The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons [Paperback]

I would like to commend Ms. Barbas for the wonderful book she has written about a relative of mine.

Given the length and breadth of the material covered, I found only 3 very minor errors in the entire 345 pages of text, and I

think that is remarkable.

My congratulations to Ms. Barbas, and my aunt would have been very proud of the thoroughness and accuracy of her book (I think).

I grew up the the 1950s and bought every movie magazine with articles by Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper that my meager allowance would afford me. Dr. Barbas has produced an academic, thoroughly researched work (there are a ton of footnotes)with the ring of authenticity to it. Fingers crossed that she devotes equal time to Hedda Hopper.

For Christmas a good friend gave me this exceiting biography (Hi there Mac!) and ever since New Years I've been on a race to finish it. But some books are so good you don't like them to end, and for the past few weeks I've been envying my former self who still had the whole book in front of him instead of a rapidly dwindling few.

Louella Parsons was a woman or iron determination who summoned up the inner strength to leave her shame behind in the small town where she'd grown up, and go to New York where nobody would know her. With her she had a second husband and a small daughter, Harriet, who quietly like a pet, watched her mother with a mixture of fondness and venom. I wonder if Harriet the Spy was named after her! It sounds improbable on the face of it but both HTS author Louise Fitzhugh and Harriet Parsons formed part of the same glamorous Lesbian New York underground in the late 1950s, early 1960s, the years of Harriet's inception. Anyhow Louella soon rose to the top of the Hearst newspaper empire by a unbeatable combination of loyalty, native smarts, and an earnest brown-nosing that is almost endearing to view today, although how it must have irked her professional rivals way back then.

Samantha Barbas is no John Didion but she lays out the facts with a great deal of skill. She has done her homework (and even conducted a handful of new interviews, such as one with Mamie Van Doren, a Hollywood starlet who claims to have been one of Louella's victims. For Louella (I suppose I should call her "Parsons") was very much a bogeyman, a prop employed by the studio system to keep errant stars in line. She crucified Orson Welles, who had the temerity not only to make a jackass out of Hearst in CITIZEN KANE but also to lie about it to Parsons' face. "It deals with a dead man," he told her when she pressed him about the rumors that KANE was going to be a demolition of Hearst. She never forgave left-wing leaning stars like Chaplin. And yet she had a soft side and people could cozy up to her, particularly the unpleasant songwriter Jimmy McHugh. Samantha Barbas shows us how McHugh "dated" Parsons for years, always stringing her along, never actually taking her emotional needs seriously but palming her off with a ditty called "Louella" which made her feel like a schoolgirl. It's a shame a once distinguished press like UC Berkeley can't afford a proofreader nowadays. Or else Dr. Barbas isn't very familiar with the stars of Hollywood--Parsons' beat--otherwise she wouldn't have written "Frederic March," would she?

But what she's terrific at is discovering the roots and the extent of Parsons' feminism, which went far and wide and early. Even before women's suffrage (1920) Parsons was in there fighting for women's rights, and she did help a lot of women journalists find their way. Good for her, too bad she turned into a tragic old harridan figure, half Miss Havisham, half Cassandra, nearly forgotten by the time of her death. I feel sure that THE FIRST LADY OF HOLLYWOOD will remain the standard biography for at least the next few years, for what could supplant it? Anyone writing in the future on Parsons will be like a pygmy standing on the shoulders of a giant.

I hope Dr. Barbas continues to give us more, perhaps next she should turn to the life of Harriet Parsons and clear up the speculations about "Harriet the Spy"?

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