It’s wild to think that Louella Parsons was initially fired by William Randolph Hearst because he didn’t think movie gossip was interesting or important. This was more than a century ago, the same year that Hearst began his relationship with Marion Davies. By championing Davies in her columns, she drew Hearst’s gratitude, and he established her as a nationwide columnist. She became one of the most important women in the industry at that point, with the power to create and destroy careers. Which she mostly did in ways that kept her boss happy. See also her savaging of Citizen Kane.

In fact, the main reason Hopper moved to Los Angeles from New York was the climate. She had tuberculosis, in those days still considered almost an automatic death sentence. Moving to the Southwestern deserts was seen as the best way to prolong life. (Pasadena, in particular, was very much a health resort in its early days, part of why there’s a law against cemeteries within the city limits.) Hopper started writing movie gossip because it was a topic she could write about in a climate she believed would help sustain her life.

Horribly, one of the things that really solidified her career was violating the trust of a friend. She actually befriended Mary Pickford. Pickford, in a moment of emotional distress, confided to her friend Louella that she and Douglas Fairbanks were getting a divorce. And, sure, Parsons sat on the news for actual weeks, but when she heard she was about to be scooped, she was the one to release the news to the world. Friendship was all well and good, but she had a job, and she was going to do it. Apparently she basically held Maria Langham hostage in her house to make sure that she, Parsons, would have the scoop on Langham’s divorce from Clark Gable.

For years, she was the undisputed gossip queen of Hollywood. Then Hedda Hopper came along. They were initially allies but quickly became rivals, a relationship delightfully satirized by the Tilda Swinton characters in Hail, Caesar! Parsons deliberately cultivated a goofy air, hoping to make people underestimate her and therefore talk in front of her. But she also hired a few people to gather information for her, and it’s believed to be possible that she had her husband, a urologist, violate patient confidentiality and feed her information.

And, yes, she was on that yacht where Thomas Ince may or may not have been shot. According to some, she was blackmailing Hearst with the knowledge of what actually happened. I don’t know; maybe that’s true. Now, if I were Parsons, I definitely would’ve left that information to be revealed at some point, either after my death or after Hearst’s death or maybe on the hundredth anniversary of that sailing of the Oneida. And if it’s that latter, well, we’ve got two more years to wait.

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