Part 6

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 Louella’s first marriage, before Docky came on the scene. RKO had signed Harriet as a producer, and she set to work delving into the studio’s files, looking for likely properties. She dug out _The Enchanted Cottage_, had it prepared for the screen, arranged a deal with Sam Goldwyn to borrow Teresa Wright as the heroine. Then suddenly it was snatched away from her and given to another writer-producer.

Undeterred, she went back to the files and excavated a story called _Mama’s Bank Account_, which was retitled _I Remember Mama_, and lined up Katina Paxinou to play in it. That, too, was grabbed from her by RKO. At that point, I stepped in with a column item relating Harriet’s misfortunes and asking: “What goes on? Harriet’s clever, and I think this is shabby treatment, even for Hollywood.”

The day after the item appeared _The Enchanted Cottage_ was returned to her--it was a big success when she produced it--and she got _I Remember Mama_ back, too. Louella had been restored in health and spirit in time to attend the preview, though in a seat removed from mine. “I expect Harriet’s picture will be very good,” she confided to a friend, “but I know one person here who won’t give it a good review.”

Harriet was in New York, where she read my notice in the News. She telephoned her mother. “Have you read Hedda’s column?”

“No, I never read that column,” Louella sniffed.

“She’s done what nobody else would do for me. I want you to call her and thank her for me.” Louella did, and we arranged a peace parley over a luncheon table at Romanoff’s for one o’clock the following day. When she walked in, a bit late as usual, every chin in the place dropped. Hasty telephone calls brought in a mob of patrons who stood six deep at the bar to witness our version of the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty. Nobody moved until we left arm in arm two hours later.

Harriet, whom I’ll always like, wired: YOU AND MA WOULD MANAGE TO TOP ME STOP YOUR HISTORIC LUNCH HAS NOW CROWDED I REMEMBER MAMA OFF THE FRONT PAGE STOP YOU GALS MIGHT HAVE WAITED FOR BABY. After that, she won a ten-year contract at RKO. But peace between Louella and me wasn’t wonderful enough to last very long.

The flames of our relationship blazed merrily one Christmas when a studio head unwittingly poured fuel oil on. Louella and I are on the same list for good-will offerings from studios, which fill my living room from floor to ceiling every season.

One Christmas just before Ernie Pyle went off on his last visit to the South Pacific, he came to call on me with some friends. After a few drinks in the den, I said: “Ernie, do you want to see what fear can bring a female in this town?”

We went into my living room. He looked in wonder at the loot and said softly: “I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.”

Not every female star gets carried away with generosity. Doris Day once sent me boxes of gift-wrapped chocolate-covered pretzels, and Rosalind Russell a fist-sized hunk of coral such as you’d find in a fish bowl. Louella’s loot exceeds mine. Once, I’m told, she collected an automobile.

One unlucky studio chief had bought expensive handbags for each of us, but they got switched in delivery. When I telephoned to thank him and included a glowing description of the bag, I could hear his face fall. “But that’s Louella’s,” he moaned. “Will you be a doll and send it on to her and explain?”

“Like the devil I will,” I countered crisply. Louella is certain to this day that I got a better present than she did. Another store’s mistake brought me two handsome cut-crystal decanters for another Yuletide, one engraved HH, the other LOP. “Would you return hers to me?” said their donor.

“Not for the world. It makes such a gay conversation piece when I can ask a guest: ‘Would you like some Jack Daniels out of Louella’s bottle?’”

I regard her ungrudgingly as a good reporter, though she doesn’t always get her facts straight where I’m concerned. (Nor do I sometimes.) She invariably pretends that I am published only in the Los Angeles _Times_, so her followers won’t know about the syndicate, which gives Hopper a considerable edge in readership.

She has sometimes been tripped by her own prose. When Warners years ago chose Alan Mowbray to play George Washington in _Alexander Hamilton_, she took aim and fired: “It seems strange to me that an Englishman would be cast as the father of our country.” During the days when Mussolini invaded Albania and lives were snuffed out by the thousands, she decided: “The deadly dullness of the past week was lifted today when Darryl Zanuck announced he had bought all rights to _The Blue Bird_ for Shirley Temple.”

In a reminiscent mood she noted: “I don’t know how many of my readers remember John Barrymore and Dolores Costello in _Trilby_, the George Du Maunier story, but my mind goes back to John just loving the part of Svengali, wearing a black beard and hypnotizing the artist’s model who could only sing when he cast his baleful eye on her.” As Irving Hoffman recalled: “There wasn’t a thing wrong in the story except that the name of the picture was _Svengali_, not _Trilby_, the leading lady was Marian Marsh, not Dolores Costello ... du Maurier wrote it, not Du Maunier.”

Louella left me with egg on my face with her exclusive story that Ingrid Bergman was going to have a baby by Roberto Rossellini while she was still the wife of Dr. Peter Lindstrom. This, a few months after I’d interviewed Bergman at the scene of the crime and left Rome convinced by her that Italian newspapers had lied in their linotypes when they called her pregnant.

I will always believe that Joe Steele (the press agent employed both by her and her studio boss, Howard Hughes) subsequently told the truth to Louella. When her scoop appeared and the newspapers were hunting for Joe, they couldn’t find him. Seems she had persuaded him he was in bad shape, made sure he didn’t suffer thirst or hunger, then kept him safe and sound for three days away from her competitors.

After her story had been spread to the world, it seemed like a good idea to do something to help Ingrid, who wanted a quick divorce so that her baby could be spared at least a part of the stigma. I thought that perhaps she could be smuggled by plane out of Italy to some other country, where only friends would know exactly when or if the child was born.

Plans were going beautifully when the plan was broached to Ingrid. She refused to have anything to do with it. She would have her child proudly, she said, and if anyone didn’t like the idea he could lump it.

In 1951, Docky Martin died of cancer in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. It was a crushing blow for Louella. Not long ago, she found herself there, too, for an operation. The feebleness in her voice alarmed me. “I’m so tired of this place,” she said, “and I’m so sick.”

I had a word with Harry Brand, publicity director of Twentieth Century-Fox and a good friend to Louella and Docky: “If you want her to live, you’d better get her out of that hospital. Either she’s in the same room that Docky had or one exactly like it. She’ll never recover until she’s moved.”

Nobody apparently had thought of that. She was out of there and into the Beverly Hills Hotel the next day. Her column power is still potent, but the times and temper of Hollywood have changed. Though she doesn’t change, you can’t help but feel sorry for her. She still belabors her enemies and coos over her intimates: Mervyn LeRoy, Jimmy McHugh, Cobina Wright, all the Catholic “A” group that includes Loretta Young, Irene Dunne, Dolores Hope. She still pretends not to read Hopper, but when I broke the news of Kay Gable’s pregnancy, on the strength of a tip from a crew member on _The Misfits_, Louella must have read the item and put in a call instantly to Kay, begging to be the child’s godmother. At the baptism her hands were so shaky we were scared stiff she’d let young John Clark Gable fall on the floor by the font.

Louella claims that the people she writes about are all her dear, dear friends, a total she once estimated at 312. My taste runs closer to that of Dema Harshbarger, my manager, whom I have known since she first put me on radio. “I have three friends in the world,” says Dema, “and I don’t want any more. The average Hollywood friendship today wouldn’t buy you a ham sandwich.”

_Five_

One of the legends that haunts the typewriters of most of Hollywood’s five hundred resident reporters and columnists insists that our town is just like Podunk, a typical American community with a heart as big as Cinerama. (Are you there, Louella?) This is true, of course--give or take a few billion dollars a year. Provided Podunk can muster three dozen and more Rolls-Royces outside a movie house for a new picture opening. And pay a good cook $500 a week to steal her away from the best friend. And produce half a dozen houses with built-in pipe organs and one with wood-burning fireplaces in both the master and children’s bathrooms--it used to belong to Maggie Sullavan and Leland Hayward but Fred MacMurray owns it now.

If the majority of people in Podunk worship money like a god, then there isn’t much to choose between us. Take a man like Dean Martin. If Podunkians judge their fellows by how many dollars they earn, then Dean would be right at home. There was the day he got to arguing with his press agent about Albert Einstein.

“I made $20,000 last week,” Dean said. “What do you think he made?”

“You’re right,” said the press agent, a thoughtful soul. “That Einstein’s a dummy. I bet he never earned more than $12,000 a year in his whole life. He’s got to be an idiot.” Dean had the grace to grin. In Hollywood, where the love of money can change people’s nature every bit as fast as in Podunk, he has a reputation for cool blood behind his beaming Italian charm.

He isn’t alone in his class. It’s an obvious weakness among singers. Perry Como, for instance, sets few records for making appearances for charity. Bing Crosby, who enjoys almost nothing about his profession except the income it brings him, can’t be dragged to a benefit. It took his fiery little Irish mother, Kate, to push him out of his house to one Academy Awards show when he was at the top of his career. “You’ll go,” she threatened, “or you’ll never hear the last of it from me.” Kate was a woman to be reckoned with and still is. That was the night Bing got his Oscar for _Going My Way_.

Jerry Lewis on one occasion begged one big star to join him in New York on an all-night telethon to raise funds in a muscular-dystrophy drive. “You know what you can do with those crippled kids,” was the response he received from this father of a big family, who has a reputation for charming birds off trees.

Some of our inhabitants cherish the quaint idea that the number of charity performances he gives is an accurate yardstick for measuring an entertainer’s heart. More accurate, anyway, than the size of his bank account. It’s easy to sing a song or two, harder to stand up and be funny for half an hour. Yet the comics measure up well; Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis, George Burns--all knock themselves out in the sweet cause of charity.

Our number-one citizen on that score is Bob Hope, and we’re proud as peacocks of him. There isn’t a place in the world he wouldn’t fly to for charity and work without drawing a nickel. He’s ham enough to love the publicity it brings him, but he does a monumental amount of good. Bob has literally made the millions that everybody believes Bing has stashed away in the vaults.