The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  She contacted Hoover again that summer, when she forwarded him threatening letters she had been receiving from a "crackpot." "I'm not afraid for myself, but in view of the nuts running around indulging in wholesale shootings these days, I thought you ought to see them," she wrote to the director.75 In early June, she had received a letter that read, "We arrive in Hollywood October 1st 1953 and we'll see you and Jimmy at Ciro's on Oct 3rd. I am going to sing, cook pork chops ... and also dance. I write letters to John Wayne. He's my father to be. See you soon alive Louella." She also called Los Angeles agents and told them that John Wayne and Gary Cooper had received letters from the same source, and that "the author of the letters is probably a psychopathic individual who might have dangerous propensities." Along with the letters, she received three small packages and two letters, addressed to John Wayne and Donald O'Connor, marked "please forward."76 FBI in vestigators tracked the letters to a drugstore owner in Brooklyn who had previously been confined to a mental institution, and who had written similar threatening letters to a "big league baseball player" four or five years earlier. In June 1953, U.S. Attorney Edward Skelly advised the Los Angeles office that "inasmuch as it appears that subject is suffering from a'mental condition' .. . no action is warranted at the time." The "crackpot" never contacted Louella again.77

  In August 1953, after going to the Del Mar racetrack for her birthday, Louella went to New York to secure a fifty-two-week deal with NBC for a half-hour television show to be sponsored by the makers of Toni home permanents and Viceroy cigarettes. The proposed program, See Hollywood with Louella Parsons, which would air at 10:30 on Sunday nights, would feature interviews, film clips, and "cinema chit chat." To avoid the "free talent" problems of the past, NBC had arranged with the Screen Actors' Guild to pay stars appearing on the program a minimum of one thousand dollars.78 Though the show was originally scheduled to debut in the winter of 1953, for unknown reasons it was delayed until December 1954. While in New York, Louella guest-starred on the show What's My Line and appeared on the game show Queen for a Day.79 After visiting Cardinal Spellman, she returned to Hollywood in early December and remodeled her house in preparation for a "Christmas blowout."80

  Louella was now in her seventies and in poor health, but she was still one of Hollywood's top hostesses. Liz Smith, the future New York Post gossip columnist, who wrote for Modern Screen in the mid-1950s, remembered attending a Christmas party at Louella's. Louella, "charming and vague," sat proudly in a living room with "wall to wall gifts." "My loot!" she had laughed.$' Charles Young, a cousin of Louella's from Freeport, went to Hollywood in 1954 with his wife and teenage daughter, Diane. At a party at Louella's home, they met Gregory Peck and Clark Gable, then had dinner at Chasen's, where Louella arranged for Diane to meet her idol, Eddie Fisher. "The stars all seemed to be Louella's friends," recalled Young's widow, Phyllis Young Muller. "She was like God."" When not partying in Hollywood, Louella went to Las Vegas, which was fast becoming the out-of-town hotspot for the Hollywood crowd. In 1954 McHugh launched a nightclub act at the Sands Hotel, and Louella visited him almost weekly. A cryptic note in her FBI file suggests that in Vegas she may have had run-ins with the Mafia: what appears to be a transcript of a taped conversation between two mob connected figures described a couple of "Jewish fellas who were run out of Vegas" and another figure "we put ... in Luella [sic] Parsons' suite."83

  Louella devoted column space not only to McHugh but also to many of his proteges, including the young singer Eddie Fisher, who owed his stardom in large part to publicity in Louella's column. Mamie Van Doren, a young actress whose career McHugh was managing, was not so lucky. In the early 1950s, McHugh had arranged for Van Doren, who was relatively inexperienced as an actress, to attend Ben Bard's Theater, a Hollywood acting school. Then, inexplicably, McHugh announced that he was taking Van Doren out of the school. Apparently Louella was jealous of McHugh's attentions to the buxom blonde actress and had pressured Bard, telling him that if he didn't dismiss her from the school she would give him only bad press. Shortly afterward, Van Doren took a screen test at Paramount, which turned her down, claiming that she looked too much like Marilyn Monroe. She later found that Louella had pressured the studio to reject her. 84

  For her upcoming TV appearance, Louella went on a crash diet, against her doctor's orders. Down to 104 pounds from her usual 130 or 140, Louella was "too thin," Mike Connolly noted in the Hollywood Reporter in 1954. When diet guru Gayelord Hauser sent Louella a copy of his book How to Reduce and Stay Reduced, he wrote on the flyleaf, "To Louella, who doesn't need this."85 In October 1954, weakness from dieting put her in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Her nurses unplugged the phone in her room and she was furious. After being fed a lasagna diet, she gained weight-which she lost again, and in December she was again back in the hospital. According to one rumor, it was from exhaustion; another suggested that she had suffered a heart attack.86 (In 1956, when Louella's car was struck by a bus, she told reporters that she sought ten thousand dollars in damages because the accident "aggravated a heart condition" from which she suffered.)87 She then called off the television show, citing exhaustion and illness."

  Louella's health troubles and her increasing fear of death led her to mend some fences. Though Louella was still telling reporters that Marion Davies was her "closest friend in Hollywood," she and Davies had not spoken since Hearst's death. Finally, in 1955, after her divorce from Horace Brown, Davies contacted Louella again, and Davies, "loaded with flowers," according to the Hollywood Reporter, came to Louella's for a visit. 89 That year, Louella gave a copy of The Gay Illiterate to Hopper, signed "To my favorite rival," and Hopper reciprocated by giving Louella her best hat. Hopper later gave Louella a copy of From under My Hat inscribed "To Louella Parsons, the Queen, from Lady in Waiting Hedda Hopper." At a party for Hopper, Louella toasted her as a "gallant lady."90

  In the summer of 1955, Louella and Hopper accompanied a group of Hollywood actors on a trip to Istanbul sponsored by hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, to celebrate the opening of the Istanbul Hilton. Hopper had recently been the victim of an extortion threat-"Dear Miss I will come to kill you" read a message she had received in April-but the letter turned out to be not from an angry actor, as she had thought, but two young pranksters in Brook- lyn.9' Louella wrote her columns from Istanbul. "I am so fascinated by this great city, part modern, part ancient. Oddly enough, the women of Turkey seem the most completely modern of the foreign countries I've ever visited. There are few veiled women on the streets of Istanbul," she wrote in one dispatch. While there, she was interviewed by the Turkish press. ("Unfortunately I can't read a word of what they write!" she laughed.) 92 According to King Kennedy, who was also on the trip, the Istanbul journey marked a "friendly" period between Hopper and Louella. Kennedy recalled that one day when Hopper and Louella went out sightseeing, "the sun was terrific and Louella just had a little hat on. So the very next day ... Hopper [said], `Well dear, you know in this sun there's nothing more dangerous than not having the back of your neck protected, and that's why I always carry with me these big hats."' Hopper then gave Louella one of her favorite red hats.93 Though the two were far from being friends, they had achieved a tentative rapprochement.

  After going to Cairo, where Louella was made an "official guest of the city," she and the entourage were off to Jerusalem and then to Rome, where she received a visit from the playwright Tennessee Williams. Williams's visit, Louella recalled, was a little embarrassing, because she had protested MGM's decision to film his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which she had described to her readers as immoral and sexually explicit.94 Upon her return to Hollywood in August, she proudly announced that Harriet, who had left RKO after working for twelve years as a producer, had formed her own independent production company. The only female member of the Screen Producers' Guild, Harriet was praised in a 1956 Newsweek magazine piece that described her as "Hollywood's lone active woman producer." (Commenting on sexism in the film industry, she told the magazine, "After all my ye
ars of experience, I still have to convince each director that I know my job.")95 In her last film at RKO, Susan Slept Here, released in 1953, Harriet had given Louella a small part. One of the main characters in the story makes a call to Louella, whose voice was recorded on the sound track.96

  In late 1955 the producers of the Chrysler-sponsored Climax TV series, which featured hourlong biographical sketches of famous figures portrayed by film and television actors, approached Louella with the possibility of filming a version of her life story. CBS and the Climax producers were less interested in Louella than in the ability she had had to coerce Hollywood stars to perform on the show for low or no pay. They also hoped that the lineup of stars they planned to use would help the show's ratings, since the episode with Louella was slated to air during ratings week in March 1956. Climax had pitched actress Anne Baxter for the part, but Teresa Wright, a former stage actress with over fifteen film credits, won the role.97 Produced by Martin Manulis and directed by John Frankenheimer, the show used the largest cast ever in the history of dramatic television, with Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Dan Dailey, Howard Duff, Ida Lupino, Robert Mitchum, Merle Oberon, Ginger Rogers, Robert Stack, Lana Turner, and John Wayne, among more than two dozen actors, who made cameo appearances. Based on The Gay Illiterate, the episode followed Louella from Essanay to the Chicago Herald to New York to Hollywood, lingering on her relationship with Peter Brady and her later romance with Harry Martin. In one scene, Harriet, as a little girl in New York, burst out in tears because she had seen Louella's picture on the side of a Hearst news truck. "Don't you worry," Wright-Louella told Harriet. "You just tell them that it's better to have a mother on the wagon than one that's off. "91

  Louella appeared in person at the end of the program wearing a low-cut dress and a huge gold cross. "I hope you've enjoyed my life as much as I've enjoyed living it," she stiffly told the audience. Many if not most of Climax's subjects were dead, which had stirred up rumors that she was, too. "It's pretty hard to play someone who's still alive," she told Climax host Bill Lundigan. "And believe me, I'm very much alive."99

  Not surprisingly, given the sentiment toward Louella in Hollywood and press circles, the reviews were poor. Ray Oviatt of the Toledo Blade claimed that it "established a new mark for banality"; and the Miami Herald quipped, "That batch of movie celebrities who had walk-on parts to lend authenticity looked like character witnesses there under subpoena."10° It should have been called "Auntie Climax," joked one reviewer.101 Many viewers were similarly disgusted. In a letter to a Cleveland columnist who had panned the film, one reader wrote, "It was disgusting to witness the fawning. No wonder the pub lic is completely fed up with Hollywood and the people who make pictures. Louella Parsons means nothing to the average person so why fall all over her. I for one switched to another station." 102 However saccharine, the episode earned the highest rating ever won by the show, and Louella received dozens of congratulatory telegrams from film and press notables.103

  Louella previewed the show alone in a control booth at CBS. Later she and several friends viewed the show at Chasen's restaurant. She thought Teresa Wright was "sensational." "It was too bad," she told the Hollywood Reporter, that "so many of my friends were left out. But an hour's a short time for a lifetime." "They didn't tell what a bad temper I have," she added.104 Immediately after the show, Louella went to New York, where she was feted at a party hosted by Anita Loos. Then she traveled back to Hollywood, and then on to Europe for a monthlong vacation. According to some rumors, she had sought out a European specialist for a facelift.105

  When Louella was in London, she saw Ingrid Bergman, who was also staying at the Savoy Hotel. "I was struck by the lack of change in her appearance. She was just as lovely; still had that same aura of purity and innocence. It was I, not she, who was stiff and embarrassed. It took time for me to adjust," Louella recalled. She claimed to have detected in her conversation with Bergman that "all was not well" between Bergman and Rossellini, and she was right. A little over a year later, the couple divorced, and on the front page of the Examiner Louella reported Bergman's split from the director "who had swept her off her feet so that she left home, daughter, and reputation." 106 In 1957, Bergman was back in the United States, after having won the Academy Award for Anastasia, her first American film in over seven years. A few months later, Louella found out about remarks that Bergman had made to an American magazine that blamed Louella for the 1950 scandal. Upset, Louella refused to go to a dinner party given in honor of Bergman and "sent her regrets in a curt note." 107

  Born in an era of horse-drawn buggies, Louella now traveled around in a chauffeured Chrysler. She had grown up without electricity, indoor plumbing, or heat, and now she lived in a modern home equipped with every creature comfort. At the turn of the century, the average life expectancy had been forty-seven. In 1956, Louella turned seventy-five. She had lived through a social and technological revolution and, though reluctant at times, had adapted to the changes. But she was now telling friends that she felt out of place and was overwhelmed by her new environment. She filled the column with news about old-timers such as Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and Bette Davis, even though some of them had not made films in years, and she loudly lamented the passing of the old studio moguls. By the mid-1950s, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn, David Selznick, and Darryl Zanuck had resigned from film; Mayer, once the mightiest of them all, died in 1957. In the same column in which she published her tribute to Mayer, Louella announced that San Simeon, which the Hearst family had donated to the state of California, would be opened to the public, and that The Birth ofa Nation was playing in art theaters in Los Angeles. "Now Birth ofa Nation is being reissued when civil rights are a burning issue before our legislatures. It will be very interesting to see if once again it creates a national commotion," she wrote in July 1957. Shortly afterward, she went to Las Vegas to witness an atomic bomb test and, amazed and horrified, "stayed up till sunrise to see the light from the blast explode over the sky with the brilliance of too daytime suns." 101

  Pressured by her editors, who feared that her outmoded style would lose readers, she began gearing her column toward a younger film audience. By the mid-1950s it was estimated that 6o percent of the movie audience was between twelve and twenty-four, and one quarter of the industry's revenues were coming from drive-in theaters.109 Louella herself received an "enormous amount of mail" from teenagers. 110 "In this day and age you have to be familiar with the teenagers or you're old-fashioned," she admitted to her readers. )11 She began writing about Elvis Presley, whom she met on his arrival in Hollywood in 1956. "He arrived at my house all alone and ill at ease. He seemed frightened at meeting me.... Then I noticed his shoes. On each shoe was a full-color picture of Elvis! After so many years in Hollywood nothing shocks me, but never had any star I knew worn his or her picture on his shoes."112 But Louella was offended by Presley's cocky flamboyance. "Cut out the bad taste in your act-the hip swinging, torso-tossing nonsense.... Remove the gag `Pelvis' tag that has been hooked onto your name," she wrote in an "open letter" to Presley in Modern Screen. n3 She was a bigger fan of the young Catholic pop star Fabian, whom she described as a "friend." "No matter where he goes on his personal appearance tours, Fabian telephones to tell me any news about himself. Fabian and Frankie [Avalon] took me to church one Sunday, then to lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel," she told her readers. 114 She adopted the new teen lingo, describing actors and films as "cool." When Pat Boone announced that he would record McHugh's song "Louella" for Dot Records, he asked Louella if she would mind if he did a rock-and-roll version. She said she'd love it. 115 Privately, she expressed her despair. At her 1957 birthday party, put on by Jimmy McHugh, she whispered to friends, "I don't know half the people here."' 16

  Louella's popularity was dwindling, and there was more to blame than teenyboppers and rock-and-roll. Years of exposure to celebrity news and the recent publicity given such scandals as the Bergman pregnancy and Robert Mitchum's 1949 arrest on narcotics charges
had created a more cynical, media-savvy public that was weary of Louella's sugarcoated descriptions of the stars. One indication of the new public consciousness was the wildly successful debut of Confidential magazine in 1952. Robert Harrison, the publisher of popular "girlie" magazines such as Wink, Titter, and Eyeful, had been fascinated by the way that Americans were enthralled by the Estes Kefauver hearings in the Senate in 1951. The scandalous, nationally televised hearings, in which over fifty witnesses exposed the crimes of the highest-ranking Mafia crime syndicate in America, had had Americans of all walks of life glued to their sets. Sensing an audience for scandal, in 1952 Harrison began bimonthly publication of Confidential, which filled its pages with sensationalistic exposes of celebrity misdeeds. Among the most famous included a story describing Frank Sinatra eating Wheaties between rounds of lovemaking, and Robert Mitchum allegedly appearing naked and smeared with ketchup at a Hollywood dinner party. Articles such as "They Passed for White," "The Lavender Skeletons in TV's Closet," and "Hollywood-Where Men Are Men and Women Too" lured readers titillated by the taboos of miscegenation and homosexuality. 117