Nobody would deny that Louella has talent. She showed at her best with GBS, who was writing some articles for Hearst. All of us invited to San Simeon that weekend had been warned against asking Shaw for an interview. That didn’t stop Louella. He yielded to her persuasions only on condition that he have the right to approve every word of her article after he’d talked to her.
When she went back with the typescript he had her read it to him. After the first few words, he interrupted sharply: “But I didn’t say that.”
“Oh, Mr. Shaw,” she said, batting her big brown eyes, “I’m so nervous just being in your presence. What was it you said before?” He repeated the sentence, which she carefully inserted, and then read another line or two before the irate Irishman pulled her up short again.
This performance went on for some minutes longer before GBS took the manuscript from her hand. “Give it to me—I’ll write it myself,” he said firmly, proceeding to do just that. But Louella wasn’t through yet. When he handed back the completed article to her, she asked: “Oh, Mr. Shaw, won’t you please autograph it for me? It will be such a wonderful keepsake for my daughter, Harriet.”
He couldn’t refuse; he was writing for Hearst, too. So Miss Parsons scored in a triple-header. She collected the only interview Bernard Shaw gave in the United States. She subsequently sold the article to a Hearst magazine. And she has the autographed interview, which someday will sell for another tidy sum.
Some of us San Simeon regulars discovered that Louella isn’t slow to take credit. When W.R. and Marion went abroad on one of the many voyages they made together, we decided to throw a party for them on their return. We intended it as a gesture of thanks for all the parties of theirs that we’d enjoyed. We put on a terrific evening at the Ambassador Hotel, with its rooms crammed with flowers and cockatoos, and split the bill between us: $175 apiece. Louella was one of the party, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t write an article for a national magazine taking credit for it.
She owed a lot to Marion Davies. It was an article praising Marion in When Knighthood Was in Flower that got Louella started with Hearst. It caught W.R.’s eye and prompted him to hire her away from her $110 a week as movie reporter on the New York Telegraph into working for him at more than twice the salary. Over the years Marion shielded Louella from boss trouble more than once. After W.R. died in 1951, she was among those who didn’t exactly hurry to give Marion sympathy.
She did ring the doorbell, however, immediately after Marion had appeared on my television show. She arrived at her house bearing as a gift a photograph of herself in a heavy silver frame. She proceeded to place it in full view on a table in the front hall, taking star position ahead of an autographed portrait of General Douglas MacArthur.
Marion asked me to take a look when I arrived soon after Louella had left. I carried it back to the library, where Marion was sitting. “Do you want this?”
“No,” she said quizzically. I took the frame home to substitute a photograph of Marion standing beside me on the TV show, returning the old frame and new picture to her the following day.