As a present for the baby, Jack Warner sent Bette an add-a-pearl necklace with five pearls on it and space for the donor to add another each birthday. Recently I asked Bette if her daughter’s necklace was still growing. She gave that raucous laugh of hers and replied: “It’s just the size it was the day you came to visit me.”
Personally, like Louella, I’ve found that silence is the greatest blow you can deliver to a Hollywood ego when it needs whacking down to size. Not to mention the name of a star drives him half out of his mind; they live and die by publicity. Not even producers are immune, as Sam Goldwyn demonstrated. He cabled me once from Hawaii, where my day’s eight hundred words apparently were read so faithfully that even when wartime restrictions limited the paper there to four pages, I had to be squeezed in somehow. Sam complained: NAME NOT IN COLUMN FOR WEEK STOP THEY DO NOT THINK I’M IMPORTANT OVER HERE STOP PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Ginger Rogers and Ronald Colman were both excommunicated by Louella for years for their effrontery in refusing to appear on her former radio show, “Hollywood Hotel.” As mistress of ceremonies, she collected $2500 a week and the stars appeared free. If any star balked, the producers hastened to Louella’s aid by putting the pressure on until that star was convinced of the error of his ways. Total value of the free talent has been estimated by better mathematicians than I at $2,000,000. For a while, her sponsor, a soup company, was delighted to pay a weekly tab of about $12,000 for a show which, without her, would have cost well over $30,000.
But after the soup maker had been replaced by a soap maker and the show had been restyled as “Hollywood Premieres,” the Screen Actors Guild plucked up its corporate courage to do what only Ginger and Colman had dared. The Guild ruled that Louella had to pay her guests, and thirteen weeks later the program was off the air.
She showed her power when Mary Pickford organized a radio spectacular, to be sponsored by a milk company, to benefit the Motion Picture Home, where poverty drives so many veterans of the movie business. Gable and dozens of other stars wanted to appear, but Louella got busy on her telephones. Mary had to back down and cancel the program with the stars in her living room waiting to go on.
For one of my radio series I wanted to hit up the competitive theme, which press agents had originally invented. They rubbed their hands when I got started because, by having us fight, they thought they could get double space and play off one columnist against the other.
Louella didn’t seem to sense what they were up to. I said: “Let’s take a tip from Jack Benny and Fred Allen and whip up a feud. We could have a mountain of fun. It would increase our audience ratings, and we might get a salary increase out of it. Supposing on the first show we staged a battle royal and both got carried out on stretchers....” But Louella wouldn’t play.
Habit dies hard with her if she is invited to appear with me for a photograph, still shot, or movie. When Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder wanted us to appear together in Sunset Boulevard as reporters breaking the news of the murder, they extended the first bid to me. I began scheming a scene in which she and I would rush for a telephone simultaneously. Then I would trip and say sweetly: “After you, Louella.”
When she got her invitation and was told I had already been signed, she stormed: “Get her off. I won’t be in it if she is.” They would have none of that, so Miss Parsons did not appear in Sunset Boulevard. And she didn’t mention the picture in her column for months.
She didn’t know what to do when Time ran a cover story and a cover portrait along with ten columns of some highly flattering prose about yours sincerely. (Hopper “is a self-appointed judge and censor of all that goes on in Hollywood,” said Time, “and she carries out her assignment with a hey nonny-nonny and the old one-two.”) In frustration, Louella took to her bed.