Louella Parsons was a journalist working for William Randolph Hearst, the media mogul. With a cruel and sarcastic style, she made any figure succeed or fall. The fear that she provoked, the accusations in exchange for her silence, the extortion, and the day that a competitor of her level appeared.
"One word from you will be enough to bury me," thought the great Hollywood stars every time they saw Louella Parsons, the most feared woman in the industry.
She wasn't one of the tycoons, she didn't have her own studios, and she wasn't even a director or handled castings. Louella had a gossip column in the paper.
Her reign lasted forty years. The only thing she achieved over time was to harden her. The feeling that nothing could hurt her, the inordinate power to destroy careers or direct them, and the need not to give up the throne before the appearance of skilled and shameless (as much as she) competitors of hers. Power generates this type of pressure and prevents relaxation; a brief stumble can mean the fall of the kingdom.
The sources of it were diverse. Police, nurses, doctors, studio technicians, executives who wanted to hurt their rivals, representatives angry with their clients, second-rate actors, and actresses who in exchange for information they saw on the sets earned a mention in one of the newspaper columns. most read in the country. But there was yet another method of gaining scoops and loyalty: not publishing certain information. A kind of blackmail that made some figures feel indebted to her (to be more precise: she made them feel indebted and reminded them all the time), A possible dialogue with an actor as recreated in The Groove Book Of Hollywood:
Louella: Who was that girl that was with you in that bar last night?
Actor: She wasn't a girl, she was my mom.
Louella: she wasn't your mom. You were with Joan Smith. I guess she told her husband that she was going to be working late.
Actor: Yes, in fact, we stopped for coffee before each going to her house.
Louella: My informants tell me that one of her breasts was in your hands.
Actor: She Just ripped her dress. I helped her fix it.
Louella: Lie. But I'm not going to publish it so as not to create problems for you.
Actor: God bless you. You are charming.
Louella: Now you have to call me as soon as you have any news. And make it big.
Actor: I promise I will.
And of course, she did it the first opportunity she got. Nobody had outstanding debts with Louella Parsons.
Louella was born in Illinois on August 6, 1881. Since she was a child, she liked to write. She spent time teaching until she got married. The couple settled in Iowa and lived there for many years. They had a daughter. After the divorce, she moved to Chicago. There, in 1914, she began working as a film critic for a newspaper. Within a few years, William Randolph Hearst bought the journal, and she was fired from it. Movie news didn't seem to excite readers. But some time later she was rehired in another of the many media that Hearst owned.
She gained Hearst's attention again through a ruse. Every time she could, she wrote compliments to Marion Davis, the showgirl girlfriend of the tycoon he was trying to turn into a star (for which she was reviled by journalists and colleagues). However, her great leap is attributed to a dark episode that could never be resolved and that produced innumerable legends. One afternoon in 1924 Hearst, Marion Davis, and other celebrities went sailing. On the ship was Charlie Chaplin and also Thomas Ince, a film director. Ince did not return to land alive. The version that circulated indicated that the tycoon discovered his girlfriend and Chaplin having an affair. Blinded by jealousy, he shot him, but in the dark of the night, he mistook Ince for Chaplin. Ince's body was quickly cremated and a doctor signed the death certificate indicating that his cause of death had been a massive heart attack. Many hold that Louella Parsons was on that ship. And her silence was bought with a column in the most massive media in the United States.
Her gossip column was syndicated, that is, it was reproduced every day in hundreds of newspapers around the United States and the world. With such diffusion, her influence began to grow. It came to have more than 70 million readers.
Louella's first big gossip was the divorce between Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the most adored couple in their country. She then revealed hundreds of separations, clandestine love affairs, love triangles, unwanted pregnancies, and various addictions. Her greatest satisfaction was when the news came out of her column and she was on the front page of the newspapers. She got it multiple times. One of them was with Ingrid Bergman. Louella said that the actress, loved by the public and with an angelic image, had cheated on her neurologist husband and was pregnant with Roberto Rosellini. Bergman's career was deeply affected by this news and for years she was branded as an adulteress.
Her style was worked. She played with humor and sarcasm. Many times she did not name the protagonists of her gossip but she gave so many clues and signals that no one could fail to identify them (or produced an even more useful effect for her: these clues could simultaneously identify three or four actresses and the threat -and its advantages) - was wider). She knew how to shock society. She was one of those responsible, for example, for the final downfall of Frances Farmer by meticulously describing for several weeks some aspects and consequences of her alcoholism. She attacked Lupe Velez for months and when the actress committed suicide she wrote an impudent article describing her last moments. Some actresses got fired after calling studio bosses who never annoyed them.
She gloried in her impiety. A legendary episode that has been attributed to several actors. Someone (Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy) very angry about something that Louella published expressed out loud I'm Kicking Her Ass, an expression whose meaning in Spanish would be "I'm going to kill her" but whose literal translation is "I'm going to kick his ass." And many say, attributing it to different men, that at a party this celebrity ran into Louella Parsons, and her man without greeting her kicked her tail.
She invented the genre as it is known today. The Spanish writer Andrés Barba wrote: “Transferring the distances, it could be said that Louella Parsons is the Cervantes of the pink chronicle; the before and after is so marked that not only the genre is established, but also the demand for it, and the initial format devised by her is so effective that it remains intact even today”.
It mixes gossip, inclement judgment, gossip, some sadism, sarcasm, and impunity. She enjoyed the power of it and the damage output of it. She exalted movies, lowered plays, consecrated strangers, or definitively sank stars.
When she was the queen of gossip, a competitor appeared to her. To top it off she was someone she had spoken well of many times in her texts. Hedda Hopper was an actress who had never been able to make the big leap, she never went beyond minor roles, until the studio that had hired her did not renew her contract. The greatest success of hers in her profession had been to be featured in Louella's columns, but it was not due to her merits but it was a consideration. Hedda provided information, and Louella provided gratuitous praise.
Finding herself without a job, Hedda realized that several decades in the world of cinema had given her extensive knowledge of the environment and its secrets. And that he could use it. She began writing for the Los Angeles newspaper competitor to Louella's. She was 53 years old and had no time to waste. She very quickly earned her place. His thing was self-confidence and impact. If Louella used to play mystery and elegance, the underhanded insult disguised as praise, Hedda was the opposite. She was bombastic, torrential and she always named the one who would be attacked.
The two-way cement got into a fierce fight. Hedda had achieved her goal, she chose her enemy very well. If one attacked an actor, the other defended him. They found no point in common and each played to be more virulent than the other. Amid that war, Hollywood characters suffered because, amid that runaway shooting, anyone could fall. The confrontation benefited them both. They were read by millions of people, making them more widely known and powerful. Hedda Hopper went from being unemployed to, in a few years, buying a lavish mansion that she named "The House That Fear Built".
Hedda was hired at the behest of some studio priests. They believed that this way they would neutralize Louella. The play went wrong. They only managed to create another monster. And activate Louella Parsons who, when she found a rival, someone who could overshadow her, reappeared as the one from her beginnings.
Louella defended what she was doing by saying that it only showed the human side of the stars, that in this way she showed that they were people just like those who went to the movies every week. “The discovery of Louella Parsons is as simple as it is demonic; the most secret of the secret, the shameful, makes the daily routine of ordinary lives acquire relevant relevance”, wrote Truman Capote.
But Parsons' role (and Hopper's as well) is more complex and influential than it seems. She not only shared secrets of show business. The damage that she produced was not only reduced to the person alluded to by her. What Louella was doing was going down the line permanently. Thus, she favored the installation of homophobia by making many actors come out of the closet (or what is worse, forcing them to marry a woman as a screen), she urged exacerbated nationalism or was one of the great witch hunters during McCarthyism, using her notes to denounce communist infiltrations in every corner of Hollywood. She, the gossip, was the great censor, the great moralist of the industry.
Louella was dressed very elegantly, with a small hat tilted to the side, heavy makeup, and an evil look on her face. As a manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome, although she still did not know it like that, she was invited to every gala, every important dinner, and every premiere. Nobody wanted her to get angry.
She was a persistent pursuer of Orson Welles. When he found out what El Ciudadano was about, she demanded to see her in a private session exclusively for her and two Hearst lawyers. She then wrote against Welles (she did for decades) and advocated the censorship of the film. She talked to distributors and theater owners not to show the film. In many cases, she succeeded. It is said that she prevented it from being given in 17 states.
She retired in the mid-sixties. Times had changed and she was already showing signs of deterioration. She died in December 1972. She was 91 years old. Her funeral was quite crowded. Some actress when asked why she had gone, she replied: "I wanted to make sure that she was dead."
She spent her last years in a nursing home. She was alone and ravaged by senile dementia. Her favorite activity was sitting in front of the television. But she wasn't interested in the news, sports, or soap operas. She used to get excited when they played old movies. At that moment she seemed to turn on. Every time a famous actor or actress appeared, she rejuvenated and regained energy. With all her strength—strength the of hers that seconds before anyone would have sworn had abandoned her years ago—she was screaming at the screen. She insulted the star of the day, the old glory of Hollywood and almost running out of her voice, threatened to reveal who she had slept with.
