MOST famous cinema stars have, at one time or another, placed their hands & feet in a block of wet cement in the courtyard of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, thereby receiving some desirable publicity and, after the cement has hardened, attaining a certain immortality. The only columnist who has been so honored is Louella Oettinger Parsons.

This is not surprising. Her movie column has sometimes been the object of abuse and ridicule, her radio voice is uncomfortably nervous and high-pitched, she herself has not always been the subject of affectionate comment, and many competitors, including that spectacularly be-hatted warrior, Hedda Hopper, have tried to beat her at her own game. But in 1952 Louella Parsons, after reigning over a quarter century, is still queen of the Hollywood gossip columnists. Her work appears daily in twelve Hearstpapers and is syndicated in some 1,200 others throughout the world. She is held in awe, respect, esteem, fear or terror, as the case may be, by practically everyone in Hollywood who has any connection with motion pictures. Every producer, director and actor reads her column in the Los Angeles Examiner every morning, and each knows that all the others are reading it. That makes everybody happy. It also makes Louella a Very Important Person.

In her autobiography, The Gay Illiterate, she wrote that her first husband, John Parsons of Dixon, Ill., "knew of my ambition to write and urged me to study Thomas Hardy . . . Unfortunately, the exposure didn't take. Nothing of the Hardy style has ever seeped through my pronouncements."

She long ago developed a style all her own, as distinguishable as searchlights at a Hollywood premiere. She has a real talent for using a cliche in precisely the right place, she never avoids phrases like "the reason is because" unless it is impossible not to do so, and she likes her infinitives split. Louella is aware of these oddities and will talk about them frankly, explaining that she types so badly that it is difficult to read what she has written, and when she dictates, she does so at a terrific pace. The result is a chatty, intimate, informal, verbose and, on the whole, knowledgeable hodgepodge.

MANY people have tried to explain the extraordinary success of Louella Parsons. The story has gone the rounds for years that, as she puts it in her autobiography, she was "supposed to know 'something' "--presumably about her boss, William Randolph Hearst, whom she steadfastly revered through the 29 years she worked for him. Careful research has still to uncover any evidence to support this legend.

The Parsons success may be attributed to a combination of circumstances. She wrote her first movie column for the Chicago Record-Herald in 1914. She enriched her experience by working for three years on the Morning Telegraph, a New York racing and theater sheet, and then, starting in 1922, for Hearst's New York American. Her husband had died, and she was supporting their young daughter Harriet, who is now a producer in Hollywood. Her first big break came when she fell ill of tuberculosis and Hearst shipped her to recuperate, on full salary, to an unknown California town called Palm Springs. When she went back to work a year later, Hearst ordered her to stay on in Hollywood, and his paper began syndicating her column. Louella was on her way.

Even those who have been most malicious in their talk about Louella Parsons admit that her love for The Industry is deep and real; and now that she has reached the stature of Mother Superior in the business, she has assumed a more benign air toward those she is writing about.

In 1930 she married Dr. Harry Watson Martin--"Docky" to her--a convivial and gregarious Irishman whom she adored for 21 years until his death last year. He never told her he had been suffering from cancer for five years.

Now about 60, her figure more svelte than it has been for a long time, Louella still arrives at all parties late, looks vaguely around her, and never misses a trick. She still puts her heart. her soul, and most of her waking hours into her work. Her day begins between 8 and 9 a.m., in her expensively furnished house on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills. After coffee and a walk with her two tempestuous cockers, Jimmy and Woody (named for Woodbury soap, a former sponsor of a Parsons radio program), she proceeds to her office on the second floor of her house, about 15 paces down a carpeted hall from her bedroom. Working space consists of two rooms large enough for Louella, her handsome assistant Dorothy Manners and two secretaries. The daily bedlam lasts for five or six hours. At least one of the three telephone lines is always busy (Miss Parsons has two ivory sets beside her bed for emergency scoops), and sometimes all three ring at once. It might be a collect call from a tipster in New York with hot news from the marriage bureau, it might be a big producer with an "exclusive," or it might be an enraged victim of the morning's column. When no one is calling Louella, she is calling someone. By the time lunch is brought up to the slacks-clad staff on trays, her hair is awry, her reading spectacles have slipped down to the end of her nose, and her desk is even more cluttered, if possible, than it was at 9 o'clock. Around 3, her No. 1 secretary, Dorothy May, who shares her pine-paneled inner office, opens the teletype in the corner and sends down to the Examiner the column that will hit the nation's press 48 hours later. Then Louella takes a nap.

AS befits a queen, Louella sees most of the top-ranking new pictures on a projector in her house (a practice deplored by audience-conscious producers), and interviews rising screen luminaries in her own drawing room or her well-stocked bar to these are run-of-the-mine chores. What excites her to a feverish flutter at any hour is a scoop. "Movie scoops," she has written, "have been, and still are to me, the breath of my job." They are also a pain in the neck to everyone concerned if Louella doesn't get them. When that happens, there is first a prolonged and sometimes bitter telephone call to the culprit, with studio publicity men receiving special attention. In the old days, Louella recalls, "I used to cuss so badly I had to mention it at Confession." The next step might be a rebuke in her column or, in extreme cases, reprisal.

When explosive Shelley Winters not long ago denied to Lou ella that she was planning to marry her well-advertised Italian boy friend and then married him that very day, Miss Winters drew down a number of uncomplimentary Parsonisms on her fig ure and her social graces. Once, because of a misunderstanding, Dorothy Lamour was banished from the column for a year. There have been feuds with Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Cagney and many others. With one exception, they did not last. (The exception is Orson Welles, whom she still has not forgiven for satirizing Hearst in his movie, Citizen Kane.)

Louella is a loyal and sympathetic friend, and both qualities are frequently put to the test by the stresses &strains of Hollywood domesticity. Of one marriage which had broken up after exactly 39 days, she managed to observe: "I will say for Barbara [Ford] that she tried very hard."

Like a marriagetruly made in heaven, Louella and Holly wood seem to have been made for each other, and each is al most unimaginable without the other. So much so that it seemed like another Parsons redundancy when she inscribed in her square of cement outside Grauman's Chinese Theater the two sentences she always uses to sign off her column: "That's all today. See you tomorrow."

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