The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  Louella was devastated beyond belief, so distraught that she seriously considered giving up the column. After the funeral she announced that she was going on an "indefinite leave of absence" from the Examiner, and she and Bebe Daniels went to Joe Schenck's cottage at Lake Arrowhead, where Daniels spent an entire weekend trying to talk her out of quitting.76 Louella and Daniels then went back to Hollywood to visit Hearst, who had been living with Davies in her Beverly Hills home since 1947. She had seen him earlier that year at a small party on New Year's Eve hosted by Davies with Anita Loos and Davies's nephew Charlie Lederer. Hearst, who was suffering from pneumonia, had shrunk to 125 pounds and was frail and feeble. Not wanting to upset Hearst, Louella said nothing about Harry's death. Hearst then said, "Tell Dr. Martin I am expecting him to be toastmaster at my next party." "I had to fight to keep from breaking down and crying," Louella recalled. To lighten the mood, Daniels reminded Hearst of a time at San Simeon when Louella had put on her riding breeches backward. "Louella was always one to do things differently," Hearst smiled. "Nobody knew whether she was coming or going," Davies quipped.77

  Two weeks later, unexpectedly, Louella was back at work. On July 14, 1951, Dorothy Manners announced, "On Monday you will find your girl and mine, Louella Parsons, back on the column giving you the news as only Hollywood's greatest reporter can do it. From the thousands of letters which have come in asking about her, I know how happy you will be to have her back. There's nobody like her, God bless her." But grief soon got the better of Louella, and ten days later, she announced that she planned to take a "no destination" vacation.78 She spent her birthday, on August 6, "incognito" at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, then went to Lake Tahoe for a few days.79

  Then on August 14, 1951, Hearst died at the age of eighty-eight in Beverly Hills. During Hearst's last hours, Davies was so distraught that she was put under a sedative by a physician and was still asleep when a Beverly Hills undertaker took the body to prepare it for burial in San Francisco. Louella sent a telegram to Daniels, who was in New York on her way back to London, saying, "Our dear W. R. left us in the night," and then drove quickly from Tahoe to San Francisco to attend the funeral. In San Francisco, Louella and Adela Rogers St. Johns met in the lobby of the Fairmount Hotel, then went upstairs to cry.80 Per the wishes of Hearst's family, Davies was not invited to the funeral, held at Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco. Over fifteen hundred people attended, and hundreds gathered on the streets outside.81 At the conclusion of the half-hour-long service, the bronze coffin, draped in a cloth of purple and gold, was covered with a blanket of red roses and carried to the Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, a San Francisco suburb, to be buried alongside Hearst's parents. At the funeral, Louella and St. Johns sat with the Hearst family in the front pew.82

  After the funeral Davies released the news of the secret trust agreement that Hearst had signed in November 1950, giving her control of the Hearst empire. 'I When Millicent, Hearst's wife, heard of the agreement, she pledged to fight it on the grounds of California's community property law, which theoretically made half of Hearst's holdings hers. Rather than fight and thus jeopardize the earnings she had previously acquired from Hearst, in October 1951 Davies relinquished her rights "as voting trustee for the stock of the Hearst Corporation." The following day, October 31, Davies eloped with Horace Brown, a merchant marine captain, and less than two years later they divorced. With Hearst no longer in the picture, the friendship between Davies and Louella weakened. In an indication of their deteriorating relationship, Davies gave the news of her divorce to Hopper.14

  Hearst's death led to immediate changes in his newspapers' editorial pol icy. His son Bill, who assumed the chairmanship of the corporation, attempted to disperse power within the organization by doing away with the official "Hearst policy" and encouraging local editors to "play the story for what it's worth." Bill Hearst was a devoted admirer of the anticommunist Senator Joseph McCarthy, with whom he had a close working relationship. However, the majority of the executives on the Hearst papers were even stauncher anticommunists. They pushed all the Hearst writers to launch a full-blown attack on the Reds; William Randolph Hearst, by contrast, had urged political attacks only by political columnists. Hearst entertainment writers were enlisted in the cause, and by 1952 even society columnist Igor "Cholly Knickerbocker" Cassini was attacking New York's "rich parlor pinks, traitors to their class."85

  In spring 1951, HUAC, now chaired by Georgia Senator John Wood, returned to Hollywood to resume its investigations. Since 1947, the Soviets' explosion of an atomic bomb, the fall of China to the communists, the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of atomic espionage, and Joseph McCarthy's rise to power had increased the domestic anticommunist hysteria, and public support for HUAC was high. Surprisingly, Louella made only a few mentions of the investigation in her column, compared to her more aggressive treatment of the 1947 hearings. Her reporting on HUAC in 1947in particular, her attacks on the CFA-had been criticized by many in Hollywood. Given her increasingly precarious status in the industry, she may have been hesitant to invoke further wrath from her colleagues. She may have also been wary of broadcasting the industry's alleged ties to communist organizations, given the ongoing losses at the box office. Nonetheless, she made clear to her readers her hard-line anticommunist stance, and for this she won the praise of FBI director Hoover, who in the late 195os named her a "Special Correspondent. 1116

  In March 1951, eight screenwriters, actors, and directors with former communist affiliations received subpoenas to appear before the committee. The first to testify was Larry Parks, a young actor who had earned acclaim for his portrayal of the title role in the 1946 film, The Jolson Story. Parks admitted to the committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party in the early 1940s but said that he had left it in 1945 because of "lack of interest." He initially refused to name fellow party members, but when he was told that this decision was "in contempt of the Committee" and would lead him to jail, he broke down and named names. Parks's contract with Columbia was subsequently canceled. During the next several weeks, dozens of subpoenaed witnesses took the stand, where they either became informers, denied participation in communist activities, or attempted to use their acting skills to get out of the accusations. Lucille Ball, adopting her scatterbrained Lucy Ricardo persona from her television show I Love Lucy, swore that she was never a member of the party but had registered as a communist voter in 1936 to please her socialist grandfather. After denying guilt, John Garfield praised the committee for its work and tried to prove his patriotism by lashing out against the Communist Party. Some witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment, while others refused to accept their subpoenas and went underground. The thirty-one prominent Hollywood artists who testified cited an average of twenty-nine names apiece, which, excluding duplications, came out to over two hundred Hollywood communists.87

  One of Louella's major contributions to HUAC's 1951 mission was an April 22 radio show in which she promoted the anticommunist film I Was a Communist for the FBI. "What possessed a young man like Larry Parks to make him become a communist.... Why did the Communists try to influence Hollywood's thinking. I'm about to bring you the answers to these questions, through what I regard as about the most timely and dramatic combination I've ever had on my show," she announced. Appearing on the show was Frank Lovejoy, who played the lead role in the film, and Matt Cvetic, the FBI agent who in real life had infiltrated the party between 1943 and 1950. Referring to the HUAC investigations, Louella asked, "Mr. Cvetic, what about the argument that these trials only drive the Reds further underground?" "Don't fall for that one, Miss Parsons," he replied. "The Reds try to put that idea across to discourage these trials. But the truth is, the commies always work underground, and anything that brings them out into the open hurts them. That's why Hollywood must support Larry Parks ... to encourage more people to speak out." The program concluded with Lovejoy's recitation of a speech from the film: "The political activity of the communis
t party in this country is actually a vast spy system founded here by the Soviet, and composed of American traitors whose only purpose is to deliver the people of the United States into the hands of Russia as a colony of slaves. The idea of communism as common ownership and control by the people has never been practiced in Russia and never will be. Their state capitalism is a fascist horror far worse than the one Hitler intended for the world.""

  Louella later reported proudly in her column that director Edward Dmytryk, a member of the Hollywood Ten who eventually became an in former and named names for HUAC, cited the Cvetic interview on Louella's radio show when asked by Congressman Donald Jackson for his opinion of the need for legislation to abolish the Communist Party. Dmytryk quoted from Cvetic's comment about the need to "legislate the party out of exis- tence."89

  Los Angeles FBI agents forwarded to Hoover Louella's radio script, and Hoover was also apprised of Louella's repeated false claims that she used the FBI as a news source. On November zo, 1950, Agent R. B. Hood reported that Louella had stated on her radio program, "The FBI is fully aware of the pro-Communist picture called Speak Your Peace which opposes US intervention in North Korea. The picture has been quietly shown around Hollywood for a week under the auspices of the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. This group may be interested to know that two or three FBI men attended every showing and took the names of those present just for future reference, if you know what I mean." According to Hood, "This statement of Louella Parsons is obviously completely untrue[,] and Agents have not been attending any showings and have not been taking the names of those attending such showings."90 In September 1951, Louella reported in her column that Hood was being transferred to Washington, D.C., to work as an assistant for Hoover; Hood then reported to the director that he had "no contact with Louella Parsons in the recent past ... and ha[d] no idea where she obtained her inaccurate information."91

  Louella had also come to the FBI's attention in 1949 when she reported on the Actors' Lab, a leftist, pro-labor theater group in Hollywood that was under investigation by the California State Fact-Finding Committee on UnAmerican Activities, known as the "little Dies committee," or the Tenney Committee, after its chairman, Jack Tenney. "The FBI is keeping a very close watch on a certain little theatre group in Hollywood. It is so infested with Communists that several of the players have resigned because they do not want to be a part of a group suspected of Red activities. The membership includes some very well known names," Louella had written in her column.92 In public hearings in 1948, Tenney described the organization as a communist front affiliated with several of the Hollywood Ten, and in the fall the Los Angeles Examiner claimed that evidence "proved" that the Actors' Lab was a communist front organization. Jim Henaghan of the Hollywood Reporter and Hopper similarly printed innuendoes in their columns that supported the Tenney Committee's accusations. Members of the group were subsequently blacklisted, and former supporters stopped attending its productions and enrolling in its acting classes. The Lab essentially shut down as a theater company in 1950.93

  Hopper, however, with her vitriolic anticommunist tirades, did the most political damage in Hollywood. In a famous column on July 19, 1948, she had attacked MGM producer Dore Schary, who during the 1947 hearings had gone on record opposing a blacklist. At the time an executive at RKO, Schary had testified before HUAC that, since a California law explicitly prevented the denial of employment based on political affiliation, blacklisting was illegal. He stated that he opposed the firing of two former Communist Party members, Edward Dmytryk and the screenwriter Adrian Scott. "It will be ironically amusing to watch some of the scenes behind the scenes now that Dore Schary is the big noise at Metro Goldwyn Moscow. He testified on the opposite side of the fence in Washington from Robert Taylor, James K. McGuinness and L. B. Mayer, Sam Wood, George Murphy, and other men with whom he will work," crowed Hopper. She opposed Schary, she explained, because "he expressed pinko sympathies for years in Hollywood [and] stated on the stand in Washington that he would never fire Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott until it was proven that their work was subversive.... Americans don't admire a man like that."94 In response, Schary banned Hopper from the MGM lot.

  Hopper's digs at Schary seemed anemic, however, compared to her attack in 1951 on Larry Parks. When HUAC had pressed Parks for information about Hollywood subversives, Parks had replied, "I ask you again, counsel, to reconsider forcing me to name names.... Don't present me with the choice of either being in contempt of this Committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer."95 At a meeting of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, at the American Legion Hall on March 22, 1951, Hopper attacked those in Hollywood who were sympathetic to Parks, including the alliance's president, John Wayne.

  In a speech in which he was to reiterate the group's stance on HUAC- "the MPA regrets anything that will bring discredit to the industry ... but the welfare of our country comes first and any enemies of our country must be brought into the open," read its official position-Wayne praised Parks for his "courage to answer the questions and declare himself. "96 "The American public is pretty quick to forgive a person who is willing to admit a mistake," Wayne had said.97 Hopper lashed back: "I suggest before we let the tra ditional theatrical charity govern our reason that we consider whether the mud of an informer is worse than the mud of Korea mixed with 55,000 boys whose luck ran out before they came to fame in Hollywood or anywhere else. Larry Parks says he felt he'd done nothing wrong. I feel sorry for him. And I'm wondering if the mothers and families of those who've died and the wounded who are still living will be happy to know their money at the box office has supported and may continue to support those who have been so late in the defense of our country?"98 In smearing Parks's name, Hopper "permanently hurt" the actor, according to Hopper's legman Spec McClure. Parks remained on a Hollywood blacklist until he was finally pardoned in 1962 and given a role in the film Freud. He made only two more films before his death in 1975.99

  Even more than in her career as a columnist, in her work as a political reactionary Hopper seemed to have found her true calling. By the early 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover, Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, and Joseph McCarthy were among her allies; she, too, was one of Hoover's "Special Correspondents," and she met regularly with the director to discuss her political concerns. In April 1952, on a trip to New York, she attempted to meet with Hoover to discuss what she characterized as an urgent matter "about our friend Walter Winchell." During the previous year, Winchell had been falsely accused of colluding with the management of the Stork Club, a New York nightclub, in its discrimination against the black singer Josephine Baker. The accusations led to a story in the tabloid Expose and a damning series in the New York Post. Winchell then suffered a physical and mental breakdown and took five weeks off the air. Hopper believed that the "Winchell situation ... was maneuvered by the Communists" and that "if they can destroy Winchell then they can destroy anyone." When Hopper visited the FBI headquarters in Washington in January 1953, Hoover's staff was instructed to give her a tour, as they had "had cordial contacts with her for some years." 100

  Hopper adored Hoover, whom she praised in personal letters for having "been such a fighter against communism for so long and [doing] such a marvelous job." ("If you had your way, I feel sure you'd name names, which is the only way we'll ever get rid of them. Some day they've got to stand up and be counted," she told him.)10' She was also a fan-"one of your greatest boosters"-of Joseph McCarthy. "It's mighty tough what I've had to take in defending you," she wrote to the senator in 1953, when he had come under attack by President Eisenhower.102 Hoover and McCarthy became the heroes of her column, which often contained less "celebrity gossip" than political di atribe. "We've had many pictures pointing up our racial problems, political corruption in government, the evil of wealth, men driven to crime because of the supposed pressure of our capitalistic system. These are but a few devices which the Com
mies could use to get inverse propaganda in our films," she told readers in May 1951.103 The Daily Worker had labeled her and Cecil DeMille as "two of the most bigoted, sybaritic, ostentatious, and fraudulent reactionaries in all of filmdom. "104 She wore it as a badge of honor.

  But her zealotry got the better of her when, in the spring of 1951, she told reporters from the Hollywood Citizen News that HUAC had "whitewashed" certain prominent industry figures who were communist sympathizers and had allowed them to deny guilt under oath. "Hedda Hopper has seen some people go before the committee and deny any connections or sympathies with communist-front activities though she knows from the battles she has been through that those very persons have aided the fronts in every possible way," the Citizen News wrote.105 According to Variety, she was subpoenaed by HUAC; in her autobiography, Hopper claimed to have never received a subpoena and that "someone ... planted the story on that unsuspecting publi- cation."106 Regardless, committee chairman Wood met privately with Hopper and asked her for names-to either "put up or shut up." Hopper then retracted her accusations, admitting that she "didn't know anything." 107