It is frustratingly difficult to find pictures of Harriet Parsons. Mostly, you can find pictures of her mother. And you can find pictures of her mother with another woman, but it’s usually Hedda Hopper. I feel as though this is in no small part because of how hard it is to find pictures of anyone who works behind the scenes in that era who isn’t one of the big, famous moguls. To a certain extent it’s easier if they worked for Disney, which Parsons never did, because Walt liked to do a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. For most of the other studios, they assumed no one cared, and the pictures are hard to find.

On the other hand, there must have been a certain amount of freedom to being the daughter of Louella Parsons. She had one brief lavender marriage that was over by the mid ‘40s, and by the ‘50s, she was living with a woman. She lived with publicist Lynn Bowers and eventually adopted a child. I won’t necessarily say she was openly living as a lesbian; honestly, I don’t think most people had the slightest idea who she was. That’s certainly not open by Hollywood standards. It’s not as though Rock Hudson were living with a man, which would have been open in Hollywood. Women have also been considered Just Pals With Roommates more easily, after all.

Parsons was one of the only female producers of her era. She’s only listed as director of seven movies; apparently this is mostly because RKO would routinely reassign movies from her to other producers. She was one of only three female working producers at the time, and it was intensely frustrating to her to see the stories she’d been developing taken away from her. Presumably, she was good at her job; Howard Hughes fired most of RKO’s producers when he bought the studio but kept her on. However, she was seldom allowed to actually do that job.

Most of the work she actually seems to have been allowed to complete was in the publicity department. She made many, many shorts introducing audiences to the studio’s stars. It’s not unlikely that she was hired because of her mother. Which also, if you think about it, means that she likely knew a lot of gossip that she wasn’t sharing with audiences. One wonders, all things considered, if she had a stronger feeling about the stars’ right to privacy than her mother did, knowing that things that could destroy people’s careers were not necessarily the business of the general public.

Harriet Parsons had the freedom of knowing that her mother would destroy people’s careers if she felt the need, and I suspect she was able to do more of what she wanted because of that. On the other hand, that still didn’t mean she was allowed to actually do the job she wanted, because she was still a woman and there was still the assumption that a woman wouldn’t really be a good producer even if the evidence was clear that she was. Among her only credits are some serious classics, and she worked with some big names on them. Today, her career would be stronger even without her mother’s pull simply because she would’ve been allowed to do her job.

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