Louella's popularity and visibility increased in September 1936, when Warner Brothers announced its plans to turn the Hollywood Hotel radio show into a motion picture. It was a ploy, in part, to take advantage of the success of the Hollywood Hotel program and also to capitalize on the studio's connection with Louella and Hearst. Because of the Hearst-Warner Brothers alliance, the film was guaranteed good reviews in the Hearst papers, and Louella could pressure the show's real-life actors to appear in the film. Jack Warner also saw the film as a way to make amends with Hearst. Since moving to Warner Brothers, Davies had made three films, all flops, and Hearst had blamed the studio for mishandling her career.
After Warner Brothers put the project on hold for the winter of 1936, Louella told her readers in the spring of 1937 that Dick Powell, Hollywood Hotel's emcee, and Ginger Rogers were slated to play the leads. But Rogers backed out of the film, as did Bette Davis, who had also been approached for the lead, and the film was stalled over the summer. Finally in September 1937, the film went into production with Powell and sisters Lola Lane and Rosemary Lane in the starring roles. In addition to Warner Brothers actors Ted Healy, Alan Mowbray, Glenda Farrell, and Hugh Herbert, the real-life Hollywood Hotel players Frances Langford, Ken Niles, and Raymond Paige would appear in the film, along with bandleader Benny Goodman. "Well, you've heard everything now. Louella Parsons is going into the movies. Jack Warner and Hal Wallis have decided for me that I ought to play myself in Hollywood Hotel," she announced on September 15, 1937.13 Harry, acting as her agent, negotiated the contract, which stipulated that Louella would be available for work for five weeks, four days a week, after one o'clock in the afternoon. In addition to thirty thousand dollars paid in six installments, she received a stand-in, a hairdresser, and a private dressing room on the Warner Brothers lot.14
This was not the first time Louella had been asked to appear in a film. In 1932, Carl Laemmle had invited her to appear in The Cohens and Kellys in Hollywood, though for unknown reasons Louella declined.15 In 1928, she had appeared as an extra in a Cosmopolitan film, The Bellamy Trial, and had a cameo role in MGM's Show People, a comedy starring Marion Davies. Louella was both thrilled and terrified by her upcoming screen appearance. Though she had always been enchanted by acting, she had no formal experience. In the week before September 20, 1937, when shooting was scheduled to start, Louella called impromptu rehearsals at her home, where she read over her scenes with professional actors and voice coaches and tried to lose weight by pedaling an exercise cycle. Though the Warner Brothers costumer Orry-Kelly created an elegant wardrobe for her-a tailored black business suit and a black evening gown complemented by diamond jewelry said to be worth thirty thousand dollars-Louella was insecure about her appearance. "Heaving coal, walking a tightrope, or even meeting a wild jungle beast face to face would be child's play compared with facing the enormous, all-seeing eye of the camera," Louella told her readers. "You start getting an inferiority complex."16
Producer-writer Jerry Wald wrote the screenplay, the prolific composer and lyricist Johnny Mercer did the music, and behind the camera was vet eran cinematographer Charles Rosher, who had over eighty film credits to his name. Despite the respected talent, Hollywood Hotel was unexceptional, a cliched and smarmy rehash of the Hollywood rags-to-riches theme. In the film, Ronnie Bowers, a young saxophonist played by Powell, comes to Hollywood on a short contract with the fictional All Star Pictures. On the same day, All Star actress Mona Marshall (Lola Lane) reads in Louella's column that she has been passed up for the starring role in an upcoming film; angry, Marshall refuses to attend a film premiere scheduled for that evening. All Star then finds a stand-in for Marshall to attend the premiere, an aspiring actress named Virginia Sanders (Rosemary Lane), and Bowers is asked to accompany her. When Marshall finds out, she demands that Bowers and Sanders be fired. Bowers then takes a job as a singing waiter in a drive-in, where he is noticed by a director who hires him to dub the voice for star Alexander Duprey in an upcoming musical. When Duprey is asked by Louella to sing on the Hollywood Hotel broadcast he agrees, assuming that Bowers will also dub for him on the program. But when Duprey is late for the broadcastpart of a scheme engineered by Sanders on Bowers's behalf-Bowers sings on the show in his own name and goes on to film stardom.
Hardly an actress, Louella was so stiff and restrained that most of her scenes were cut from the film. In the final version, she appears five times. In one notable scene near the beginning of the film, Louella, on her way to interview Mona Marshall, meets a wisecracking press agent in the elevator. "Hey Parsons, why don't you put me in your column sometime?" he asks. "Oh you're not news," Louella says sarcastically. "Get her," the agent says to his friend. "What does she want me to do, take a bath in champagne or something?" "Soap and water will do," Louella retorts.'? This exchange was deemed by several critics to be one of the funniest in the film.
The film's trailer described her as "the columnist who knows all filmland's secrets," and as part of its publicity campaign for the film, Warner Brothers nicknamed Louella the "First Lady of Hollywood," a moniker that stayed with her for the rest of her career. In the contract, the studio had agreed that, in publicity material, the type for "no other member of cast except [the] stars shall be over 75% as large as type used for Miss Parsons," and that she had the right to approve all the photographic stills and newspaper publicity for the film. 18
The film premiered in late December 1937 to mixed reviews. "Hollywood Hotel is a cinch to cop new box office records-a knockout show," wrote the Hollywood Reporter. According to Variety, the film was "smash musical enter tainment with a lively and amusing story and some popular song numbers. There's box office draw in this one for all theatres, from first runs to the smallest houses." The Hearst reviews, naturally, were sparkling. "Miss Parsons is delightful in this, her first appearance before the movie cameras. She is unaffected and at ease as she radiates the personality which has won her the confidence of Hollywood's greatest," commented one Hearst reviewer. "I enjoyed every minute of Hollywood Hotel so very much," wrote Mary Pickford, who, despite her lingering animosity toward Louella, had agreed to write a review for the Hearst papers. "Louella plays herself in the film-and a very pretty and charming and slender self she is, too. I know Louella was nervous about making the film ... but none of that nervousness registers on the screen. In fact, Louella is just the same as her many friends in Hollywood know her to be-and I claim that is pretty nice. "'9 "She may be the first lady of Hollywood ... but she's just Ma to me," wrote Harriet, who also did a review for the Hearst papers.20
Other reviewers were more honest. "Louella Parsons gives nothing to the film-but who expected her to?" wrote one New York critic. Joked one reporter on a Vermont paper, "Louella Parsons looks like she writes. Boy, am I sick to my stomach. 1121 "Louella was a brave woman to play herself in the picture. Her acting isn't bad and she photographs quite well, though she looks more like the president of a women's club than a movie columnist," wrote another.22
Not long after the premiere, Jack Warner wrote to Hearst expressing "how happy we are over Louella Parsons' splendid performance in our musical production Hollywood Hotel. Reviews this morning praise her naturalness and dignity of performance. I believe her presence in this production will bring a mutual benefit." When Hearst saw the film in January 1938, he wrote to Warner that he agreed: "Louella was excellent. Very composed like a practiced actress. I bet she will want to be in pictures all the time."23 Though Hearst was happy with the film, he was still upset with Warner Brothers, and shortly after Hollywood Hotel's release, Hearst left the studio and went on to produce films at Twentieth Century Fox.
The thirty thousand dollars from the film appearance could not have come at a better time, since Louella and Harry were having financial troubles. They took regular weekend trips to Agua Caliente, a Tijuana gambling resort that was a favored hotspot among the Hollywood elite, and Louella lost thousands on racetrack betting. She had also become something of an antiques collector, and
her home was filled with expensive (and by many accounts tasteless) old knickknacks. Then in 1937, Louella and Harry took a lavish six-week vacation to Rome, London, and Paris with actress Sally Eilers and her husband, director Joe Brown. As in 1932, she surveyed the foreign film market and relayed her observations back to Hearst. By the late 1930s, the German film industry had nationalized, forcing American distributors to leave the country, and in Italy, Mussolini similarly developed a national film industry, headquartered at Rome's Cinecitta film studio. In 1937, Louella visited Cinecitta, and in one dispatch from Rome reported on Mussolini's plan to send his son Vittorio to Hollywood to learn filmmaking from director Hal Roach. (The plan fell through when, in October 1937, not long after his arrival, the young Mussolini found himself the object of a "concerted drive of the Anti-Nazi League against his presence in town," and returned to Italy in a huff, according to Variety.)24
But this European trip was more for pleasure than business. After visiting Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon, who had moved to London to work in theater, Louella and Harry motored through northern Italy, saw friends in Budapest, and visited the papal summer home, Castel Gandolfo. During the 1930s Louella had become increasingly devoted to Catholicism and was a regular attendee at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Her religious commitment was sincere, but some who knew her past suspected that it may have been a guise to conceal her Jewish roots. According to historian Steven Carr, during the 1930s the Jewish producers and studio moguls were still the victims of early-twentieth-century stereotypes that depicted them as "Shylocks controlling mass culture" and "stubborn foreign influences unwilling to yield to an assimilated national identity."25 Though Louella did not openly reveal her Jewish background, she nonetheless spoke out against antiSemitism and was known to inform Jewish studio heads Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Harry Cohn when she came across actors whom she thought "didn't like Jews." Sometimes this became an excuse to attack those who had crossed her in other ways. When one actor refused to appear without pay on Louella's radio program, Louella told Harry Cohn that she thought the actor was "not only arrogant ... but also anti-Semitic."26
Also draining Louella's bank account in 1937 was Marsons Farm, a twentyfour-acre plot of land in the Northridge area of the San Fernando Valley that Louella and Harry had purchased that summer. For the rest of the year, they poured tens of thousands of dollars into the construction of a colonial-style house that they planned to use as a weekend retreat. Completed in early 1938, the home was decorated with simple woolen rugs and plain wooden furni ture, and in one room Louella had installed her childhood furniture from Dixon. Throughout were housewarming gifts from Hollywood friends: a crystal candy box from Peter Lorre, a set of china figurines from Sid Grauman, a poker table from Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, and antique ceramic pitchers from Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon. One of Louella's favorite rooms in the house was the library, which she stocked with a collection of mystery novels and decorated with an oil painting that had once hung in her grandmother Jeanette's dining room. In addition to a swimming pool and a large lawn (Louella borrowed artificial sod from a studio prop department to fill in gaps in the grass), the grounds boasted a fully functioning ranch, complete with chickens, horses, dairy cows, and an orange grove. Two olive trees stood in the garden, gifts from Gable and Lombard and Myrna Loy and Arthur Hornblow.27
Louella and Harry began using Marsons Farm as a weekend retreat in the spring of 1938. Each Friday Louella hurried to finish her duties in town while Harry went to the Farmers' Market on Fairfax Avenue and purchased fresh fruits and vegetables for the weekend. Zeppo Marx, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, and Clark Gable and Carole Lombard all had estates in the area, and, according to Dorothy Manners, "Carole, Clark, Stanwyck, and Taylor got very clubby."28 Not long after the completion of the home, Louella began hosting social events at Marsons Farm. Before long her country barbecues were as celebrated as her Maple Drive affairs. (In 1939 Photoplay magazine named Louella as Hollywood's "best barbecue thrower.")29 Sometimes the parties were attended by a hundred or more guests, and Louella installed bunk beds so that guests could sleep over. In an oft-repeated story that illustrates Louella's famed hospitality (and absentmindedness), Charles Gentry of the Detroit Times was visiting Hollywood and called up Louella to pay his respects. Louella invited him to visit her at Marsons Farm, and the following day Gentry drove to the ranch. Harry was playing cards on the porch and waved him to a chair. After an hour's wait Louella finally showed up on horseback. She turned to him and smiled. "Hello! I'm so glad you came! You must stay for dinner! I'm giving a party for Charles Gentry of the Detroit Times!"30 The days at Marsons Farm, Louella claimed, were among the happiest in her life, providing a much needed respite from her increasing anxieties.31
The Hearst empire was crumbling. By 1937, as a result of the depression and the anti-Hearst movement, Hearst papers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston had lost to percent of their circulation. And because Hearst had not reduced his spending to compensate for the losses, the corporation faced bankruptcy.32 Hearst was forced to sell off not only several of his newspapers but also much of his prized art collection, and to help bail him out, Davies gave him a million dollars of her own earnings from her screen career.
Though they continued to live at San Simeon, Hearst and Davies were coming upon dark days. Despite glowing reviews from Louella, Davies's Hollywood career had all but ended in 1937. Though Louella had described Davies's last film, Ever Since Eve, as "a real audience picture" that brought "such spontaneous applause and laughter that those who saw it promptly put it down as a sure-fire hit," it was a box office flop.33 Depressed, Davies began drinking heavily, and Hearst struggled to come to terms with the loss of his empire. In April 1937 Davies put on a seventy-fourth birthday party for Hearst at her Santa Monica beach house. Featuring a circus theme and attended by over five hundred guests, this was one of the last great HearstDavies extravaganzas. From then on, there were only a handful of parties and few guests at San Simeon. By the late 1930s only Hearst and Davies's closest friends, including Louella and Harry, were invited to the ranch for weekend retreats.
On March S, 1938, Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler reported what Louella had feared-the weakening of the Hearst empire was diminishing her influence in Hollywood. "For many years, the actors, more especially the women stars and the producers and publicity departments have stood in awe of Louella Parsons. This prestige appears to be diminishing now, with the consolidation and elimination of some of Mr. Hearst's papers and the narrowing of his interests in other fields," he wrote. According to Pegler, Louella appeared "to have been topped" by the Hollywood Reporter, a "small and strictly professional trade paper with a class circulation."34
By late 1937, Louella's radio career was also imperiled. In November, she had announced to the show's producers that, unless she received $5,ooo a week for Hollywood Hotel, she would leave the show. The money was not for personal expenses, she insisted, but to pay actors who appeared on the show-the Screen Actors' Guild had turned up its pressure on Louella and her "free talent" policy, and she was determined to avoid what could become an ugly standoff with the union. In mid-November, Harry and executives from the William Morris talent agency, which represented Louella, entered negotiations with the F. Wallis Armstrong agency, which produced the show, but Armstrong rejected Louella's demands. Louella then withdrew her ulti matum and continued on at her $2,250 salary; actors continued to appear on the program without pay, and SAG's wrath mounted.35 Finally, as a result of the trouble with SAG, the producers did not renew Louella's contract, and actor William Powell took over her spot on the program. The previews and star interviews were dropped from the show, which plummeted in ratings, and it was taken off the air in December 1938.
Knowing the importance of radio to her popularity, Louella looked for another opportunity to go back on the air. In early 1939 there were rumors that she would appear regularly on the popular Kate Smith radio program, and there was a
lso some discussion of her hosting another "free talent" film preview show, Hollywood Previews, which would be produced by Hollywood Hotel producer Bill Bacher. Due to SAG pressure, the show never materialized. 16
In 1936, MGM producer Irving Thalberg died suddenly at age thirty-seven after a bout with pneumonia. Louella had metThalberg in 1919, when he was a teenager working in the New York office of Carl Laemmle's Universal Studio, and they had been friends ever since. Louella saw Thalberg a few days before he died; Norma Shearer, Thalberg's wife, had just appeared on Louella's radio show, and after the show Louella delivered Shearer back to the studio in time for Shearer's departure for a Labor Day weekend trip with Thalberg. It was during the trip that he contracted pneumonia. "The last time I saw him, they [Thalberg and Shearer] were standing with their arms around each other, blowing me kisses as I drove away," Louella recalled. "When he died, I was terribly broken up. There have only been a few deaths that touched me as deeply."37 With the rest of Hollywood, she mourned his passing, and she wrote lengthy tributes to him in the Examiner. That year Hearst executive Arthur Brisbane also died. Though Louella initially despised him-Brisbane had rejected Louella's appeal to transfer to Hearst's Chicago Examiner after the takeover of the Chicago Record in 1918-he became a benefactor who, according to Adela Rogers St. Johns, bailed Louella out of debt twice.38 In 1937 Jean Harlow, who was only twenty-six, passed away from a severe kidney infection, and in honor of the actress, one of Louella's favorite young stars, Louella and Dorothy Manners wrote a series of biographical articles that appeared both in the Examiner and in book form, under the title jean Harlow's Life Story.39 It sold a million copies at ten cents a copy, and years later Louella was still getting fan mail asking where the book could be found.40
The unexpected deaths shook Louella and reminded her of her own mortality. In her midfifties, Louella was having recurring kidney problems and reported frequent feelings of weakness. In the spring of 1938, she had a physical and mental collapse, most likely from exhaustion, and spent two weeks in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital recuperating. Later that year Harry became ill with a nearfatal bout of pneumonia, and Louella stayed with him in Good Samaritan Hospital for over two weeks while Dorothy Manners wrote the column.
The First Lady of Hollywood Page 26