The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  Then it happened. In October 1939, Hopper outscooped Louella on one of the most important stories of the year. Jimmy Roosevelt, the president's son, who had been working as a producer at the Samuel Goldwyn studio, was planning to separate from his wife, Betsy, and marry a nurse at the Mayo Clinic, Romelle Schneider. A longtime friend of Roosevelt's, Hopper had known that he was planning a divorce and made him promise to tell her first when he was ready to break the story. For weeks Roosevelt remained silent, but on October zi, 1939, a friend of Hopper's in New York told her that she had heard "through the grapevine" that the Roosevelt divorce was imminent. At ten that evening, Hopper phoned her assistant Hy Gardner and the two met at Roosevelt's Beverly Hills home. Pushing her way past the butler, Hopper shouted at Roosevelt, who appeared on the doorstep in bare feet and a bathrobe: "My spies from New York tipped me off. Now give." After Roosevelt confessed-he was indeed about to begin divorce proceedings-Hopper sped back to the Times and, literally shouting "Hold the press" as she ran through the door, managed to get the story into the Sunday paper. The exclusive article, with Hopper's byline, made the front page.61 According to Gardner, it was "the hottest exclusive of national impact in her ... career."69

  In her column on Monday, Louella included only a short mention of Roosevelt, a comment criticizing his work at the Goldwyn studio. Hearst, appalled that Louella would take such an obvious crack at the president's son, ordered it out of the paper. When it appeared in the first edition-an "old employee tossed in the paragraph without knowing it had been killed," ac cording to the Hollywood Reporter-editor "Cardington and everyone else at the Examiner threw a fit."70

  The Hollywood Reporter noted a few days later, "The fight that's on between Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons is now coming out in the open, with both on a struggle to scoop the other and much of the local gentry taking sides in the effort." The opening shots had been fired, and the feud had officially begun.71

  Slowly, the balance of power was shifting. As publicists and actors began to side with Hopper, Louella complained of a "shortage of news." When she told her troubles to producer David Selznick in July 1939, out of sympathy Selznick mentioned that they had tested the actress Alla Nazimova for a part in his upcoming film Rebecca. Nazimova was a possibility, Selznick had said, but the role was still uncertain. So when Louella printed that Nazimova was set for the role, Selznick was furious. "You neither secured the story nor checked it with us," he wrote back. Then, when Nazimova was ultimately passed up for the part, Louella complained to Selznick that he had misled her. "I think it is important that you straighten this [matter] out with her one way or the other," Selznick wrote to one of his publicity managers, Bill Hebert. "If you don't, the next story we give her of a casting possibility that doesn't come true she is going to get sore all over again, and if we don't give it to her, she is going to get sore if and when it comes true."72

  Angry with Selznick, Louella began circumventing his publicity office, getting her news about Selznick and his productions from other sources. Shortly after the Nazimova incident, Selznick reported to Hebert, "I may as well tell you that despite our precautions Louella picked up word of the joint arrival of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. My suspicion is that she picked up word of their arrival from the airline publicity bureau."73 Louella then printed that Selznick had offered seventy-five thousand dollars for the script of King's Row, though Selznick had made "no offer whatever and [had] no interest in acquiring the property," he wrote to Hebert. Louella was getting her news from inaccurate sources, and her tactics were not only hurting him, Selznick claimed, but ruining her own credibility.74

  So when Louella asked Selznick, in the fall of 1939, "as a favor to a friend," to screen an unfinished version of Gone with the Wind, Selznick was not about to give in. Claiming that there were "soundtracks missing, colors not straightened out, scenes missing," he turned her down. Upset, Louella called him and yelled at him over the telephone. Selznick responded with a letter: "Dear Louella, I understand that you are upset with me because I won't show you GWTW. It is hard for me to believe, Louella, that you are serious about this. Won't you please try to understand also that if I ran the picture for you I would be breaking my word, given to literally dozens of newspaper people over a period of two years, that all the members of the press would see it at one time? Surely, Louella, you wouldn't want to place me in the light of being unfair to the people who have worked so hard for me, and of being a liar and a breaker of my word with all the rest of the press?"

  "God knows I have tried in every conceivable way to prove to you the extent of my friendship with you," he continued. "But I would be very disappointed indeed if I believed that you really wanted me to go this far." But Louella would not relent, and she continued to snipe at Selznick. In angry letters and telegrams she called Selznick a "fair weather friend," a "backstabber," and "unfair."75

  "You told me, Louella, as well as others, how hurt you have been by a recent article which contained what, in your own words, were inaccurate statements about you and your family," Selznick responded, referring to the Saturday Evening Post article. "This makes it doubly hard to understand why you turn right around and make unfair charges against someone who has been a friend of yours for so long a time. I am disappointed and hurt that[,] after knowing me since I was a little boy, you should know me so little as to believe that I would deliberately mislead you. I did not think it was necessary to explain to you, of all people, that I am not given to such tactics."76 Ultimately, Selznick would not relent, and Louella saw the final version of Gone with the Wind when she was on the East Coast that fall. Her relationship with Selznick was one of many that would deteriorate in the years to come.

  IT WAS LARGELY AS A MEANS OF DAMAGE CONTROL that Louella, in the fall of 1939, began toying with the idea of doing a personal appearance tour. Personal appearance tours had saved the sagging careers of many actors and actresses. Why not that of a wounded Hollywood columnist? In October 1939 she floated the idea by friends, who quickly put her in her place. Yes, fans would turn out to see Clark Gable or Joan Crawford, but how many would pay to see Louella? Fans would pay to see her, Louella countered, if she were surrounded by a group of attractive Hollywood stars. One idea led to another, and by mid-October Louella had made the rounds at the studios and struck a tentative agreement. On the grounds that it would be good publicity, Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, and Warner Brothers agreed to let Louella take six of their up-and-coming young actors-Arlene Whelan, June Preisser, Susan Hayward, Joy Hodges, Ronald Reagan, and Jane Wyman (the latter two had recently gotten engaged)-on a two-month personal appearance tour. Starting in San Francisco, Louella and her "Hollywood Stars of 1940" would crisscross the nation with a seventy-minute music, dance, and comedy show. Whelan and Hodges would sing, Reagan and Wyman would crack jokes, and even Louella would get in on the act.

  According to the deal she struck with the Leo Morrison agency, Louella would receive not only top billing but also a generous weekly salary, rumored by the Hollywood Reporter to be five thousand dollars. From this she would pay the actors, though how much the troupe actually received is unclear. The tour would visit only cities with Hearst papers, thus ensuring free publicity and positive reviews. The actors, of course, profited from the publicity, but their relatively meager salary and hard work-the stars carried the burden of the show and in some cities played five times a day-made Louella the winner in the deal. After only a week of rehearsals, the troupe made a rough debut in Santa Barbara on November 15, then prepared for "the big event in my life," as Louella called it-the opening performance at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco.'

  She tried to be glamorous. Bedecked in a mink coat and pearls and elegantly coiffed by her private hairdresser, who traveled with her, Louella emerged onstage at the beginning of the show and asked breathlessly, "Am I late?" The orchestra struck up "Oh Susanna," and an all-woman chorus, dressed as newsboys, sang: "Oh Louella, won't you mention me? For a movie star in Hollywood, that's what I want t
o be." Audiences then watched a short film ("not short enough," quipped Variety) of Louella being sent off by her Hollywood "friends," including Deanna Durbin, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Eleanor Powell, Fred Astaire, and Mickey Rooney, who thanked her for "all the nice things you've said about me" and wished her well on her tour. When the lights came back on, Louella took the stage and read prewritten "news flashes" that emerged from a phony teletype machine-"William Powell and Ginger Rogers have been seen holding hands!" she exclaimed-and concluded her portion of the show by answering questions that audience members had left in a box in the lobby. She exited gracefully as Arlene Whelan took the stage and sang a bossa nova tune, moving "with mild undulations of her torso."2

  As predicted, the Hearst paper gushed. The show was "sparkling," declared the San Francisco Examiner; Louella, in particular, it noted, had great "dramatic flair." Other reviews were more honest. "Show was too long and rough," wrote one Hollywood-based reviewer. "Motherly Louella ... displayed negligible stage personality but by being herself made more of a hit than had she attempted dramatics, which would have been disastrous." "The act may smooth out and speed up after a week or two," predicted Variety. "It may even reach the point where Miss Parsons will be able to speak her lines without muffing, spluttering, and/or stumbling." Quipped one cynic, "Louella Parsons, with `honey' and `darling' bubbling from every pore walked upon the scene. Well my dear, it was so exciting, and so gay, and so precious from then on that we just had to shut our eyes to keep from careening dizzily to the lower floor."3

  The non-Hearst reviews may have been poor, but the turnout was not. When the troupe hit Philadelphia, after a turbulent flight in a chartered TWA plane with "Louella Parsons and her Flying Stars" written on the fuselage, they were mobbed by fans that occupied "every available inch of standing room inside the theater ... and overflowed down Market Street as far as the eye could see," reported the Philadelphia Record 4 It became so chaotic that police were called in to control the mob. "Hate to brag," Louella wrote in her column from Camden, "but we're doing five shows daily and each one is to standing room only."5 By December, they had given izo performances and were barraged with requests for appearances. "The LOPersonal appearances are so successful that demands are pouring in for an extension, but Warners and MGM NEED their young players who are on the jaunt," the Hollywood Reporter wrote on December 6.6 After a shopping spree on Fifth Avenue, Louella spent Christmas in New York with Harry, who had flown out to see her. "We're smashing records!" she told him. "People are wonderful to us all over!" 7

  In truth, fans came to see the actors, not Louella. It was the troupe's "s.a.," their sex appeal, that drew the crowds, according to Variety.' Louella knew she was hardly the star of the show, but the positive publicity from the tour worked wonders on her morale. When the show played Chicago, she was honored at a luncheon attended by Kenneth Olson, dean of the Medill School of Journalism, and James Cane, publicity director of CBS. "I've seen my name in lights over many theaters lately, but this, in Chicago, gives me the greatest thrill of all, because I was once so poor in this town, just a nobody with hardly a penny to my name," she told the Herald American. In Chicago she was guest of honor at a luncheon sponsored by several hundred members of the Chicago Headline Club, an organization composed of the alumni chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, a national journalism fraternity.

  In Washington, the Post printed a glowing tribute to "LOP, the ... initials that are as famous as FDR and ones which command as much awe and respect as the latter three. They belong to Louella O. Parsons, the First Lady of Hollywood, confidante of the stars and undisputed ace of aces among filmdom's press correspondents. "'o On the return journey, during a layover in Albuquerque, "the airport was thronged with thousands of men and women, high school boys and girls, women's club leaders, army officers, and a special delegation of Pueblo Indians," who made Louella an honorary member of their tribe. "My new Indian name is Ba Ku La, which means Princess Starmaker," she wrote in her column. Shouting through the crowd, a "cowboy" asked her when the war was going to end, if Hitler would be assassinated, and if taxes would be lowered. Louella looked at him quizzically. "Well, you know everything, don't you?" he replied."

  Most gratifying to Louella was a New York interview with B. R. Crisler, drama writer for the Times. Friends had warned Louella that she was in for a serious panning, so when she entered Crisler's office, she fired off a defense. "I'm a blackmailer, I can't write, and I'm sure you've seen those articles about me, I'm that, too. Now what else would you like to know?" 12 Crisler was so impressed with Louella's forthrightness that he described Louella as the "friendliest soul in films." According to Crisler, she had forgotten her grudge against the Saturday Evening Post. "She isn't bitter about it," he wrote. "She really doesn't care. It is obvious that there is not a bigger heart in Hollywood than Miss Parsons'; nor is there anywhere in the world probably a longer memory for movies, a more formidable film background." "Nobody in the world could ever really dislike her," he concluded, "except on abstract literary grounds."" Back at home, Billy Wilkerson at the Hollywood Reporter showered her with "verbal orchids." Unlike columnist Sheilah Graham, whose tasteless jokes and comments during her public appearances defamed Hollywood, according to Wilkerson, Louella "spreads news and gossip from her rostrum in the theatres that help the picture business.... We say that Miss Parsons rates applause from Hollywood, as she is doing a great job for lt." 14

  On January 15, 1940, Louella arrived back in Hollywood "after a skyrocketing public opinion in favor of the industry in the best of all ways," wrote the Reporter. 15 While in New York, she had received a lucrative offer to switch to the United Press syndicate, which she considered but turned down. William Hawkins, head of United Press, and Monte Bourjaily, then in charge of the United Press syndication service, visited her at her hotel in New York, bearing an offer that would allow not only for a significantly higher salary than she was earning with Hearst but also the ability to retain all her radio rights. The offer was too good to refuse, and Louella told the executives to return the following day with a contract.

  That night, however, she began having second thoughts. "I couldn't fall asleep that night," she remembered. "I kept recalling all of Mr. Hearst's kindnesses, all the things he had done for me.... I remembered how much trust he had placed in me and his confidence in me as a newspaperwoman." Finally she got out of bed, went to the sitting room, and sat in the darkness. Moments later, Harry joined her. He said, "Louella, you never did intend to sign that contract, did you?" "Of course," she replied. "I'm going to."

  But when Hawkins and Bourjaily returned the next day, she told them that she'd changed her mind. "I know I'd never be happy working for anyone but Mr. Hearst," she said.16 Shortly afterward, she renewed her Hearst contract at her usual salary of $85o a week. "Dear Boss, Well you will have to put up with me for another three years," she wrote Hearst. "But I hope you are just as happy as I am." Hearst responded with a diamond pin and a note:

  Dear Louella-First Lady of Hollywood

  You must never shake your grandfather-first gent of San Simeon

  We belong in the same boat'?

  "I'm going to keep your letter all my life," she wrote back. "That's the very nicest letter I ever received. You know very well I'd never leave you[,] because I told you once if I went to work for anybody else I'd still be working for the Hearst papers [,] because I feel that you're not only my boss but my friend." 11

  In the spring of 194o, after flying to New York to appear on the Kate Smith radio show and announcing that she would be going on another personal appearance tour in the fall, she was informed by Motion Picture magazine that she had been named "one of Hollywood's ten most interesting persons." Number one on the list was Orson Welles.'9

  It was with spectacular fanfare that Orson Welles, the temperamental, imperious, twenty-three-year-old stage actor and radio star, arrived in Hollywood. Famous for his radio broadcast of H. G. Wells's novel War of the Worlds in 1938-Welles's depiction of the Martian
invasion of America was so realistic listeners thought it was true-Welles was approached by the head of the RKO studio, George Schaefer, who hoped to hire him in an attempt to avert the studio's imminent bankruptcy. Welles had gained international acclaim for his work on Broadway-Time had recently celebrated Welles's theatrical achievements with a cover story titled "Marvelous Boy"-and all his life he had been touted as a prodigy. At the age of five, he was performing in the Chicago Opera; as a teenager, he was a theatrical star in Ireland; and by the time he was twenty, he was known for his brilliant-and politically and socially radical-productions for the Federal Theater Project. He had produced an all-black version of Macbeth, set in Haiti, and The Cradle Will Rock, which he had described as a leftist "labor opera." Welles went on to found his own theater company, Mercury Theater, which produced a controversial version of Julius Caesar that was a parable about fascism.20

  Welles was reluctant to leave New York and refused Schaefer's initial offers. It was only when Schaefer promised Welles complete control of his films, from scripts to casting to direction and production, that he finally capitu lated. Taking the Mercury Theater troupe with him, Welles moved to Hollywood in the summer of 1939. He was surprised to find the reception lukewarm. Many resented Welles for having played hard to get; others, including Louella, were angry with Schaefer for having given a complete rookieWelles had no experience in film-a contract that was the envy of everyone in Hollywood. "Personally I haven't a thing in the world against Welles. He has proved that he is a brilliant actor-producer both in the theater and on the air. But I am becoming impatient with producers who go courting prima donnas and bend the knee before every foot that kicks them," Louella told her readers in the summer of 1939.21