The First Lady of Hollywood
Page 42
By 1953, Hopper and Louella headed a pack of 4ii Hollywood press cor- respondents.31 With the exception of Washington, Hollywood was the most widely covered city in America. In third place behind Hopper and Louella was Sheilah Graham, whose column had more than twenty million readers. Graham also wrote a monthly article for Photoplay and edited special paperback books for Dell Publishing, such as Sheilah Graham's Hollywood Yearbook and Sheilah Graham's Hollywood Romances.32 The three women competed with Erskine Johnson, a columnist for the Newspaper Enterprise Association with 786 daily newspapers; Aline Mosby of the United Press and Bob Thomas of the Associated Press; Harrison Carroll and Jimmy Starr, columnists for the Los Angeles Herald Express; and Sidney Skolsky, Florabel Muir, and Lowell Redelings, who worked for the Hollywood Citizen News. On television Ed Sullivan had hosted a popular CBS variety-talk show since 1948, and Wendy Barrie filled a prime-time gossip spot on ABC. ("Hedda Hopper and the other chatter girls on the West Coast would be aghast over the way Miss Barrie handles items of alleged Hollywood news," noted the New York Times in 1949. "With tongue away in cheek she spoofs the latest bulletins of who is going with whom and who is no longer going with whom, interpolating her own barbed remarks as she goes along. For that alone Wendy rates an Oscar of her own.")33 At his peak in 1950, Jimmie Fidler was heard over 486 radio stations each week by forty million people, and his gossip column appeared in 36o papers.34
Though the Hollywood Reporter's circulation was only between eight and nine thousand, the shrewd "Rambling Reporter" columnist Mike Connolly was generally acknowledged to be the most influential gossip in the film in- dustry.35 In contrast to Hopper, who accused the openly gay journalist of being a "drunken faggot," Louella was an ally to Connolly, a Catholic and Illinois native.36 According to Connolly's biographer, Val Holley, Louella described Connolly as "my greatest newspaper rival but still one of my greatest friends" and often gave him stories that she could not use in her column. Since Jimmy McHugh and Connolly shared the same birthday, each year Louella, McHugh, and Connolly celebrated together. Connolly's principal rival was Army Archerd of Daily Variety, who became the paper's leading columnist in 1953.37
Louella and Sheilah Graham, who did a radio show sponsored by the makers of Rayve Creme Shampoo, became friendly after Louella's illness in 1946. In the hospital, Louella heard Graham's broadcasts for the first time, and later told her, "I like your radio show. It's very good." When Louella went to Europe in the summer of 1948 and needed substitutes for her own radio show, Graham told Louella that she was interested, and that an appearance on Louella's show might encourage Rayve Creme to put Graham's program on the air coast to coast. Realizing that this would make Graham a rival, Louella coldly refused her offer to appear on the show.38
But Louella always faked a cordial front. When Graham became Louella's neighbor on Maple Drive, Louella sent her a big basket of flowers. According to Graham, Louella began to like her "because meeting on a walk around the block, I would slip her a story I could not use." Louella was particularly impressed when Graham gave her a big story for her Sunday radio show that Hopper was using as the lead in her Monday column. "At the time, I was between radio shows and it was too late for me to use it myself. When you gave Louella a scoop, she was your friend for life," Graham recalled. But Louella snubbed Graham in 195o by refusing to invite Graham's children to a kids' party she was holding at her home with actor Bill Boyd, who played the character Hopalong Cassidy in cowboy films. The party was a stunt to publicize Boyd's upcoming appearance on Louella's radio show. Even though Louella knew that Graham's two children were enamored of the actor, she feared that if she invited them, Graham would use the opportunity to interview Boyd for her column.
To get back at Louella, Graham called Boyd and asked him to stop by her home on the way to Louella's event. When he showed up, Graham called a photographer from the Citizen News. "My children were regarded very highly in their circle. And to hell with Louella," Graham recalled.39
The press competition, combined with the demise of the studios and the subsequent changes in star publicity, made news gathering more challenging for Louella, who found herself snubbed by stars who had once feared doing anything, from vacationing to divorcing, without calling her in advance. Consequently, Louella doted even more on those stars who remained loyal and compliant. One of the most cooperative was Marilyn Monroe, who was rewarded with a generous amount of space in the column. When Louella was in the hospital in October 1952, she reported that "there were more questions asked about Marilyn Monroe that any other star, male or female. Marilyn herself had been in the same hospital not long ago, and she made a great hit with all the nurses and doctors." Later that month, in a series of articles Louella did on the women of Hollywood, titled "Ten Most Exciting Women," she put Monroe at the top of the list.40 "Marilyn is the most exciting movie personality of this generation. She possesses the star quality that has to be natural, that can't be manufactured," Louella wrote.41
In early 1953, when Monroe went to a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel wearing a form-fitting gold lame gown, Citizen News columnist Florabel Muir reported the next day, "With one little twist of her derriere, Marilyn Monroe stole the show.... The assembled guests broke into wild applause, while two other screen stars, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, got only casual attention. After Marilyn every other girl appeared dull by contrast." Offended, Crawford summoned the press and publicly denounced Monroe's "burlesque show," adding, "Kids don't like Marilyn ... because they don't like to see sex exploited."42 Appalled by Crawford's attack and believing that "Marilyn should have a chance to say her piece," Louella called Monroe and "asked her to let [Louella] tell the public her side of the story."43 In the interview, to win sympathy for Monroe, Louella played up Monroe's innocent screen image and her well-known tragic childhood as an orphan. She quoted Monroe as saying, "The thing that hit me hardest about Miss Crawford's remarks ... is that I've always admired her for being such a wonderful mother-for taking four children and giving them a fine home. Who better than I know what that means to homeless little ones?"44
Monroe thanked Louella by giving her exclusives and interviews for the rest of her career. Monroe's press agent recalled an incident when, at a press reception at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Hopper grabbed one of Monroe's arms, hoping to catch her for an interview, while Louella took hold of the other. Each was pulling in the opposite direction and neither was willing to let go. Eventually Monroe gave in to Louella because she "liked Louella better. "45 When Monroe and baseball star Joe DiMaggio got married in San Francisco in 1954, they gave Louella the story, which earned more space in the Examiner than Louella's 1933 scoop on the divorce of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.46
Marilyn Monroe could do no wrong, and Marlon Brando, no right. A bel ligerent, tough-talking freethinker who came to Hollywood in 195o, Brando refused to pander to the columnists and he publicly scorned the celebrity lifestyle. Louella found this appalling. Following an interview in Life magazine in which he claimed that his wealth and fame meant little to him, Louella wrote that if Brando was as "squirrelly" as he appeared in the article, "I don't think I want to look at Brando on the screen again." In response, Brando wrote her a letter that read, "Please stop picking on me. You are becoming offensive, not only to me, but to other people." Louella wrote back, "What about you, Marlon?"47 When Brando won the Academy Award for On the Waterfront in 1955, Louella went backstage and Brando rushed up to meet her. She expected an embrace. He shook her hand.48
When Brando, disgusted with the script, went AWOL from the set of the 1954 film The Egyptian, Louella chastised him in her column for days.41 In her typical fashion, she continued to use her column to publicly attack and discipline those who defied the producers. When Mario Lanza was in the midst of a contract dispute with MGM, Louella snidely remarked that at the Del Mar racetrack, a horse named "Lucky Lanza" unseated his rider and threw him. "Is there any moral in that for Mario?" she asked.50 When Donald O'Connor refused to do the last film in the
Francis series, about a man and a talking mule, Louella told her readers in 1953, "Donald O'Connor is getting on the difficult side. Whether Donald thinks he is now above the mule-movies or not, the fact remains that they are money makers. I said it before and I repeat: Don is too talented and too hot at the moment to jeopardize his career by not keeping his studio commitments-as well as his ap- pointments."51 Judy Garland's inability to lose fifteen pounds as directed by MGM sparked bitter words. "This is the first time I have publicly spanked Judy. But I can't understand her attitude after all that has been done for her," Louella wrote.52
In 1954 she also turned on Rita Hayworth, who had since divorced Aly Khan and married singer Dick Haymes. When Hayworth invited Louella to her wedding to Haymes at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Louella declined, saying, "I think I'd better not this time dear. You'll have better luck without me." Haymes, an Argentinian citizen living illegally in the United States, was in trouble with the Justice Department. For much of 1954 he and Hayworth, who was having contract disputes with the Columbia studio, hid out in a secluded bungalow near Lake Tahoe. "It's unfortunate that Rita Hayworth has shut herself away. I have always been very fond of Rita and I feel sorry for her now because she seems so mixed up," Louella wrote.53 "I've had many, many letters-most of them saying she is throwing her career away. She listens only to Dick Haymes, who certainly did not manage his own affairs too wisely... I have been very fond of her through the years, but I don't understand this new girl."54
Charlie Chaplin also came under attack, both by Louella and, far more viciously, by Hopper. Though Chaplin had never been a member of the Communist Party, he was widely criticized by conservatives for his advocacy of liberal causes and his unwillingness to adopt American citizenship. He never testified before HUAC, but in 1949 he had come to the committee's attention due to rumors that he would attend the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, an event sponsored by the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, which the FBI had declared to be a communist front organization. "I can hardly believe that Charlie Chaplin has the nerve to plan another movie here right on the heels of admitting that he has become a member of the Communist-organized world peace congress," Louella had written at the time. "I think his conduct has reached a point where even his old friends who said, `Oh Charlie isn't really a Communisthe's just misguided' can no longer continue to apologize for him. It is nothing short of insolence on his part to be talking about a new film in which he will play a clown who loses his burlesque queen sweetheart to his son. I can assure him that real Americans will not pay to see him on the screen-and add more dollars to the millions he has already collected in this country," she concluded.55
By 1950, however, thanks in large part to his own efforts, many of Chaplin's critics, including Louella, had modified or reversed their positions. Chaplin had tried to restore his public image by rereleasing his classic 1931 film City Lights; he also ordered his lawyers to halt a proposed showing of his film The Circus as a fund-raiser for the Daily People's World, a San Francisco leftist paper. Louella recognized Chaplin's efforts and, in January 195o, reported that when she was in New York she dined with Frances and Sam Goldwyn and Chaplin, "who was there with Oona." "Charles was more like himself than I've seen him since he and I came to a parting of the ways over his sympathy for the Russians. Now, I believe, he has that Leftist idea out of his system. I never thought he was serious about it anyway, although he did too much talking."56 In July 1950, the Hollywood Reporter noted: "Looks as though LOP and Charlie Chaplin have kissed and made up. She went all the way across the room to give him a big handshake at Charlie Feldman's party the other night."57 This was a little too much for Louella, who did not want to go on record as being Chaplin's friend. She wired back, "Just for the record I did not ... walk across the room to speak to Charlie Chaplin at Charles Feldman's party. You were not there so how could you know? I wish you would check things with me before you use my name or better still kindly leave my name out of your column." The Reporter lashed back, "Dear Louella, were you in Italy when Ingrid had her baby?"58
Chaplin stayed out of Louella's column until the summer of 1952, when he went to Europe for a family vacation. As a British citizen, he applied to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for a reentry permit, which he received on July 16. After setting sail, he received news from the attorney general that his reentry permit had been revoked and that he would have to answer questions about his political views before he could reenter the country.59 This was the culmination of a long campaign by Hedda Hopper, J. Edgar Hoover, and Vice President Richard Nixon, among others, to deport Chaplin. Since 1947, Hopper had been discussing the "Chaplin problem" with J. Edgar Hoover and had also mentioned it to Nixon. "I agree with you that the way the Chaplin case has been handled has been a disgrace for years.... You can be sure that I will keep my eye on the case," Nixon wrote to Hopper in 60 May 1952.
Hopper celebrated the deportation, claiming that there were "hundreds of people in Hollywood ... who are dancing in the street for joy over Attorney General McGranery's statement that before Charlie Chaplin can return to the US he will have to pass the board of immigration." "I've known him for many years. I abhor what he stands for, while I admire his talents as an actor. I would like to say `good riddance to bad company,"' she .6 Louella took a different approach. Though she too criticized Chaplin, she tried to defuse the accusations that he was a communist and traitor. In the first article of a syndicated series on Chaplin in September 1952, she dismissed Chaplin's "arrogance and apparent indifference towards his adopted country" as an expression of his "innate stubbornness," rather than one of disloyalty. In his early days in America, Louella wrote, he "was charming, amusing, and gracious, and as far as I know had no part in any alleged subversive groups."62 During World War I, when Louella accompanied Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford on a war bond tour, "the revolution in Russia was going on, and he never had expressed any sympathy for the overthrow of the Czarist regime."63 Only in the last installment did she attack Chaplin for the Simonov incident and for allegedly pro-Soviet inscriptions on the back of pictures he had given to the children of the Soviet ambassador to the United States.64 Many of Hopper's fans, who praised her for the attack, criticized Louella's sympathy for Chaplin. "Please ... ask [Louella Parsons] to keep her story out of the paper about Chaplin. No one cares anything about him and we are not interested in her story about the real CC. I am surprised at Louella. I always admire and love her but I don't understand how she can stand up for a guy like C," one woman wrote Hopper .61
While Hopper saw herself as Hollywood's self-appointed political guardian, Louella became its moral protector. She was disturbed by the edgier, more sexually explicit content of postwar films and used her column to crusade for what she described as cleaner and more "family oriented" fare. As she explained to her readers in a 1954 Cosmopolitan article, the divorcement of the production companies from the theaters had made it easier for the makers of risque films to exhibit their material. All they had to do was "to go out into the open market" and lure "any theater manager who wanted to pay the price of it." The changed content was also the result of a 1952 Supreme Court decision that decided movies were covered by the First Amendment and extended to them the same protected status granted newspapers, magazines, and other organs of free speech.66 In 1954, Louella attacked the controversial film The Moon Is Blue, which raised eyebrows throughout the country with its use of the words virgin, seduce, mistress, and pregnant. That same year, when she heard of the arrival of Simone Silva, an actress who had made headlines when she posed bare breasted with actor Robert Mitchum before a photographer on a topless beach in Cannes, Louella "went on her soapbox" in outrage. "My Sunday in Palm Springs was interrupted by a call saying that Simone Silva, the girl who posed with Bob Mitchum, was on her way to Hollywood. I'm not even going to mention the name of the independent producer who is bringing her here. How dare anyone bring this girl to Hollywood. Certainly there are plent
y of other girls who do not need to strip from the waist up to get publicity. I want to be the first to ... protest her coming here," she wrote that spring.67
She similarly criticized the 1955 film The Man with the Golden Arm, in which Frank Sinatra played a drug addict. The film received the endorsement of the Catholic Legion of Decency but failed to win approval from the Production Code Administration. "The opinions on The Man with the Golden Arm seem to be unanimous. On all sides there is a feeling that Otto Preminger overstepped his bounds of decency in making a picture that could very well bring down federal censorship. Unfortunately, a picture of this kind will make money. "61 She encouraged the producers to make more "religious" films, since "the condition of the world is frightening and people are turning more and more to prayer and spiritual help."69 Love and religion, she believed, were the answer to political conflict. "I believe that love is the answer to almost all the problems the world faces. If everyone in the world were happily married, as I see it, there would be less hate and viciousness and misunderstanding. Happy loving people don't make wars."70
She paired her moral conservatism with staunch Republicanism. Scarred by HUAC, and with the liberals in retreat, much of Hollywood had gone Republican in the 1952 election, and Louella, along with the moguls, had contributed heavily to the Eisenhower campaign. In January 1953, after making a New Year's resolution "to take it a little easier (if I could only learn how)," Louella proceeded to break that resolution by traveling to Washington with Maggie Ettinger for Eisenhower's inauguration.71 She had been invited by the wife of Colonel James Hunter Drum of Washington, D.C., to serve on her hostess committee for visiting entertainment figures at the inauguration, an invitation for which she said she felt "greatly honored."72 "Out of my hotel window at exactly 9:25 I had a glimpse of Mamie and Ike, who drove down the ramp of the Starlet Hotel on their way to the National Presbyterian Church. I thought as I watched these two fine Americans they had started their big day right-with prayer," she reported from Washington on January 20.73 In Washington she attended a party given by Fred Gurley, president of the Santa Fe Railway, at the Mayflower Hotel, where she met Senator Joseph McCarthy, General Omar Bradley, and the Eisenhower brothers, Edgar, Arthur, Milton, and Earl. Later that week she and Maggie stopped by the FBI headquarters and met with J. Edgar Hoover.74