Samantha Barbas,
The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 520 24213 0
417pp
US$29.95 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

Roughly a century has passed since the dawn of movie star worship, and it therefore seems fitting that attention should again turn to Louella Parsons, self-proclaimed inventor of movie-land gossip. Parsons’s gossip column became an influential player on many fronts. Its wide readership whet the American appetite for scandal, however tame, and kept stars in check according to the often conflicting demands of the studios and William Randolph Hearst. No less impressively, it secured a woman a position of power with tenure for fifty years. Roughly a quarter century has passed since Parsons’s death; yet, until Samantha Barbas’s The First Lady of Hollywood, no biography has contested the information in Parsons’s autobiography, The Gay Illiterate. Now at last, the murky details of Parsons’s life can begin to come to light.

Barbas’s biography spans nearly a century as well. Barbas starts before Parsons’s birth with the courtship of her parents in the 1880s, covers Parsons’s years at Essanay, her columns in Chicago, New York and finally Los Angeles, and comes to a close after Parsons’s death in the media frenzies of the 1970s. Throughout, Barbas’s research is meticulous and painstakingly documented. Particularly because many of Parsons’s efforts were devoted to spinning her own life story, Barbas’s thorough legwork is invaluable to researchers interested in Parsons or her influential columns. Barbas is especially careful to highlight misleading information in Parsons’s own version of events; indeed, Barbas emphasizes the degree to which Parsons molded a “just folks” image for not only Hollywood royalty, but for herself as well.

Fittingly, Barbas opens the biography with an episode from the waning years of Parsons’s career: a visit to Dixon, IL on Parsons’s celebrity studded personal appearance tour. Barbas’s argument – that Parsons’s “homespun” gossip and literary style were careful moral defenses of both Hollywood and her own choices – is built into the very structure of the book. Even as she doggedly sorts through rumors and lies scattered by and about Parsons, Barbas sees that the importance of the rhetoric remain after the fact is dispelled: A “false image of propriety became Louella’s trademark, and maintaining it, one of the most important projects of her career” (97). Indeed, Parsons was so bent on maintaining this propriety that her columns often veered toward the ridiculous and even bizarre, as excerpts from a piece on Theda Bara amply demonstrate:

Her hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa, her eyes have the cruel cunning of Lucretia Borga . . . and her hands are those of the blood-bathing Elizabeth Bathory, who slaughtered young girls that she might bathe in their life blood and so retain her beauty. Can it be that fate has reincarnated in Theda Bara the souls of these monsters of medieval times? … Scientists have questioned this most extraordinary of women to secure fresh evidence to support their half-proved laws of transmigration of souls, but the result has only been to prove that, though Miss Bara is the greatest delineator of evil types on the stage or screen today, she is in real life a sweet wholesome woman who detests the abnormal. (51)

This emphasis on rhetoric reflects the greater scope of Barbas’s book as she incorporates Parsons’ life and career trajectory into greater historical trends. Not surprisingly, America’s moral climate becomes of central importance, in reference to both film and journalistic history. And while Barbas rarely breaks free of a popular understanding of large trends in film history – she makes much of the moral pressures on nickelodeons (26) and calls cinema’s conversion to sound “the single greatest transformation in motion picture history” (116) – the integration of news and film history is quite compelling. Parsons occupies a strange position in journalistic history, when demands for objectivity were beginning to emerge alongside desires for “an increasing amount of intimate information on public figures’ private lives” (344). Her position in Hollywood might be described as transitional, too – Parsons was both a willing participant in the studios’ careful press control and an independent agent, motivated by personal and corporate interest to manipulate stars’ images.

Therein, of course, lay Parsons’s power. Barbas briefly outlines a history of gossip and suggests that Parsons, like so many women before her, used gossip as a sort of social currency, a bid “to gain respect, attention, or leverage with powerful men” (20). From the pages of Barbas’s book, almost in spite of Barbas, emerges a highly ambivalent portrait of Parsons. Barbas argues that Parsons can be seen as a feminist figure of sorts. Parsons divorced more than once in a society where women were “expected to tolerate affairs” (29). Parsons worked as editor, screenwriter (who sometimes elucidated “feminist” themes), accountant, secretary and minor actress for Essanay (37). Parsons was the first columnist to use the gossip format for the film industry (44). She wrote a screenwriting textbook that was both a bestseller and ultimately adopted by the University of Chicago (53). She openly advocated women’s rights in her columns (69). She was the sole writer and editor of her own columns (100).

Yet, Parsons also incarnates a sort of female conservatism. The same Parsons who divorced two men adamantly insisted that she was a war widow (33). And where Barbas, for instance, sees Parsons “challenging the stereotypes,” a degree of sexism remains: Parsons recalls, “‘ I wanted to grow up as quickly as possible and to be hailed – if not as the best writer – at least as the youngest and most beautiful'” (15). Perhaps more tellingly, throughout her career, Parsons used her column as a sort of moral weapon to keep female stars in check: “‘Verbal spankings’ were administered to the actresses who, according to Louella, showed too much will and sexual independence and thus threatened their careers” (141).

While Barbas is willing to concede the contradictory nature of women’s liberation through gossip, her clear sympathy for her subject engenders inconsistencies in Barbas’s argument about Parsons’s journalistic abilities. From the beginning of Parsons’s career, Barbas argues, Parsons was a good journalist who “did a good deal of footwork on her own” “though her prose was often ponderous” and “though she often relied on personal connections and studio press releases” (54). “Footwork,” however, ranges from eavesdropping in bathrooms (55), to getting information from a husband who worked as an abortionist and STD consultant to the stars (131), to bribing telegraph workers at the Waldorf hotel (243), and persistently, consistently partying. Most significantly, Barbas notes there were even times when Parsons used outright false information: during the HUAC years, for instance, she falsely claimed on more than one occasion to be receiving information directly from the FBI (303).

Barbas is similarly uneven in downplaying Parsons’s politicization. Instead, Barbas emphasizes Parsons’ shrewd personal and business maneuvering – Parsons lavished praise upon Hearst and Marion Davies in her column before going to work for a Hearst paper (83), and freely blacklisted actors who would not perform gratis on her radio show (189). Barbas uses Hedda Hopper (referred to as “Hopper” as opposed to the more familiar, “Louella”) as a point of comparison. If Hopper was so right-wing she was an embarrassment to the American right, Parsons nonetheless hovered right of center, and increasingly so as she aged. She supported the internment of the Japanese (244), and began to lash out virulently against communism in the last years of her column (355). But Barbas relegates this late period of Parsons’s life to a brief chapter near the end of the book, de-emphasizing the outright political stage of Parsons career.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Barbas fails to elucidate the area of Parsons’s personal life that Parsons herself may have been most ambivalent about: her daughter’s lesbianism. A woman of no small importance in Hollywood herself, Harriet struggled to maintain an image of normalcy. Unfortunately, the portrait of Harriet and her relationship to Louella remains underdeveloped in Barbas’s book. Barbas mentions only in passing that Parsons was alternately protective of gays in Hollywood and prone to gay bashing (153). Ironically, in a book about the queen of gossip, I found myself thirsting for more personal detail. Yet, in a way, this fits the portrait of Parsons that does emerge – one of a pioneer and moral enforcer, one of a disseminator of gossip and protector of personal privacy. Although Barbas’s biography may not cover everything, it comes very close, and will certainly serve any researcher interested in Louella Parsons and gossip in the years to come.

Heather Heckman.

Created on: Thursday, 23 November 2006