The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  After suffering from pneumonia for several weeks, Louella went to Palm Springs in late November 1944 for a vacation. Her recovery was quick, and by early December she was back in Hollywood, attending-and hostingseveral high-profile parties. In addition to her usual Christmas dinner attended by more than twenty guests, she hosted a "tremendous soiree" for Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon, who were visiting from London. Shortly afterward she threw a party for Fred Sammis, editor of the fan publication Modern Screen, who had commissioned Louella to write a regular column for the magazine. Louella had set up a massive tent in her backyard, installed a patio on which she placed a hundred white tables, and planted dozens of longstemmed American Beauty roses for the occasion. A few hundred guests showed up. "What are you going to wear to Louella's party? someone had the naivete to ask us," wrote Edith Gwynne in the Hollywood Reporter. "Wear? We screamed. You don't wear anything to Lolly's parties-you just put a heavy coat of grease on your beautiful body. It's easier to slither through the crowd that way!"92

  Her extravaganza for the Modern Screen editor was followed by another blowout that winter to celebrate a long-awaited radio deal. After more than two years off the air, Louella finally secured a contract for a fifteen-minute gossip show, sponsored by Jergens-Woodbury. The program was slated for Wednesday nights on ABC from 6:15 to 6:30, immediately after Walter Winchell's show. Jergens had actually chosen Hopper for the spot, but when Winchell, who disliked Hopper's politics, vigorously protested, the company settled on Louella.93 On the new show, Louella "chatted" briefly with a guest star and recommended films she deemed to have "the best performances of the month."94 The show also featured a short segment called the "Woodbury Soap Box," in which Louella "got on her soap box" and editorialized on various political and social issues, ranging from the serious to ridiculous. She devoted one soapbox segment to what she described as America's "national menace in the sleeping pill habit" and urged the producers to "wake up" and eliminate references to sleeping pills in films.95 During the next three years, over one hundred different stars and Hollywood personalities appeared on the show, including Louis B. Mayer, Walt Disney, Frank Sinatra, Al Jolson, Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Olivia DeHavilland, Spencer Tracy, Ronald Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart, and Shirley Temple.

  Louella and Winchell had always been somewhat testy with one another, but the two maintained a relatively cordial facade. That is, until Winchell broadcast one of Louella's exclusives on his show-the three-hour time difference between New York and California enabled him to raid her column, and Louella was furious. She was nonetheless grateful for her radio presence, which she believed enabled her to compete effectively with Hopper. On the air, Hopper, who did a weekly gossip show for Armour Brothers, often attacked Louella, sparking criticism from the Hollywood Reporter, which complained about the way Hopper "clutters up the ether with denials of Louella's yarns."96 By 1946, Louella was outranking Hopper in the Hooper radio ratings, a national ratings system based on samplings of listeners in thirty-six cities. Louella was ranked the second most popular Hollywood gossip broadcaster after Jimmie Fidler.97 That year director Mervyn LeRoy celebrated Louella's radio work by giving her a cameo appearance in the film Without Reservations. Claudette Colbert played Kit Madden, a novelist who falls in love with an American soldier, Rusty Thomas, played by John Wayne. Convinced he will be perfect for the starring role in the upcoming film adaptation of her book, she takes him to Hollywood. In a scene near the end of the film, Louella broadcasts the news of their romance on her radio show.98

  As in Hollywood Hotel, Louella appeared glamorous and composed, but the groomed charisma masked anxiety over her and Harry's poor health. In May 1945 Harry returned to the hospital with what seemed to be a reoccurrence of the fever he had contracted in the South Pacific and was in and out of the hospital for much of the summer and fall of 1945. Louella, too, struggled with recurring bouts of kidney trouble and abdominal pain, but she continued to burn the candle at both ends. In October 1945 she accepted an assignment from Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine to do a monthly film review article, called "Cosmopolitan Citations." For the articles, she screened as many as a dozen films a week in the private movie theater she had installed in the Maple Drive home. She woke up at 6 A.M. to write the articles, in addition to pieces for Photoplay and Modern Screen magazines. "Here it is and I won't say it doesn't come to you without the sweat of my brow. To finally complete this classic [,] I've seen enough pictures to drive a sane woman crazy and a crazy woman crazier," she wrote to Cosmopolitan editor Frances Whiting in March 1946.99

  But the hard work only exacerbated her physical problems, and in April 1946 she was hospitalized for a diaphragmatic hernia, which, according to Madalynne Lang, was caused by Louella's "old fashioned" tight corsets. In May 1946 Louella had an operation, supervised by Dr. William Flick, a specialist who had arrived from Philadelphia. It would be the first of several operations during the next two decades. "She was supposed to go in for checkups all the time. She never went. She just didn't have time. So eventually she had trouble again," Lang recalled. 100 On May 15, 1946, Dorothy Manners announced that "the best news ever printed in this column is that Louella Parsons successfully came through a major operation at the Good Samaritan Hospital yesterday morning." Louella's office was flooded with "telephone calls, [an] avalanche of telegrams, [and] notes and messages inquiring about [her]. She is so deeply and sincerely touched that she wants you to know she has received every one of them. The beautiful flowers from old friends-the notes from new friends and even those messages from fans who say `Miss Parsons wouldn't know me but I've read her column for years and feel she is a friend."'101 She recovered quickly, in less than a week, and she was taken home from the hospital a day ahead of schedule. While she was being carried into the house on a stretcher, she insisted on being carried through every room. "I was so homesick," she explained.102

  Hundreds in Hollywood, including Hopper, sent flowers and good wishes. "Dear Hedda. Thank you for the lovely flowers but more for the spirit that prompted you to think of me. It's ... good to be alive with the promise of a complete return to health in a short time," Louella wrote back.103 In July 1946, to recuperate, Louella went to San Simeon, where Hearst had resumed residence. Due to the expanded circulation and advertising stimulated by the war, Hearst had been able buy back many of his former newspaper and magazine holdings; his postwar empire, nonetheless, was only a fraction of what it had been in the i92os, and the atmosphere at San Simeon was subdued. 104 According to Bebe Daniels, who was there with Louella, instead of the usual seventy-five or one hundred weekend guests, there were only six. "It was a very different San Simeon from the one we had known in those gay days before the war," she recalled.105 Louella enjoyed a quiet two weeks, then returned to Hollywood at the end of July. 106

  By the beginning of September, she was back on the radio, and critics noted a marked improvement in her delivery. "Her enforced inactivity was not passed in idleness, judging from the general improvement in her diction, delivery, and relaxed manner," noted Daily Variety. "Not a line was fluffed and the excited inflections were toned down. Gone, too, was the gushy treacle that formerly dripped from her gabby sessions from her guest stars." 107 Radio TVNews noted "a new quality in her voice which until now was lacking." "The show was sensationally good. Very warm, very human. It sounded as if for the first time a Parsons broadcast was actually rehearsed and that she had read her material before presenting it."108 Only Frank Colby of the Los Angeles Times attacked her, accusing her of adopting the "phony broad a" (in "such pronunciations as `ahsk, lahst, ahfter, cahn't, dahnce, bahth"') "in the silly belief that it will make [her] ... cultured." Colby awarded her the distinction of having the "most slovenly speech pattern" on the radio. JergensWoodbury was nonetheless pleased with her performance, and the following year she started a new five-year radio deal with a substantial salary boost, and Jergens was discussing the possibility of giving Louella her own
television show. 109

  In the fall of 1946, Sid Grauman, owner of the famed Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, asked Louella to enshrine her footprints in cement in the theater's forecourt. Grauman had been collecting stars' footprints since 1927, and although over seventy-five actors had been thus immortalized by 1945, Louella was the first-and only-film columnist to receive an invitation. She called it the "highest honor" that Grauman, a longtime friend, had ever paid her. "We are very proud of Miss Parsons in Hollywood. She is the first among many Hollywood columnists," Grauman announced to the assembled crowd.

  In the small, green-tinted square, Louella left her handprints and two high-heeled footprints. She signed it and dated it September 30, 1946, and at the top, in large capital letters, scrawled her daily column closure: "That's all today. See you tomorrow1110

  IT WAS, IN RETROSPECT, Hollywood's last hurrah. Boosted by millions of returning servicemen and a prosperous postwar economy, motion picture attendance in 1946 reached an all-time high. That year, ninety-five million film admissions were sold each week, and the film industry's revenues soared to $1.7 billion, up from $1.45 billion in 1945. "Maybe we are sitting around in this country waiting to buy new toasters, vacuum cleaners and cars, but we're not sitting at home my friends," Louella wrote in an article in Cosmopolitan in May 1946. "We're sitting in movie theaters and the producers are picking up the change."' Though the national economic upswing continued-between 1945 and 1950, consumer spending rose by 6o percent-by 1949, Hollywood was no longer reaping the benefits.2 Plagued by internal labor struggles, restricted foreign markets, and battles with the federal government, in 1947 the film industry began a period of rapid and steady decline.3 By the beginning of 1948, an 8 percent drop in domestic theater attendance and a 75 percent tax on American film earnings in Britain led the major studios to begin a series of layoffs; MGM cut its staff by a quarter, and Columbia, a third. The Screen Actors' Guild reported record levels of unemployment, and movie executives were "wearing sackcloth," according to Newsweek.4

  And the troubles were just beginning. In 1948, in the culmination of the film industry's long antitrust battle with the government, the Supreme Court issued its Paramount decision-which declared that the Big Five and Little Three studios held a monopoly over film production, distribution, and exhibition-and forced them to divest. The studios were given five years to sell off their theater chains and were required to end the practice of block booking: films would now be sold to exhibitors on an individual basis, and the studios were prohibited from setting minimum admission prices as a condition for film rental. The decision was a blessing for independent produc ers and theater owners, but it spelled financial disaster for the major studios, for which exhibition had been the primary source of profit. According to Variety in 1948, over 70 percent of the major studios' annual profits, roughly $too million, came from their affiliated theater chains.5 The earnings of Paramount, the first studio to comply with the decision, plummeted from $zo million in 1949 to $6 million in 1950.6

  Added to this was the new competition from television. Television technology had been developed in the 192,os and 193os by the major radio corporations, and by the late 1930s the CBS and NBC networks were transmitting crude black-and-white programming to a handful of wealthy families who could afford TV sets. But Hollywood's influence thwarted large-scale TV broadcasting. In 1939, pressured by the movie industry, the Federal Communications Commission prevented the development of television as a major industry, and it was not until 1946 that the ban was finally lifted. Spurred by technological developments, the strong postwar economy, a soaring birthrate, the rapid development of the suburbs, and the subsequent demand for in-home entertainment, NBC, CBS, and ABC introduced regular prime-time television programming in several major metropolitan areas by the late 1940s. By 1949 a million television sets had been sold, and approximately one thousand sets were installed every twenty-four hours.?

  Americans were weary from wartime dislocation and eager to return to a comfortable life in the suburbs; the national mood in postwar America was conservative and family-oriented. Former soldiers now donned gray flannel suits to work in the nation's growing corporate economy, and female war workers returned home, becoming housewives-and mothers-at an unprecedented rate. Between 1948 and 1952, a record twenty-two million children were born in the United States-the "baby boom"-and women were exhorted to pursue early marriage and domesticity.' Politically, too, the nation veered sharply toward the right. By 1947 the postwar rise to power of the Soviet Union and the triumph of Soviet-backed communist governments in eastern Europe had created a Red scare, and Americans feared not only the spread of communism overseas but also communist activity at home. It was an intolerant, claustrophobic cultural environment, and it became an ideal breeding ground for one of the most shameless acts of political repression in American history.

  In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee, which in 1940 had unsuccessfully investigated accusations of communism in the film industry returned to Hollywood with a vengeance. Established as a permanent congressional committee in 1945 and revitalized by the election of Republican majorities in the House and Senate in the November 1946 election, by 1947 it had widespread popular and political support from millions who feared that West Coast liberals-in particular, radical Hollywood screenwriters-were injecting communist themes into films and using motion pictures as agents of mass "subversion." (In 1947, a Gallup Poll reported that 61 percent of Americans wanted to outlaw the Communist Party in the United States, and, the following year, that a third of the public believed that communists controlled "important elements in the economy.")9 It was thus with great fanfare that, in the spring of 1947, the conservative, antilabor, anti-New Deal, New Jersey congressman J. Parnell Thomas, chairman of HUAC, announced that the committee would reopen its investigations into Hollywood. Like the infamous red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy, who rose to prominence in 1950 with accusations of communist infiltration of the federal government, Thomas saw the film industry investigations as a golden opportunity for publicity and self-promotion. He also knew that the investigations would silence not only the few directors and screenwriters who had, in fact, been involved in communist-front organizations in the 193os and 1940s but also all Hollywood liberals. As film historians Larry Ceplair and Barry Englund have written, HUAC's accusations of subversion "simply served as a pretext for silencing a cultural and humanitarian liberalism-a liberalism of the heart-which in the eyes of America's right wing, regularly `infected' the atmosphere in which Hollywood movies were made." 10

  The film producers, who feared reprisals at the box office, moved quickly to thwart HUAC's attack. In March 1947, Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Producers' Association, went to Washington to testify before HUAC, where he "admitted the presence of Communists in Hollywood" but reiterated that the industry had successfully fought off their influence. Though Johnston was initially hostile toward HUAC, in April, realizing that his plea had not dissuaded Thomas and the committee from opening their investigation, he pledged the "full cooperation" of the Producers' Association with HUAC's demands and stated that the producers would not employ "proven communists." Then, in May 1947, Thomas traveled to Los Angeles to conduct closed hearings with fourteen members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, who testified to communist infiltration of the industry." The witnesses' claims were sketchy at best. In addition to one witness's description of the MGM studio's pro-Soviet film Song ofRussia, made at the height of United States-Soviet friendship in 1943, as "Communist propaganda," Thomas heard testimony from Ginger Rogers's mother, Lela, who told investigators that her daughter had refused to speak the line "Share and share alike-that's democracy," since it supported communism.12 Throughout the summer of 1947, HUAC investigators led by a former FBI agent continued to gather information on Hollywood communists. One potential source, which they monitored closely, was Louella's column.

  This was nothin
g new. Aware of the wide readership of Hollywood gossip columns and the columnists' vast knowledge of the day-to-day doings of the film industry, the FBI had cultivated a relationship with the major Hollywood writers-most prominently, Winchell, Hopper, and Louella-during the 193os. Agents followed their writings carefully for information on the activities of communist front groups and possible communist influence on film content (information classified under the heading "compic"-communist pictures). In 1949, for example, Los Angeles agents reported to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover Louella's announcement of the MGM studio's production of Big Country, a film that was to "stress feats of the foreign born," which the agents suspected was a possible pro-Soviet reference.13 The FBI also provided information to Hopper and Louella that it hoped could be "leaked" through their columns. In 1947, Louella was forwarded a report from the Washington, D.C., office referring to a 1922 article in the Soviet newspaper Pravda that praised Charlie Chaplin as a "communist friend of humanity." The item, however, never appeared in Louella's column.14