Hollywood's Back Fence

When Hollywood's world-famed Gossip Columnist Louella O. (for Oettinger) Parsons (from her first husband) turned authoress and brought forth her autobiography, The Gay Illiterate (Doubleday. Doran; $2), her wise publishers jumped their publication date and rushed a few carloads of the remarkable volume to Hollywood's bookstores in time for the Christmas rout. The book sold like mad.

American Document. The Gay Illiterate is as much an American document as The Education of Henry Adams. It is the self-recorded sound track of a smalltown, intensely feminine mind which for 30 years, with unabated enthusiasm and energy, has been hanging over Hollywood's back fence, talking like a ruptured water main to hundreds of thousands of other smalltown, intensely feminine minds. Most of the talk is a nonstop, hypnotic colloquy, starched with babbling anecdote. But the book includes little about Lolly Parsons as good as the things it leaves out.

Next of Kin. Early last summer, when Bob Hope was about to board an Army bomber for Belfast, he was asked who should be notified in case of his injury or death. He named Hearstling Parsons as his next of kin. "She'd be mad," he explained, "if she wasn't the first to know."

To anyone in Hollywood, the explanation was superfluous. At 9:30 each weekday morning, every Hollywood press-agent who values his professional life dials Crestview 1-4222, the Beverly Hills home and office of Columnist Parsons. However long it takes, he clings to the phone like a limpet until he gets through to her, for he must show his good faith. If he doesn't, Louella may take Borgia vengeance.

Batting Average .800. It is the same higher up. Lolly Parsons can reach any studio executive in Hollywood within five minutes. The rumor that the great stars consult her before conceiving a child may be one of many malicious exaggerations. But it is the sort of poetic license that characterizes a legendary career. Louella Parsons may not have the biggest circulation of any syndicated film columnist. Erskine Johnson, Robbin Coons and Lolly's famed rival Hedda Hopper, all probably outcirculate her. But she gets a minimum 2,000 fan letters a week, and in lush seasons 5,000. Her batting average on scoops is .800, a record which no other journalist living or dead has remotely approached. Her appetite for gossip is insatiable, her power through gossip imperial.

You Can't Lose. When Louella goes to the races, she makes sure of a happy afternoon by betting on every horse that starts. At her generous buffets she never bothers to fill her own plate, but wanders among her guests, helping herself from anybody's plate that comes handy. In gossip-gathering she uses the same techniques. The men who run the studios and hand out the jobs read her faithfully and as faithfully react. (One screen writer who managed to get mentioned three times in Louella's column found himself abruptly raised from $500 a week to $2,500.)

As the pioneer Hollywood gossip, moreover, she has more and better contacts than anyone else. She is the confidante or the confidante's confidante of every big: name in Hollywood. Nominally, every column gets an even break from the studios. But that does not prevent a star (with a tactful kick under the table from the studio pressmen) from giving Lolly advance tidbits. Plenty of stars need no kicking. They still consider a beat in Lolly Parsons' column the best break. For Louella is exceedingly loyal to those who play ball with her. She also plugs, helps out or wholly supports a string of oldtimers who are attempting comebacks or are too far gone even for that.

You Can't Win. But if people do not give Lolly first pick at gossip, or if anyone crosses her, her retaliation can be as swift and terrible as a rocket gun. In serious cases she "calls the matter to the attention of a studio executive." This means that for weeks Louella will carp at that studio in her columns. When stars are too popular for such treatment, Louella snipes at them personally from her columnar vantage point. She has had it in for Ginger Rogers ever since Ginger declined to appear (for nothing) on Louella's Campbell Soup program. As a result of Lolly's distaste for Ginger--plus the Citizen Kane fracas, RKO and all its stars were almost totally ignored in her column for a year.

Months after Nunnally Johnson coined the title of her book (in the Satevepost), Louella took a swipe at his bride, who was trying to make her way as an actress: "I ran into Dorris Bowdon last night," sang she in her column. "She used to be such a pretty girl before she was married."

Louella can sometimes take it as well as dish it out. Last fall she gracefully took a fearful shellacking over the Blue Network (from the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street}because she felt their brand of insult "humanized" her. Then there was the reconciliation luncheon with Columnist Sidney Skolsky. When his contract was not renewed with the Hearst syndicate, Lolly says Skolsky told every one he thought she was responsible. But she wanted Sidney to understand that she was innocent. What a splendid friendship, she cried, might now develop, mightn't it! Skolsky, in a cold rage, leaned over and bit her, hard, in the arm. They have been the best of pals ever since.

The Old Bean. Of her world-famous anachronisms, malapropisms and plain bloomers, Louella says with dazzling in consequence: "I use the old bean. That's why I make so many mistakes, I guess." But Louella is by no means as fatuously cavalier as she is cracked up to be. Most of her tens of thousands of facts are at least reasonably accurate. All of them are double-checked. When the source remains questionable, Lolly announces on the authority of "a little bird."

All Hollywood is her aviary. For Lolly combines a horror of solitude with a passionate love for her job (gossip), and though she has a number of close, and a regiment of pleasant, friendships, it is all but impossible for her to spend five minutes with anyone without being hard at work. There is one all-important exception: her husband, Dr. Harry Watson Martin, whom she calls My Doctor, My Favorite Doctor, Docky, and Docky-Wocky.

Held His Head On. Docky is a pleasure-loving, truculent, curly-haired Irish urologist. Louella married him 15 years ago, shortly after he dived into the Bimini Baths on Vermont Avenue when they had no water in them, broke his neck but saved his life by holding his own head in place until another doctor came. Today Docky is head studio physician at 20th Century-Fox.

Together, at parties, Louella and Docky are laughable only to the heartless. Seldom have two middleaged, unbeautiful people been more recklessly, conspicuously in love. A few drinks among friends, and they are necking like high-school kids. Their relationship is a firecracker-chain of enthusiasms which would exhaust less magnificent mortals. For Dr. Martin, until malaria (contracted in Australia) returned him from the Army last spring, was one of the most happily energetic men in a community unexcelled, in certain fields, for tirelessness. And Louella, in giddiness as in gossip, is a mighty fortress.

Extracurricular Activities. "After half a century on this earth (which is all I intend to admit to . . .)," Louella Parsons has accomplished and earned as much as ten ordinary women. Besides her salary from Hearst, an estimated $750-$1,000 a week, she has been in a position to do nicely on the side, with Hearst getting one-third of the take. Radio used to bring her as high as $2,500 a week until the Screen Actors' Guild, thanks to James Cagney, made it impossible for stars to appear on Louella's programs with no reward other than Louella's love and unflagging loyalty--or her equally unflagging enmity if they said no. She got $50,000 from Warners for her appearance in Hollywood Hotel. For getting stars to pose gratis for Woodbury's Soap testimonials (beginning in 1939) Louella gratefully admits to having received a "Christmas gift," promises to sue anyone who says she gets a salary. For the screen rights to her autobiography, Darryl Zanuck is paying Louella $75,000. (Cracked Hedda: "Darryl, I want $150,000 if I appear in it, and $75,000 if I stay out of it.")

Despite this income and prospering Dr. Martin's, the Martins are nearly always broke. Reasons: 1) their intense love of a good time, 2) Louella's fabulous extravagance, 3) her fabulous generosity. The legends about her Christmas harvests are, like many of those told about her, one-sided and often untrue. All gifts in Hollywood are likely to be on the sunny side of munificence, and Louella invariably spends more on gifts than the value she receives. It is the same with parties. Louella and her husband love them and give them often. Sometimes the Martins entertain 300 people in an evening; their home on Maple Drive is known around Hollywood as the Parsons Short-Order House.

For Lolly Parsons is a survival of Hollywood's great decade, the 1920s, and she still has (almost alone now) the untamed crudity, savage innocence, feral force and daft grandeur of that Medicean cinemera. Much of the malice, many of the rumors, and most of the moral solemnity which are directed against her tell less about Lolly Parsons than about the loss of heart, toughness and humor in the changing world around her. She is wielding a halberd among the gas-masked, and the lawyers of war do not approve.

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