A weekly feature in which my five-year-old son is let loose on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles, and chooses a star from among the more than 2,500 honorees. His “random” picks sometimes reveal unexplained connections such as the summer day in 2012 when he sat down on the star of actress Celeste Holm and refused to budge. We later learned that the Oscar-winning actress had died only hours earlier. There are five categories on the Walk of Fame: motion pictures, television, radio, music and theater but Charlie tends to favor the movies.
There aren’t very many journalists honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and many of the ones that are there are also noted for other achievements in the arts: people like Edward R. Murrow, Mike Wallace, Robert Osborne, John Daly, and Dorothy Kilgallen. But this week Charlie chose Louella O. Parsons, a woman who is not usually even accorded the title of journalist but derisively referred to as a gossip columnist. I’m not sure Parsons or her arch rival, Hedda Hopper, would even bristle at that title, and I’m not saying that gossip wasn’t their primary stock in trade, but they were hardly guilty of the TMZ-like shenanigans of today. Well, not most of the time. To be honest, I always considered myself a member of Team Hedda but Charlie’s choice suddenly made me stop and reconsider.
Louella Rose Oettinger was born to a family of German Jewish immigrants on August 6, 1881, in Freeport, Illinois. She grew up in nearby Dixon, Ronald Reagan’s hometown, and showed a talent for writing at a young age. After delivering a speech at her 1901 high school graduation, her principal declared that she would one day be a great writer. Indeed, the following year she became the first female journalist in Dixon. She married John Parsons and moved to Burlington, Iowa, where her only child, Harriet (who would grow up to become a successful film producer in her own right) was born a few years later. When her marriage broke up, Parsons took Harriet to Chicago and, fascinated by the new motion picture industry, sold her first script (for $25!) to the Essanay Company in 1912. She even wrote several stories that were filmed by Essanay starring her daughter who was billed as “Baby Parsons.”
In 1914, Louella landed her first column for a Chicago newspaper — not a gossip column but a guide to potential screenwriters called “Lessons for the Ambitious Young Photoplaywright.” This eventually morphed into a column about the movies and the people who made them. Later, when William Randolph Hearst bought the paper she was working for, Parsons was out of a job, but he changed his mind and hired her back because of her support for his mistress Marion Davies. Some accounts of this business arrangement infuriate me with the assumption that Parsons was throwing her support at some kind of talentless Susan Alexander Kane just to impress the boss, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Marion Davies was, in my opinion, one of the most gifted actresses and comediennes in the movies and the fact that Parsons, as Davies wrote in her autobiography, encouraged her readers to “give this girl a chance” showed her savvy in identifying true talent.
By the mid-1920s, Parsons had moved to Los Angeles and was firmly established, thanks to the syndicated Hearst newspapers, as the country’s foremost gossip columnist, the uncontested “Queen of Hollywood,” courted by the stars and the studios and whose disfavor struck fear into the hearts of publicists and studio executives. Parsons’ daily column eventually appeared in more than 400 newspapers and was read by 20 million people around the world. That’s a lot of influence, and Louella apparently loved every second of it.
Hedda Hopper didn’t start her column until 1938. The two women were friendly at first but soon became bitter enemies. I think my positive view of Hopper stems from her acting roles, including her delicious turn as reporter Dolly Dupuyster in George Cukor’s near-perfect film The Women (1939) as well as her effective cameo as herself at the end of Billy Wilder’s spectacular Sunset Boulevard (1950). But spending a little time reading both women’s columns, it turns out that Hedda was far more vicious than Louella ever was. Hedda also gleefully named names for the Hollywood Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was loathed by most of the stars of the day even though they often submitted to her interview requests out of fear and intimidation.
Not that Louella was a pussycat. And her role in sinking the initial theatrical release of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ masterpiece loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst (except let’s stress again that Susan Alexander Kane was NOTHING like Marion Davies!) is not a high point in her career. Neither Parsons nor Hopper should have ever been given the amount of power that they had. When Parsons published her memoirs in 1944, oddly titled The Gay Illiterate, reporters jumped on her with a vengeance. “Half the title is inaccurate,” wrote reporter John Rosenfield, “Louella isn’t gay.” He then goes on to detail the inaccuracies in her book, her atrocious English skills, and her unwavering devotion to Hearst.
“She does not mind saying that the Lord of San Simeon is the greatest, kindest, noblest man she ever knew. Like rare wine, he grows finer, more mellow, and his talents more sharpened. This is a rather highly polished apple!” Her demands on the studios (which pale by comparison to Hedda Hopper’s) were derided. “If Louella hasn’t been the best Hollywood reporter, she has been the most rambunctious. She has demanded that the dates of premieres be changed to fit her schedule and has sought other privileges for no other reason than that she was Louella Parsons with an automatic outlet in the Hearst chain…She has got away with murder, a fact she attributes to her powers and personality. It hasn’t dawned on her that movie publicity departments are the original appeasers. She is proud of her friendships with the stars but we have met just as many who don’t call her ‘Darling Lolly.’”
Years later, reporters delighted in tearing down her methods and habits. “During lunch at a posh Hollywood restaurant, Louella Parsons often would seem detached and distracted, drifting from table to table like some vagrant blimp buffeted by random breezes. But in her office she was anything but vague, banging our her daily columns, plus reviews and a full page for the Sunday paper. By phone, she checked her intelligence network, which included switchboard girls, telegraph operators, beauty-parlor employees, doctors’ receptionists. Her power was such that she could reach Hollywood’s elite simply by picking up a phone, but it was her anonymous sources who supplied her with many of her biggest breaks. A star could not send roses to his girlfriend without considering the possibility that the florist might dial Louella the moment he left the shop.”
Louella had several radio shows and did some movie cameos in films such as Hollywood Hotel (1937) and Without Reservations (1946) but her real success was on the page. She wrote another book, Tell It to Louella, in 1961 that was greeted with similar scorn by many. Her influence lasted through the 1950s but began to diminish in the 1960s as the studio system crumbled. She ended her daily column at the end of 1965. Following two more marriages, Louella Parsons died in a nursing home in Santa Monica on December 9, 1972. She was 91 years old.
I’m not saying that Louella Parsons deserved a Pultizer Prize for her writing or was a great influence on the movie industry, but after reading more about her life and career, I’m officially changing sides from Team Hedda to Team Louella. Thanks for that, Charlie.
As far as her legacy goes, I’m sure Parsons would have been delighted to know that she was played by none other than Elizabeth Taylor in the campy 1985 movie Malice in Wonderland about her rivalry with Hedda Hopper (played by Jane Alexander). During her career, Hopper had lavished praise on Taylor’s beauty and talent so I’m sure she would have been gobsmacked by the compliment, especially since, to be honest, I look more like Louella Parsons than Elizabeth Taylor ever did! Parsons has also been portrayed by Academy Award-nominated actress Brenda Blethyn in RKO 281, about the squashing of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and by Jennifer Tilly in The Cat’s Meow. And how many columnists get their names included in a song by Cole Porter? Louella was mentioned in the lyrics of Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love).” But the final victory for Parsons could be found right under Charlie’s feet. Louella Parsons has two stars on the Walk of Fame while Hopper has only one. Suck it, Hedda!