Louella Parsons

Louella Parsons , born as Louella Rose Oettinger , (born August 6, 1881 in Freeport , Illinois ; † December 9, 1972 in Santa Monica , California ) was an American reporter who at times reached an audience of millions with gossip stories from the world of stars .

Life

Louella Parsons was one of the most influential society reporters of her time. Since 1925 she had a contract with the media empire of William Randolph Hearst , in whose countless publications her daily columns from Hollywood appeared. It also had a nationally broadcast radio show since the mid-1930s, thanks to which it reached millions of listeners. There are persistent rumors that Parsons got the job as a kind of "hush money" for allegedly knowing what happened on the Hearst yacht, where film producer Thomas Harper Ince was killed in an unexplained manner in 1924 . Participants included Marion Davies , Charles Chaplin and Hearst himself. The story was freely interpreted in the 2001 film The Cat's Meow by Peter Bogdanovich . Kenneth Anger aims in a similar direction with the description of the events in his book Hollywood Babylon .

At the height of her power in the 1930s and early 1940s, she had only one rival, former actress Hedda Hopper , with whom she had countless arguments over the decades. She employed a whole army of official and unofficial staff and informants who kept them up to date with the latest gossip from the film company. However, most of the messages were rather banal stories about alleged romances and love stories.

Parsons was known for her "style blooms" and unintentionally funny slip of the tongue. For example, at the height of the Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini scandal , when it became known that Bergman, although still married to someone else, was expecting a child from Rossellini , she exclaimed on her show:

Ingrid, Ingrid, what has gotten into you?

Louella Parsons wrote two successful memoirs: The Gay Illiterarte from 1944 and Tell it to Louella from 1961. With the advent of magazines such as Confidential , which published even the most intimate details of the private lives of celebrities, the influence of Parsons and others declined Hopper quickly.

Her daughter Harriet Parsons was the producer of several successful films for RKO in the late 1940s , including I Remember Mama from 1948 with Irene Dunne , directed by George Stevens .

movie Award

The Hollywood Women's Press Club presents the Golden Apple Award and in this context also presents the Louella Parsons Award , which was named after Parsons.

Representation in art

• Parsons was caricatured in Frank Tashlin's cartoon The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos (1937) as "Louella Possums".
• Elizabeth Taylor played Parsons in the 1985 television movie Malice in Wonderland .
• Jennifer Tilly played Parsons in The Cat's Meow (2001).
• She appears as a character in Ken Ludwig's play Shakespeare in Hollywood (2004).

Web links

• Louella Parsons in the Internet Movie Database (English)