The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  Despite the mistakes and the embarrassing corset connection, the program earned praise from critics and listeners and hundreds of fan letters each week. "Dear Miss Parsons, welcome back to the mike! You are ... my favorite columnist. I'll be reading you and hearing you!" wrote a woman from De- troit.56 "While you and Connie Bennett were chatting in Hollywood, we back in Iowa were having coffee with our lunch. Your broadcast came over very clear and we want to hear more from you. We're for you, Louella O. Parsons, and we'll be listening Wednesday," reported a woman from Tabor, Iowa.57

  Many of the letters were from working women, Louella's traditional fan base. During the depression, women's workforce participation rose only slightly-from 24 percent of all workers to 2-5 percent-but their average age increased. A large percentage of working women in the 1930s were over twenty-five and married, and they sought work to contribute to the family income during the economic crisis.58 Louella's fans sometimes complained that her show was broadcast in the morning, when many of them were at work. "This letter is being written to say I don't like your radio program. Why? Because I never hear it. Why must you put on such a program at 10:15 A.M.? It is at that time most of the women are either slaving away in someone's office, trying to sell something to a very fussy customer, or busy making beds," wrote one fan. "It has been said that heaven helps the working girl. Now Louella, won't you please help the working girl and arrange your program for some evening hour so that we, too, may enjoy it? ... Now just to prove to you that I am not a crab, I want you to know that I enjoy your column in the Examiner very much," she continued. "I have it with my coffee in the morning. Instead of coffee and donuts I have coffee and Louella Parsons. The time it takes to drink a cup of coffee is just time enough to read your column." "Your daily column is one reason why I take the Post-Intelligencer," wrote Eva Gove of Seattle. The column "is nearly always read and nearly always about the first thing that is." In 1934, Louella was receiving over eight hundred fan letters a week.59

  Like her column and Sunday feature articles, the shows were presented as homey "chats" between Louella and the stars, and listeners commented that the program provided an "intimate touch" that the column sometimes missed.60 Indeed, the letters reveal the intimacy and familiarity that many fans felt with Louella. Fans besieged her with requests for information. "I just wondered if you would mind answering a few questions about my favorite actor, Robert Montgomery. Will you please tell me the name of his wife, how old he is, what his favorite hobby is," came a typical request from Chicago. They also asked her to pass along greetings to actors .61 As Louella had hoped, fans saw her as their liaison to the stars. The fact that Louella was a friend of Bebe Daniels, a fan wrote, "makes me feel like we are all pals. Let's hear about her in your column a lot. Do have her on the air regularly. You are lucky to know such a grand person, for I know you are grand yourself. "62

  Thrilled by the response to the series, in the spring of 1934 Charis and CBS urged Louella to consider signing another thirteen-week contract. In the meantime, Louella had received offers from other sponsors. She told the network, "I am very glad to consider any proposition you may have had for me. My relations with Columbia have been very pleasant and with Charis, too, and naturally I shall be glad to give you the preference, provided the offers are as good as the ones I have received."63 Two weeks later Charis came back with an offer of $i,zoo a week, but by that time Louella had already signed a deal with William Paley of CBS and the Campbell Soup Company for a weekly show called Hollywood Hotel. The hourlong broadcast, slated for Friday evenings at nine, would earn Louella a weekly salary of $z,z5o and primetime exposure. In the summer of 1934, she signed the contract and began preparing for the show, which was slated to begin that fall.

  Hollywood Hotel was not the only new responsibility Louella took on that summer. In June 1934, she also began a series of articles, "Hollywood Is My Home Town," for Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine. Written in her familiar "just folks" vein, the articles likened the movie capital to a small midwestern town like Freeport or Dixon, Illinois. In Hollywood, like Dixon, "I can run two streets over to Ruth Chatterton's ... house and borrow a cup of sugar, or I can pop in on Jessica and Richard Barthelmess and beg for a bit of lunch," she wrote. "My neighbors here are hard working folk who take their work as seriously as the village plumber, the skilled architect or the busy clerk in the general store. Their home lives are as simple, as wholesome and as natural as if they were living in the thriving cities of Muncie, Indiana, or Freeport, Illinois, instead of dwelling in the exciting kingdom of filmland."64 The series earned her several hundred fan letters, causing the Cosmopolitan editors to extend the series into the spring of 1935.65

  While she was in New York visiting the Cosmopolitan headquarters, Louella covered the Max Baer-Primo Camera fight in Madison Square Garden. Thanks to Harry's position as a California athletic commissioner, they had ringside seats. "The primitive emotions of our earthly Adam before Mother Eve donned the concealing fig leaf seethed in the breasts of the snarling, howling mob of 50,000 souls." The ticket holders, who "paid a big price for the privilege of seeing Max Baer knock out Primo Camera in the Madison Square Garden Bowl," became "temporary maniacs. I was one of those maniacs," read her syndicated dispatch.66 Exhausted from her working vacation, in late June 1934 she returned to Hollywood to renew her Hearst contract.67

  Harriet, too, was taking great strides in her career. Since 1930, she not only had taken over Louella's column during the latter's summer vacations but also had written short Sunday feature stories for the Hearst papers, freelanced for Modern Screen magazine, and headed a movie section, "Hollywood in Review," for Woman's Day magazine. Then, in 1934, she changed directions and signed a contract with Columbia Pictures to direct and produce Screen Snapshots, a series of short films depicting Hollywood stars "at work and at play." As "producer, writer, director, narrator, cutter, location manager, casting director, and idea man," as she later described it, she produced the "snapshots" almost single-handedly.68 Harriet, who had never had any experience in film production, at first wondered why Harry Cohn of Columbia approached her for the job. Then she realized that "it was a favor to Mother, who could help get him the stars he wanted." The job made her the only woman producer in Hollywood and, with the exception of Dorothy Arzner, who directed sixteen feature films in the 193os and 1940s, the only woman director.

  Though she could always get her foot in the door through Louella's connections, Harriet felt that she had to work "twice as hard" to prove herself. "I had two strikes against me: I was the woman behind the camera at a time when there were none, and I was Louella's daughter," she recalled.69 By the mid-1930s, that had become something of a liability.

  At 9:0o P.M. on Friday, October 5, 1934, radio listeners turned on their sets and heard what sounded like a telephone operator. "Hollywood Hotel, Hollywood Hotel. Good evening," the voice said. In the background were clicks, scratches, and operators' voices; it was so realistic that many listeners thought they had tapped into a switchboard. At last they heard the strains of the Ted Fio Rito Orchestra and the announcer, Ken Niles. Tonight, Niles told them, they were to be special guests at one of the poshest celebrity hangouts in the world. For an hour, Louella Parsons would transport them to the Orchid Room, a star-studded nightclub in the Hollywood Hotel.

  In reality, there was a Hollywood Hotel, an imposing Spanish-style building at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. Built in 1903 for Southern California's first tourists, it became a mecca for actors, who often stayed there upon arriving in Hollywood. Between 1912 and 1925, "the Who's Who of the movie capital lived there," recalled one Hollywood journalist. Jack Warner, Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer, Jesse Lasky, Gloria Swanson, and Pola Negri, among other film notables, would meet on the front porch every evening, and on Thursday nights the rugs in the lobby were rolled back and the guests danced to jazz records.70 But there was no "Orchid Room." The fictional lounge had been created for the radio program, and the show was actually
broadcast from a studio at radio station KHJ in Los Angeles. Yet most listeners believed the imaginary nightspot was real. After introductions by actor Dick Powell, the show's emcee, Louella "entered" the Orchid Room and began "chatting" with the episode's featured actors. To create the illusion of being in a nightclub, radio technicians tinkled forks and glasses in the background and a group of radio actors nicknamed "the gay ad libbers" chatted quietly: "Look, there's Ginger Rogers! Isn't Connie Bennett wearing a marvelous dress!"

  Like the Charis show, Hollywood Hotel was another "free talent" program. In addition to celebrity interviews, the program featured film previews, which were readings of short scenes from upcoming releases. In the first broadcast, Claudette Colbert and William Warren read from the script of the 1934 film Imitation of Life. During the program's first two seasons, Gloria Swanson, William Powell, Constance Bennett, Gary Cooper, Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, Jean Arthur, Frederick March, Mae West, Bette Davis, Lionel Barrymore, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck, Errol Flynn, Marlene Dietrich, Spencer Tracy, and the Marx Brothers performed. The star-studded program was broadcast on seventytwo radio stations from coast to coast.

  Though the stars and studios resented Louella's use of actors' unpaid services, they profited from the free publicity. Many studios, in fact, required their stars to appear on the show, both for publicity and to keep in Louella's favor. But not all the actors were equally agreeable, and in November 1934 Variety reported that Louella had "asked a picture star to sing on her air program and was informed by the star that she'd love to do it for so much money. Columnist blew up and chirped that as long as she syndicated her column, the star's name would never appear in it."71 The "picture star" was Jeanette MacDonald, who, as a result, was banned from the column for the next few years. At a wedding reception for Ginger Rogers and Lew Ayres, Louella walked up to MacDonald amidst a crowd of guests and said, "I think you're a bitch." "Thank you Louella," MacDonald replied. "May I say that the thought is mutual?"72

  MacDonald's blowup was just the beginning of Louella's troubles with the show. In January 1935, Louella interrupted a musical number during a broadcast to report the death of actor Lowell Sherman. "Friends, I want to tell you Lowell Sherman died just a few moments ago," she announced. Variety called it "the most flagrant case of bad judgment ever launched over the air," and Paul Kennedy, one of the Scripps-Howard News Service's radio critics, nominated Louella as the season's worst performer. Later that winter, despite her testy relationship with Louella, Mae West agreed to appear on the show. But she was not going to make things easy. During the dress rehearsal, West stopped the orchestra just before a song she was to sing. "Where's the spotlight?" she asked. The show's producer, Bill Bacher, told her that they never used lighting on the show. "I don't sing without a spot," she said. Bacher repeated his explanation and brushed her off. That night when the orchestra began the opening bars of her song, she went to the microphone and said, "I'm supposed to sing a song here. But I don't think I'm going to do it." Hands on her hips, West shuffled offstage.73

  In April 1934, the J. Walter Thompson agency, which produced the program, chastised Louella for attempting to line up actors who were already under contract to other sponsors. Mary Pickford, who had mended fences with Louella since the divorce story and had agreed to appear on Hollywood Hotel, was yanked from the program at the last minute when she found that her existing radio contract with Royal Gelatine made it impossible for her to go on the air. Angry that she had to line up a guest at the last minute, Louella threatened her with blacklisting from the column unless she appeared on the show. But Pickford refused, insisting that her hands were tied.74 The relationship between the two women again turned icy.

  At the end of Hollywood Hotel's three-year run, approximately two million dollars worth of services had been extracted from actors for free. As a result, the entire program cost only between $iz,5oo and $15,ooo a week to produce, a fraction of what it would have cost had the actors been paid. Looking back, many stars found it hard to believe that they had actually agreed to appear on the show. Recalled Myrna Loy, who read scenes from The Thin Man on the program, "We didn't want to-those scenes don't come across on radio-but the studio made you do it to keep in Louella's good graces. Talk about blackmail!"75

  They got points with Louella-and Campbell's soup. At the end of the show the actors were given a free case, either tomato or chicken. At least that choice was theirs.

  ALL HIS LIFE, HEARST HAD DREAMED OF THE PRESIDENCY. It was a fitting aspiration for a man with lofty ideals and a regal vision of himself. Though he had served in Congress as a Democratic representative from New York from 1903 to 1907, he lost his bid for the New York governorship and, in 1904, failed in his attempt to win his party's nomination for the presidency. But his fantasies lived on. For the rest of his life, Hearst had an active hand in national politics, using his film and publishing empire to influence, manipulate, and in some cases help elect America's presidents.

  In the 1932 presidential election, Hearst lent his support to Franklin Roosevelt, the popular New York Democrat. Through publicity in his papers, Hearst practically delivered the election to Roosevelt on the basis of Roosevelt's isolationist foreign policy and what Hearst perceived as Roosevelt's "centrist" take on domestic policy. Unlike Republican Louis B. Mayer, Hearst was critical of the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, whose insensitivity to workers' interests, he believed, was pushing American workers toward rebellion. In her column Louella praised the charismatic New York governor who promised to boost Hollywood's sagging fortunes. "At last we have a man at the helm who talks directly to us and gives us a confidence we haven't had since 1929," Louella told her readers. "Today he is the hero of the film colony. He isn't just a public idol, sitting on a throne, he is a close friend." He is "the man who will lead us out of all this darkness into sunshine," she wrote.'

  During Roosevelt's first year in office, Hearst offered two "presents" to the new president. The first was a "Buy American and Spend American" campaign in which, every day for two months, beginning in late December 1932, the front pages of Hearst's twenty-seven newspapers featured three or four stories urging Americans to help end the depression by boycotting foreign products, including foreign movie stars. "We are going to have the greatest drive for American stars the world has ever seen. It will be `Buy American' in the studios as well as in the shops," Louella told her readers in January 1933.2 The second present to Roosevelt came in the form of a film. Shortly after the election, Hearst's Cosmopolitan productions, in partnership with MGM, produced a political parable about a Roosevelt-like president who rescues America from a devastating depression. Louella gave Gabriel over the White House a glowing review, writing that the film "strikes a high intensity and dynamic force. Destined to become the most talked of film of the year, it is more sensational than any sex problem play and more exciting than any murder mystery."3 Following the press buildup, the film not only was successful at the box office but also received high praise from Roosevelt, who personally sent Hearst his thanks.

  Both Hearst and MGM studio's head, Louis B. Mayer, contributed to the film, but Mayer's influence was much greater. Mayer altered several scenes in the film, including one involving a presidential speech to Congress that Hearst claimed was based on his political editorials. "I think you have impaired the effectiveness of the [scene] because you have been afraid to say the things which I wrote and which I say daily in my newspapers and which you commend me for saying but still do not sufficiently approve to put in your film," Hearst wrote to Mayer in the spring of 1933. "There were a lot of alterations in the picture which were not requested by the government and which in my humble opinion were not necessary."4 The dispute between Hearst and Mayer over Gabriel was a sign of the growing tensions between the publisher and MGM, differences that revolved around politics and Marion Davies's career.

  In the fall of 1933, Davies appeared in Going Hollywood a musical that became the most successful film during
her tenure at MGM. For Davies's costar, director Arthur Freed wanted to get Bing Crosby, who was under contract at Paramount, because he "knew Marion Davies couldn't sing." Freed got Mayer to borrow Crosby from Paramount through negotiations brokered by Louella. Though it was Crosby who made the film successful, Hearst disliked Crosby, who was known around Hollywood to be a drinker and womanizer. "Hearst didn't like Bing. I had a tough time selling Hearst on letting me use Bing opposite Marion," Freed recalled.'

  Sometime during 1933, Irving Thalberg was given the opportunity to purchase the script of a historical drama called The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Thalberg initially turned it down but later became convinced that the piece would be an ideal vehicle for his wife, the actress Norma Shearer. In the meantime, Hearst had bought the script for Davies, and Thalberg asked Mayer to get it back. Mayer then told Hearst that he doubted the film would be a success if Davies starred in it and that he refused to commit MGM to any share of the cost. Hearst relented, and Barretts was made into a hit starring Shearer. The success of the film only added insult to injury, and to spite MGM, Hearst ordered Louella to keep Norma Shearer's name out of the column for several .6 When MGM publicist Howard Strickling noticed that Shearer was being omitted, he called Louella to ask why. Louella lied, telling Strickling that it was "accidental" and denying that she had received orders from Hearst to exclude Shearer. Suspicious, Strickling sent Louella three news exclusives that normally would have rated top headlines. But none of them appeared in the column, confirming his suspicions of foul play.

  It was the first time any MGM star had been blacklisted by Hearst. Since the mid-19zos, when Hearst had allied with MGM, the studio's stars had always received top billing in Louella's column. Screenwriter Budd Schulberg recalled that Louella had been almost slavishly devoted to MGM. "Louella might run an item in her column because she wanted to ingratiate herself with L. B. (Mayer); everybody in town knew she was doing it to please her boss W. R. Hearst.? (Louella's editorial assistant Dorothy Manners remembered that when she [Dorothy] was assigned to review a Cosmopolitan or MGM picture, she was supposed to have "an orgasm." "You had to say this was the greatest thing that ever was made and better than any other picture you ever saw.")s The press ban on Shearer was a sign of trouble, heralding the beginning of the end of the relationship between Hearst, Louella, and MGM.