The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  Founded in 1903 as a union-friendly alternative to the Times, the Examiner was known for its photojournalism and sensational crime stories.10 The Examiner staff, according to the Los Angeles newspaper historian Rob Wagner, was a "mixed bag of responsible, ethical newsmen and women and fascists, Communists, crooks, thugs, and opportunists." Many of the paper's top journalists were seasoned professionals who had come from New York and Chicago, while others had neither experience nor talent but had "conned an acceptable $25 a week living through hack reporting and a willingness to make deals and play fast and loose with facts."11 The Examiner building had been designed by Julia Morgan, the famed architect who also designed Hearst's San Simeon residence. The imposing mission-style building, which featured white adobe-like walls, rounded clay roof tiles, wide arches, and wrought iron balconies, took up an entire block downtown. Louella's office was across the street from the main Examiner building, in the Los Angeles Railroad Building. There, she worked with her two editorial assistants, "legmen" Jimmy DeTarr and Jerry Hoffman.

  DeTarr, a distant cousin, had been her legman for five years and had come over with her from New York.'2 Hoffman, who graduated to having his own Examiner column in the early 1930s, had been an editor at the trade journal Motion Picture News in the mid-19zos, when Louella hired him on a part-time basis. When the editor of the News demanded that Hoffman stop working for Louella, Hoffman resigned from the paper and stayed with Louella. Though a tough and critical boss, she was, Hoffman claimed, "the most generous person in the world. "13 Louella also worked closely with city editor Ray Van Ettisch, who had joined the Examiner in the early 19zos. Though he was known for his calm demeanor, Van Ettisch sometimes found himself pressed into bouts of temper when Louella demanded the right to cover a front-page news story and hounded him to let her steal the assignment from another re- porter.'4

  Written in the same vein as her column for the New York American, Louella's Examiner column, "Flickerings from Filmland," was aimed at a readership of both industry insiders and fans. The column featured production news, reports on social events in the movie colony, and tidbits of star trivia, alongside Louella's daily film review. In her debut column on April 12,, 192,6, she reported:

  The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles looks like the Astor Hotel in New York during the early days when the "fillum" men gathered to plan their campaigns over strong coffee and much scribbled table covers. They are all hereAdolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Winfield Sheehan, Richard Rowland, William Fox, P. A. Powers, Sam Katz, S. L. Rothapfel, and scores of lesser lights.

  I am told that the exotic Pola Negri has changed her mind about Valentino. No longer is he her ideal and the one handsome sheik of her life. In short, Pola and Rudy have come to a parting of the ways. Who is next? Well I haven't heard yet but judging from Pola's past record it's a handsome lad, possibly a movie editor.15

  The only source of daily movie news in the Los Angeles area, "Flickerings from Filmland" was read religiously both by movie fans and film industry personnel. The only other movie-related column was a daily film review by Edwin Schallert in the Times. "Like most people of that era, one of the first things I turned to was Louella Parsons' column," remembered silent film actress Pola Negri.'6 By the summer of 1926, the column had become so detailed and lengthy that the Examiner began cutting its theater section to accommodate it. Angry theater managers protested. Claiming that Louella gave studios free publicity through her column, they demanded that Louella's column be trimmed in the name of "better representation": "The theater men, who do at least patronize the Examiner's advertising columns, should be given a preference in publicity." 17 Their protest was in vain, and the column continued unaltered. Thanks to Louella, the Examiner was experiencing a circulation boom. "[Louella] had faults, but she sold papers," recalled one colleague, "and that's why Hearst hired her and kept her on." In 1927, Louella filed exclusive reports on Pola Negri's wedding to the French prince Serge Mdivani, on actress Vilma Banky's marriage to actor Rod LaRocque, and on the divorce of Jack Pickford, Mary Pickford's brother. Each of these exclusive stories sold an estimated five thousand additional copies of the Examiner, and the Negri story prompted an additional ten thousand papers to fly from the newsstands.18

  Between 1927 and 1929, Louella was not only cementing her position as one of the city's best-read columnists but also establishing a repertoire of news-gathering tactics and a working relationship with the studios. During the 192os, a series of corporate mergers led to the creation of five vertically integrated film companies-Paramount, Warner Brothers, Fox, RKO, and Loews, the parent company of the MGM studio-that dominated film production, distribution, and exhibition until the late 1940s. Annually, the "Big Five" each produced forty to eighty movies, which were created in their massive Hollywood production facilities. For example, by the early 1930s the MGM lot spanned 117 acres and had twenty-three sound stages, a park, a miniature jungle, and the world's largest film laboratory. Movies created by the Big Five were exhibited nationwide in the theater chains they 19 Though these companies owned only 15 percent of America's movie theaters, they took in almost 70 percent of box office income, since their holdings included the most profitable urban theaters in the nation. Three other film companies, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists, which owned no theaters, were also involved in production and distribution, and these "Little Three," along with the Big Five, collectively known as the majors, were the key players in the Hollywood studio system.20

  Internally, the studios were organized into departments, each with a leader under the direct command of the studio head. One of the most important departments was the publicity department, which was responsible for disseminating to the press any information about the studio's contracted stars. Much if not most of the information was fabricated. "Studio biographies" presented phony accounts of actors' lives that portrayed them as moral, upstanding, home-loving individuals who retained their humility and work ethic despite their wealth and glamour. Special care was taken to ensure continuity between the actors' on- and offscreen personae. Those actors who portrayed "athletic types" on screen, for example, were described as being sportsmen in real life, and innocent ingenues were said to be similarly sweet and lovable offscreen. When the producers, often in response to audience input, altered the actors' type, the publicity also changed. In a famous example, when Bette Davis was hired by the Warner Brothers studio in the early 1930s, she was typed as a flirtatious blonde bombshell, and press releases described her as a "love expert" and "temptress." When the studio began casting her as a serious, temperamental vamp, the press releases were revised to depict her as a "manwrecker" exuding "fatal attraction."" Of all the studios, MGM was known for having the best-organized and most sophisticated publicity department, with over a hundred employees under the direction of Howard Strickling, known as the "dean of studio publicists."22

  Publicists wrote the feature stories and press releases, copy editors reviewed them, and "planters" placed them wherever they thought they could get the best exposure-either in fan magazines, trade papers, or newspapers. Given the prominence and circulation of Louella's column, scoring an item in "Flick- erings in Filmland" was a major coup. To keep in Louella's good graces, the publicists used a technique, dubbed the trade technique, in which they promised Louella exclusive news in exchange for positive press in the column.21

  Officially, Louella met the publicists weekly at a luncheon at the Montmartre Cafe .24 Informally, she consulted them at parties, nightclubs, and her unofficial office at the Brown Derby restaurant on Vine Street in Hollywood. By 1928, she had become a near-permanent fixture at the Derby, and proprietor Bob Cobb gave Louella her own private booth. Cobb also created a special dessert for her. Louella, who loved sweets, was always on a diet. After one of her weekly staff gatherings at the Derby, she told Cobb that she refused to come back unless he put a nonfattening dessert on the menu. Reasoning that a dessert with grapefruit would satisfy her, he invented the Derby's famous Classic Grapefruit Cake. It was
hardly low-calorie, but it was enough to satisfy Louella, who remained a regular customer for the rest of her life.25

  Though she often used information given to her directly from the publicists, she prided herself on the fact that she did much of her own reporting. This, in her mind, separated her from other movie writers and reviewers, who relied almost exclusively on studio press material. Louella depended on her personal connections with studio executives, producers, and actors and a coterie of local informants. At the Hollywood Hotel, a popular celebrity hangout, she paid bellboys and chambermaids for news. At the Montmartre Cafe, she eavesdropped on lunching celebrities, and at Jim's Beauty Shop on Highland Avenue, she pressured manicurists and hairdressers for the latest "dirt" on their high-profile clientele.26 "She was a freeloader," remembered one employee of a local beauty parlor, recalling that, although Louella promised to pay for news, she was often short on cash.27

  Knowing the power she wielded over public opinion, young actors tried to befriend her. Not long after Louella's arrival in Hollywood, she was approached by Bess Peters, the mother of the aspiring teenage actress Jane Peters. The elder Peters asked Louella to put in a good word for her daughter with Winfield Sheehan, the production chief of Fox Films. Since Sheehan owed Louella a favor, he signed Jane Peters to a yearlong contract. Shortly afterward, Peters changed her name to Carole Lombard and embarked on a successful screen career.21

  In film and press circles, Louella became notorious for her obsessive devotion to her work. As one fan magazine profile on Louella noted in 1926, she wrote, interviewed, and researched between twelve and sixteen hours a day. The magazine writer, who had planned to meet Louella one morning at the Examiner office, "had to wait until late afternoon before [Louella] came in." " [Louella] had luncheon with one of the most brightly scintillating of the movie stars and had been to several studios getting the latest facts and gossip for her next day's article. Just before dinner time she returned to her officewith the real work of writing her articles still ahead. Every day she does this," the author continued. "And not only that, but in order to make her criticisms and discussions of the movies judicious, she must have read all other recent discussions and criticisms of the movies as well as getting the opinions of the producers or actors themselves."29

  But the hard work was paying off. According to Editor and Publisher, by the fall of 1926, Louella's syndicated column had over six million readers, both in Los Angeles and across the country.30 Dubbed by one fan publication as the "official source of information" on film to readers worldwide, Louella was receiving over a thousand fan letters a week.31 That November, she affixed her name to another three-year contract with Hearst and began one of the most fulfilling and challenging periods of her career.

  Though Louella's main focus was her daily column, Hearst occasionally commissioned her to write front-page news stories and other nonmovie features. In September 1926, Louella went to Philadelphia to report on the celebrated Dempsey-Tunney boxing match.32 For Louella, a boxing fan since her days at the New York Morning Telegraph, the assignment was a dream come true. With Harriet, who was returning to Wellesley after summer vacation, and fellow Hearst reporter Gene Fowler, Louella took the train east.

  Because Dempsey andTunney had both appeared in films and because "over half the movie colony" was rumored to be attending the fight, Hearst had instructed Louella to write the story with a "Hollywood" angle. But the story that resulted was less about the star-studded match than about Louella's experience covering the fight as the sole female reporter. "The night of the fight, I started to take a seat in the press box," she recalled. "This started a near riot. There were 258 male reporters, and a shout was raised that the press box was no place for a lone woman." When Tex Rickard, Dempsey's manager, called for a vote, the reporters finally decided that Louella could stay. "I couldn't help thinking what my grandmother would have said if she could have seen her favorite granddaughter with pencil poised, sitting with all the sports writers, getting the thrill of a lifetime at being allowed to report a fight. The only woman, if you please, sitting in the seats of the high and the mighty. "33

  After Philadelphia, she went to nearby Somerville, New Jersey, where she reported on the Hall-Mills trial, one of the most sensational murder trials of the decade. Like the other journalists in the courtroom-more than izo reporters were assigned to the case-Louella wrote melodramatically about the "drama of life" that had the entire town of Somerville as enraptured as a "motion picture audience." The Hearst papers advertised that "Miss Parsons, probably the most widely read authority on motion pictures in the country, has pictured the settings and criticized the actors of this real life drama as though it were passing before her on the silver screen." Likening the players in the trial to screen stars, Louella wrote that Mrs. Hall, on trial for the murder of her husband, had been dealt an "unsympathetic role" that she played "with realism few actresses on the screen could duplicate."34

  In between assignments she stopped by the American office in New York, where she found flowers sent from D. W. Griffith. In response, she wrote Griffith, "I do want to see you and have a talk with you, and thank you in person for your friendship, which I always know I have whether I am sick or well. There are so few people one can call friend, and I have always been so proud that I could place you in that category.35 But the point of her visit to New York was to see Peter Brady, and Louella divided her time between writing her column, which she dispatched from the American office, and rendezvous with her lover.

  In the summer of 1927, Brady, who had been appointed chairman of Mayor Jimmy Walker's committee on aviation, traveled west and arranged for Louella to join him aboard a giant army airplane known as a Fokker, at Clover Field in Los Angeles, from which they would fly to Crissy Field in San Francisco. Using the flight as a publicity stunt, Louella brought along her typewriter, donned a pair of mechanics' overalls and a twenty-five-pound parachute, and wrote her column while flying up the California coast. Articles in the Hearst papers portrayed her as a modern Nellie Bly and lauded her for her courage and adventurousness. "She is the only newspaper woman to have written a story while flying 7000 feet in the air. She is the first civilian woman to make a flight in a government plane," reported the San Francisco Examiner.36

  The landing was smooth, but she returned to find Hollywood in an uproar. In the fall of 1927, the studios were being revolutionized by sound.

  It was the single greatest transformation in motion picture history. As a business, an art form, and a medium of popular entertainment, the American cin ema-virtually every aspect of it-was affected by the arrival of sound technology in the mid-r9zos. Though sound wreaked havoc on the studios, they had seen it coming. At the turn of the century, Thomas Edison had experimented with linking film to the phonograph, and by 192o several inventors had created systems that were nearly feasible. Finally, in 1925, the Bell Telephone Company's research laboratory, Western Electric, developed and marketed a sound-on-disc process called the Vitaphone. Though the Vitaphone was primitive-the recording quality was poor, and voices came out distant and garbled-it was the first system that worked. Films, silent for thirty years, could now talk.

  Rather than prompting cheers of elation throughout Hollywood, however, the Vitaphone elicited only a lukewarm response. Talking pictures might be intriguing in theory, but in practice, applying sound technology would be time-consuming, arduous, and expensive.

  In order to produce and exhibit sound films, studios would have to not only purchase entirely new equipment but also wire all their theaters for sound, a process that averaged twenty thousand dollars per theater. Moreover, there was no guarantee that audiences would take to the "talkies." Film attendance was at an all-time high, and many fans, when interviewed by magazines, expressed reluctance to hear their screen idols talk. When a theater in Glendale, California, announced to the audience that it might soon be showing sound films, the audience burst into boos and catcalls. Many actors were bombarded by fan letters begging them not to let
their voices be recorded.37

  Thus, it was hardly a surprise when the major film studios, in 1925, exhibited little interest in the Vitaphone system. A year later, however, Warner Brothers, a "minor" Hollywood studio bent on expanding its operations and making it to the big time, decided to make the risky investment and signed a contract with Western Electric. During the 1926-27 season, Warner Brothers released nine films with recorded musical sound tracks, to mixed reviews. Though these films had synchronized sound, they did not talk, which disappointed many audiences. It was not until the fall of 1927, when Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer, a musical containing several scenes of recorded dialogue, that the talkie era really began. When the film scored high at the box office and won rave reviews, Warners announced that all its films in the 1928-29 season would be "Vitaphoned." Grudgingly, the rest of the Hollywood studios jumped on the sound bandwagon.

  Though nearly all the major studios were reluctant to invest in sound, the most reluctant was MGM. One of the most profitable and prestigious stu dios of the 192os, MGM had done well with its silent productions, and studio executives Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg saw little reason to change. Even more than Mayer and Thalberg, Hearst was opposed to sound. The high cost of wiring the theaters, he predicted, would put hundreds of independent movie houses out of business, thus cutting down on venues for his newsreels. "His pet screen hobby has always been his newsreels, and any condition within the industry that might threaten the distribution of this particular product would undoubtedly find Mr. Hearst ready to put up a tremendous fight to protect it," explained Variety.38 To make matters worse, Davies had an incurable stutter, and the talkies would almost certainly destroy her career. Hearst ordered Louella to whip up antitalkie sentiment in her column, which she did throughout late 1927 and 1928. "I have no fear that scraping, screeching, rasping sound film will disturb our peaceful motion picture theaters. The industry is too wise to spend fortunes for machines, new equipment, and sound stages to project noise that the customers do not want to hear," she wrote.39 "Who wants to have the art of pantomime utterly destroyed by a mechanical device that promotes conversation where it is unnecessary?" she asked in 192,8.40 "I do not believe any of the producers will be foolish enough to destroy the silence of the screen by attempting to make a series of one hundred percent talking pictures. It would be the height of folly. "41