Loella Parsons was an American journalist and gossip columnist.
Background
Louella Parsons (original name: Louella Rose Oettinger) was born on August 6, 1881 in Freeport, Stephenson County, Illinois, United States. She was the daughter of Joshua Oettinger and Helen Wilcox. Although her father was Jewish, the family attended local Episcopal churches. As an adult, Parsons became a devout Catholic. Her father was a prosperous clothier who took over a store in Sterling, near Chicago, in 1888. On his death two years later, the family moved back to Freeport, where her mother married John H. Edwards, a traveling salesman, on December 1891.
Education
In 1897 the family moved to Dixon, where Louella Parsons graduated from Dixon High School in 1901. She attended, but never graduating from Dixon College and Normal School.
Career
Louella Parsons taught at a country school for a year before going to work part-time for the Dixon paper, The Star. By late 1910 she had settled in Chicago and had found employment in the Chicago Tribune's syndication department. Parsons wrote scenarios (outlines of film plots) at night and soon landed a job with Essanay Film Manufacturing Co. as a story editor and scenario writer. She later estimated that she wrote hundreds of one- and two-reel scenarios before being laid off in 1915. That year saw the publication of How to Write for the Movies, which was successful enough to be republished in revised form in 1917. The Chicago Record-Herald hired her in 1915, and in addition to serving as a general assignment reporter, she claimed to have introduced the movie gossip column during her four-year stint with the paper, which folded in 1918. She moved to New York in 1919 and became motion-picture editor for the Morning Telegraph. She worked long hours, ruthlessly cultivated people, and put together an efficient staff.
By the early 1920's her editorial work, reviews, and gossip columns had made her a "small but important cog in the motion-picture business. " Although McCaffrey lived with Parsons in the early 1920's (he piloted excursion boats on the Hudson), she began a decade-long, on-and-off clandestine affair with Peter J. Brady, a married man-about-town who introduced her to a wide range of useful people. Parsons's columns and reviews came to the attention of press tycoon William Randolph Hearst, in part because of her favorable reviews of his mistress, the actress Marion Davies. In 1923 Hearst made Parsons motion-picture editor of his New York American. Her career was slowed by serious health problems, including tuberculosis, but after a recuperative stay in Palm Springs, she became motion-picture editor for Hearst's Universal News Service in 1926, which meant widespread syndication. She settled in Hollywood. Loella Parsons lived happily with "Docky" (as she called her husband, Harry Watson Martin) until his death from leukemia in 1951.
Parsons's professional life paralleled that of the industry she covered. During its heyday in the 1930's and 1940's, Hollywood was her beat, and she was at the zenith of her power. Her columns were published in more than 600 papers. She had radio shows ("Hollywood Hotel" from 1934 to 1938 and "Hollywood Premieres" in 1941), one of which was even made into a movie, in which she appeared (1938). Making fine use of a handpicked staff and a network of willing informants, Parsons wrote about the glamour, excitement, and dark side of the movie industry, focusing on marriages, divorces, and morals. The critic Nora Ephron characterized Parsons's prose as "childlike" and described the columns as "full of malapropisms and misinformation. " These faults seemed to make no difference to her millions of readers, who gleaned from her columns fascinating tidbits about the stars who had been successfully urged to "tell it to Louella. " Parsons offered advice to studio executives, lectured stars about their careers, and chided the industry about its product.
Louella Parsons demanded deference and engendered fear; given her vast following and Hollywood's cowardice, she (and her fellow gossip columnists) tyrannized the industry, abetted by a studio system that wanted to keep its contract players in line. The Gay Illiterate, her romanticized autobiography, appeared in 1944. By the 1950's Parsons's career was in decline. The studio system was breaking down, her friends and sources had been fired or displaced or had died; a new generation in Hollywood paid less attention to her; and her column had fewer outlets and a diminishing number of readers. Despite her advanced age, she continued to track down the "exclusive" story, but a changed Hollywood and a changing America made her innocent gossip increasingly anachronistic. Her last book, Tell It to Louella (1961), described as a gossipy series of reminiscences, was largely ignored. She wrote her last column in December 1964 and then entered a nursing home. She died in Santa Monica, California on December 9, 1972.
Achievements
Louella Parsons was the first American movie columnist. Her Hollywood gossip columns were read by over 20 million people in 600 newspapers worldwide (1915 - 1960). She had her own featured radio shows "Hollywood Hotel" (1934 - 1938) and "Hollywood Premieres" (1941). Her memoir The Gay Illiterate (1944) became a bestseller, followed by Tell It to Louella (1961). Parsons also appeared in movies such as Hollywood Hotel (1937), Without Reservations (1946), and Starlift (1951).
Louella Rose Oettinger Parsons was a member of Republican party.
Views
Quotations:
". .. it isn't in my nature to cry for very long. It is one of the blessings of my life that things that are past -- are past. Yesterday's calamities are merely today's challenge. I can get down -- but I can't stay there. "
"The first person I ever cared deeply and sincerely about was - myself. "
"Almost anyone who has ever attained any kind of public stature in his or her profession can expect sometimes to see a reflection in a cracked mirror. "
Personality
Louella Parsons was exuberant, sometimes kind, often generous, but she was also vain, and often cruel (though less so than her main rival, Hedda Hopper).
Connections
On October 31, 1905, Louella Parsons married John D. Parsons, and they moved to Burlington, Iowa, where he managed a family realty development. They had one child. Parsons considered these to be the unhappiest years of her life. The marriage foundered, in part because of her husband's unfaithfulness. Much of her life at this time is shrouded in mystery and obfuscation. She later maintained that Parsons died in World War I, even though substantial evidence indicates that she divorced him. In any event, Louella Parsons entered into another marriage (or long-term liaison) with Jack McCaffrey, a riverboat captain. On January 5, 1930, Louella Parsons married Harry Watson Martin, a physician.
