dined with Charlie Chaplin at the home of the well-known New York entertainment lawyer Nathan Burkan. Film premieres threw her into the center of New York's cafe society, where she rubbed elbows with writers, directors, politicians, publishers, composers, and stars of society, stage, and screen. A cartoon, drawn by Ralph Barton, of the premiere of the 1923 film Little Old New York depicted Louella in the second row, flanked by author Rupert Hughes, artist James Montgomery Flagg, former mayor John Hylan, D. W. Griffith, and Will Hays. Behind her sat George M. Cohan, Florenz Ziegfeld, Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, Heywood Broun, Ethel Barrymore, Alexander Woollcott, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among other literary, theatrical, and musical luminaries.2