The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  Stars and publicists who showed up at Louella's house for interviews were subject to a precise and unvarying routine. "You'd go into her game room with the black and white floor. And Harriet would be there or Dorothy Manners taking notes. You'd have tea and Collins the butler would serve. You could hear the clackety clack of the teletype machine which was in the office upstairs. She had this enormous picture of Hearst on the wall," recalled publicist Frank Liberman. Louella would scrawl her notes in a large, almost illegible hand on big yellow tablets of paper. Sometimes Dorothy Manners conducted the interview, "but Louella would often call you to follow up.... With Louella you had to be direct and honest," Liberman noted.35 Publicists who planted false rumors or gave important news to other columnists were subject to immediate punishment-blacklisting from the column, or at the very least, a painful tongue-lashing. "I was out of her column at least twice because I didn't give her news," recalled Walter Seltzer, who worked for the MGM publicity department in the 1930s.36 At times Louella would curse so badly that she had to mention it at confession.37

  During 1933, Louella's shrewd news-gathering tactics won her three exclusive news stories that made international headlines. The first was on Joan Crawford, one of the most popular stars of the early 1930s. Crawford, a former chorus line dancer named Lucille LeSueur who was originally from Texas, was discovered by MGM talent scouts in 1924 and was cast in several films as an "athletic type." By the late 192os, however, in response to audience comments, the studio began giving her fashionable, sexually charged "flapper" roles. When Crawford's screen image changed, so did her real-life habits. Determined to become as glamorous offscreen as she appeared to be in movies, she lost weight, studied etiquette, and mimicked the styles and mannerisms of the upper class. She subsequently attracted the attention of several wealthy, eligible Hollywood bachelors, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr., son of actor Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford's stepson.

  When Crawford wed Fairbanks Jr. in 1929, fan magazines described the union as a storybook wedding. Like Cinderella, Crawford had triumphed over her hard-scrabble roots and married the "Hollywood prince." Though Louella, like the other writers, had hyped the marriage in the column, she never liked Crawford, who had often snubbed her at parties. Consequently, Crawford received relatively few mentions in the column until the spring of 1933, when Fairbanks Jr. found himself embroiled in an alienation-ofaffections suit. A man named Jorgen Dietz, a stranger to both Fairbanks and Crawford, pressed charges against Fairbanks, claiming falsely that the actor had "stolen the love" of his wife. Appalled, Louella turned to her typewriter and began writing an article in defense of Fairbanks. When Louella called Crawford for a quote, Crawford surprised Louella by insisting that she hold off on the article. "If you wait I will have another story for you," Crawford said cryptically. Intrigued, Louella drove to Crawford's house in Beverly Hills.

  It did not take much prodding to coax a confession. Crawford and Fairbanks were having marital problems, the actress admitted, and she had decided to initiate a divorce. A sympathetic story about the lawsuit would look awkward in light of the breakup. Thrilled with the front-page story she'd just received, Louella thanked Crawford and turned to leave. Just as she reached the door, Crawford stopped her. Embarrassed, Crawford admitted that she'd already broken the news to another writer-her friend Katherine Albert, a former MGM publicist who was a member of the Hollywood Women's Press Club and a freelancer for the fan magazine Modern Screen. Though upset, Louella knew she would still get the exclusive. Modern Screen, a monthly publication, was scheduled to appear later that week, while Louella's story would be out in two days. Louella borrowed Crawford's typewriter and in the living room wrote the story, which she called in to the Examiner.38

  On March 18, 1933, movie fans read the news:

  Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Joan Crawford Reveal Separation

  Both Deny Any Other Person Causing Marital Rift Actor Asserts He'll Try to Win Back His Wife

  BY LOUELLA 0. PARSONS

  Joan and Doug, famous film stars, at one time considered the happiest married couple in the colony, have decided to separate. No divorce is being planned and each is emphatic in the statement that no other man or woman has entered into their matrimonial difficulties.

  Joan yesterday, facing an emotional crisis that equaled any dramatic role she has ever played on the screen, begged me to say that the heart balm suit filed ... by Jorgen Dietz against Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. [,] had absolutely nothing to do with her decision to seek her matrimonial freedom.

  White faced and with sad, tragic eyes, Joan said, "The last thing in the world I want is to hurt my husband. I am seeking this separation because I know we will both be happier apart."39

  But the Crawford-Fairbanks story was a minor victory compared to Louella's exclusive in June 1933. This one involved an old friend, Mary Pickford. Louella and Pickford had known each other since 1915, when Louella interviewed Pickford for her Chicago Herald column. Since then they had been friends, and when Pickford married Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in 1920, Louella was one of the first reporters to break the news, which appeared in her New York Morning Telegraph column. At the time, Pickford and Fairbanks were the most popular film couple in the world. Pickford, nicknamed "America's sweetheart," was known for her sweet, pixie image, and she played young girls in her films, even when she was in her thirties. Fairbanks, best known for his swashbuckling roles, had become a national icon of athleticism and rugged masculinity. Their union resulted not only in several happy years at Pickfair, the couple's palatial Beverly Hills mansion, but also in a fruitful creative alliance symbolized by United Artists, the independent film studio they founded with Charlie Chaplin in 1920.

  By the late 19zos, however, weakened by the strain of celebrity life and their declining careers-neither one had weathered the transition to soundthe marriage began to disintegrate. By 193o Fairbanks had taken up with Sylvia Ashley, an English heiress, and began spending time in London. According to Gloria Swanson, an upset Pickford began drinking. In July 1933, when he was overseas, Fairbanks sent Pickford a telegram informing her that he planned to stay with Ashley and make films in England. Pickford took it as an indication that the marriage was over, and she decided to initiate divorce proceedings. In the midst of her despair she called her friend Frances Marion, an MGM screenwriter who was also a longtime acquaintance of Louella's. Marion arranged to meet Pickford for lunch at the Vendome Restaurant in Hollywood, and she brought Louella along.

  Pickford claimed that Louella's appearance at the Vendome was a surprise. "I never dreamed [Frances] would invite a newspaper columnist along," Pickford wrote in her autobiography. According to Pickford, "Without beating around the bush," Louella asked about Fairbanks and Ashley, and Pickford showed her the telegram. She asked Louella to keep the telegram a secret, but when Louella announced her intention to reveal the news, the actress "learned quickly of her folly."40 According to Marion, however, Pickford had known Louella was coming along and purposely showed her the telegram, hoping that she would print it. According to Marion's biographer, Cari Beauchamp, Marion and Pickford had "talked about the idea of Mary's going public with the separation. Her pride mandated that she announce it before it was forced on her, and she called Frances to say she was going to tell a woman she knew at the LA Times." Marion told Pickford that she was making a mistake, and that the story instead should go to Louella. "After all Hearst has done for you. You have asked them before to keep things out of the paper and they have done it. If you give someone else the story now it is unfair." The two women agreed that, at the Vendome lunch, Pickford would break the news to Louella.41

  In the false version that appeared in Louella's autobiography-an attempt to portray herself as a sympathetic friend of Pickford's-she walked into the Vendome clueless. She was leaving for a weekend with Harry at Lake Arrowhead when she received a call from Pickford inviting her to lunch. She arrived late at the restaurant, and one of the other guests said, "Mary, aren't you going to tell Louella
what you told us?" Louella claimed that she was devastated when Pickford blurted out the news. "I went back home but I didn't write the story," she wrote in her autobiography. "I kept thinking that if I didn't print Mary's decision to divorce Doug it might never happen, but it was Mary herself who changed my mind. She called me later that night and said, `If you don't use the story Louella, I'll give it to someone else."' Though she claimed that she "hated to do it," Louella ran the news in the Examiner that evening. "I maneuvered to hold up the story until the final edition ... on a Saturday night. That was the zero hour when the rival typesetters would not be on the job. For hours, after my story broke Sunday morning, no other news service could catch up with us!"42

  Then there was a fourth version of the story, a false account that appeared in several rival newspapers after the divorce announcement. According to this version, at the luncheon Louella told Pickford that she had heard a rumor that Fairbanks and Ashley were thinking of marrying. Heartbroken, Pickford broke down and announced her intention to leave Fairbanks, which Louella printed. For years, Louella vehemently denied this "bitter, well-circulated" account. "No scoop in the world is worth telling a woman something that will break her heart. I knew nothing to tell Mary until she told me," she maintained. "There was far more of the Parsons luck involved in getting that story than any other reportorial factor."43

  Luck, in Louella's version, but according to Pickford, deceit. After the story, Louella and Pickford were barely on speaking terms. Reporters mobbed Pickford as she came out of church and thronged around the gates of Pickfair for days, and Pickford blamed the press circus on Louella. Meanwhile, Louella's exclusive not only ran in all of the Hearst papers and syndicate subscribers but also was picked up by non-Hearst publications across North and South America, Europe, and even parts ofAsia. "Heartbroken and with tearfilled eyes, America's sweetheart was facing the biggest situation in her life. Pickfair, the beautiful home built with such love by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, is to be sold, which can mean only one thing-marital unhappiness. The marriage of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, so long regarded as the ideal motion picture union, seems destined to end in the di vorce courts," Louella stated in her typically overwrought style. It was, she maintained, "the biggest story of my career. "44

  A few weeks later Louella scored another exclusive, this time involving an unlikely subject. In the summer of 1933, the famed British playwright George Bernard Shaw was a guest at San Simeon, and when Louella came up for a weekend, she approached him for an article. Shaw had successfully eluded the press during his visit to the States, and Louella dreamed of being the first reporter to score an interview. After pressure from Marion Davies, Shaw consented, on the promise that Louella would show him the story before it went to press. Louella and Shaw went off to the parlor, and Frances Marion, who was also at San Simeon that weekend, sat in and observed.

  Marion was amazed when Louella began firing off a stream of ridiculous and insensitive questions. When Louella asked Shaw whether he had written Cashel Byron c Profession with boxer Gene Tunney in mind, Marion could hardly believe it. "Good heavens woman, I wrote Cashel Byron c Profession before he was born," Shaw replied. After asking him about his relationship with Ellen Terry and his opinion of actress Sarah Bernhardt, Louella went back to her room to write the story. Later that afternoon she emerged with a draft, which she showed to Marion. Poorly written and filled with mistakesLouella described Shaw as looking like "a jolly Santa Claus with a white beard"-the article was appalling, but Marion said nothing.

  When Louella showed the article to Shaw, the playwright, disgusted, pulled out a pen and made line-by-line corrections, then signed it. Only then did Marion realize Louella's ploy. By playing dumb, "with her innocent faraway expression and her voice honey sweet," Louella had not only gotten her article, which appeared in Screenland magazine in July 1933, but a valuable signed manuscript.45

  Still basking in her success, that fall she received an unexpected telegram at the Examiner office. Ralph Wonders, a representative of CBS Radio, had lined up a sponsor for a thirteen-week gossip show that needed a host, and he immediately thought of Louella. Intrigued, Louella wired back: "Need to know type of product program is to sponsor before deciding." The account, it turned out, was with Charis, the makers of a line of women's undergarments. If she accepted the assignment, she would be required to plug the company's best-selling product, corsets. Concerned about the possible effects on her image, she wrote to Wonders that she was having second thoughts. Won ders replied swiftly: though the program would be interspersed with commercials for Charis, Louella herself was to "make no mention ofproduct."46

  Louella accepted the offer, then wired E. J. Gough, head of Hearst's King Features syndicate. "How much [should] I charge per week? What do you think would be right? Since I have to give one third of all I make to Mr. Hearst, I would appreciate your opinion.... Do you think $iooo would be all right?"47 The salary was particularly important that fall. In May, with some hesitation, Louella had taken a to percent pay cut-one of the Hearst Corporation's belt-tightening measures in response to the depression. Though Louella had initially protested, after being chastised by Examiner editor George Young she agreed. ("Thanks Louella," Hearst wired her. "I am glad you did that for the general effect on our morale.")48 With King Features' approval, Louella entered negotiations with CBS for a thousand-dollar-a-week salary, and in December 1933 Louella, King Features, and CBS signed a threeway contract for a fifteen-minute radio program to begin in February 1934.

  Since the Charis show, like the Sunkist show, would be based on "free tal- ent"-stars would appear on the show gratis in exchange for radio publicity and praise in Louella's column-it was up to Louella to line up the prospective guests. During mid-December 1933, while Louella worked to line up a slate of stars for the show, theater owners throughout the country, hearing about the upcoming program, sent angry letters to Will Hays. "Protests from exhibitors piled into the Hays Office against the proposed tieup of stars and screen personalities with Louella Parsons for a series of broadcast interviews she is scheduled to start in February," reported Variety. The exhibitors feared that potential moviegoers would stay home instead of going to the theater; "competition from the air," wrote Variety, "is terrific enough at present." Although the studios had since rescinded a 1932 ban on radio performances by stars, the theater owners hoped that the Hays Office could pressure Louella to back out of the show.49 In response to the exhibitors, the Hays Office assured the theater owners that no actress in her right mind would "be stupid enough to fall for any attempt to get [her] on the air for a corset program." The actresses "undoubtedly would be astute enough to understand that if they [promoted] corsets, audiences would get the impression that they were corset wearers."50 The Hays Office was wrong. By the end of December 1933, actors May Robson, Norma Shearer, Connie Bennett, Kay Francis, and Bebe Daniels had agreed to appear on the program, and Shearer allegedly turned down a radio appearance that would have netted her twenty-five hundred dollars in order to be on Louella's show. On Wednesday, February z8, 1934, the program debuted at 10:15 A.M.

  The show opened with a swing tune from the Raymond Paige Orchestra, a popular 193os dance band, followed by a short commercial for Charis. According to radio historian John Dunning, the commercial was a "humorous affair in which the word `corset' could not be used." Listeners were instead told how to "avoid abdominal bulge," a phrase that caused titters throughout the country each time it was read.51 Louella and the guest then began what appeared to be spontaneous chitchat-casual conversation about Hollywood fashions, the star's family and marriage, and her latest films.

  In reality, the gossip was entirely scripted. Louella had written the dialogue for the first few episodes while recovering from a minor car accident in early January 1934. ("I would like to have had more time to prepare them," she complained to Ralph Wonders. "When I tell you that I have worked two nights to get this out, you will see that it is a little difficult with my newspa
per work.")52 Later in the season, Louella and writers Edgar Allan Wolf and Jock Lawrence met at the Maple Drive house each Sunday and worked on scripts over lavish lunches of Chinese, Mexican, and Armenian food that were provided by Harry. (The lunches, Louella recalled, became more celebrated in Hollywood than the broadcasts.)53

  Although Charis was pleased with Louella's scripts, the company was less enthusiastic about her radio voice. On the Sunkist program, audiences had complained that her voice was timid and "quivery," and though she had since taken diction lessons, she still sounded whiny. "I have always been terribly self-conscious about my voice. I do not know whether the fact that I had tuberculosis has anything to do with it, but when I get scared, my voice gets high and thin," she admitted. 54 Nonetheless, she pulled off the thirteen-week series with virtually no audience complaint. Only once that spring did she commit a major faux pas, when, during one episode, she unexpectedly extended an interview with Connie Bennett. There was time left in the show, and since the interview was going well, Louella decided to continue. This meant that one of the Raymond Paige Orchestra's musical numbers would have to be cut. Outraged, Paige and the orchestra stalked to an adjacent studio and had the line switched over. They then played their number, which went out over the air while Louella and Bennett continued their interview, not knowing they were speaking into dead microphones.55