Born in Freeport, Illinois, probably on August 6, 1881 (although she frequently gave 1893), Louella Oettinger obtained her first newspaper job while she was still in high school, as dramatic editor for the Dixon (Illinois) Morning Star. Her starting salary was $5 a week, a sum that was multiplied several hundred times before she was through. She married John Parsons in 1910. When he died four years later, she went to Chicago and became a reporter on the Chicago Tribune. In 1912 she had had her first contact with the movie industry, selling a script to the Essanay company for $25, and she soon began the first movie column in the country, in the Chicago Record-Herald in 1914. When the paper was bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1918 she was out of a job, for Hearst had not yet discovered that movies were news, but she moved to New York City and started a similar column in the New York Morning Telegraph that caught Hearst╒s attention. After some shrewd bargaining on both sides he obtained her services for his New York American in 1922. She was associated with various Hearst enterprises for the rest of her career. She underwent a crisis in 1925, when she contracted tuberculosis and was told she had only six months to live. She decided to spend her last days in California, but the disease went into remission and she emerged as the Hearst syndicate╒s Hollywood columnist.
Parsons made several attempts to start a radio program in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but it was not until 1934 that she found a successful formula: an interview program, ╥Hollywood Hotel,╙ on which stars appeared gratis to publicize their films. The Radio Guild put a stop to all such free appearances in 1938, but by that time she had established herself as the social and moral arbiter of the Hollywood colony, her judgments being considered as final in most cases and her disfavor being feared more than that of any film critic. Her daily gossip column eventually appeared in 407 newspapers in the United States and other countries and was read by upwards of 20 million people. Although its items were often inaccurate and sometimes simply spiteful, it was followed religiously and thus afforded her a kind and degree of power held by no one else in Hollywood. Her nearest rival was the somewhat friendlier and more tolerant Hedda Hopper, who began her column in 1938. Volumes of memoirs appeared as The Gay Illiterate, 1944, and Tell It to Louella, 1961. With the decline of Hollywood as the center of the motion picture industry after World War II her influence also waned, but she continued to turn out her column until December 1965, when it was taken over by her assistant, Dorothy Manners, who had in fact been writing it for more than a year. Parsons died in Santa Monica, California, on December 9, 1972.
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