When Louella Parsons heard that I’d started work on this book, she telephoned to ask what its title was going to be. “Come, Louella,” I said, “you don’t expect me to reveal that to you, do you?”
“I hoped you would. And I hope you’ll be kind to me in your book because I was very nice to you in mine.”
“You certainly were—you got the facts about me so mixed up that I haven’t finished reading it.”
“Well, anyway, what are you going to write about?”
“I’m just going to tell the truth.”
“Oh, dear,” she wailed, “that’s what I was afraid of.”
* * * * *
In the days when I earned my living as a motion-picture actress, I was one of Louella’s regular news contacts. I had an insatiable curiosity about the town I’d known for years. I got around a lot, and lots of people talked to me. I salted down stories by the barrel load.
Louella would call up and say: “I understand you went to so-and-so’s party last night. Tell me something about it.” I was glad to oblige. Payment came in kind, not cash, when she inserted my name in her column, which helped a working actress.
She really was the First Lady of Hollywood then, for one good reason which nobody was allowed to forget. She was William Randolph Hearst’s movie columnist, and he was lavishing millions of dollars and acres of publicity space on his motion-picture properties, bent on making himself the greatest of all impresarios and Marion Davies the greatest star.
With the Hearst newspaper empire behind her, Louella could wield power like Catherine of Russia. Hollywood read every word she wrote as though it was a revelation from San Simeon, if not from Mount Sinai. Stars were terrified of her. If they crossed her, they were given the silent treatment: no mention of their names in her column.
When Hearst let himself be lured by Louis B. Mayer into putting his own production company, Cosmopolitan Pictures, under MGM’s wing, Louella’s power was apparently complete. She could get any story she wanted front-paged in the Los Angeles Examiner and all other Hearst papers, none of them accustomed to making much distinction between real news and flagrant publicity.
At San Simeon, Hearst’s $40,000,000 Shangri-La in San Luis Obispo County, Louella mingled with the stream of visiting celebrities, stars, and producers that poured every weekend into the fabulous, twin-towered castle or the surrounding marble “bungalows” at the summons of W.R. or Marion. So did I. At the fifty-four-foot table in the Renaissance dining hall, you’d see Garbo, John Gilbert, Errol Flynn, Norma Shearer, Nick Schenck, Beatrice Lillie, Cissy Patterson, Frank Knox, Bernard Baruch. Name the biggest and they’d be there, including, on one occasion, Mr. and Mrs. Cal Coolidge and Bernard Shaw.
Nobody would deny that Louella has talent. She showed at her best with GBS, who was writing some articles for Hearst. All of us invited to San Simeon that weekend had been warned against asking Shaw for an interview. That didn’t stop Louella. He yielded to her persuasions only on condition that he have the right to approve every word of her article after he’d talked to her.
When she went back with the typescript he had her read it to him. After the first few words, he interrupted sharply: “But I didn’t say that.”
“Oh, Mr. Shaw,” she said, batting her big brown eyes, “I’m so nervous just being in your presence. What was it you said before?” He repeated the sentence, which she carefully inserted, and then read another line or two before the irate Irishman pulled her up short again.
This performance went on for some minutes longer before GBS took the manuscript from her hand. “Give it to me—I’ll write it myself,” he said firmly, proceeding to do just that. But Louella wasn’t through yet. When he handed back the completed article to her, she asked: “Oh, Mr. Shaw, won’t you please autograph it for me? It will be such a wonderful keepsake for my daughter, Harriet.”
He couldn’t refuse; he was writing for Hearst, too. So Miss Parsons scored in a triple-header. She collected the only interview Bernard Shaw gave in the United States. She subsequently sold the article to a Hearst magazine. And she has the autographed interview, which someday will sell for another tidy sum.
Some of us San Simeon regulars discovered that Louella isn’t slow to take credit. When W.R. and Marion went abroad on one of the many voyages they made together, we decided to throw a party for them on their return. We intended it as a gesture of thanks for all the parties of theirs that we’d enjoyed. We put on a terrific evening at the Ambassador Hotel, with its rooms crammed with flowers and cockatoos, and split the bill between us: $175 apiece. Louella was one of the party, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t write an article for a national magazine taking credit for it.
She owed a lot to Marion Davies. It was an article praising Marion in When Knighthood Was in Flower that got Louella started with Hearst. It caught W.R.’s eye and prompted him to hire her away from her $110 a week as movie reporter on the New York Telegraph into working for him at more than twice the salary. Over the years Marion shielded Louella from boss trouble more than once. After W.R. died in 1951, she was among those who didn’t exactly hurry to give Marion sympathy.
She did ring the doorbell, however, immediately after Marion had appeared on my television show. She arrived at her house bearing as a gift a photograph of herself in a heavy silver frame. She proceeded to place it in full view on a table in the front hall, taking star position ahead of an autographed portrait of General Douglas MacArthur.
Marion asked me to take a look when I arrived soon after Louella had left. I carried it back to the library, where Marion was sitting. “Do you want this?”
“No,” she said quizzically. I took the frame home to substitute a photograph of Marion standing beside me on the TV show, returning the old frame and new picture to her the following day.
* * * * *
Louella didn’t regard me as a serious rival when I got started as a columnist in 1938. Andy Harvey, in MGM’s publicity department, had recommended me to Howard Denby of the Esquire syndicate: “When we want the low-down on our stars, we get it from Hedda Hopper.” I was signed by Mr. Denby and sold to thirteen papers straightaway, the first to buy being the Los Angeles Times.
The betting in town after column number one appeared was that I wouldn’t last a week. My mistake was being too kind to everybody. I didn’t tell the whole truth—only the good. I set out to write about my fellows in terms of sweetness and light, not reality. I began:
Just twenty-three years ago my son was born. Since then I’ve acted in Broadway plays. Sold Liberty Bonds in Grand Central Station. Knitted socks for soldiers—which they wore as sweaters. Made very bad speeches on the steps of the New York Library. Helped build a snowman on Forty-second Street ... when the streetcars were frozen solidly in their tracks. Earned money for one year as a prima donna in The Quaker Girl with only two tones in my voice, high and low—very low. Played in Virtuous Wives, Louis B. Mayer’s first motion picture.
I’ve worked with practically every star in Hollywood. Sold real estate here—made it pay, too, but not lately. Was a contributor to one of the monthly magazines. Did special articles for the Washington Herald. With a friend, wrote a one-act play. Through pull had it produced at the Writers’ Club and was it panned! Ran for a political job here; thank goodness the citizens had a better idea! Coached Jan Kiepura in diction. Learned about the beauty business from Elizabeth Arden in her Fifth Avenue salon. Made three trips abroad, one to England on business. Put on fashion shows. Have a radio program.
And today I begin laboring in a new field and am hoping it will bring me as much happiness as that major event which took place twenty-three years ago. I can only write about the Hollywood I know. About my neighbors and fellow workers. Amazing stories have been written—many true. Hollywood is mad, gay, heartbreakingly silly, but you can’t satirize a satire. And that’s Hollywood....
I was green as grass, and the town jeered at me. Luckily, I had a good friend at my side. Wonderful Ida Koverman carried the title of executive assistant to Louis B. Mayer, but she was the real power behind his throne. To all intent and purpose, she ran MGM. Two months after my launching, when I was sinking slowly in an ocean of kind words for everybody, she gave a hen party for me. On the guest list were Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald, singer Rosa Ponselle, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Sophie Tucker, press people, public-relations people—every woman you could think of. There was only one holdout—Louella.
It was a night to remember. A forest fire was blazing in the hills, and the sky was lit with flame. I was burning, too. Ida had just set me straight about column writing. “They’ve laughed at you long enough. You’ve been too nice to people. Now start telling the truth.”
That was the best advice she ever gave me. It marked a turning point. My telephone started ringing like a fire alarm every day soon after.
“Hedda,” the callers would moan, “how can you print such things about me?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but you’re my friend. I didn’t think you’d tell.”
“I’m earning my living with my column. I’ve got to tell the truth. You didn’t call when I wrote sweet nothings about you, did you? If you can’t face facts, then I’m sorry.”
The column began to grow almost instantly, on the way up to its present readership of 35,000,000 people, which came about after I switched from Esquire to the Des Moines Register & Tribune, then in 1942 to Chicago Tribune-New York News syndication. (If I stop to think of that audience figure, I get so scared I can’t write a line until I’ve pushed the arithmetic out of my mind.)
Louella prepared for a fight. She had an intelligence service that included telegraph operators, telephone switchboard girls, beauty-parlor assistants, hotel bus boys, doctors’ and dentists’ receptionists. Her medical-intelligence chief was her husband, Dr. Harry Watson Martin. She called him Docky or Docky-Wocky. He was often known as Lolly’s Pop. His special field earlier had been venereal disease and urology, his hobby was show business, and he retired as head of the Twentieth Century-Fox medical department.
Docky had the friendship of everybody, along with a certain nonchalance. He once took a dive into the Bimini Bath pool when it lacked a single drop of water, broke his neck, and lived to marry Louella in 1929. He displayed a similar unconcern about water one morning when Louella, dressed up to go ashore for Mass, made her cautious way down the gangplank of a yacht in Catalina Harbor straight into the sea. Docky was waiting in the dinghy, engrossed in the Sunday papers. “Ready to go, dear?” he asked, not raising his head until her splashing drew him to her rescue.
Leaving a party, Docky once fell flat on the floor and lay there, comfortable enough. When a friend came forward to hoist him up, Louella put out a restraining hand. “Oh, don’t touch him, please. He has to operate at eight o’clock this morning.”
Through Docky’s good offices, Louella had a tie-in with testing laboratories, notably those making rabbit tests for pregnancy. This private line into the womb could give her news that a star was pregnant before the girl knew it herself.
But I had sleuths on my side, too. As an actress, I knew directors, producers, stars, and the men and women who worked on the other side of the cameras. One special ally was Mark Hellinger, a hard-boiled columnist for the New York Daily News before he became a gentle, kind, and great producer for Warner Brothers and Universal.
He called me over to his house for an off-the-record conference and offered to help “because you’re going to need it.” He said: “I don’t somehow care for what Miss Parsons stands for. Whenever I hear a story at the studio, I’ll pass it on to you. I shan’t be able to call you through the switchboard, so I’ll give it to you from a private booth. There won’t be time for questions, but you’ll get the truth.”
The scoops I had on the affairs of Warner Brothers nearly drove Jack Warner out of his cotton-picking mind. He could never make out how it happened. When he reads this, he’ll know.
Louella watched her monopoly start to crack. If she was asked to a party, she’d want to know whether I was going to be invited. If I was, she’d demand that I be excluded “or else I certainly shan’t come.” Some timid hostesses fell for that. I laughed in their faces for their cowardice.
Anxious to break her hold, producers were steering my way more and more of the items that had previously been hers alone—the news of engagements, weddings, pregnancies, and divorces that made up a fat share of her daily diet. An engagement announced first to Louella had been good for six months of smiles for the happy couple. An exclusive on a pregnancy was even better—the mother-to-be could count on nine months’ favorable notice, which could be extended if she gave Lolly a beat on the birth announcement, too.
The competition she was getting didn’t make her any fonder of me. When Jean Parker was about to marry for the second time, she telephoned me: “I want you to have this exclusively.”
“No,” I warned her, “you must tell Louella.”
“But I don’t want her to have it.”
“You can’t afford to give it to me alone. Call her and tell her I have the news, too. For your career’s sake, you must.”
Ten minutes later she called back, weeping. “I did what you said and told her I’d given it to you. She said: ‘Get it back from her, or I won’t print it.’”
“Tell her she’s got it exclusively, if it means so much to her,” I said. “What’s one story among friends—and you’ll need friends.”
If a studio passed along a story to me that Louella thought she should have, she raised the roof, if necessary going over everybody involved to the studio head himself: “Hopper was given that. I should have had it. Don’t let it happen again.”
Even a producer as peppery as Darryl Zanuck had reservations about doing anything that might antagonize her. Zanuck, at that time Twentieth Century-Fox production chief, thought nothing of squaring off and mixing it in a fist fight with a director who argued with him. But when Bill Wellman, after three days of shooting on Public Enemy, urged that Eddie Wood, who was the star, should be replaced in that gangster epic by a newcomer who had the second lead, Jimmy Cagney, the fiery Zanuck flinched.
“My God, we can’t do it, Bill. Eddie’s engaged to Harriet Parsons, Louella’s daughter. Parsons will raise hell.”
“You son of a bitch,” answered Bill, who’s a flinty character. “You mean you’re going to let that decide it?”
“Damn it, no,” said Zanuck, put on his metal. “You go and put Cagney in.” And that’s how two men with guts turned an ex-chorus boy into a star.
Harriet married not Eddie Wood but King Kennedy. There were more stars in attendance than there are in the Milky Way when the two of them became man and wife at Marsden Farms in the San Fernando Valley in September 1939. Some of the guests were old-timers like Rudy Vallee, Billy Haines, Aileen Pringle, Frances Marion, and myself. The photographers ignored us completely, to the point where Billy got spitting mad.
He went up to Hymie Fink, who had been the town’s best still photographer since Valentino’s day. “We’ll each give you five bucks if you’ll take a picture of us,” Billy offered. But Hymie couldn’t do it. He had his orders, he said. After Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy were divorced in 1944, King came to work for me as leg man, covering the studios for a while, but I insisted that he get Louella’s consent before I hired him.
Not many men had the courage of Bill Wellman and Darryl Zanuck. I was in a roomful of faint hearts at a party the Gary Coopers gave when Gene Tierney made a beeline for me: “I’ve been trying to get you all afternoon to tell you I’m going to have another baby.”
That was wonderful news. Louella and I both knew that Gene’s first child, a beautiful little girl, had been born with a sleeping mind—it was one of the many blows that life dealt Gene, who finally cracked under the torment and needed psychiatric care. I hustled to the telephone, but it was tied up with a call to Henry Hathaway, who was a patient at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. By the time I got through to the Times night desk, Gene was nowhere to be found to verify her news for the paper. But Louella had barged over to me and was hanging on like a limpet.
Next morning I heard what had happened. Gene’s studio had given the story of the forthcoming baby exclusively to Louella the previous afternoon. When she heard Gene had told me, she had flounced over to the poor girl and delivered a tongue lashing so violent that Gene had collapsed into tears. Gary Cooper had been in another room and didn’t hear it, but of the whole mob of Hollywood heroes who listened to Louella, not one lifted a voice or a finger to help Gene. Fear of their own precious skins kept them as dumb as mutes at a funeral.
Even Frank Sinatra had to come to terms with Louella in her heyday. He stood high in her disfavor for months. It seemed there was nothing he could do to stop the attacks she made on him. I thought I might be able to help, so I suggested through Perry Charles, his agent, that Frank should call Marion and arrange to meet Hearst. The meeting came about, and Frank made a good impression. The order was passed down from San Simeon, and Miss Parsons suddenly discovered that Sinatra was nowhere near as black as she’d imagined him.
Clark Gable and Carole Lombard flouted the “first to know” rule Louella had laid down when they set their wedding day to coincide with Louella’s absence from town—she’d gone off on a trip to San Francisco. She was on the train coming home when she got the news that they were married. “It can’t be true,” she gasped. “They would have told me first.”
But Clark had given the story to all newspapers simultaneously to avoid any bickering over who should have first whack. She took such a dim view of that, though, that the Gables felt they had to make up to her by means of a distinctly unusual present: They had her bathroom done over with mirrored walls and brand-new plumbing.
Orson Welles is one of the few who never gave a damn for her. When he was making Citizen Kane, a picture with a striking resemblance to the life of William Randolph Hearst, he persuaded Louella that the story was something entirely unconnected with her chief. I wasn’t convinced so easily, and Orson finally agreed to let me see the first screening of the finished product in a private projection room of RKO. What I saw appalled me.
W.R. had been a friend to me for years. So had Orson, ever since I’d been a struggling actress and he’d gone out of his way to be kind to my son Bill, who was a struggling young actor. When Hearst learned that I’d been hired as a columnist, he said: “Why didn’t you come to me? I didn’t know you wanted to write a column. I’d have given you one.”
“Have I ever asked you for anything?” “No,” he said. “What makes you think I’d ask for anything as important as this is to me?”
“Everybody else asks for things. Why not you?”
“I don’t ask,” I said. Then he wrote me this, to which I didn’t reply:
My dear Hedda:
I am glad you are going to do some work for the Esquire Syndicate. The Esquire people are very clever. They produce a fine publication and they know good stuff.
I always thought that the stuff you did for the Washington paper was extremely good.
It was accurate, interesting, and high-grade. It appealed to intelligent people, who like the movies—and there are lots of them. So many moving-picture commentators write down to the level of the movies, as they call it.
I always figure, however, that these commentators write down because they cannot write up.
Best wishes. I will look for your column.
Sincerely,
(s) W.R.
After the screening Orson asked how I liked it. “You won’t get away with it,” I said. But he arrogantly insisted that he would. It was his arrogance that decided which of two friendships had to come out ahead. I put in a call to Oscar Lawler, a great friend of mine and one of W.R.’s attorneys, to tell him about Citizen Kane and what Orson was up to.
As soon as word was passed along to W.R., he telephoned Louella. When she heard I’d seen the picture already and that, contrary to the assurances she’d given him, it had a great deal to do with the chief’s affairs, the sky fell in on her. He commanded her to have it screened for Oscar Lawler and herself. After the showing she begged the attorney to go home with her to help describe to Hearst what they had seen, but he declined. She had to get on the telephone herself to San Simeon, just as later she made many calls, including one to Nelson Rockefeller, in a battle royal to keep Citizen Kane out of Radio City Music Hall, which is part of Rockefeller Center, and every other movie theater.
If W.R. had taken Oscar Lawler’s advice to ignore Kane, it might never have received the attention it won when, breaking the boycott ten months later, it was shown around the world, won a Best Picture of the Year award, and, as late as 1958, was named as one of the greatest movies ever made. But on W.R.’s orders Orson Welles’ name went on the Hearst Silent List of people about whom Louella could never say a kind word.
The black list constantly makes its presence felt. When Nunnally Johnson aided and abetted in a blistering article about her that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, she hit back at his wife.
“I ran into Dorris Bowdon last night,” she wrote. “She used to be such a pretty girl before she married.” Joan Crawford, Nelson Eddy, Jimmy Cagney, and Ava Gardner have all had the treatment.
Bette Davis and I were administered a slap on the wrist after I tracked her down to Laguna, where she holed up, refusing to talk to newspapers, following the birth of her May Day baby in 1947. The door of the cottage was open, so I walked in, and we talked for hours. The next week Louella wrote: “Since Bette Davis has had so many unwelcome visitors, she has had to have her gate padlocked.”
As a present for the baby, Jack Warner sent Bette an add-a-pearl necklace with five pearls on it and space for the donor to add another each birthday. Recently I asked Bette if her daughter’s necklace was still growing. She gave that raucous laugh of hers and replied: “It’s just the size it was the day you came to visit me.”
Personally, like Louella, I’ve found that silence is the greatest blow you can deliver to a Hollywood ego when it needs whacking down to size. Not to mention the name of a star drives him half out of his mind; they live and die by publicity. Not even producers are immune, as Sam Goldwyn demonstrated. He cabled me once from Hawaii, where my day’s eight hundred words apparently were read so faithfully that even when wartime restrictions limited the paper there to four pages, I had to be squeezed in somehow. Sam complained: NAME NOT IN COLUMN FOR WEEK STOP THEY DO NOT THINK I’M IMPORTANT OVER HERE STOP PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Ginger Rogers and Ronald Colman were both excommunicated by Louella for years for their effrontery in refusing to appear on her former radio show, “Hollywood Hotel.” As mistress of ceremonies, she collected $2500 a week and the stars appeared free. If any star balked, the producers hastened to Louella’s aid by putting the pressure on until that star was convinced of the error of his ways. Total value of the free talent has been estimated by better mathematicians than I at $2,000,000. For a while, her sponsor, a soup company, was delighted to pay a weekly tab of about $12,000 for a show which, without her, would have cost well over $30,000.
But after the soup maker had been replaced by a soap maker and the show had been restyled as “Hollywood Premieres,” the Screen Actors Guild plucked up its corporate courage to do what only Ginger and Colman had dared. The Guild ruled that Louella had to pay her guests, and thirteen weeks later the program was off the air.
She showed her power when Mary Pickford organized a radio spectacular, to be sponsored by a milk company, to benefit the Motion Picture Home, where poverty drives so many veterans of the movie business. Gable and dozens of other stars wanted to appear, but Louella got busy on her telephones. Mary had to back down and cancel the program with the stars in her living room waiting to go on.
For one of my radio series I wanted to hit up the competitive theme, which press agents had originally invented. They rubbed their hands when I got started because, by having us fight, they thought they could get double space and play off one columnist against the other.
Louella didn’t seem to sense what they were up to. I said: “Let’s take a tip from Jack Benny and Fred Allen and whip up a feud. We could have a mountain of fun. It would increase our audience ratings, and we might get a salary increase out of it. Supposing on the first show we staged a battle royal and both got carried out on stretchers....” But Louella wouldn’t play.
Habit dies hard with her if she is invited to appear with me for a photograph, still shot, or movie. When Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder wanted us to appear together in Sunset Boulevard as reporters breaking the news of the murder, they extended the first bid to me. I began scheming a scene in which she and I would rush for a telephone simultaneously. Then I would trip and say sweetly: “After you, Louella.”
When she got her invitation and was told I had already been signed, she stormed: “Get her off. I won’t be in it if she is.” They would have none of that, so Miss Parsons did not appear in Sunset Boulevard. And she didn’t mention the picture in her column for months.
She didn’t know what to do when Time ran a cover story and a cover portrait along with ten columns of some highly flattering prose about yours sincerely. (Hopper “is a self-appointed judge and censor of all that goes on in Hollywood,” said Time, “and she carries out her assignment with a hey nonny-nonny and the old one-two.”) In frustration, Louella took to her bed.
The studios were in a panic. They couldn’t afford to have Louella out of action. She’s too useful to them. They know how to handle her, where I’m a tougher nut to crack. If she lays hold of a scandal, she does not print it unless the studio involved is willing. When scandal comes in range of my telescope, I’ll print it so long as it’s news and true. Press agents can’t stand it; the business they’re in should be called suppress agentry. They’ve suppressed far more than they’ve ever passed out as news. In the olden days, when Louella reigned alone, there was a mighty load to suppress, too.
As she slid into a decline through sheer aggravation over Time, her spirits were rapidly restored by a suggestion put up by Adela Rogers St. John, the magazine writer: “Give Louella the most wonderful dinner party Hollywood has seen, then maybe she’ll forget about the cover story.”
Now Louella has accepted every conceivable and inconceivable degree, doctorate, scroll, and plaque held out by college or corporation. Testimonial dinners to her are routine, though Eddie Cantor may have said a little more than he meant at a Masquers Club event celebrating her thirtieth anniversary as a columnist when he conceded: “I am here for the same reason everybody else is—we were afraid not to come.”
The idea of putting on a super-size testimonial caught on with every producer who heard about it. The Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove was hired and treated to a face lift for the big event. It was originally planned to collect $25 from each of the hundreds of guests who sat among the papier-mâché monkeys and imitation palm trees, but when Hearst heard about it, he footed the whole bill.
Daily Variety did the evening up proud: “The guest list was the Who’s Who of motion pictures, and even the oldest old-timer could not recall when so many reigning stars of the past, present, and future, in toto, as well as agents, press agents, producers, directors, authors, distributors, studio chiefs, maîtres d’hôtel, the mayor, and governor all got together in one room. Flanked by industry leaders, Miss Parsons sat on a garland-strewn dais and listened to oratory in which no adjectives were spared.”
As a climax, Louella collected a gold plaque with an engraved inscription to her “courage, accuracy, fairness and curiosity.” Time’s account noted: “Such well-established stars as Clark Gable and Cary Grant allowed themselves the liberty of not attending.”
All I know about it, I read in the papers. I wasn’t invited. Neither was Adela Rogers St. John.
My modest contribution to the welfare of Louella and her family took the form of some column paragraphs that appeared soon after the Cocoanut Grove whingding: “I Remember Mama, and you will, too, when you have seen the film. With all the elements of good theater and good cinema, humor, humanity and hominess, it will be hard to forget ... to Harriet Parsons, who found the story and produced the picture, must go a lot of credit....”
That was the final chapter in a story that had started four years earlier. Harriet is an only child; her father was John Parsons, who died following the breakup of Lo