Nonetheless, public sentiment was quickly turning against Bergman. Following Bergman's retirement announcement, Louella received hundreds of letters from readers who found Bergman's conduct immoral and demanded that her films be banned. In response, she asked her readers, "How can you ban the pictures of someone who is retiring? ... The time to talk about a ban is when and if she makes other pictures." Louella knew that Bergman's future was shaky, but out of sympathy for the actress, she assured a reporter from Quick magazine that "if Ingrid ever decides to continue with her career, she will be the success she has always been."32
In December 1949 Bergman's publicist, Joe Steele, learned from Bergman that she was indeed pregnant. Seeing nothing but the box office failure of Stromboli if the baby were to be born before the public release of the film, Steele figured that the movie would have to be released before March 1950, when the baby was due. Steele then went to see Howard Hughes, who was living in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He told Hughes the situation in confidence and convinced him to release Stromboli immediately, in as many as five hundred theaters. Steele left, then Hughes did something unexpected. That Sunday night, as Louella was about to go on the air with her radio show, she received a message from Hughes that he would meet her at the station after the show with important news. After the broadcast, Hughes told her that Bergman was pregnant. Louella was upset that Hughes had not given her the news before the show, but Hughes explained that he wanted to break the story in the papers, where he felt it would have greater exposure. Hughes believed that the publicity surrounding Bergman's adulterous pregnancy would increase the film's box office take. "There were few people whose word I would have taken on a story such as this. I realized that if I wrote the story and it turned out to be untrue, the repercussions could well destroy me. But I knew that my informant would never put me in such a position. I had every reason to trust him," Louella wrote in her 1961 memoirs.33
Columnist Sheilah Graham, who was writing for the Hollywood Citizen Examiner, later insisted that she had the scoop on the Bergman story. After a friend wrote Graham with the news from Rome, she called Joe Steele, who implied that the pregnancy news was true. Graham promised Steele that she would not reveal the news on her Hollywood gossip radio show that evening, "but the cat was out of the bag." Alarmed, Steele called Louella and gave her the story.34 In her autobiography, Hollywood Reporter columnist Radie Harris also claimed to have heard the news first. Harris claimed that Hughes informed her of the pregnancy when she was in Rome, but that conscience prevented her from running the story. "It was a code of ethics I had decided for myself when I got my first newspaper job," she remembered. "I would rather sleep well than eat well, and the money and kudos I would collect from this headline story, hawked around the world and eventually wrapped around fish, wouldn't ease my conscience. I waited full of suspense to see who would break the story."35
It was Louella, who, on Monday, December iz, 1949, reported the biggest story of her career. "INGRID BERGMAN EXPECTING BABY" read the headline that appeared in over one thousand papers worldwide. "Ingrid Bergman expects a baby in three months," Louella stated. "She has been living in a secluded apartment in Rome, close to the Italian director, Roberto Rossellini, and has refused to see anyone except close friends.... Few women in history, or men either, have made the sacrifice the Swedish star has made for love. Mary Queen of Scots gave up her throne because of her love for the Earl of Bothwell. Lady Hamilton, beautiful English queen of society, gave up her position in the London social world to bear a child out of wedlock to Lord Nelson.... Great as all these sacrifices were, none of them was any greater than the one made by Ingrid Bergman, queen of motion pictures."36
It was the first time Louella had ever released any news that she knew would most likely be scandalous. Though during her career dozens if not hundreds of actors had gone in for abortions, had had out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and had struggled with infidelity and addiction, Louella, always concerned with the film industry's reputation, had never divulged any transgressions that might offend public morals. But in 1950 the situation, both concerning Louella's career and in Hollywood, was different.37
In the studio era, news of an illegitimate pregnancy would have destroyed both the star and her studio, which had millions invested in her career. But with the breakdown of the studio system-actors now worked on an individual, film-by-film basis, rather than on long-term studio contracts-a scandal would only hurt the star and possibly her director and producer, which meant, in this case, Bergman, Rossellini, and Hughes. And though the affair offended many, by 1950 the movies were well entrenched in American culture, meaning that the Bergman affair was unlikely to turn public opinion away from Hollywood or incite the wrath of censorship advocates, as it would have in the past.
Above all, it was careerism that led Louella to break the news. Not only did she face an ongoing threat from Hopper, but Louella feared, quite rightly, that the rise of television and declining film attendance would diminish her readership and popularity. During the studio era, Louella had worked closely with the studio publicity departments, which had provided her a steady stream of news. For studio-contracted stars, interviews with Louella were a virtual condition of employment. Now, with actors' careers handled by pri vate agencies and press agents, actors had more control over their images and were less likely to kowtow to the columnists. Interviews in mass market magazines such as Time and Life, and appearances on national television broadcasts, brought greater exposure than Louella's column, and many stars no longer saw Louella's cooperation as essential to their success. Through the Bergman story, Louella reminded an increasingly recalcitrant generation of actors of her power over public opinion and her ability to shape and potentially destroy careers.
The morning of the story, Steele, furious, called Louella on the phone. Steele later reported that Louella told him, "I just feel terrible about it-just awful. But honey, you understand I couldn't do anything else. It's a big story, I just had to do it." At five that afternoon, Steele went to Louella's home to hide out from reporters who had been hounding him all day. When he again complained to Louella, she replied, "I had to, honey, I had to. I've felt awful about it ever since. Just awful. I couldn't sleep last night for thinking about it," she repeated.38 She offered Steele a drink, then told him that the Examiner would pay him five thousand dollars for his own story about Bergman. Steele declined the offer, then went into Louella's guest bedroom to take a nap. At nine that evening he woke up, Louella fixed him some eggs, and he went home. Later, Louella was falsely accused by Look magazine of having kidnapped Steele and hidden him from other reporters.39
"The story created a sensation. The greatest ever, I believe, in relation to a story about a movie personality. And resulted in the greatest effort I have ever known by other newspapers and newspaper people to deny a story," Louella recalled.40 The day after the announcement, the Los Angeles Times ran an article titled "Hollywood Sees Hoax in Reports of Bergman Baby," calling it "a lie, a cruel hoax, and a preposterous phony. "41 Even an article in the Hearst evening paper, the Los Angeles Herald Express, denied the pregnancy report. Hearst called Louella to check whether the news about Bergman was true, and when Louella assured him that it was, Hearst called the Herald Express editor and yelled, "How dare you deny a Louella Parsons story!" The denial was yanked in the next edition.42 Hopper never commented on the Bergman pregnancy in her column, but years later admitted in her autobiography, "I spent the day of the announcement rubbing egg off my face because six months before I'd interviewed Bergman at the scene of the crime."43
Like many Americans at the time, Louella, a Catholic, viewed Bergman's act as a moral transgression, and her presentation of the pregnancy as shocking and rebellious reinforced dominant attitudes toward female sexuality. Had Louella been more sympathetic toward Bergman, or had she been willing to fly in the face of public opinion, she might have turned the pregnancy story into a social critique-as a pretext to champion Bergman's independence or t
o question the sexual double standard. Though the story did not lead to a public reassessment of sexual mores, it did raise a moral issue that Louella had not expected-namely, Louella's own journalistic ethics. Immediately after the story, "storms of debate ... raged" about "newspapers and their ethics in splashing this extremely private story into every gossip nook in the nation," noted Max Lerner of the New York Post.44 Both in journalistic circles and among the general public, Louella was criticized for her encroachment on Bergman's private life. The LosAngeles Times claimed proudly that it "never has specialized in this type of news and unashamedly was scooped by Louella Parsons on Dec. iz last, when she told of the impending event," and Louella received dozens of angry letters from Bergman's fans.45 One woman notified Bergman that she had written to Louella and "told [her] a thing or two about her nasty tongue."46 Like HUAC's witch-hunt, Louella's story heralded more ominous encroachments on personal privacy by the government and press in years to come.
In January 195o, after leaving Harry for a checkup at Johns Hopkins, Louella went to Manhattan for two weeks, then to Boca Raton, Florida, with Harry, and then back to New York, where Sherman Billingsley, owner of the famed Stork Club, honored her with a party with three hundred of the "top names in show business."47 While in New York, Louella discussed with Anita Loos the possibility of Loos writing a script for The Gay Illiterate, to be made into a Broadway play starring Carol Channing.48 Loos eventually completed the script, which was written in an exaggerated, almost breathless style that mimicked Louella's book. "There is something of cosmic necessity about the manner in which Louella pursues her story. She is a Kansas cyclone, a tidal wave. She would knock down the Empire State Building to land that scoop on the front pages. Immediately she has done so, the demons leave Louella and she settles back in satisfaction, once more to be her own feminine self again," Loos wrote in the introduction. For unknown reasons, the play was never produced.49
When Louella arrived in New York, Seymour Berkson, head of the International News Service, met her at the station and shouted to her, "It's a boy, Louella," referring to Bergman's baby. Berkson ordered all of the Hearst papers to print Louella's original story "and the denials of all the other papers side by side." 50
It was after the baby's birth that the Bergman scandal really began. Throughout the country, church groups and local censors tried to ban Stromboli, and some even tried to ban Bergman from the screen. To them, Bergman's act was a powerful and unwelcome reminder of the will and libido that lurked behind the seemingly most chaste of appearances. The Memphis censor Lloyd Binford tried to ban all Bergman films from the city, claiming that "Miss Bergman's conduct is a disgrace, not only to her profession, but all American women." In Birmingham, the Protestant Ministers Association urged exhibitors to ban all movies in which Bergman or Rossellini were identified, while another ministers' group in Albuquerque instructed all residents to stay away from Stromboli.51 On March 14, 1950, Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, a leader in the Swedish American community, denounced Bergman and Rossellini for more than an hour on the floor of the U.S. Senate, calling Bergman and Rossellini "free love cultists," "moral outlaws," and "a powerful influence for evil." He urged passage of a resolution barring Bergman forever from returning to the United States and presented to the Senate a bill that would have made it mandatory for all entertainment industry members to be licensed before being permitted to work. Johnson later attacked Rossellini, intimating that he was a Nazi collaborator, fascist, and drug addict, and proposed a resolution, with the director in mind, "expressing Senate disapproval of the exhibition in the United States of motion pictures produced or directed by Fascists, Nazis, or Communists."52
Ultimately Bergman was not banned from the country, but her American film career was essentially over. Soon after the baby's birth she divorced Lindstrom and married Rossellini. Taking up residence in Italy, she did not work in the U.S. film industry for more than seven years. In a 1953 interview with the Los Angeles Mirror, Louella assured reporter Herb Stinson that Bergman held no grudge against her. "Ingrid had no hard feelings about it, and since it was bound to come out, she was glad that I was the one who broke the story," she claimed.53 In reality, Bergman hated Louella for the rest of her life. "Louella ... said she cried over her typewriter when she had to write the news. I think they were tears of j oy," Bergman recalled in her autobiography. 54
While Bergman's career was devastated, Louella's revived. As a result of the publicity from the story, Louella experienced a sudden boost in popularity. A pocket paperback book she wrote in early 1950, on Clark Gable's recent marriage to Douglas Fairbanks's widow, Sylvia Ashley, sold four hundred thousand copies by the end of February 1950, and Dell Publishing expected sales to reach a million by late spring.55 In December 1949, Variety reported that Louella, as a result of the Bergman story, was "gaining on Walter Winchell in the Hooper ratings": that month she had earned a 15.1 rating, compared to Winchell's 16.7.56 Louella was reportedly more delighted with her new rating "than with any Christmas gift."57 In March 1950, a poll of 272 prominent female journalists taken by Pageant magazine ranked Louella as "one of the country's most powerful and influential women." Others on the list included Eleanor Roosevelt, Irene Dunne, Clare Booth Luce, and Dorothy Thompson.51
The following month, she was named "Favorite Woman Commentator on radio" by Radio TVMirror magazine and that fall was featured in a lengthy article in Look magazine.59 The feature, by Isabella Taves, credited Louella with having written the first gossip column and lauded her for her "unremitting service" as "Hollywood's number one booster." "She does an expert Charleston at the Mocambo on Dixieland Jazz nights and leaves a good party reluctantly, no matter how late the hour. She has a work and social schedule which would wreck many women half her age," Taves wrote.60 At the end of the year, Louella celebrated her sixth anniversary with Jergens and her twentieth anniversary on radio with a special broadcast featuring Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert, Bing Crosby, Marion Davies, Dick Powell, and Mary Pickford. She ended the show with a tribute to Hearst, who had made "it possible for me to be on the radio all these years." The Hollywood Reporter described the show as a "charmingly sentimental occasion."61
In late 195o Harry spent a few weeks in Honolulu and, unbeknownst to Louella, was hospitalized briefly.62 He recuperated quickly, in time to return to Beverly Hills to spend Christmas with her. But two weeks later, he was ill again, and he and Louella left for the Mayo Clinic in New York.63 Louella returned to Hollywood in mid-January 1951, leaving Harry at the clinic, where he would stay for the next three months. Then in March 1951, Louella, suffering from exhaustion, checked herself into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital for a brief stay.64
During this time, Louella, overwhelmed by her responsibilities and by Harry's deteriorating health, started drinking. She had imbibed regularly in the past, typically at social events, but during the 195os her alcohol consumption became heavy, and observers noticed that she often seemed drunk or hung over. Esther Williams recalled that in 1950, shortly after Williams's baby was born, Louella came to her house to do an interview. Williams had set up the baby in "an old-fashioned colonial cradle," which she decided "would be picturesque and make good copy." When Williams brewed a pot of tea for Louella, Louella complained. She wanted a drink, and when Williams gave her one, she "drank like a fish."65 Actress Jayne Meadows remembered going to Louella's house for an interview in the early 195os and meeting Montgomery Clift, who was also there for an interview. Clift had kidded Louella about drinking during the interview, saying, "You aren't going to remember any of this in the morning. Why don't you write it down?" Despite her inebriation, according to Meadows, Louella seemed to remember everything. Louella "was a crazy nut, fisting down the sherry. And, drunk as she was, she always knew when something was going on.... She had a mind like a steel trap," recalled another actor.66
In June 1951, the Warner Brothers studio paid Louella five thousand dollars to do a cameo role in Starlii t. The film was about an air force pilot ser
ving in Korea who falls in love with a movie actress; the story is subsequently picked up by Louella, who played herself in the film.67 In real life, Louella had been volunteering to visit Korean War casualties returning to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California. According to Shirley Temple, who went on an overnight trip to the base with Louella, Louella was picked up by a stretch limo "preceded by two suitcases and a hatbox." Louella entered the car clutching a rosary, a Saint Christopher medal, and a full-length black mink coat. Temple and Louella then boarded a two-engined C-47 airplane from World War II. "At last, as we roared off the runway, Louella clasped her religious medals with one hand and her safety belt with the other. What a headline it would be, she shouted. Hearst motion picture editor and former child star die in each other's arms."68
During the filming of Starlift, Louella learned that Harry, who had since returned to Los Angeles from the Mayo Clinic, was in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in a coma, and she rushed back to Beverly Hills. Shortly afterward, at 10:30 A.M. on June 24, 1951, Harry died of leukemia at the age of sixty- one.69 Lawyer Jake Ehrlich, Harry's close friend, recalled that in his last days Harry would call him on the phone and cry like a baby; he was terrified of dying. "But so that Louella wouldn't see it, she'd come in the room and he'd declare war. He couldn't let her see him frightened," Ehrlich recalled.70
The Hollywood community grieved with Louella and sent condolences by the thousands. Louella received over two thousand telegrams of sympathy, including a personal message from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.7' ("My husband admired you greatly and was also a staunch supporter of the ideals for which you stand," Louella wrote back. "I am deeply touched that a man as busy as you are took time to write me." )72 The Hollywood Reporter remem bered Harry as "genial, open hearted, and generous to a fault," while the Examiner described him as "a hale, vigorous man with a hearty humor." "Doc Martin enjoyed the friendship of thousands of persons in and out of the film industry who knew him as a kindly, generous man and physician with a ready quip on his lips and where necessary an encouraging word," the Examiner wrote.73 Over five hundred attended the funeral at the Church of the Good Shepherd. The eulogy was delivered by Father English, who had been one of Harry's close friends. "Without question the distinguishing characteristic in the life of Dr. Martin has been his devotion-devotion to his God and country, devotion to his wife, devotion to his mother and father and devotion to his friends," said English. "The passing of this good man with his grand sense of humor, his kindly greeting, his good nature, his genuine friendship has left a void as few others have done."74 He was buried at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City; pallbearers included Hollywood executives Louis B. Mayer, Darryl Zanuck, Harry Brand, Howard Strickling, and Edward Mannix. Attending Louella were Harriet, the composer Irving Berlin, and Bebe Daniels, who flew in from London. Harry had left his estate, valued "in excess of $io,ooo," entirely to Louella, with the exception of five thousand dollars to his brother, Carl David Martin, five hundred dollars to Lillian Nelson, his secretary, and "any jewelry I possess" to MGM publicists Howard Strickling and Harry Brand.75
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