Hearst made a small peace offering to Mayer in May 1934 by having Louella write a Sunday feature article titled "Mayer's Career Dazzles: MGM Head's Achievement Is Impressive." "Fantastic, fabulous Cinderella tales of the stars who have risen to fame and wealth are printed every day in our newspapers. Not one of these glamorous stories compares in interest with the career of Louis B. Mayer, who started in life without a penny and who is today one of California's famous men and an important figure in the affairs of the nation," Louella wrote.9 She had also praised Mayer's involvement in Republican politics, remarking in October 1934 that Mayer had been "receiving calls from men in all walks of life who prophecy dire things for our California should [Upton] Sinclair be elected governor." 10 This comment was as much to boost Mayer's ego as to hammer another nail in the coffin of socialist Sinclair's California gubernatorial campaign. Sinclair, who ran on the platform "End Poverty in California," had announced his intention to raise taxes on the film industry, prompting a major attack by the studio heads. MGM produced a series of phony newsreels, exhibited throughout the state, that falsely depicted Sinclair supporters as disheveled foreigners and vagrants. By contrast, the supporters of incumbent Republican governor Frank Merriam, who was running for reelection, appeared as upstanding, middle-class, native-born citizens. The Hearst papers contributed anti-Sinclair cartoons and editorials and, in the Los Angeles Evening Herald, ran a photo of a pack of young hoboes on their way to enlist in the Sinclair campaign. (The photo, like much of the newsreel footage, was false, having been taken from a Warner Brothers film, Wild Boys of the Road.)"
Despite Hearst's cooperation with Mayer, during 1934 the Hearst-MGM relationship worsened. Soon after the conversation between Louella and Strickling, Hearst executive Edgar Hatrick informed Mayer that Hearst had expected Davies to play Marie Antoinette in an upcoming film, although the script had been purchased with Norma Shearer in mind. At a party, Davies mentioned it to Thalberg, who later talked to Shearer about it; Shearer allegedly said, "If Marion wants it, she can have it!" But Mayer told Davies that he couldn't visualize her as Marie Antoinette, "so I don't want to spend that much money on a production of yours." "That last part got me burned up," Davies recalled. "I called W. R. in San Francisco and he was furious. When we saw that MGM wouldn't let me make the picture, we decided to leave the lot." A few days later, Hearst made a deal with Warner Brothers, and Davies and Cosmopolitan moved from the MGM lot in Culver City to the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. While at MGM, Davies had worked out of an enormous fourteen-room bungalow; on the day of the move, the cottage was cut into sections, and a parade of trucks carried them across town. "The passage of this strange caravan through the heart of the colony was somewhat like an historic parade-the visible token of a high-level change involving not only picture making but social prestige and politics," observed Mayer biographer Bosley Crowther. "Anyone of an analytic nature might have sensed a transition here." 2
The day after the contract with Warner Brothers was signed, Hearst's secretary Joe Willicombe informed the Examiner staff that "Chief says the moving picture connection of the Hearst institution from now on is the Warner Brothers studio. Anything that you can do to help Warner Brothers would be appreciated.... In fact, from now on, Chief says, give the same kind of attention to Warner Brothers that we used to give to MGM."13 Louella adjusted her column to reflect Hearst's new allies. Actors Bette Davis, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson would now get top billing in the column, rather than MGM's Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Wallace Beery.
In 1934 Hearst was also concerned with what he perceived to be a dangerous political situation within the film industry. Since late 1933, Hollywood had been the site of a powerful unionization drive spearheaded by the Screen Actors' Guild and the Screen Writers' Guild. The story of the guilds dates back to June 1933, when President Roosevelt's plan of economic recovery, the National Recovery Act, went into effect. In an attempt to foster cooperation among trade organizations and thus boost employment, the act mandated that industries were to draw up codes of "fair competition" that would be enforceable by law. This meant that antitrust laws were waived, but in return the industries had to make concessions guaranteeing labor the right of collective bargaining and establishing minimum wages and maximum hours. The Code of Fair Competition for the movie industry was written during the summer of 1933 and signed into law on November 27.
To quell public indignation about the high salaries paid Hollywood executives, Louis B. Mayer and other industry executives took temporary pay cuts. They also wrote provisions into the code that limited actors' salaries to one hundred thousand dollars a year. This enraged the actors. The executives had steady year-round jobs, but acting work could be sporadic and acting careers notoriously short. The actors responded by starting the Screen Actors' Guild that June, and by October 1933, membership was in the hundreds. Hoping to gain access to sympathetic, left-leaning writers and actors and to exert a national voice by tapping into mass culture, the Communist Party began recruiting in Hollywood in the early 193os. By the middle of the decade, it had over two hundred members, many of whom became involved in SAG and the Screen Writers' Guild.14 Hearst, who had sided with labor in the past, supported SAG, as did Louella. Throughout the fall of 1933, Louella devoted space in her column to interviews with SAG leaders, including a Sunday feature article on SAG president Eddie Cantor, who attacked the producers for the salary cap.15
Less than a year later, however, Hearst reversed his stance when the American Newspaper Guild started an organizing campaign that spread throughout the newspaper industry. During the early years of the depression, the Hearst papers had incurred heavy financial losses-advertising in the Hearst papers had dropped by 40 percent between 1929 and 1933-and Hearst feared the consequences of unionization within his own industry. The rise of the American Newspaper Guild, combined with Roosevelt's reversal of his isola tionist stance, led Hearst to turn his back on Roosevelt and the New Deal. "I think the most unfortunate thing that has occurred in Mr. Roosevelt's M1sDEAL," he wrote to Tom White, head of his newspaper division, in 1934, "has been the encouragement of newspapermen to form guilds-and to support extreme radicalism. We are not only going to have trouble with the guilds interfering with the efficient conduct of the newspapers, but we are going to have eternal difficulty in keeping radical propaganda out of the papers, because every newspaperman as soon as he joins a radical guild becomes a radical propagandist. Already I see this radical propaganda continually creeping into our papers. I am going to stop it drastically by holding the editors as well as the contributors responsible, and letting the correspondents or reporters who continually proselytize go."16 Hearst immediately began firing guild members from his papers, causing the guild to officially denounce the publisher, at its 1934 national convention, as "a son of a bitch." 17
Convinced that Roosevelt was an enemy of free market capitalism, Hearst launched strident editorial attacks on the president. When Roosevelt announced his plan to create a federal income tax in 1935, Hearst declared it to be "communism." "Everywhere he looked, including his own newsrooms and Hollywood, Hearst saw threats to the foundations of American democracy, capitalism, and the free press," according to Hearst biographer David Nasaw. 11 Prodded by Hearst, Louella-who in her own right was fairly apoliticalranted in her column about the "evils of taxation" and was reported to have intimidated actors from taking part in the pro-New Deal Motion Picture Democratic Committee. Believing that radicals and communists were taking over motion pictures and the press, in 1934 Hearst began a communist witch-hunt in every city with a Hearst paper. Editors were dispatched to pose as students and expose "subversive influences" on college campuses. That December, he turned his attack on alleged communists in the movie industry, accusing several producers of making "certain pictures [that] are propaganda." In an editorial titled "Red Pictures," Hearst announced, "Let it become commonly known that certain pictures are propaganda designed to overthrow the American form of government, t
o haul down the American flag and run up the RED banner of Russian Soviet Communism."19 In a November 1934 editorial, he wrote, "If motion pictures are to be used for communistic propaganda, it will not be long before the American government will have to step in either to suppress such propaganda or to take over the film companies responsible for it and see that they are conducted on a patriotic American basis. 1120
By early 1935, Hearst's tirades had spread from the editorial page to the movie screen and the radio. On January 5, 1935, Hearst had appeared on NBC in a radio address devoted entirely to denouncing Soviet communism. His newsreels similarly contained anticommunist themes and were protested by students at Princeton University, who demonstrated against theaters showing Hearst's "offensively militaristic and Fascistic propaganda."" That June, anti-Hearst picketers were arrested in New York for causing disturbances outside theaters, and the American Communist Party and its front groups called for a boycott of all Hearst publications.
Meanwhile, the press had a field day. There were twelve New York Times stories on the anti-Hearst activities in 1935, and in late February 1935 a nationwide group of educators met in Atlantic City to discuss "the Hearst problem." The keynote address was delivered by Charles Beard, former president of the American Historical Association, who declared Hearst to be "an enemy of everything that is noblest and best in our American tradition."22
As bundles of Hearst papers were torched on city sidewalks and images of Hearst burned in effigy, Louella feared that she, too, would come under fire. She was right. In August 1935, the leftist magazine New Theater published a vicious attack on Louella, accusing her of being "Hearst's Hollywood Stooge." "Louella Parsons," the article declared, "is Hollywood's sacred cow. The feeling of reverence, fear, and awe she inspires in leaders of the motion picture industry speaks for itself. That this waddling drivel-monger, this venomous, disagreeable woman can be respected by the big shots is a sad, sad commentary upon the industry.... Louella's chief function is to ballyhoo Marion Davies, the blond girlfriend of her boss." The article continued, "Willie's greatest sorrow is that with all his money and power he has not been able to convince the American people that his bosom friend [Marion] is an actress. Year after year the senile Sultan of San Simeon pours out his gold in more and more lavish streams trying to buy popularity for Marion. His chief aide in that attempted fraud is Louella. Thus Willie, Marion, and Louella constitute the most powerful triumvirate in Hollywood."
The article was accompanied by an unflattering photo of Louella that accentuated her weight and double chin.23 The same photo later appeared in a mock Hearst newspaper that was issued by a New York-based communist front organization the following month. For its front-page illustration, the creators of the "Anti-Hearst Examiner" ("Hearst in War, Hearst in Peace, Hearst in Every News Release, Spreads his Filth and Desolation to Increase His Circulation," read the masthead) had pasted the grotesque image of Louella in the lap of a large caricature of Hearst.24
In Hollywood the article caused a sensation. According to George Lewis, a columnist for the Los Angeles Post-Record, "There has been excitement in town since the New Theater came out with its article about Louella Parsons. The magazine's hard to get." Within hours, the issues were sold out at newsstands and "people are gathering in small circles to read the story over a subscriber's shoulders," Lewis wrote. Variety reported that "copies of the magazine were selling at a premium among film folk, with prices running as high as five and ten dollars a copy." The real identity of the author remained a mystery, but many believed-incorrectly-that George Lewis was the author of the article. "People have telephoned threats, called [me] a Communist, and one person sent a little tomato wired like a bomb with a note that reads, 'congratulations for an effective explosion. Next month throw this!"' he wrote. New Theater joked in a subsequent issue, "The popular Hollywood game seems to be trying to guess the real name of the author of the article. About the only prominent member of the film colony who hasn't been mentioned is Shirley Temple."25
In its September 1935 issue, New Theater published a follow-up article, "Louella Parsons, Reel z." In the way of an "apology" to Louella, it wrote that "it may comfort Louella ... that this magazine, unlike most of Hollywood, bears her no personal animus. New Theater's interest in Louella extends only as far as her works, for she is the most prominent representative of that vicious and degraded form of journalism the function of which is to sell the cheap and unreal movies of Hollywood and fascist Hearst. There are a few dozen Louellas writing, some more mannered, but all produce the same pap to the same end-providing the ultimate excuse for bourgeois newspapers to claim larger grants of paid advertising." In an attempt to "put the real Hollywood in print," the magazine promised to run subsequent damning "por- trait[s] of filmland," including an expose of Louis B. Mayer, to be penned by "Joel Faith."26
The New Theater article launched open season on Louella. When Louella and Dorothy Manners were in New York in the fall of 1935 to attend a tea given by the Newspaper Women's Club at which Louella was honored, Louella consented to an interview with Joseph Alsop of the New York Herald Tribune. In the resulting article, Alsop accused Louella of using her column to boost her friends: "The first players she mentions when bestowing laurels are Miss Marion Davies and Clark Gable," he wrote. And he mocked Louella's description of Hollywood as a "cultural center." "Nowadays Hollywood is just like Vienna before the war," Louella had allegedly told Alsop. "I mean, all the greatest writers in the world are there, and all the greatest musicians. The conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra is there now." According to Alsop: "Miss Parsons was asked his name. For the first time since she had emerged from her sanctum, Miss Parsons was at a loss. Finally, she turned toward the sanctum door, behind which her cortege were transacting the day's business. `Dorothy,' she called. `Dorothy, what was the name of that conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, anyway?' `Leopold Stokowski,' replied the unseen Dorothy, after a moment's cogitative pause. `That's it,' said Miss P. "I can't think why I forgot. I know it every bit as well as my own name.' 1127
The Herald Tribune piece was followed by another attack by New Theater that described Louella ("St. Louella") as Hollywood's "most publicized racketeer." According to New Theater, Louella blackmailed stars in exchange for expensive Christmas presents, "blood sacrifices laid on her altar."28
The attacks were obviously motivated by the anti-Hearst movement and Louella's "free talent" shenanigans for Hollywood Hotel. It also reflected a growing public animus toward newspaper gossip. Once the purview of the fan magazines, urban tabloids, and "scandal sheets," such as Town Topics and Broadway Brevities, which circulated among New York cafe society and the Broadway crowd, gossip had now gone mainstream with the syndication of Louella's column and the proliferation of celebrity stories in the popular press. By the mid-1930s, critics decried the proliferation of celebrity gossip as a corruption of journalistic ethics and launched attacks against the "new journalism" and its most enthusiastic purveyor, Walter Winchell. Winchell, a former vaudeville actor, had started his career as a gossip writer in the early r9zos, when he began writing a daily column for the New York trade paper the Vaudeville News. In 1924, he transferred to the tabloid the Evening Graphic, and in 1929 he took a post on Hearst's Daily Mirror. Syndicated by Hearst's King Features, by 1934 Winchell not only had become the country's most popular columnist but also had a national radio presence as the host of an eponymous gossip show.
In contrast to Louella's prim, dowdy image, Winchell's public persona and his writing were breezy and street-smart. In Winchell's column, divorcing couples were "Renovated," expecting women were "that way," and a mistress was a "keptive." His radio show was an aural version of his column, delivered in a brash, arrogant staccato. Even more contemptible than his corruption of the English language, according to critics, were his questionable sources. Though Winchell, like Louella, claimed that he got his news from reputable informants and studio press agents, he was accused of printing libelous informatio
n that tarnished the images of public figures and potentially destroyed careers. "He outdoes the yellow sheets in prodding impudent fingers into intimacies which any gentleman would consider deserving of privacy," wrote one editor. He "throws mud upon the institution of journalism."29
Though "Winchellism" was described as an affront to long-standing notions of media truth and impartiality, objectivity was a relatively new journalistic standard in the early 193os. At the turn of the century, as the newspaper historian Michael Schudson has written, there was little discussion within the profession about reporters' potential bias or subjectivity.30 It was only two decades later, in response to the alleged subjectivization of facts in World War I reporting, that objectivity was enshrined as a coveted, albeit elusive, journalistic ideal. By the late 192,os, in defense of the new standard, critics routinely attacked papers for publishing too much "trivial personal detail, scandal, romance, and stormy love" and described "the stuff we read in the daily press" as a form of "glorified gossip."31 To Americans in the 1930s, Winchell and Louella had become agents and symbols of the mass media's encroachment on personal privacy and gossip's potentially dangerous influence over public opinion, politics, and culture.
The First Lady of Hollywood Page 23