“Well, anyway, what are you going to write about?”
“I’m just going to tell the truth.”
“Oh, dear,” she wailed, “that’s what I was afraid of.”
* * * * *
In the days when I earned my living as a motion-picture actress, I was one of Louella’s regular news contacts. I had an insatiable curiosity about the town I’d known for years. I got around a lot, and lots of people talked to me. I salted down stories by the barrel load.
Louella would call up and say: “I understand you went to so-and-so’s party last night. Tell me something about it.” I was glad to oblige. Payment came in kind, not cash, when she inserted my name in her column, which helped a working actress.
She really was the First Lady of Hollywood then, for one good reason which nobody was allowed to forget. She was William Randolph Hearst’s movie columnist, and he was lavishing millions of dollars and acres of publicity space on his motion-picture properties, bent on making himself the greatest of all impresarios and Marion Davies the greatest star.
With the Hearst newspaper empire behind her, Louella could wield power like Catherine of Russia. Hollywood read every word she wrote as though it was a revelation from San Simeon, if not from Mount Sinai. Stars were terrified of her. If they crossed her, they were given the silent treatment: no mention of their names in her column.
When Hearst let himself be lured by Louis B. Mayer into putting his own production company, Cosmopolitan Pictures, under MGM’s wing, Louella’s power was apparently complete. She could get any story she wanted front-paged in the Los Angeles Examiner and all other Hearst papers, none of them accustomed to making much distinction between real news and flagrant publicity.
At San Simeon, Hearst’s $40,000,000 Shangri-La in San Luis Obispo County, Louella mingled with the stream of visiting celebrities, stars, and producers that poured every weekend into the fabulous, twin-towered castle or the surrounding marble “bungalows” at the summons of W.R. or Marion. So did I. At the fifty-four-foot table in the Renaissance dining hall, you’d see Garbo, John Gilbert, Errol Flynn, Norma Shearer, Nick Schenck, Beatrice Lillie, Cissy Patterson, Frank Knox, Bernard Baruch. Name the biggest and they’d be there, including, on one occasion, Mr. and Mrs. Cal Coolidge and Bernard Shaw.