No. 1 Movie Fan

Marlon Brando called her "the fat one," Author Ben Hecht "one of the most sad things in Hollywood." When they get up enough courage in their cups, some pressagents refer to her simply as "the old broad"--after glancing nervously around to see that only friends are present. The object of this catalogue of clouts, usually more affectionate than they seem, prefers to describe herself as "the gay illiterate," a tag she swiped from a magazine story and magnified into an autobiography in 1944. This week Louella Oettinger Parsons adds another hard-cover installment, Tell It to Louella (Putnam; $3.95), to the legend of a girl reporter who came out of Dixon, Ill., to spend nearly 40 years as the queen of movie journalism--and, indeed, of all Hollywood.

Now a dowager on the far side of 70--or the near side of 80--tiny, frail Louella Parsons is still adding busily to the legend. When Lolly prattles in her column (syndicated in 70 papers) of Hollywood's marital triangles and parallelepipeds, when she sifts the dust from its closets, even when she gives a plug to a young star she thinks deserving, her chatty, outrageous blend of cat's claws and sentimentality enthralls 20 million readers. In 316 freshly printed pages about herself, Louella does not change the formula: her book is a marvelous and implausible edifice built of glittering scraps in a make-believe land by a magpie. "It's a terrible book," said Lolly candidly. "I wrote every word of it."

No Handholding. Though Lolly has five assistants, she is still her own best legman, gleans most of her items from the ceaseless jangle of CR 1-4222, from her nightly round of parties, openings and dinners, and from rumors and tips phoned her by ingratiating pressagents and later nailed down by Lolly's direct confrontation with the parties involved.

After writing some ten million perishable words, Lolly has misspelled so many names that pressagents now usually confirm every telephone tip with a typed copy sent to her Beverly Hills home. She once exhumed an author dead a decade to report that he was busily retooling a book of his as a film vehicle for Dolores del Rio. After she reported that Conrad Nagel was handholding at the Derby with Frances Somebody-or-Other, she hardly seemed fazed to discover that Frances was really Francis--and that there had been no handholding. But her friends stand by her: when she prematurely published the claim that a certain actress was pregnant, the actress' husband hastened to prove her correct.

Vanishing American. Despite such slips, Lolly's habitual double-checking usually ensures that the kernel at the heart of the item is correct--though the details may be a little mixed. In rumor-ridden Hollywood she is respected for refusing to print a rumor if she gets a flat denial--a courtesy that not all columnists can afford. She usually punishes those who offend her by keeping them out of her column rather than lambasting them in it. But her wrath, when aroused, has always been formidable. When Producer Nunnally Johnson outraged her dignity, Lolly vented her spleen on his wife. Wrote Lolly: "I ran into Dorris Bowdon last night. She used to be such a pretty girl before she married."

Like all legends, Lolly cannot be measured by reality, but only by herself. Sent to Philadelphia by Hearst to cover the 1948 Republican National Convention, she went looking for Grade Allen late one night, finally found her asleep in the darkened auditorium, and turned in a story that she still considers one of the two best to come out of the convention. (Her other nomination for first: a Louella Parsons interview with Thomas E. Dewey). In early April, 1939, as Europe openly slid towards war, her column reported: "The deadly dullness of the past week was lifted today--when Darryl Zanuck admitted he had bought all rights to Maurice Maeterlinck's The Bluebird for Shirley Temple."

Louella Parsons is one of those vanishing Americans for whom life begins in a darkened movie theater and ends when the house lights go up. For her, the show still goes on. She is just as thrilled today by a swivel-hipped guitar-twanger named Duane Eddy as she was, 36 years ago, by a leering profile called Rudolph Valentino. "Reporting on Hollywood is my life," she writes in Tell It to Louella. "I've made a fortune and spent a fortune, and I've never been bored a moment. Someone once said of me, 'The secret of Louella's success is she has never stopped being a movie fan herself. She really believes that what she is doing is important.' " She really does.

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