In celebrating important women of Hollywood for Women’s History Month, my inclination was to seek out long-forgotten women producers, directors, or other creative behind-the-scenes people who have made at least minor contributions to the industry. And, my research only verified what I already knew: After the silent era, there were very few women in creative positions behind the camera or in positions of power. Every time I embark on a search like this, I always think it will turn out differently — like a movie with a bitter conclusion that you watch again hoping it will end better than you remember. However, more than once in my search I ran across repeated references to the “two most powerful women in Hollywood.” These two women were not in creative positions, and they had nothing to do with making movies, save for a handful of cameo appearances. Instead gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper had the film industry in the palm of their hands because they were willing to print whatever gossip, scoops, and inside information they came across.   

During the Golden Age and into the 1950s, publicity and promotion about Hollywood stars were strictly controlled by the studios’ press agents and publicity departments. Information, biographies, and feature stories were manufactured, complete with photos, by press agents and sent to fanzines, newspapers, and other outlets, who printed them to satisfy the public’s fascination with movie stars. These outlets rarely printed anything negative, partly because studios worked hard to hush up wrongdoing, and partly because the studios sent their stars on public outings in order to be photographed, so that the newspapers and magazines got all the “candid shots” they needed. In addition, press agents created “at-home” stories and fed them to fanzines so that movie fans felt like they were getting a glimpse of their favorite stars’ personal lives. For the stars, it was part of what was expected of them — part of the job — and all very controlled. As a matter of fact, in this system, in which fans wanted to believe that stars were a combination of their onscreen image and just like the folks next door, control of the information was key. Most of that control was in the hands of the studios, but threatening their domination over information were Parsons and Hopper, who had no qualms about printing something negative about the studios’ meal tickets.  With any given star, they might print good news, bad news, rumors, an absolute fiction, or, worst of all, NOTHING — all of which could affect that star’s career.

PARSONS

I already knew about Parsons and Hopper through all of the Hollywood lore about them. I remember Hopper’s cameo at the end of Sunset Boulevard and her appearances on I Love Lucy and The Beverly Hillbillies. When researching the life of Elvis Presley, I came across several of Hopper’s columns about him. In the 1950s, she was morally outraged about his hip-swiveling performing style, but during the 1960s, after Elvis changed his image and his manager spoon-fed Hopper scoops, she changed her tune and wrote positively about him. I have never thought much of Parsons and Hopper, pigeon-holing them as nosy busybodies from another era. But, after researching more about them, I changed my mind. I can’t say that what they did was a great contribution to film history, but I have a newfound respect for the power they wielded in a male-dominated industry. And, for better or worse, their columns and radio appearances played significant roles in the development of America’s celebrity culture.   

It all started with Louella Parsons, who is credited with writing the very first movie gossip column. Born Louella Oettinger in Freeport, Illinois, she had always wanted to be a writer and began working for the Dixon Morning Star while still a teenager in the 1890s. (Finding out the exact birthdates of Parsons and Hopper is not easy because both of them shaved years off their official bios. Parsons liked to claim she was born in 1893, but it was probably more like 1881. Most credible sources claim Hopper was born in 1890, though she liked to list 1895 as her birthdate. Nobody ages gracefully in Hollywood — not even gossip columnists.) Young Louella married John Parsons around 1905, moving with him to Iowa. Mr. Parsons was a philandering fool, which ended the marriage. In some versions of her life story, she left her husband, and in other versions, he abandoned her. Either way, Louella ended up alone in Chicago with a baby daughter to support. One of things I liked about Louella Parsons’s story was the way she overcame hardships by using whatever skills she had. In an era when women couldn’t even vote, she began writing for the Chicago Tribune around 1910. In love with the flickers, she started writing scenarios for Essanay Studios in Chicago, which introduced her to some important people in the burgeoning film industry. Her access to inside information about upcoming films prompted her to propose a column about the movies for the Chicago Record Herald. She parlayed this job into a similar position for the New York Morning Telegraph. While in Chicago, she married a riverboat captain, then became romantically involved with labor union leader Peter Brady. It is likely that she eventually married Brady, whom many say was the love of her life. Apparently, the feeling wasn’t mutual, and the relationship didn’t last. Small wonder Parsons left for a new job in New York City. Years later, she converted to Catholicism and somehow expunged these marriages from her personal history. She never referred to these men in her biographies. (This is a swell trick; I have a few “mistakes” I wish I could expunge and then never refer to again.)

PARSONS WITH WILLIAM POWELL AND NORMA SHEARER

 Women news reporters at the time were typically given light assignments, and Parsons’s domain fit that category, but it also paralleled the film industry’s increasing dependence on the star system and the public’s growing interest in movie stars. The Morning Telegraph was one of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, and Hearst knew first-hand the lure of motion pictures, because his relationship with movie star Marion Davies gave him close access to the ever-growing film industry. He signed Parsons to an exclusive contract to syndicate her column in his newspapers. According to Hollywood legend, Parsons got her contract by blackmailing Hearst, who allegedly shot and killed producer Thomas Ince one night aboard his yacht, the Oneida. Hearst was supposedly after Charlie Chaplin, who was probably romancing Davies. Hearst mistakenly took Ince for Chaplin and shot him, then secured the secrecy of everyone aboard the yacht who knew something. (See Peter Bogdanovich’s film The Cat’s Meow.) Parsons always swore she was in New York during the time frame of the Ince affair, and most scholars are positive that this old Hollywood rumor is untrue. Apparently the rumor was widely known because Hedda Hopper, Parsons’s only rival, once said, “It’s the kind of story that if it isn’t true it should be.”

 However it happened, Parsons became the movie editor for Hearst’s Universal News Service, meaning her gossip column, reviews, and movie-related features appeared in Hearst’s 400 newspapers across the country. Maybe Parsons did sell her soul to the devil for the position because her dream job did not bring her the riches and security she wanted, and she was plagued with bad luck. In 1925, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and doctors told her she probably did not have long to live. Never one to take anything lying down, Parsons moved to California to take treatments in the drier climate. The strategy worked, and she was in remission within a couple of years. The new location also served her job as the movie industry’s first and premiere gossip queen. As her column became extremely popular with the public and her power as an information broker rose, she married again. In 1930, Parsons wed urologist Dr. Harry Martin, an alcoholic physician to the stars. Behind the scenes he was called Hollywood’s “clap doctor,” because he treated stars for venereal disease. Later, he was hired by 20th Century Fox as their staff doctor, where he earned a reputation for pumping stars full of any substance that would keep them working under any circumstance.  Louella sure could pick them.

 Parsons knew how to get a scoop in Hollywood, where she laid down her one and only law: “You tell it to Louella first.”  Parsons broke some the industry’s biggest stories, from the divorce of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in the 1920s to the news of Ingrid Bergman’s illegitimate baby in the 1950s. She depended on a couple of assistants and an army of informants in doctors’ offices, hair shops, and lawyers’ offices for her information. Parsons often assumed the role of moral arbiter of the film industry, weighing in on the personal decisions and personal lives of the stars. When she heard that Grace Kelly and the very married Ray Milland were romantically involved during the production of Dial M for Murder, she let it be known that Kelly was about to be spotlighted in her column in an unfavorable light. Kelly stopped the relationship with Milland before it got any further. Sometimes when Parsons made threats to expose the darker proclivities of some of the biggest stars, studio heads were not above offering her a bribe, and she was not above taking it. During the 1940s, 20th Century Fox bought the rights to her autobiography, The Gay Illiterate, for $75,000 with no intention of turning it into a movie. Behind-the-scenes rumors maintain that the deal was made to persuade Parsons not to leak damaging information.  

PARSONS ON HER RADIO SHOW

Louella’s popularity expanded to the radio, where two interview programs failed before her third attempt finally succeeded in 1934. This program also introduced the idea of the “sneak preview” to the public. Stars appeared on her show and read scenes from scripts as a way to tout films to the listening audience. 

Parsons’s only competition was Hedda Hopper, who launched her career as a gossip maven in the late 1930s. Hopper had been an actress in both the silent and sound eras, though without achieving stardom. Born into a large small-town family as Elda Furry, she quit school as a teenager to become a chorus girl in an acting troupe that was touring the country. Around 1913, she married William De Wolfe Hopper, the not-so handsome matinee idol heading the acting troupe. Hopper, who was 32 years older than young Elda, was a skirt-chaser who rivaled John Barrymore for breaking young hearts.  The couple had a son, William Hopper, before divorcing in 1922 or 1924.  Sometime before appearing in her first movie, Elda Hopper became Hedda Hopper after visiting a numerologist and plunking down $10 for advice on adopting a more successful name.

HOPPER IN ONE OF HER TRADEMARK CRAZY HATS

Hopper’s onscreen career began with the movie Battle of Hearts in 1916. I was surprised to read that she appeared in more than 120 films over the next 23 years, including Louis B. Mayer’s first movie as a producer, Virtuous Wives, in 1919.  As her career was waning in the 1930s, when she was in her late 40s, someone gave her an opportunity to write a gossip column. It didn’t really take off until Louis B. Mayer stepped in and used his influence to get her on at the Los Angeles Times. L. B. and some of the other studio heads wanted a new gun in town to challenge Parsons’s one-woman monopoly of the gossip empire. Unfortunately for them, all they did was create another dictator.

 In comparing Parsons and Hopper, the latter’s stories and gossip were supposedly more malicious and her tactics more ruthless. As she was fond of saying, “Nobody’s interested in sweetness and light.” Hopper also had a radio program, and her column was syndicated as well, yet she seemed to have been more financially successful than Parsons. She bought a mansion in Beverly Hills and dubbed it “the house that fear built.” Intolerance and maliciousness is a dangerous combination: She tried at least two times to out famous stars as homosexuals. First, she hinted in a column that housemates Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were gay, but the whole industry backed Grant against Hopper, and the rumor persisted but did not break open. Likewise, she intimated that Stewart Granger and Michael Wilding were gay, but that rumor did not reach the mainstream public either. If she supported a star, she used her column as a seal of approval. Of Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, she noted, “There’s a new star in town.” If she didn’t approve, she could be downright nasty; she called James Dean “another dirty shirttail actor from New York.”

LUCY AND HEDDA

 Hopper was a political conservative who backed Joseph McCarthy during the witchhunts of the 1950s, and she served as the vice-president of the Motion Picture Alliance of the Preservation of American Ideals. Despite this, she used her column to support good friend Lucille Ball when the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) questioned her loyalty because Lucy’s grandfather had been a card-carrying Communist. In her column, Hopper repeated a line often said by Ball’s husband Desi Arnaz, “The only thing red about her is her hair and even that is not legitimate.” Ball and Hopper were lifelong best friends.

 Naturally, Parsons and Hopper were arch enemies, each in competition for the hottest scoops. Parsons in particular despised Hopper, feeling she was unqualified for the job. After all, Parsons had been a legitimate newspaper writer and earned her column, while Hopper had very little education and knew nothing of writing. Hopper distinguished her writing by adopting an edgy, bitchy style, and she distinguished herself through her trademark hats. Hopper wore large, flamboyant, even outrageous hats, which set her apart from the frumpy Parsons. In competing to break the story of a divorce, pregnancy, major new role, or important career move, Parsons threatened certain stars and their studios about the consequences of giving the story to Hopper first, and Hopper did likewise regarding Parsons.  According to photographer Murray Garrett, the worst nightmare for any star was to be invited to Hedda’s and Louella’s on the same night. “You knew you were going to make an enemy of one or the other of them. Some people would try to go to one and then duck out and slip into the other. It was tricky.”

HOPPER WITH ROBERT WALKER

As I read about Parsons and Hopper, the columns they wrote, and the way they reveled in their control of the information, I could see that their power in a male-dominated industry was real — and rare for women. In a business that touts only women with beauty, glamour, and youth as worthwhile, two women who had none of these qualities instilled fear and anxiety in Hollywood’s most powerful men. For that, I have to grant them begrudging respect.

 Their reign as queens of gossip did not last forever. During the 1960s, when old Hollywood was gasping its last breath, Parsons and Hopper lost most of their power. The large studios had let go of their tight control over the star system as they evolved into financial institutions and distributors. Also, a new liberal socio-political era had ushered in sexual freedom, radical politics, and open drug use. Stars no longer cared what was written about them; careers no longer hinged on the columns. Parsons wrote her last column in 1964 and died in 1972, while Hopper penned her last tidbit in 1966 just before she died.

 However, gossip did not fade away; if anything, it has flourished into a national obsession, with new types of columnists making names for themselves and tabloids going farther with innuendo and rumors than Parsons or Hopper ever did. Like it or not, celebrity culture — in which television info-tainment shows, Internet gossip columns, and even legitimate news outlets beat us over the head with Britney Spears’ latest embarrassment or Brangelina’s newest family addition — has turned into a billion-dollar industry. And, this is the legacy of Parsons and Hopper.  I wonder what they would think of the monsters they unleashed — the Internet gossip sites that spread rumors with a twisted vengeance, the columnists who think their snarky discourse is good writing, and the paparazzi who terrorize the children of stars or chase princesses into tunnels at breakneck speeds.