The scoops I had on the affairs of Warner Brothers nearly drove Jack Warner out of his cotton-picking mind. He could never make out how it happened. When he reads this, he’ll know.
Louella watched her monopoly start to crack. If she was asked to a party, she’d want to know whether I was going to be invited. If I was, she’d demand that I be excluded “or else I certainly shan’t come.” Some timid hostesses fell for that. I laughed in their faces for their cowardice.
Anxious to break her hold, producers were steering my way more and more of the items that had previously been hers alone—the news of engagements, weddings, pregnancies, and divorces that made up a fat share of her daily diet. An engagement announced first to Louella had been good for six months of smiles for the happy couple. An exclusive on a pregnancy was even better—the mother-to-be could count on nine months’ favorable notice, which could be extended if she gave Lolly a beat on the birth announcement, too.
The competition she was getting didn’t make her any fonder of me. When Jean Parker was about to marry for the second time, she telephoned me: “I want you to have this exclusively.”
“No,” I warned her, “you must tell Louella.”
“But I don’t want her to have it.”
“You can’t afford to give it to me alone. Call her and tell her I have the news, too. For your career’s sake, you must.”
Ten minutes later she called back, weeping. “I did what you said and told her I’d given it to you. She said: ‘Get it back from her, or I won’t print it.’”
“Tell her she’s got it exclusively, if it means so much to her,” I said. “What’s one story among friends—and you’ll need friends.”
If a studio passed along a story to me that Louella thought she should have, she raised the roof, if necessary going over everybody involved to the studio head himself: “Hopper was given that. I should have had it. Don’t let it happen again.”