The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  It was finally in the following winter when she sensed that all was not well. On the morning of November 7, she woke up feverish but knew it was impossible to call in sick; she had a column to turn out, several appointments, and a lunch meeting at noon. "I remember very little about the luncheon," she recalled. "The idea of food made me sick, and I knew I should go home and go to bed. But that was nonsense." After the meeting she took a taxi back to the American office and, at her desk, began coughing uncontrollably and hemorrhaging. Panicked, she called Teddy Bean, who took her to a doctor and then to the Fifth Avenue Hospital. At the hospital, a doctor told her to rest. But it was election day Jimmy Walker was running for mayor and was sure to win-and Louella was determined to attend the parties that evening. Against the doctor's wishes, she left the hospital after only a few hours and headed to a party at Hearst's home .41 There she collapsed. After running upstairs to answer a phone call from Davies, Louella hemorrhaged again, fell on the floor, and was rushed to her suite at the Algonquin by Samuel Goldwyn and his wife. "Now I knew I was done. I couldn't even pretend to fight any longer," she recalled.42 It was tuberculosis, the same disease that had killed Joshua Oettinger.

  The following morning, Hearst called Louella and discharged her for a year on full salary, insisting that she recuperate. Confident that the dry, warm air in the Southern California desert would cure Louella's tuberculosis, Hearst summoned Harriet from Wellesley, purchased train tickets, and shipped mother and daughter to the small, rural California desert town of Colton.

  This was not the first time Hearst had come to the aid of an ill-fated employee. When a valuable Hearst writer lost thousands of dollars gambling, Hearst rescued him from his debts. When cartoonist Jimmy Swinnerton came down with tuberculosis, Hearst sent him to recover in Arizona. Employees who stole from Hearst were never punished for their deeds, and many took "advances" that they never bothered to repay.43 Sentimental and loyal to his workers, Hearst had a capacity for "sudden kindness," in the words of one biographer .44

  To Hearst, sending Louella to Colton was simply an act of generosity that he extended to his best employees. But to Louella, Hearst had become the benevolent father figure she never had as a child. From that moment on, she vowed that she would spend the rest of her life repaying him for having saved her life. "Such loyalty, such kindness, seemed more than I could bear," Louella remembered. "Where are there words to express further the greatness and understanding of this man who is so often vilified by the people who do not know him?" "He was the best friend I ever had," she wrote more than twenty years later. "The proof of that lies in the fact that I am still here."45

  In New York, news of Louella's illness and departure circulated quickly in press and film circles. Variety incorrectly reported that she had gone to California to write news; Zits' Weekly called it a "vacation." Another paper claimed that she had a "nervous breakdown." Only the New York Star had it right. "Louella O. Parsons is dangerously ill," it declared, "and her complete recovery is doubtful."46 Even Louella was skeptical. As she sat on the westbound train, coughing and hemorrhaging, she wondered whether she would ever see New York again.

  She had envisioned a sanitarium surrounded by green lawns, fountains, and palm trees, like those she had seen in Hollywood. When the train finally pulled into what looked like a deserted ghost town, her heart sank. She had been told by Hearst that Colton was a wonderful place to recuperate, but she was skeptical about the possibility of recovery. "Oh-I thought-what a hell of a place for me to die!"47

  Though it was only fifty miles east of Los Angeles in the San Bernardino Valley, the sleepy town of Colton seemed as far away from Hollywood as New York. Founded in the r87os as a railway stop on the Southern Pacific line, by the turn of the century it was home to several citrus ranches, a cement company, and the Globe Flour Mill, one of the largest milling establishments in the state.48 In 1925, it had one movie theater, two telephones-both of them on one line-and a population of six thousand.49 It was the last place Louella wanted to be.

  Years later, on a radio broadcast with Louella, Harriet recalled those weeks in Colton as "our worst time." "You and I felt just like a stranded vaudeville team as the train disappeared and left us standing forlornly on the deserted platform," she remembered. A sophomore at Wellesley who was a member of the literary journal, theater club, and basketball and crew teams, Harriet traded her active college schedule for long days of confinement in a dusty, barren hotel room at her ailing mother's side. Despite the somber mood, "we had some wonderful laughs and fine talks," Harriet recalled, and near the end of her stay, she rented a car and took Louella on short jaunts around the desert.50

  By late December, Louella was recovering. Rest and a healthy diet had improved her condition, and though she still ran a fever and had lost considerable weight, by Christmas the hemorrhages had ceased. Her strength regained, she called Hearst and asked to be moved to Palm Springs, a nearby desert town that was gaining a reputation as an international hot spot. Hearst consented, and in late December Louella moved to the Desert Inn, a famed Palm Springs hotel where artists, affluent vacationers, and members of the Hollywood film community sought sunshine and solace. "Every day some director, scenario writer, film editor, or star walks past my cottage," she wrote. With its "orange trees and flowering plants," backed by a "range of majestic mountains, positively breathtaking in their color and beauty," Palm Springs, Louella predicted, is "destined to be the greatest winter resort in the world."51

  Energized by her new residence and improving health, Louella swung back into action. Through letters and telegrams she directed the preparations for the annual Newspaper Women's Ball and, by early 1926, began writing features and columns for syndication through the Universal News Service, one of Hearst's two major news syndication services.52 As a New York celebrity, she was also the subject of several articles and photo layouts in the American, which chronicled the saga of her recovery in the desert. These texts and pictures, carefully crafted by the Hearst press, reinforced the merger of traditional and modern values that was the essence of her public image. In one article, Louella described rural Colton and New York as sharing similar tastes in movies. Defusing the potent cultural conflicts that had flared between rural and urban Americans in the 19zos, Louella wrote that, despite their different lifestyles, small-town and city dwellers both appreciated "clean and artful" films. In one photograph, displayed prominently in the American, Louella sat at an outdoor table with her typewriter against a backdrop of sagebrush and desert hills. Neither a flapper nor a prude, she appeared fashionably yet demurely dressed in a long skirt and blouse and gazed off into the mountains, deep in thought.53

  In February 1926, novelist John Galsworthy retreated to the Desert Inn to work on his novel The Silver Spoon, and Louella, along with Darryl Zanuck, a writer for Warner Brothers who was working on a film in Palm Springs, interviewed Galsworthy for the Hearst papers. Later, Zanuck, whom Louella claimed became as close as a "blood relative" that winter, brought a film to Palm Springs to cheer her up. "What an audience we had: Indians, hotel guests, bell boys, and ranchers. It was the first picture I had seen in months, and Darryl announced that the premiere was given especially for me. It was a wonderful morale builder."54 Zanuck kept Louella informed of the latest gossip in the California film colony, and in February 1926 Louella made two trips to visit Davies in Beverly Hills.

  In March, feeling fully recovered, Louella called Hearst and told him that she was ready to come back to New York. The only telephone in Palm Springs was in the lobby of the Desert Inn, and in order to be heard over the poor connection, Louella had to shout. When Hearst said no, Louella shouted back, insisting that she was well enough to return. Hearst then proposed a plan that he claimed would make her the most powerful woman in Hollywood and potentially the most influential movie writer in the world.55

  According to Hearst's plan, Louella would move permanently to Los Angeles and become motion picture editor of the Universal News Service. As editor, she w
ould turn out daily columns and film reviews that would appear not only in the Los Angeles Examiner, the Hearst morning paper where she was to be headquartered, but also in all twenty of the Hearst papers and those that subscribed to the Universal News Service.56 Florence Lawrence, the current film writer on the LosAngeles Examiner, would move to Hearst's Chicago Examiner, and Eileen Creelman, a New York writer who subbed for Louella when she was in Palm Springs, would take over Louella's berth on the American. With worldwide exposure and a salary of $35o a week, it was an offer she couldn't pass up.57

  She didn't. Without a moment's hesitation, Louella agreed to sign a threeyear contract, and for years she referred to that day in Palm Springs as the luckiest in her life. "Well, at last, boys," she said to directors Winfield Sheehan and Raoul Walsh, who were with her in the lobby, "the Hollywood writer is going to Hollywood!"58

  The move made sense for both Louella and Hearst. By 1926, Hearst was locked into his production deal with MGM and had completed the construction of San Simeon, his palatial estate north of Santa Barbara, where he would take up residence the following year. With both Hearst and his movie enterprise in California, it was logical that Louella would follow. In addition, Hearst, like Louella, knew how difficult it was to report on Hollywood while living in New York. While in New York, Louella had been limited to the secondhand gossip telegrammed and telephoned to her by Marion Davies and Hedda Hopper and to interviews with actors and directors vacationing in New York. By moving to Hollywood, Louella would have access to breaking celebrity news and could serve as Hearst's representative to the studiosin particular, to MGM. No producer or studio boss would double-cross Hearst on a production deal, or push Davies around, if Louella threatened him with poor press in the Hearst papers.

  Besides, Louella had little to keep her in New York. Harriet was away at Wellesley and planned to move to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter when she graduated in 1927. Louella's relationship with Peter Brady, strained by her prolonged stay in the desert, was becoming untenable. By late 1926 the two were fighting over Brady's reluctance to leave his marriage and their incompatible schedules, and Louella often found herself furious at his arrogance and insensitivity.59 Maggie Oettinger (who had changed the spelling of her last name to Ettinger) had moved to Hollywood, having taken a job in the publicity department at MGM in 1924, and most of Louella's film friends were stationed in the West.

  In March 1926 Louella returned to New York, packed up her suite at the Algonquin, and celebrated her new position with a round of parties. She was feted by the Professional Women's League and the Woman Pays Club, which encouraged her to establish a branch of the organization in Southern California. At a well-publicized gala affair at the Newspaper Women's Club, Louella passed the presidency of that organization to Teddy Bean. In film and journalism circles, the announcement of Louella's move was met with trepi dation. With firsthand access to Hollywood news and extensive national readership, Louella would have a powerful effect on public opinion. "The appearance, every day, of her news stories and comment [from] Los Angeles," noted one writer for a Los Angeles paper, would have an effect that was potentially "beyond reckoning."60 Meanwhile, Hollywood waited for Louella's imminent arrival.

  THEY WERE THE "DAYS OF PROHIBITION, the old Montmartre Cafe, the Cocoanut Grove, the Charleston, and the Black Bottom," Louella recalled. "Bands were playing `Yes, Sir, That's My Baby.' The girls were wearing kneelength evening gowns and big bows on high-heeled slippers. Clara Bow was the biggest box office star."' The environment in Hollywood in the mid-19zos was wild and heady, colored by the raucous pleasures of Prohibition nightlife and the newfound wealth of the movie elite. The Montmartre Cafe, on Sunset Boulevard, boasted crystal chandeliers and carpets from Europe and twenty-four hundred pounds of solid silver service. The premiere Hollywood nightclub in the 19zos, the Cocoanut Grove, was decorated with stuffed monkeys dangling from fake palm trees.' Hollywood movie theaters were literal temples of entertainment: Sid Grauman's Egyptian Theater, constructed in 1923, was an archaeologically exact replica of an Egyptian temple, complete with hieroglyphics, statuary, and sarcophagi, and the United Artists theater, designed as a Spanish cathedral, featured an elaborate mural emblazoned with larger-than-life portraits of actors Constance Talmadge, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin.3

  Given the city's future reputation, its founders were unlikely. In 1903, a band of Christian Prohibitionists from Kansas, seeking their fortunes in the West, established Hollywood as a small farming village and fashioned it after the conservative Midwest they had left. An ordinance passed that year banned factories and high-rise buildings; dancing, drinking, and public merrymaking were similarly prohibited. The village would be a quiet, devout Protestant utopia, as clean and bright as the California sunshine.

  The Edenic visions were short lived. In 1909, William Selig of the Chicago-based Selig Film Company, in search of winter sunshine, took a troupe of actors to Southern California to shoot a film. Word of Selig's dis covery traveled quickly, and by 1911 several filmmakers, including D. W. Griffith, had taken crews to the Los Angeles area. By 1912, huge barnlike studios had cropped up on deserted lots, and cheap apartment buildings and hotels were hastily erected to house the flood of newcomers seeking careers in the movies. As the population rose, from seven hundred in 1903 to seventy-five hundred in 1913, so did the founders' tempers.4 In an attempt to chase the actors away, restaurants, apartment houses, and theaters posted signs reading "No Movies Allowed."

  But the "Hollywood gold rush" continued. Spurred by the rapid growth of the Los Angeles area-between 1900 and 1920 over a million and a half migrants settled in the area to capitalize on an oil and real estate boom-Hollywood soon became a bustling factory town. By 192o, the film industry had become the largest industry in the Los Angeles area, with tens of thousands of workers and a payroll of over twenty-five million dollars.5

  Even the apartment buildings in Hollywood were swanky. The Garden of Allah, on Sunset Boulevard, consisted of a main house and twenty-five villas built around a huge pool. The Garden Court Apartments on Hollywood Boulevard, built in Italian Renaissance style, boasted thick Oriental carpets in every room; and the Champs Elysee, owned by Thomas Ince's widow, Nell, had been built in a French Normandy style and featured crystal chan- deliers.6

  Nell Ince also owned the Villa Carlotta on Franklin Avenue, an elegant Spanish-style building that in the fall of 1926 became Louella's new home. After a brief stay with Maggie Ettinger and her young son, Gordon, Louella moved into a ground-floor apartment at the noisy Carlotta-"I might just as well be awakened by the telephone as by a rehearsing opera singer who starts warbling with the birds," she recalled-and was promptly burgled. "I didn't know whether ... it was just a common garden variety burglar," she later wrote, "or some of the movie people looking for me with a gun." 7 Given the film industry's relationship with the Hearst press-a testy relationship dating back to 1921-she was only partially joking.

  In September 1921, comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, second in national popularity only to Charlie Chaplin, had rented several rooms in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco for a weekend party. A minor actress, twentyseven-year-old Virginia Rappe, attended the event and during the party became violently ill; two days later she died in a hospital of peritonitis. Though the peritonitis most likely stemmed from a sexually transmitted disease or a botched abortion, at the party she had screamed out: "Roscoe killed me." Parry guests interpreted her cry as an accusation of rape, and some claimed that the force of Arbuckle's weight-more than 250 pounds-had caused Rappe's bladder to rupture. Arbuckle was subsequently charged with murder, and the newspapers had a field day.

  "ARBUCKLE DRAGGED RAPPE GIRL TO ROOM" read headlines in one local newspaper. "Composographs" showed pictures of prison bars superimposed on Arbuckle and juxtaposed images of Arbuckle, Rappe, and a bottle of whiskey. Lurid stories in San Francisco and Los Angeles newspapers suggested gruesome possibilities; among them, that Arbuckle had raped the act
ress using a jagged piece of ice or a Coke bottle. Angry moviegoers turned against Arbuckle by boycotting his films, and the Paramount Studio terminated his contract. Though Arbuckle was eventually acquitted, his career was destroyed.

  Arbuckle was not the only casualty. Coming at a time when Hollywood was still under intense scrutiny by social reformers, the press circus only stirred up further antimovie sentiment. Following the Arbuckle case, the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor in 1922, and the death of actor Wallace Reid from a drug overdose in 1923, film censorship bills were introduced in twenty states. Movie "czar" Will Hays, hired in the aftermath of the scandals, pressured the producers to adopt a code of self-censorship in 1924. This was expanded in 1927 into the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," an elaborate code prohibiting the depiction of profanity, nudity, drug use, white slavery, miscegenation, and "sex perversion," among other sins. Morals clauses requiring actors to follow a strict code of behavior were written into studio contracts, and unmarried stars who were seeing each other were pressured to marry. Producers hired detectives to investigate their employees, and they fired employees seen as potential "moral liabilities."'

  The studios had a right to be afraid of Louella. The paper that had led the campaign against Arbuckle was the San Francisco Examiner, published by Hearst.

  Employed at the Morning Telegraph at the time, Louella never mentioned the Arbuckle scandal in her column, and she did not discuss the case until after his April 192,2, acquittal.9 With her falsified accounts of actors' squeaky-clean lifestyles, she had been one of the industry's greatest boosters and defenders. But Hearst was known to be unpredictable and ruthless, particularly when it came to boosting circulation in Los Angeles, where his Evening Herald and Examiner battled to maintain their lead over the Los Angeles Times.