Clark Gable and Carole Lombard flouted the “first to know” rule Louella had laid down when they set their wedding day to coincide with Louella’s absence from town—she’d gone off on a trip to San Francisco. She was on the train coming home when she got the news that they were married. “It can’t be true,” she gasped. “They would have told me first.”
But Clark had given the story to all newspapers simultaneously to avoid any bickering over who should have first whack. She took such a dim view of that, though, that the Gables felt they had to make up to her by means of a distinctly unusual present: They had her bathroom done over with mirrored walls and brand-new plumbing.
Orson Welles is one of the few who never gave a damn for her. When he was making Citizen Kane, a picture with a striking resemblance to the life of William Randolph Hearst, he persuaded Louella that the story was something entirely unconnected with her chief. I wasn’t convinced so easily, and Orson finally agreed to let me see the first screening of the finished product in a private projection room of RKO. What I saw appalled me.
W.R. had been a friend to me for years. So had Orson, ever since I’d been a struggling actress and he’d gone out of his way to be kind to my son Bill, who was a struggling young actor. When Hearst learned that I’d been hired as a columnist, he said: “Why didn’t you come to me? I didn’t know you wanted to write a column. I’d have given you one.”
“Have I ever asked you for anything?” “No,” he said. “What makes you think I’d ask for anything as important as this is to me?”
“Everybody else asks for things. Why not you?”
“I don’t ask,” I said. Then he wrote me this, to which I didn’t reply:
My dear Hedda:
I am glad you are going to do some work for the Esquire Syndicate. The Esquire people are very clever. They produce a fine publication and they know good stuff.
I always thought that the stuff you did for the Washington paper was extremely good.