"The facade looked like a combination of Rheims Cathedral and a gigantic Swiss chalet," recalled Charlie Chaplin. "Surrounding it like vanguards were five Italian villas, set in on the edge of the plateau, each housing six guests. They were furnished in Italian style with baroque ceilings from which carved seraphs and cherubs smiled down at you." Photographer Cecil Beaton, another regular guest, described it as something "right out of a fairy story. The sun poured down with theatrical brilliance on tons of white marble and white stone. There seemed to be a thousand marble statues, pedestals, urns. The flowers were unreal in their ordered profusion."27 It was Hearst's "little hideaway," his "little hilltop at San Simeon," and for over two decades, he and Davies called it home.21
In public, Hearst may have been modest about his seaside residence, but it was one of the consuming passions of his life. Built on land originally purchased by his father, George, the castle was the result of a joint collaboration by Hearst and architect Julia Morgan. Though the majority of the construction was completed in the 192os, in time for Hearst and Davies to move in in 1926, it remained a work in progress. Never quite satisfied with it, Hearst constantly added rooms and cottages, pools and gardens, more precious antiques and more elaborate facades. Hearst had an "edifice complex," pundits j oked.29
Each weekend during the late 192,os and 1930s, Hearst dispatched telegrams to the MGM studio ordering Louis B. Mayer to send up ten or twenty actors for a weekend at the ranch. Most stars were afraid to decline the offer, lest they offend Louella, Mayer, and Hearst, so the turnout was always healthy. Weekends at San Simeon became a regular feature of Hollywood celebrity life in the 1930s.
On Friday evenings at 6:30, guests assembled at the Southern Pacific sta tion in Los Angeles. They took the train to San Luis Obispo, the town nearest San Simeon, and were taken up to the castle by a fleet of Hearst's private cars. The somber procession of automobiles climbing slowly up the foggy hill looked like a "funeral procession," recalled Hedda Hopper, who was one of Hearst's regular weekend guests.30 Along the road were areas for large grazing animals, including antelope, deer, bison, elk, mountain sheep, and zebras-Hearst had the world's largest private zoo and game preserve, which housed over izo varieties of animals. In 1928 an inventory of his zoo reported twenty-seven antelope, five kinds of deer, forty-four bison, three cougars, five lions, two bobcats, a leopard, a cheetah, three kinds of bears, a chimpanzee, three Java monkeys, a tapir, sheep, goats, two llamas, two kangaroos, and a wallaby. Often the animals strayed onto the path, causing delays. Once when Louella was being driven up the hill, a moose who had settled on the road refused to budge. She and her driver waited almost an hour until it decided to leave.31
On Saturdays, Hearst planned a full morning of tennis matches, hikes, and ocean swims, and the participants were expected to enjoy themselves-or at least give the appearance-lest they insult the host. According to Hearst reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, Hearst loved to picnic, and he regularly had his weekend guests join him for pheasant and caviar beneath the shady oaks on the estate. "A picnic consisted of leaving San Simeon after lunch and stopping in a pleasant valley by a running stream. Servants went ahead with chuck wagons filled to overflowing ... with pate de fois gras, thick filet mignon, and sparkling burgundy. After sleeping on cots under army tents, guests rode all next day to one of Mr. Hearst's faraway ranches for a dinner of chicken with all the trimmings. Automobiles waited to whisk you home in the usual luxury," recalled Hopper.32 Hearst also led his guests on grueling daylong horseback rides, humiliating ordeals in which the vigorous septuagenarian outpaced sore, tired actors half his age. Director King Vidor described them as "sadistic."33 In the afternoons, guests swam in the pool, a sparkling grotto of white marble flanked by Roman columns, or read one of the nine thousand volumes in the castle's two libraries.
The focal point of a weekend at San Simeon was the Saturday evening dinner in the refectory, a dim, cavernous dining room that resembled the inside of a medieval cathedral. From the center of the long wooden table, which seated more than seventy guests, Hearst and Davies presided over the extravagant multicourse meal. Though the dinners were cooked in gourmet style and featured fine cheeses and meats-"pheasant, wild duck, partridge and venison," recalled Chaplin in his autobiography -guests received paper napkins and were offered ketchup and mustard, in their original bottles, as condiments. (A fanatic about germs, Hearst thought such arrangements more "sanitary" than more elegant serving options.) After dinner, guests were ushered to Hearst's private theater, where they watched Davies's old films.
Concerned by Davies's alcoholic tendencies, Hearst banned liquor from the castle, and guests who brought their own private bottles had them promptly confiscated by the servants. But Davies always had a stash of gin hidden in her bedroom, and when Hearst had gone to bed, the guests made merry. Davies "would get a bottle after dinner and snag two or three cronies and withdraw to the mirrored ladies' room for a pleasant aftermath," remembered actress Ilka Chase.34 One night Davies and a group of female guests were imbibing in the bathroom, and "Mr. Hearst came and threw [in] our robes and our toothbrushes," Adela St. Johns recalled. Furious, "he just opened the door and said, `if you girls are going to stay in there all night, you'll need these!"'35
Louella first went to San Simeon not long after her arrival in Hollywood, and by the late 192,os she was a regular weekend guest. According to the gardener, Louella "would come up here with her twenty-seven trunks even if she was going to stay three or four days. But she was up here a lot of the time."36 "She would like attention and sometimes she would call for me to come over, and it was only to decide which necklace she should wear, amethyst or some other necklace," recalled a housekeeper.37 Louella often used the San Simeon weekends to collect Hollywood news, and she spent much of her time working on her column, which she dispatched to the Examiner office by wire. "She was always there, and she was talking to Miss Davies about what gossip was going on in Hollywood; who was doing what, who was sleeping with whom and all that sort of stuff. That was always going on," remembered another member of the San Simeon staff 38 Hearst frequently held editorial meetings at San Simeon, and on any given weekend Hearst editors and executives Arthur Brisbane, George Young, Ray Van Ettisch, and James Richardson of the Examiner; Bill Curley, editor of the New York journalAmerican; and Walter Howey of the Chicago Herald Examiner could be found discussing finances, politics, and circulation in the refectory.
Hearst also conducted his Hollywood business at San Simeon. In the early 193os, Hearst, Davies, and actress Constance Bennett, after watching several screen tests in Hearst's private theater, made the decision to star actor Joel McRea in an upcoming Cosmopolitan-MGM film. McRae was also staying at San Simeon that weekend, but he was unaware of the decision until Louella told him the following morning. "Well congratulations," she said. "I gave you the [headline] in the Examiner this morning." Louella had been there when the decision was made, and the news was in print before McRae had even heard it.39 Actress Louise Brooks recalled that female visitors had to avoid being caught alone with Hearst. Though Hearst was never known to have seduced any of his guests, Davies was always suspicious. One weekend Hearst entered the library when Brooks was alone reading, and Brooks immediately shut the book and "fled from the room." "Had Marion come upon us," Brooks said, "she would not only have deported me from the Ranch but have ordered Louella Parsons to exterminate me from the column."40
Louella's regular attendance at San Simeon cemented her position among Hollywood's elite. Virtually every major film star of the 192oS and 1930s vacationed at San Simeon, as did major political, social, and literary figures, including Charles Lindbergh, Herbert Hoover, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, and Calvin Coolidge, among others. By the early 1930s, Louella had also become an important member of Hearst's "inner circle." According to Adela Rogers St. Johns, Louella was one of the few people whom Hearst felt he could really trust. Visitors recall that at Hearst's parties Louella sat not with the Hollywood crowd but
in a seat at the table reserved exclusively for Hearst editors. St. Johns also speculated that Hearst saw Louella not only as an employee but also as a member of his "family." Because Hearst did not have a daughter, St. Johns believed he "adopted" his favorite female writersSt. Johns, Louella, and screenwriter Frances Marion-and treated them with respect and care.4' Louella was equally devoted to Hearst. As she told reporters from the Philadelphia Sun Telegraph, "Loyalty to your company and your boss is essential to success. I can't imagine a girl accepting a salary from anyone and then talking behind his back." She meant it. Many in Hollywood recalled that Louella walked out of conversations in which Hearst was criti- cized.42
In the fall of 1931, after a long weekend at San Simeon, Louella returned to Beverly Hills to hear the tragic news that Peter Brady had been killed in a plane crash over Staten Island. An aviation buff since World War I, Brady had served as chairman of Mayor Jimmy Walker's committee on aviation and as deputy commissioner of docks, in charge of the city's airport. His funeral, on September 24, was reported on the front page of the New York Times. Honorary pallbearers included Mayor Jimmy Walker, former governor Al Smith, and Governor Franklin Roosevelt. Over fifteen hundred friends and admir ers attended, blocking the street in front of the church where the funeral was held.43
The death of a man she had loved for nearly a decade was devastating to Louella. "It is hard for me to talk about him but I thought you might like to know how much he always admired you and how often we have talked of your stand on different important matters," Louella wrote to Hearst not long after the accident. 44 Louella went immediately to New York, though she did not arrive in time for the funeral. For the rest of her life, she hated flying, with a vengeance.
By 1931, Louella had changed her approach to gossip writing. Gone were the flowery, saccharine descriptions of the stars that had filled her 192,os column; by the early thirties her writing had become more pointed and judgmental. The change reflected, in part, the new cultural climate brought about by the depression. Stories about stars' innocent yet lavish lifestyles became less appealing in a nation confronted with the reality of survival in hard times. During the early 193os, exhibitors' polls conducted by the trade journal Motion Picture Herald regularly indicated that "down to earth stars" were the most popular among audiences; the folksy comic Will Rogers, and Marie Dressler and Wally Beery, who played "two old soaks making do" in the comedy Min and Bill, outranked such glamorous idols as Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer.45 Even by the late 19zos, Louella had noticed that fans were tiring of the descriptions of stars as untouchable "heroes and heroines" and clamored for "realism of the `just folks' brand."46 So although writers in the early depression years continued to portray Hollywood idyllically, they focused increasingly on actors' mistakes. No longer monogamous homebodies or prim, jeweled divas entertaining genteelly in their mansions, actors now loved and lost, married and divorced, and became generally more human.47
Though Louella had reported on actors' divorces in the 19zos, during the early 193os divorce stories became a staple of her column. (The divorces of particularly prominent actors, such as Dolores Del Rio and Jean Harlow, sometimes made the front page of the Examiner.) Divorce was a hot topic in the popular media, one that touched a nerve in the body politic and exposed a "raw point of friction between the old morality and the new," according to historian J. Herbie DiFonzo. Rising divorce rates in the late 192-os had sparked concern over what was seen as a rupture in the traditional balance of power between the sexes, since divorce was commonly viewed as an expres sion of female sexual and economic independence.48 Playing to the still largely conservative public on the issue, Louella lamented the frequency of divorce among stars and turned her columns into paeans to the virtues of monogamous, heterosexual romance.
According to Louella, poor decisions often led to marital breakup Jean Harlow had married when she was only sixteen, and "you know how these childhood affairs sometimes turn out," Louella wrote-but more frequently it was stardom that had caused problems. "It is ironic that the very things that first attracted Estelle to Jack should later become the bone of contention in their domestic life," Louella wrote in a 1931 story on the divorce of actress Estelle Taylor and prizefighter Jack Dempsey. "The aura of fame and hero worship that surrounded Jack ... were undoubtedly the qualities which appealed to Estelle ... when she married Jack. Yet these were the very things she sought to change about him after she became Mrs. Dempsey."49 Though Louella never denied the many pleasures of stardom, she suggested that stars paid a heavy emotional toll for their fame. Success on the screen, she explained to her readers, did not always translate into real-life happiness.
This take on stardom-at once glamorous but freighted with potential emotional perils-was common in journalistic accounts of Hollywood in the 193os. Like most Hollywood writers, Louella followed what historian Charles Ponce de Leon has described as the master plot of celebrity journalism-the struggle of celebrities to achieve "true success," which was not the same as material success. In the typical true-success narrative, good, deserving stars worked hard, stayed true to their roots, and gained a sense of accomplishment and personal fulfillment. By contrast, those who "went Hollywood," who forgot their true identities and meshed with the false celebrity persona, paid with failed romances or careers. By lauding the virtues of personal growth and hard work, and by critiquing material wealth, the stories at once humanized stars and salved readers' economic anxieties. During the depression, more than ever, readers took a certain comfort in the unhappiness of the rich.50
Despite her accounts of the potential dangers of the "Hollywood game," Louella often criticized those who didn't play it. This was done less for the benefit of her readers than as a reminder to unruly stars who defied the studios, Louella, and Hearst. Throughout the 193os Louella used her column to pursue both personal vendettas and the economic and political interests of Hearst and the studios.
Stars were among the most highly paid people in the country, yet those contracted to the major studios were locked into a kind of indentured servitude. Because their selling power depended almost exclusively on their public image, their behavior was carefully controlled by the studios, which dictated not only their dress, diet, and leisure activities but sometimes even their romantic affairs. In his researches into Hollywood in the 193os, writer Leo Rosten discovered that the Twentieth Century Fox studio had engaged eight of its top stars, four men and four women, in a "libidinal round robin" in which they were paired off with one another successively. This practice, apparently common among the studios, was done entirely for publicity. News of the "couples"' unions and subsequent breakups was given to the gossip columnists and fan magazines.s' Stars were required by the studios to consent to interviews with the fan magazine writers and movie columnists and to call them with news. When stars refused to comply, Louella attacked them in the column. Those who remained recalcitrant were subject to more severe attacks, which often erupted into long-term feuds. Throughout the 193os, Louella maintained feuds with several well-known producers and actors, whom she routinely lambasted in the column. Knowing that "catfights" between women, which played on female stereotypes, made good copy, Louella publicized her disputes with actresses, while her battles with powerful Hollywood men often took place behind closed doors.
One of the most notorious feuds of the early 1930s was between Louella and Greta Garbo. Garbo had come from her native Sweden to MGM in the mid-19zos and quickly proved herself one of the studio's least cooperative actresses. Taking issue with her salary, her contract, and the trumped-up rumors about her personal and romantic life that the studio had circulated as part of its publicity campaign, Garbo had on several occasions threatened to go back to Europe. This hardly endeared her to Louella, who thought the actress "ungrateful." But Garbo's worst sin, to Louella, was her notorious reclusiveness and her hostility toward the press. Louella first encountered this on the MGM lot in the late 192,os when she went to watch Garbo on the set. On her way, she found hersel
f lost in a "mazelike series of screens" that had been set up to block her view-Garbo refused to work when there were visitors on the set. Garbo had also turned down Louella's requests for an interview and, at one social event, literally ran away from Louella when she saw her. Each of these transgressions was reported in the column. "She certainly has never let any newspaper writer peep beneath the surface of that cold, reserved nature. Interviews are absolutely unwelcome," Louella told her readers in 1930. "I met her one time at a dinner party at the home of a friend. She was charm ing, delightful, and pleasant. Then when she learned to whom she was speaking, she ran and got her hat and dashed out of the house."52 Louella's antipathy toward Garbo never diminished, and by the end of the decade she was still attacking her. "Garbo's mystery pose has about worn itself out," she wrote in 1936. "People are tired of the bad manners she has displayed, and I venture to predict that she will not be able to get away with her actions much longer."53
Louella was also hostile to Jeanette MacDonald, who arrived in Hollywood in the late 192os. The feud started at a dinner party in 1929 hosted by director Ernst Lubitsch. After dinner, a former silent film star, Carmel Myers, began singing a few songs in the living room, and most of the guests went to listen. But MacDonald and a few others remained in the dining area, and Louella, seeing MacDonald's absence as a show of condescension, was appalled and subsequently criticized her in the column.54 "After reading the interview Jeanette MacDonald gave to the New York Herald in Paris, I can only hope she was misquoted," Louella wrote. "She is quoted as saying, `Now is the time for other countries to catch up with the United States in movie production. Our producers are fumbling around, unable to tell what the public wants and curbed in their expenditures due to the depression.' Too bad such a statement ever got into print."55 Later Louella opined, "Perhaps if Miss MacDonald intends to remain on the screen, she should guard her weight as carefully as she does her voice."56 Katharine Hepburn, known for her unwillingness to cooperate with the press, also came under fire. "Extra Extra! Katharine Hepburn has proved that she occasionally has human impulses, that she is not all snobbery and self-satisfaction. Miss Hepburn forgot to be arrogant when she had a chance to take Adalyn Doyle under her wing and give her an opportunity to develop into a motion picture actress. The Doyle girl, who had been Miss Hepburn's stand-in in many pictures, has the same gawky awkward walk that characterized Hepburn's movements. She resembles her benefactress, however, only in a general way. Adalyn Doyle is prettier than Katharine Hepburn, who by no stretch of the imagination can 57 ever lay any claim to beauty," Louella wrote in 1933.
The First Lady of Hollywood Page 18