The First Lady of Hollywood Read online

  Samantha Barbas

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue z

  PART I

  i Early Years

  2 Essanay

  3 The Column

  4 New York

  S "The Lovely Miss Marion Davies"

  PART 11

  6 On the Way to Hollywood P3

  7 Hollywood io8

  8 Feuds

  9 Radio

  to The Best and the Hearst

  PART III

  it The First Lady of Hollywood IP3

  12 Raising Kane

  13 The Gay Illiterate

  14 War and Peace

  15 Scandal

  16 The End of an Era

  17 Eclipse

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index 4

  BIOGRAPHIES ARE NOT USUALLY EASY TO WRITE, but Louella made this job especially difficult. Because she did not make her personal papers accessible-and in some cases went out of her way to conceal information about her past-she sent me on a multistate paper chase through archives, libraries, historical societies, and countless rolls of microfilm. My deepest gratitude to the many generous librarians and archivists who assisted me: Ned Comstock of the Cinema Television Library at the University of Southern California; Rhonda Frevert of the Des Moines County, Iowa, Genealogical Society; Cheryl Gleason and Suzy Beggin of the Freeport, Illinois, Public Library; Barbara Hall and Jenny Romero of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences; Steve Johnson of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin; David Kessler of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; Deb Sutton of the Lee County, Illinois, Genealogical Society; Marilyn Wurzburger of the Special Collections Department at the Hayden Library at Arizona State University; and archivists at the California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, the Chicago Historical Society, Columbia University, the Los Angeles Public Library, the University of Indiana, the University of Iowa, and the Warner Brothers Archive at the University of Southern California.

  I am also indebted to the film and journalism scholars who helped me with contacts, references, and sage advice, especially Cari Beauchamp, Paul Buhle, Kathy Feeley, Val Holley, Pat McKean, Louis Pizzitola, and Rob Wagner. Walter Seltzer, Bob Thomas, and Mamie Van Doren graciously agreed to interviews. My friends, colleagues, and students at Chapman University were unfailing in their good cheer and generosity; my editor at the University of California Press, Mary Francis, was enormously insightful and encouraging. Special thanks go to my father and especially my mother, Mie Barbas, who saw me through difficult days and packed enough boxes for a lifetime.

  September 1941

  IN HOLLYWOOD IT WAS A DIFFICULT TIME. Though film attendance was at an all-time high-that year eighty-five million tickets were sold each week-the major studios were under attack. The war in Europe and Asia had led to a decline in foreign markets, the House Un-American Activities Committee was investigating the alleged involvement of several prominent actors with communism, and a Senate commission accused Hollywood of warmongering by making films that promoted U.S. intervention in the overseas conflict. Moreover, the Federal Communications Commission had allowed regular commercial television broadcasting to begin on July 1, 1941, panicking those in Hollywood who saw the new medium as potentially formidable competition.'

  Louella, too, had struggled that year. In the spring, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, a scathing attack on her employer, William Randolph Hearst, had been released in theaters across the nation. Americans watched Welles's onscreen portrayal of a manipulative, megalomaniacal Hearst, and they read in national publications about Louella's conniving attempts to suppress the film. The New York Times and Newsweek described Louella as a vicious opponent of free speech who used her power to carry out her employer's tyrannical wishes. Shortly afterward, the Screen Actors' Guild launched an attack on her, publicly condemning her refusal to pay actors who appeared on her radio show and calling her an enemy of the film industry. Though Louella's worldwide readership of nearly twenty million was more than triple that of her primary rival, Hedda Hopper, pundits predicted that it would not be long until Hopper surpassed her and became the new first lady of Hollywood.

  Yet all this seemed to matter little on the morning of Friday, September iz, when Louella left her home on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills for Los Angeles' Union Station. The strain of turning out a daily movie gossip column, monthly features for several fan magazines, and a weekly radio program seemed to disappear as Louella envisioned the upcoming journey to Dixon, Illinois, her hometown, over two thousand miles away. It would be no exaggeration to say that she had waited for this day all her life.

  In Dixon, a town of thirty-five thousand in the heart of northern Illinois's farm country, the excitement and anticipation ran high. Mayor William Slothower had predicted that Louella Parsons Day, a celebration of the region's most famous daughter, would be "a spectacle that has never before been seen in the history of Dixon-a spectacle that few communities are privileged to witness."2 Featuring a gala dinner, a parade through the streets of Dixon, and a radio broadcast by Louella and other Hollywood celebrities, the event had been planned for weeks by the Dixon Chamber of Commerce, the Dixon Evening Telegraph, the local Lions Club, and representatives from twelve local communities. Throughout the region, schools were closed for the event. Representatives of the American Legion and the Illinois Reserve Militia were scheduled to be on hand, as were several nurses, a fleet of ambulances, and Boy Scout troops from throughout the state. "Never in the history of the city has such painstaking effort and citywide cooperation been put forth in any civic undertaking, and no individual, native or otherwise, has been given such a reception as is being given to our nationally famous and much beloved Miss Parsons," crowed the Dixon Evening Telegraph. At least thirty thousand movie fans from northern Illinois, if not more, were expected to attend.3

  The two-day trip from Hollywood aboard the City of Los Angeles streamliner was for Louella a working journey. With a typewriter propped up on two hatboxes, she wrote her columns and, with her publicist Virginia Lindsay, prepared her remarks for the celebration. Louella's brother, Ed Ettinger, a Hollywood publicist, accompanied her on the trip, as did a group of actors-Bob Hope, Jerry Colonna, Joe E. Brown, George Montgomery, Bebe Daniels, Ben Lyon, Ronald Reagan, and Ann Rutherford-who were scheduled to perform with Louella during the festivities. For Ronald Reagan, too, the trip to Dixon was a homecoming. A former lifeguard at Dixon's Lowell Park and a football star at Dixon High, Reagan had lived in Dixon only nine years earlier. Louella had left in 1905, though her ties to the community remained strong.

  At nine in the morning on Sunday, September 14, 1941, crowds began milling around Dixon's northwestern train station. By 9:30, the assembly had filled the streets of the Dementtown section of Dixon, causing older residents to declare it the largest crowd the city had ever seen. When the train pulled in at 10:36, an estimated thirty-five thousand onlookers cheered, held signs, and readied their cameras in anticipation of Louella and "Dutch" Reagan. When Louella stepped out on the platform in the long silver fox coat she wore despite the eighty-degree heat, the throng screamed, waved, and snapped photos. Years of working in the film industry had taught her how to play for the camera; with a stiff white-gloved wave and beaming smile, she accepted a huge floral key to the city from Mayor Slothower and stepped gracefully to the microphone. What she said, though, seemed to be no phony Hollywood acceptance speech but to come truly from the heart. "This is an event, my old friends in Dixon, which I shall never forget," she told them. "I will remember this occasion as long as I live, and I know that Ronald will too.

  "You remember that I always used to call our Rock River the
Hudson River of the west. Then I hadn't been anywhere. Since then I have been in Switzerland, Italy-all around the world-and I still say that Dixon is the most beautiful city in the world. It's home."4

  Very little had changed in it. As the motorcade proceeded down Galena Street, Dixon's main thoroughfare, the three-story brick buildings and square clapboard houses were as plain as they had been three decades earlier. Though the welcoming arch over the boulevard had been decorated with a "Welcome home" banner bearing pictures of Louella and Dutch, and a few new stores and movie theaters now stood by the downtown square, Dixon remained as humble, quiet, and conservative as ever. "These are not pushy, celebritybored crowds," Mayor Slothower had told reporters from the Chicago Herald American, "but ninety-nine percent native-born Americans, churchgoing folks, who are proud of their Dixon civic band in blue, the home guard, and the American Legion Auxiliary."5

  At a banquet the following evening, prominent Dixonites paid tribute to Louella's rise from her rural roots. They remembered her riding her bike down a dusty road to Dixon High each day, her prize-winning oration at commencement, and the prophecy of the school principal, Benjamin Franklin Bullard, that someday she would be known as "Louella the Writer." Aspiring actresses in the community put together a dramatic sketch depicting Louella's involvement in the Kendall Club, one of Dixon's earliest social service organizations, and several longtime residents recalled that Louella, as a young reporter for the Dixon Star, had patrolled the streets each morning looking for a scoop. "How she used to walk down First Street going into every store along the way asking for news for the evening paper!" remembered Gwendolyn Bardwell, who had worked with Louella. After her first big story, she "walked wide eyed" around town, electrified with a thrilling sense of accomplishment. She was a "happy, ambitious scribe," claimed Mabel Shaw, the editor of the Dixon Telegraph, blessed with "great determination and inspiring energy." "Sometimes when fame wraps its velvet robe around a person, it changes its recipient, but not so with Louella Parsons. She loves her old friends and remembers them with graciousness," said another acquaintance. The Telegraph even noted that Louella had taken time out of her busy schedule to visit an "old gentleman, now blind, who used to see her on her way to school and [who] had expressed a desire to talk to her." On this day it seemed she could do no wrong.6

  That evening, following the dedication of a Louella Parsons wing of the local hospital, a screening-the world premiere of the film International Squadron, starring Ronald Reagan-and the crowning of the Rock River beauty queen, Louella walked the grounds of the Charles Walgreen estate, Hazelwood, where she and the visiting celebrities were staying. Alone under the stars, she may have wondered how much her old friends had not said but had known: Louella's troubles with her first husband, John Parsons; her secret divorce; and an unhappy second marriage that she had hidden from her colleagues in Hollywood for over twenty years.

  The following morning, standing on the train platform, she stared out one last time at the dusty roads, the low wooden shanties, and the deep green fields that stretched into the distance. With her brother and publicist not far behind, she lifted the hem of her fox coat, clutched her purse, and slipped gracefully into the rear car of the train. She was amazed at how simple it seemed this time; a wave, a smile, and a quick good-bye. The first time it had not been so easy.

  THOUGH DIXON WAS LOUELLA'S HOMETOWN, her story began in Freeport, Illinois, thirty miles north. Like most small communities in north-central Illinois in the i88os, it was quiet, rural, tight-knit, and fiercely proud. Settled by miners, army volunteers in the Blackhawk war of the 183os, and German immigrants, during the 184os it was a regular stagecoach stop on the route to Chicago, a hundred miles east. Thanks to industrial development in the region, by the i88os Freeport had grown into a town of fifteen thousand that was a thriving center of business and industry and one of the most important commercial centers in the area. The downtown streets were lined with general stores, clothing shops, soda fountains, and saloons. On the outskirts of town, smoke billowed into the sky from a string of factories producing leather and wooden goods-pipes, barrels, harnesses, and over six thousand pairs of shoes annually. Six days a week, men trudged off to the factories for ten hours' labor, while wives, dressed in long skirts and high collars, shopped on Stephenson Street, Freeport's main thoroughfare; cleaned their small homes; and minded their children.'

  Visually, Freeport was snug and unassuming, a tight core of downtown streets lined with brick and wooden commercial buildings flanked by rows of small clapboard homes. In the distance lay the Pecatonica River and, beyond that, open farmland as far as the eye could see. The unpaved streets were muddy in spring, dusty in summer, and filled year-round with slow-moving horse traffic, horse dung, and debris. On windy days, complained residents, dust and dung blew into the stores and settled on open containers of flour and produce. Families here depended on wells for water, and, not knowing better, frequently dug them near stables and outside privies, leading to dozens of deaths annually. Life was hard and perilous but, at the same time, slow and comfortable, with a reassuring regularity. Days passed, seasons turned, but very little changed. Hardworking and conservative, dominated by Lutherans and Methodists, the community shunned flamboyance and ostentation, with one notable exception. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Freeport residents were devoted patrons of the stage.'

  Often described as a magnet for traveling stage companies during the late i8oos, Freeport, a major stop on the Great Western Railroad line, was known as one of the best theater towns in the state. Between i88o and 1920, a period described by one historian as the "golden age" of the American theater, when hundreds of traveling theater companies toured the nation, there were six theaters and halls in downtown Freeport where operas, minstrel shows, and Shakespearean plays were regularly performed.3 The Wilcoxon Opera House, the largest and most opulent in Freeport, seated eight hundred people on the main floor and in the gallery. Despite traditional associations of the theater with immorality, and despite the hostility of many religious leaders to the stage-the Methodist Episcopal Church had actually instituted a ban on theatergoing in 1877-most Freeport residents attended regularly.'

  Like the motion pictures that followed, the theater operated according to a star system, in which actors' private lives were publicized to draw audiences and cultivate interest in performers. By i88o, theater fans could read about actors' marriages, divorces, and personal habits in major urban newspapers and in specialized trade publications like The Theater magazine, which catered to both professionals and fans. As one New York newspaper editorialized in 1888, commenting on the proliferation of theatrical "celebrity gossip" in the popular press, "One would think that actors and singers are the only people worth talking about in all this great, busy, active, pushing, enterprising world, and that newspapers are published for the express purpose of perpetuating the doings of actors in private life."5

  In Freeport, theater fan culture thrived. Young male fans looking for an excuse to hang around the stage were hired by local theater owners to pass through the audience during performances and offer patrons a drink of water, free, from a pitcher and a single .6 Young women dubbed "matinee girls" developed crushes on handsome male stars, the "matinee idols." Though the girls were criticized by parents and religious leaders who feared their unhealthy attachment to the stage and their frank expression of sexual desire, they persisted in their devotion, collecting tidbits of trivia about their idols and clipping photos from theatrical magazines.?

  In 1881, twenty-three-year-old Helen Stine Oettinger was among those deeply enamored of the stage. Guided by her mother, Jeanette Wilcox Stine, she had grown up immersed in the theater and in theater fan culture. Throughout her childhood she and Jeanette had made regular trips to Chicago to see the latest plays, including Sappho, a controversial play celebrating female sexuality that was banned in several cities.' Both mother and child had dreamed of acting and were outspoken and theatrical in temperament. Hel
en dressed in plumed hats and garish gowns, while Jeanette had earned a reputation around town as an articulate, freethinking advocate of women's rights. Though Helen had recently married a local clothing merchant, Joshua Oettinger, and was urged by friends to give up her "childish" interest in the stage, she continued to attend the theater, dream of her favorite matinee idols, and exude her trademark flamboyance.

  Helen's father, Isaac Stine, was a hardworking Jewish immigrant from Wurtemberg, Germany, who had immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1847. After moving to Freeport in 1852, he purchased one of the first brick buildings in the area and opened the Star Store, a men's clothing company. By 1857, when he married Jeanette Wilcox, the daughter of a local Irish family, he was one of Freeport's most prosperous businessmen.9 Jeanette and Isaac had five children-William, Charles, Carrie, Harriet, and Helen-and, like many German-Jewish families in the Protestant Midwest, concealed their religious background. Although most Freeport residents knew that Isaac was Jewish, the Stines regularly attended the Grace Episcopal Church.

  When Isaac died in 1879, he willed the Star Store to William, his eldest son. But William wanted to pursue a law career, and after establishing his own law firm, Stine and Kern, in 1880, William transferred the ownership of the store to Helen and Harriet. The sisters became wealthy-and very desirable-young women.10

  Enter Eli and Joshua Oettinger, two brothers of German-Jewish descent from Danville, Pennsylvania. After working in clothing stores in Chicago and Rockford, Illinois, the brothers, both in their early twenties, arrived in Freeport in 1879, where they worked at J. Levi and Company, a men's clothing house that competed with the Star Store. They heard of Helen and Harriet's acquisition of the Stine business and began courting the sisters. In September 188o Eli married Hattie, and in January 1881 Joshua married Helen, and the ownership of the business was transferred to the Oettinger brothers." Joshua and Helen moved into a small home on Clark Street, two blocks from the store, and by spring Helen was pregnant.