An aspiring actress from Detroit, Barry had come to Hollywood in the late 1930s. Shortly after her arrival she met Chaplin, who signed her to play a role in an upcoming production called Shadow and Substance, and by 1941 she and Chaplin had begun an affair. By the end of 1942, Chaplin wanted to end the liaison, and Barry became distraught. On December 23, 1942, Barry, armed, forced herself into Chaplin's home, held Chaplin at gunpoint, and threatened suicide. Chaplin managed to disarm her and persuade her to leave. Barry then left for New York; when she returned to Los Angeles in May 1943, she tried to meet with Chaplin to tell him she was pregnant with his child. By this time, Chaplin was involved in a serious relationship with Oona O'Neill, who was the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, and who was over thirty years Chaplin's junior. Barry wanted to force Chaplin to marry her, but Chaplin refused. Barry and her mother then plotted to ruin Chaplin by "going public" about the affair.54
Barry sought out Hopper, she explained, because in 1941 Hopper had printed a critical piece in her column about Chaplin's penchant for seducing his young leading ladies. Knowing that Chaplin was looking for an ingenue to star in Shadow and Substance, Hopper wrote, "This is written for just one girl in Hollywood. I don't know who you are. You haven't been discovered yet. But I can tell you there's a luscious package for you labeled Fame. A gentleman named Charlie Chaplin will be sending it over whenever he's ready. I think you should know what's in it. You'll be that lucky girl chosen by Chaplin to play the top feminine role in Shadow and Substance. It's your chance, the opportunity of a lifetime. You'll be living in a dreamworld of shining limousines, sables, and exploding flash bulbs. All that will be in your tinseled package. Something more, too. Something not quite so good. The tradition of the Chaplin leading ladies has taken a definite pattern. You were nobody when he discovered you. You were sitting on top of the world for a few months. Then you were nobody again."55 On the night that she visited Hopper's office, Barry went to Chaplin's estate, threatened him again, and during the exchange that followed the police were called. Barry was arrested and given a thirty-day jail sentence. Meanwhile, Hopper plotted action.
Hopper had always disliked Chaplin, in part for his unwillingness to pander to the gossip columnists, but even more for his progressive politics. Hopper was a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a conservative political organization established in Hollywood in 1939 in response to what was perceived by many on the right as the growing leftist domination of the film industry.56 "In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of and dominated by Communists, radicals and crack-pots. We pledge to fight, with every means at our organized command, any effort of any group or individual to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth," read the organization's founding statement.57
In contrast to Hopper, who had been a staunch isolationist, Chaplin had encouraged not only U.S. intervention in the war but also the opening of a second front in Western Europe to aid the Soviets in their fight against the Nazis. Chaplin's advocacy of the second front stemmed from his antifascism and his personal friendship with several Soviets he had met in Hollywood, including the director Sergei Eisenstein.51 On June 3, 1943, when Barry and her lawyer filed a paternity suit against Chaplin, the anti-Semitic Hopper both released the story in her column and wrote a scathing attack in which she criticized the British actor for never having become a U.S. citizen and for allegedly denying that he was Jewish (which, in fact, he was not). The column concluded: "What is to become of that child and its mother, Joan Barry? Those are the questions Hollywood has a right to ask and not only hope for an answer but to demand one."59 Later that month in her column, she again attacked Chaplin for his citizenship and for his advocacy of the second front, and she received dozens of fan letters in response. "Just a few lines to let you know that one American woman appreciates the efforts you have made in your fight for Joan Barry's civil rights," wrote one reader. "That one small girl can't be pushed around by a lot of people with authority and influence." "Dear Miss Hopper, I wish to congratulate you on your stand in the Chaplin matter. Apparently you are the only columnist who isn't afraid of him[,] because the others either avoid it altogether or handle it with gloves," wrote a woman from Chicago. "PS. Apparently we don't think Mr. Chaplin is a genius."60
Hopper and Florabel Muir, a reporter who was running a local news syndicate service, the Los Angeles City News Service, then testified before a grand jury and shared information about Barry with the FBI, which was investigating the case. Though Chaplin was eventually acquitted when blood tests proved that Barry's child was not his, the scandal marred his public reputation. By conflating his morality and political stance, according to Chaplin scholar Charles Maland, Hopper convinced a significant number of Americans that "Chaplin's moral behavior was impolitic and his politics were immoral."6'
When Chaplin and O'Neill decided to marry in mid-June 1943, Chaplin contacted Harry Crocker, a Hearst columnist who had once worked as an assistant director for Chaplin. Through Crocker, Chaplin arranged for the announcement of the marriage to come through Louella, whose byline would be "more valuable from reader standpoint than that of Crocker's," according to Daily Variety.62 "It would be better to have Louella Parsons, a friend, write it up than subject ourselves to the belligerence of other newspapers," Chaplin wrote in his autobiography, referring to Hopper .61
On June 17, 1943, Louella reported "the latest bombshell in the affairs of Charles Chaplin in his marriage today to i8 year old Oona O'Neill, daughter of Eugene O'Neill, America's outstanding dramatist. Early this afternoon, at a place I am pledged not to divulge, the 54-year-old comedian will wed for the fourth time a girl many years his junior."64 Chaplin also placed Crocker in charge of all the photography at the wedding, which took place in Carpinteria, California, near Santa Barbara. This was done to give "the LA Times a burnup as a result of the Hedda Hopper tipoffs on Chaplin's difficulties with Joan Barry," according to Variety.65
In December 1943, Doubleday released The Gay Illiterate, a thin, hardbound volume with a maroon cover that sold for two dollars. Harriet had written the dust jacket copy, describing Louella as a "lovable, maddening, impressive, absurd, sophisticated, naive, noble, unprincipled, understanding, obtuse, admiration-inspiring, laughter-invoking character."66 The Louella Parsons of The Gay Illiterate was indeed a character-sweet, innocent, and bearing little resemblance to the intelligent, shrewd, and emotionally complex woman who stood behind its pages.
Contrary to the popular stereotype, Louella claimed on the first page, she was not a "Lady Ogre Columnist." "There is the Louella O. Parsons of unpopular fable. And then there is me-the woman I live and work with and who is sometimes hurt and sometimes fighting mad about the idea of the [columnist] who eats little actors alive." Instead, she was "just another one of `us girls,"' who enjoyed "chatting" with readers "about the best-known glamour personalities in the world. Such `chatting' has to be informal-as all the best gossip is, whether in a column or over the back fence." The real Louella, who worked constantly, "gaily split ... infinitives and [mixed] metaphors," and who fought for "every important Hollywood story with every ounce of [her] energy," was a small-town girl from rural Illinois, raised in a family that had surrounded her with "warmth and tenderness and good care." "We were not rich. But neither were we poor. We Oettingers were like millions of Americans who sat on the front porch in the summertime with a pitcher of lemonade-and who, in the winter, held family court around the dining room table."67
As a child, she wrote, she was immature, temperamental, and impatient for success as a writer. After work at the Dixon Star, where she "covered musical events, wrote society notes, and ran errands for the city editor," she was derailed from the pursuit of literary stardom by her marriage-at age sixteen, she lied-to John Parsons, "the gayest blade" in town. She revealed frankly her marital unhappiness and her dismal days in Burlington, which she falsely claimed to have
escaped by one day, "out of the blue," taking a trip with Harriet to visit an uncle in Missoula, Montana. "That marked the beginning of the end of our marriage. From there we just drifted apart, lulled into an acceptance of the situation by sheer necessity." She and John might have reconciled their differences, she claimed, but "Captain John Parsons died aboard a boat due to dock in New York on February 14, 1919." Louella never disclosed her divorce from Parsons or her second marriage and divorce from Jack McCaffrey. Instead, she presented herself as a "war widow" who showed up in Chicago poor and jobless and who struggled in her "little effort ... towards buying shoes for Harriet."68
She did, however, admit her relationship with Peter Brady and her torturous experience falling "very deeply, very wholly, and very completely in love ... with a man who was not free to marry me." Though this disclosure was risky, Louella and English, her ghostwriter, most likely saw it as a way to humanize Louella before her young female readers. At a time when she was "confused and young and not sure" of herself, she saw Brady as a kind of father figure-"I found strength in his strength and kindness, and inspiration in his fine mind and his advice." She could write credibly about actors' failed romances, she implied, because of her own "heart-torture."69
One by one, she countered what she described as the many rumors about her, beginning with one of the oldest-that she had gotten her position with Hearst as a gift for covering up his murder of Thomas Ince in 1924. "The most popular and widely spread [rumor] is that I am supposed to know `something.' This fictional something varies in style from the Edgar Allan Poe school to the Bocaccio trend, according to the rumor-monger's literary preferences. Time, I am thankful to say, has dimmed some of the more absurd stories. It is heartbreaking, to say the least, after working for 25 years getting scoops and important motion picture news stories, ... to find oneself suspected of holding such a major appointment through even the cagiest blackmail scheme." She defended Hearst-"where are the words to express.... the greatness and understanding of this man who is so often vilified by people who do not know him?"-and accused Thomas Wood of having written the piece in the Saturday Evening Post because he was "evening up a score for his old friend Sidney Skolsky." "For a short time Sidney had been syndicated by the Hearst papers, and when his contract was not renewed he told everyone he thought I had been responsible for his dismissal.... I like pint-sized Sidney and his Hollywood writings, and I had nothing to do with his dismissal," she lied.70
She went on to attack Henry Luce, "another who dearly loves to resurrect dusty old legends whenever he feels called upon to mention my name in either Time or Life magazine.... I have never complained to Luce or to any of his editors when they have made fun of [me]. The only time I ever felt like putting on my own brass knuckles was in connection with the Louella Parsons Day in Dixon, my old home town. Although this festivity had been planned a year in advance, Time insisted that I am such a meanie I staged it to take away from the glory of another columnist who was making a 'personal' at the same time in a nearby Spot. "71
The rest of the book was a saccharine and largely falsified account of her news-gathering tactics and her infamous "scoops." She portrayed herself as a paragon of journalistic integrity, hardworking (she scribbled her column "in the Santa Anita Race track, and in the ladies' room at Ciro's") and ethical ("a reporter who lets his personal views get in the way of a news story just isn't worthy of his profession," she wrote).72 She ended the book with a celebration of Hollywood's morals, claiming that behind the fast-living "personality boys and girls" were "folks like the Don Ameches and Robert Youngs and the Bing Crosbys and the Bob Hopes and dozens and dozens more who live just as the prosperous and firmly united family groups do all over this USA." The only exceptions were the stars of "the genius breed-the artists of the Chaplin variety-and more recently, Orson Welles, the self-elected genius."73
Shortly before the book's release, Louella sent the manuscript to David Selznick, hoping that he would turn it into a film. Though he was pressured by his brother Myron, Louella's agent for the book, he turned her down. Rather than a film, he suggested, "you ought to go after i) Newspaper serialization; z) Magazine serialization; 3) Summarized publications in the Reader's Digest or Ladies' Home journal. I think as a radio serial it could last for a couple of years and could be something tremendous with yourself or with someone impersonating you, and with all the personalities you have known, past and present."74 Less than a week later, the Literary Guild of America placed the book on its list of recommended reading, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, two studios were reported to have been bidding for it.75 On December 9, 1944, Twentieth Century Fox-the studio allied with Hearst's Cosmopolitan film production company-purchased the rights to the book for seventy-five thousand dollars. The studio planned to market the story as the struggle of "a widowed mother at the end of World War I, her effort to find a place in the world, and her eventual success, both in business and in romance," and was rumored to have been considering either Claudette Colbert or Irene Dunne for the part of Louella.76 Hopper cynically suggested Mae West. Reporting on the book's purchase in the Hollywood Reporter, columnist Edith Gwynne wrote that she "ran into Doc Martin, who said, `they'll never be able to cast Louella's book.' They'll never find anyone sexy enough to play me!" Gwynne also wondered whether the Luce publications were "readying a blast" against Louella for her comments against the pub- lisher.77
Gwynne was right. By early January 1944 The Gay Illiterate had sold out in every bookstore in Hollywood and was one of the top-circulating books at the Los Angeles Public Library. However, Luce's Time magazine damned it as "the self-recorded soundtrack of a small town, intensely feminine mind which for 30 years with unabated enthusiasm and energy has been hanging over Hollywood's back fence, talking like a ruptured water main to hundreds of thousands of other small town, intensely feminine minds." The book was "a nonstop, hypnotic colloquy, starched with babbling anecdote." 78 According to the New York Times, Louella "persists in the "Little Me" approach ... [and] emerges with the self-portrait of an elfin creature-half-child, halfcatamount-looking wide eyed at a wondrous world.... As a literary work, it has a formidable clumsiness which suggests that she frequently turns pages with a bulldozer."79 "Mrs. Parsons' gossip column has always been an unin- cisive, undiscerning cliche-ridden portrait of Hollywood affairs," wrote Manny Farber in the New Republic. "Her book doesn't confuse the record. "'0 The Communist Party paper the Daily Worker, following Twentieth Century Fox's purchase of the book, wrote that "it is common knowledge that Louella Parsons is one of the most ignorant newspaper writers in the history of journalism.... With the Sultan of San Simeon behind her, she can mangle reputations as well as grammar." "Will zoth Century Fox expose the seamy side of Louella in their film?" the Worker asked.81 Because there are no records of readers' responses to the book, it is difficult to know whether The Gay Illiterate improved Louella's public image as she had hoped. It has, however, stood the test of time; with all its falsehoods, for decades The Gay Illiterate has been cited by journalists and scholars as the authoritative account of Louella's life.
Since the war, Marion Davies and Hearst had been living at Hearst's Northern California residence, Wyntoon. Located on fifty thousand acres of alpinelike forest near Lake Tahoe, the estate, designed by Julia Morgan as a summer retreat from San Simeon, had been built in the style of a Bavarian village.82 After visiting Hearst and Davies for a weekend at Wyntoon, Louella embarked on a nationwide book tour in late January 1944. To attract publicity, at each stop she sold books and war bonds.83 In Chicago, Louella broke all records for crowds at Marshall Field's book section and "sold out all copies of the book, including the window display in Hudson's Detroit store and set a new high for crowds in the book section of the Hutzler Department Store in Baltimore." In Detroit, the owner of the local Fox theater chain bought a hundred thousand dollars' worth of bonds from Louella in exchange for a special autographed volume. In Pittsburgh, the original manuscripts of the book were given to the Carnegie
Library, and at a war bond rally there, she raised over six million dollars.84 After appearing on the Mary Margaret McBride radio show in New York, Louella was the guest of honor at a luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria, at which former New York mayor, and friend of Louella, Jimmy Walker was toastmaster. "Through all the years I have known her, my admiration for her has been growing. In her new book she splits infinitives but she never splits friends," he quipped.85 By early February 1944, the book had sold forty thousand copies .16
Louella's publishing success did not cool her wrath toward Hopper. In May 1944, Daily Variety reported that at a Lilly Dache fashion show, when Hopper entered the room and sat next to Maggie Ettinger, Louella, who was on the other side of the room, stalked out.87 Hopper said to Maggie, "I'm terribly sorry. I'll move," but Maggie would have none of it. "You will not. This is silly. I'll get her back," she told Hopper. She went across the room and got Louella, causing a scene. "By that time the spectators-Loretta Young, Mary Pickford, Marion Davies, Claudette Colbert, and a hundred others-were paying more attention to us than to Lilly's hats," Hopper recalled. Later, Hopper found out that the table had been reserved for Lorena Danker, whose husband, an executive for the J. Walter Thompson company, had staged the show. Louella was appalled that Hopper had not asked permission before she sat down.88
That summer, two weeks after selling Marsons Farm, Louella went to Chicago with actress Gracie Allen to cover the Republican convention, at which Thomas Dewey would receive the nomination. Though she had been commissioned by Hearst to report on the "woman's angle," Louella, a registered Republican, used her dispatches from the convention to attack President Roosevelt and the New Deal. In one story she quoted a woman whom she described as a "typical woman delegate at this convention," Mrs. Alberta Huffman of Rockport, Indiana, who claimed to have been "sick and tired of the New Deal and all its ways" and who "wanted to have an active part in helping to beat it." "Now we're just average people and our friends are just average people," Huffman had allegedly said. "Then along comes the New Deal and the first we know there are class lines among us. And our farmer friends are being nagged to death by taxes."89 Both Louella and Harriet had signed on to the Dewey campaign, and in the summer of 1944, when Dewey visited Hollywood, Louella and Harriet, along with noted Hollywood conservatives Ginger Rogers, Joel McRae, Harold Lloyd, Edward Arnold, Darryl Zanuck, and Hedda Hopper attended a welcome party for his arrival.90 Hopper had also covered the convention for the Chicago Tribune syndicate.91
The First Lady of Hollywood Page 33