The First Lady of Hollywood
Page 45
In a fitting conclusion to her tribute to the studio era, Louella ended the book with an attack on the decadent "new Hollywood." She quoted extensively from a recent piece she had written for the Examiner, "How Hollywood Can Meet the Challenge of Communism," in which she accused the film industry of "feeding ammunition to the Soviets in far too many pictures ... which distort our American way of life into evil, careless morals, violenceand worst of all-perversions":
Let us turn our best writers loose on such All-American Activities as 4-H clubs and to showing our farm people and teenage farm children, many of whom are self-supporting by breeding and caring for animals.
Let's forget the sagas of our switch-blade carrying teenagers and proudly hold up to the world our young people who are entering the world of science and medicine and religion. America is one of the largest church-going nations in the world-not much of the world knows it.
Americans are NOT going to hell in a sports car.
Are we going to continue blindly to let the world think so when we have so much power at our disposal to combat it?
I think not. I've been covering Hollywood and its product for many, many years and seen it rise triumphant over all dangers. And it will again emerge triumphant when it joins its great talents to the Herculean effort our national Government is making to keep our glorious country where it rightfully belongs-leading the parade of the Free World.29
Louella claimed to have received more fan mail for this article than for any other piece in her career. "Three cheers for your putting into bold print, in no uncertain language, your views on what kind of pictures Hollywood should concentrate. Your article coincided with my personal opinion for many years," wrote a reader named Helen Moreau. "I want to commend you on your wonderful article. How proud I am that there is someone like you in the movie industry," wrote Joyce Lingle. "My breakfast dishes are piled high in the sink, but they will have to wait until I finish this.... I believe every single mother in America will say with you that we do need some more wholesome movies not only for those abroad but for ourselves and our children," agreed Mrs. Alvin Albertson of Ontario.30
The Examiner's review of Tell It to Louella was exaggerated and undeservedly positive. "A dispassionate judgment on Miss Parsons' book is that it is highly readable both for its documentary accounts of the Loreleis, Don Juans, and Calibans who were projected by the magic lanterns into national idols, and for its annotation of social and economic history," wrote reviewer Clark Kennard. But other papers were more honest.31 ("The result is a dreary outpouring of egomaniac claptrap which if taken in more than very small and infrequent doses is likely to cause any self-respecting reporter to lose his lunch," wrote the New York Herald Tribune.)32 Louella admitted to Time magazine that it was a "terrible book," but said that she "wrote every word of it" herself33 Despite their criticism, many reviewers acknowledged Louella's influence on American culture-"between the lines ... is revealed a tough, shrewd, woman who pioneered in that special brand of Hollywood journalism, the Hollywood gossip column," noted the New York Times reviewer-and the importance of her column for future scholars.34 "What would the tinsel El Dorado do without her? Almost certainly it would fold up, and researchers in the ruins would find that she had been one of its major historians," commented the Herald Tribune.35
Sensing Louella's imminent retirement, a variety of Hollywood and press organizations bestowed on her a string of awards between 1957 and 1962. In 1957, Adela Rogers St. Johns called Louella "the greatest woman reporter of this era" in a talk before the UCLA Women's Press Club, and Louella-and Hopper-were named "Women of the Year" by the Los Angeles Times. In 1958 Louella was named by the California Association of Press Women as an "outstanding woman journalist," one who had "done more to enhance the field of journalism" than any other female reporter. In 1959, the Screen Directors' Guild awarded Louella a special citation "in recognition of her loyalty, devotion, and many valued contributions to the motion picture industry" at its annual Screen Directors' Guild dinner. In 1960 she received a coveted Golden Globe Award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. (J. Edgar Hoover sent Louella his "heartiest congratulations for this honor.")36 In April 1960, during a trip to New York, she received a gold medallion honoring her status as a charter member of the Newspaper Women's Club; since its first meeting in 1922, the organization had grown from twenty-four to two hundred members.37
But the woman behind the legacy was ailing. Physically, she was in almost constant pain, suffering from colds and other bronchial ailments, in addition to ongoing heart and kidney trouble. Emotionally, despite McHugh's companionship, she seemed unfulfilled and lonely and she drank unremittingly, even when she was writing. According to Margaret Bouyette Scott, who worked at the Examiner, Louella would call in her column while drunk. Because the policy was to leave her column unedited, Scott "would watch deskmen literally sweat" as they took the incoherent column down, knowing that it could not be changed. In the end, managing editor Ray Van Ettisch usually ended up correcting errors.38
In 1959, the Examiner began an ad campaign for Louella that described her as the "MOST WIDELY READ FILM WRITER IN THE WORLD." "Being right is an old habit with Louella Parsons and being FIRST and RIGHT have always been her cornerstones. Millions of fans throughout the world ... who want to know the who what when and where and all manners of this and that in filmland look to Louella Parsons. In Los Angeles they look to her too because she outranks all other film columnists like a general over a GI," preached large display ads.39 It was a shameless, last-ditch effort to shore up her flagging readership. By the end of that year, her column appeared in only a hundred papers.
The precipitous drop in circulation was a result, in large part, of the ongoing weakening of the Hearst empire. By 1958, financial troubles and declining circulation had led to a string of closures and mergers. In Chicago in 1956, Hearst's afternoon American was sold to the Tribune; in 1959, the San Francisco Call-Bulletin merged with the Scripps-Howard News Service; and in Pittsburgh, the Sun Telegraph was sold to the morning Post Gazette. The Detroit Times shut in 1960, and in 1961 the Boston EveningAmerican merged with the Boston Daily Record 40 In 1958, Hearst's International News Service merged with United Press. Louella's column was to be carried by Hearst-owned papers and would be available to UPI clients on a special circuit.41 The upshot of this was the disappearance of the column from several hundred papers.
Then, in 1962, the morning paper the Los Angeles Examiner, Louella's home paper for over thirty-five years, finally folded. Bill Hearst Jr. decided to shut the paper, citing low circulation and continued losses. To many, this was a shocking decision, since the Examiner was far more successful than Hearst's other Los Angeles paper, the afternoon Herald-Express. (In 1962, the Examiner had a Sunday circulation of 700,ooo and a weekday circulation of 381,037, making it the tenth-best-selling morning paper in the country.) The afternoon paper was subsequently renamed the Herald-Examiner and only a few of the thousand employees from the Examiner, including Louella, were added to the new publication.42 The shift to afternoon publication caused a further loss in Louella's readership and authority, according to Variety, "since many people didn't read her column until they arrived home in the evening," making her exclusives old news.43 By 1962, she was down to only 70 papers, while Hopper appeared in 130.44
By this point, it seemed to many that Hopper had won the feud. Despite her shrill political commentary and the hostility against her in Hollywood, she was enormously visible and popular in the 19 50s, largely as a result of her own efforts at self-promotion. Each year between 1954 and 1958, Hopper toured overseas with Bob Hope; moreover, she had maintained a constant radio presence throughout the decade. She had also kept up her anticommunist efforts and frequently requested from Hoover information on actors whom she suspected of "subversive" tendencies. In 1960, she called Hoover in the hope that the bureau would give her "informal guidance" regarding an actress whom she believed was a member of the Communist Party. In the end, the bureau decl
ined her request but suggested that she "get in touch with the State Department or some of her friends ... to secure the background data she is looking for."45
That same year, Hopper tried to launch her own television show, Hedda Hopper's Hollywood, to compete with Ed Sullivan's popular television gossiptalk program, the Ed Sullivan Show. For the show, she had lined up a guest list with more than twenty stars, whom she was planning to pay $210 each, the minimum union pay scale for an "interview" appearance. Sullivan threatened her, then went on record accusing Hopper of "the most grievous form of payola." "Here is a columnist using plugs in a column to get performers for free," he stated.46 Many of the stars subsequently backed out of the program. Hopper was still able to secure commitments from several top stars, who appeared on the show for a pittance. In 1963, she published The Whole Truth and Nothing But, an autobiography that became serialized in McCall's and that headed best-seller lists in the spring of 1963. According to Hopper, when Louella heard she was working on the book, she called to ask what the book would be about. "I'm just going to tell the truth," Hopper replied. "Oh dear," Louella wailed, "that's what I was afraid o£"47 Hopper devoted an entire section of the book to Louella, whom she portrayed as conniving (as evidenced by her cagey scheme to interview George Bernard Shaw), vindictive (as in her attack on Orson Welles), and jealous (depressed over Hopper's success, Louella had demanded the testimonial dinner arranged by Hearst in 1948, Hopper claimed). She correctly described the 1948 Romanoff's lunch as a failed attempt at reconciliation.
In 1962, Louella had an operation to get rid of a lobster claw that had gotten stuck in her throat while she was eating bouillabaisse at Los Angeles's Scandia Restaurant. Later that year she was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital suffering from shingles of the optic nerve, complicated by pneu- monia.48 For six weeks she lay heavily sedated, and the last rites of the Catholic Church were administered.49 Hopper visited Louella in the hospital, and "the feebleness in her voice" alarmed her. "I'm so tired of this place," Louella had said, "and I'm so sick." Hopper talked to Harry Brand, the publicity director ofTwentieth Century Fox, who had been a good friend to Louella and Harry. "If you want her to live, you'd better get her out of that hospital," Hopper told Brand. "Either she's in the same room that Docky had or one exactly like it. She'll never recover until she's moved." Louella was moved to the Beverly Hills Hotel the next day and she recovered quickly.50 Gloria Swanson, who was in her seventies, sent Louella a telegram in the hospital. "I do not suppose I have ever written you before[,] but I have heard that you were not feeling well. We sort of take it for granted that we will see our friends somewhere in this tiny world as it is today.... I have known you all these years-I guess it goes back to Essanay, Louella-and I have always thought of you as a sweet gentle person ... [and] you have a very warm place in my heart."51
Amazingly, Louella still fought retirement. It was only in 1964, after she fell and broke a hip, that she finally gave up the column. Dorothy Manners, who had written most of the column for the previous few years, took over full-time, and she and Louella shared the byline. Finally, on December i, 1965, Manners had her first solo byline. ("Now THERE IS ONLY HEDDA," proclaimed Daily Variety.) "I feel a little bit like a buck private in a general's uniform. It will be hard to replace the finest `newspaperman' I've ever known," Manners later told reporters. In 1974, though the column appeared in eightynine papers, Manners admitted to Time magazine that many readers found her "fluffy flowered hat style"-modeled after Louella's, of course-dull. "Some of [the columns] are frankly a little flat," she conceded. "But how many people in this town make news anymore?"52 After forty-two years with the Hearst Corporation, Manners retired in December 1977.
Throughout the entertainment and publishing worlds, critics acknowledged that Louella's retirement marked the end of an era. "The end of Queen Lolly's reign is of more than passing interest, not only because of her once formidable power, but also because it reflects the changes that have taken place in Hollywood-style journalism. No longer do producers or performers have to humble themselves before the columnists in order to gain support for their pictures or their careers. Indeed a growing number of stars-among them Brando, Sinatra, Presley, and Doris Day-usually decline to be `interviewed' by any journalist, preferring instead to let their work speak for itself," wrote Peter Bart in the New York Times.53 In a scathing 1965 attack, "The Little Queen That Hollywood Deserved" (Louella was "narrow, semi-illiterate, and often moved by blubbering sentimentality," the article claimed), Life similarly noted that her departure from the field marked the demise of an old, "gaudy and narcissistic Hollywood."54 The lines of power within the entertainment industry had become at once more intricate and diffuse, and the public, more cynical. No longer could an individual columnist engineer careers, block the release of films, or dupe readers into believing fanciful illusions of stars' goodness and innocence. The era of the superstar columniststhe Hoppers and Parsons and Winchells-had all but ended, the Times concluded.
Shortly after her retirement, Louella moved to the Brentwood Convalescent Home on San Vicente Boulevard, where she was cared for by an attendant paid for by the Hearst Corporation.55 In mid-1965, after falling and breaking her shoulder, she was back in the hospital; at this time she also had three cataracts removed. Harriet, who had moved to Palm Springs, returned to Beverly Hills to care for Louella and began selling real estate to support herself. In March 1966, Louella's incredible collection of antiques and furniture, which included fine crystal; silver; seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Spanish, Italian, and English cabinets; gold-leafed mirrors; rare blue-scepter-mark Royal Berlin porcelain dinnerware; and a George IV silver basket from 1827, were auctioned off in Los Angeles. At the same time, Harriet donated Louella's fifty-four scrapbooks, containing her columns and press clippings, to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sci- ences.56 Louella sat quietly in a sparsely furnished room ("in a complete si lence," remembered Manners, "with no reaction, utterly expressionless") while her career, possessions, friends, and memories quietly slipped away.57
In February 1966, Hedda Hopper died at the age of seventy-five. Though she had remained fairly active during the early 196os-in 1964, she had covered the Republican National Convention for her syndicate; in 1965, she had traveled to Europe, and she was even the voice of the Mad Hatter in a cartoon film of Alice in Wonderland-by the end of 1965, her health had begun to deteriorate. In January 1966 she went to Washington, D.C., on vacation and returned to Hollywood ill and exhausted.58 She then entered Cedars of Lebanon in late January, suffering from double pneumonia. Though the pneumonia was conquered, the medication had weakened her heart and kidneys, and on February 1, she passed away. According to one rumor, when Harriet told Louella that Hopper had died, after a long, confused silence, Louella shouted, "GOOD!"59 At the Los Angeles Times, Hopper was replaced by Joyce Haber, a former Los Angeles correspondent for Time, whose column, by 1969, ran in ninety-three newspapers. With a "bitchy style," she won as much "respect and fear" from celebrities as her predecessor, reported Time. She was nicknamed "Hedda Haber."60
Hopper may have died with a larger readership, but Louella lived on, indefatigably. Indeed, she outlasted them all. Marion Davies died of jaw cancer in 1961, and Louella's cousin Maggie Ettinger died from cancer in 1967. Jimmy McHugh passed away in 1969. Of her friends from the early years, only Bebe Daniels, Gloria Swanson, and Mary Pickford were still alive.
Finally, it was her turn. Louella died on December 9, 1972, at the age of ninety-one, of "generalized arteriosclerosis-old age," according to the spokesperson at the Brentwood Convalescent Home. Bob Hope, who attended the funeral, was shocked to find so few paying their respects.61 Only a handful of stars showed up-Hope, Danny Thomas, George Burns, Jack Benny, Dorothy Lamour, Irene Dunne, Cesar Romero, and David Janssen- and the church was only two-thirds filled. Many of the attendees were movie fans on the lookout for celebrities. "Where are the Bette Davises, the Joan Crawfords, the Mae Wests, the Gloria Swansons?" as
ked actress Alice Parker angrily. "After all, Miss Parsons did so much for the movie colony.... I am aghast. What has happened to our movie queens?" The pallbearers were Ben Lyon, Harry Brand, Louella's butler Louis Collins, her physician Dr. Rexford Kennamer, King Kennedy, and her cousin Gordon Maynard. Harriet led the mourners.62
For one of only a few times in nearly fifty years of reporting on Louella, the press was fair. "Many men have held positions of influence during the history of motion pictures; not many women have done so. If a poll had been taken during the Golden Age of Hollywood, however, the one female who would have won hands down would have been gossip columnist Louella Parsons," read Variety's obituary. The paper highlighted her hard work and generosity, saying that she was "as much praised-and damned-as any Hollywood personality ever to emerge, [and that] she put aside a portion of her salary every week to help a number of silent-pix players who had fallen on evil times.... She was responsible for many promising newcomers getting their first breaks in motion pictures." Variety also acknowledged the "boundless energy and passion for work" that made Louella's scoops legion. "Despite her prejudices, her inaccuracies, her tendency to ignore facts when it fitted her purpose, she got her stories-often exclusively-by a tough-minded approach that could have a terrifying impact on her subjects," wrote the New York Times. "In Hollywood, Miss Parsons ... ruled as a queen."63 She rests next to Harry in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City.