“The doctor had cautioned me not to drink anything. But doctors are notorious killjoys.”
Along with her younger nemesis, Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons was one of the most feared figures in early Hollywood. She single-handedly established the celebrity journalism industry, and could single-handedly make (Marion Davies) or break (Orson Welles) a career if she set her mind to it. The Illinois native wrote scripts for Essanay Studios in Chicago before launching a column for Chicago Record Herald. Picked up by New York Morning Telegraph but signed away by W. R. Hearst in 1923, Parsons relocated to the drier climate of Los Angeles after developing tuberculosis and being told she had six months left to live. (She ended up living nearly another fifty years.) Her flagship column for the Los Angeles Examiner was subsequently syndicated to hundreds of newspapers with a readership approaching 20 million. Fiercely loyal to Hearst, and a close friend of his mistress Marion Davies, Parsons would work for Hearst enterprises throughout the remainder of her career. She launched a weekly radio show in the late twenties—a precursor to modern late-night talk shows, with stars plugging their current projects and airing audio clips. Parsons faced competition when her former source Hopper premiered her own gossip column for the Los Angeles Times in 1938. A heated rivalry between the two persisted until Parsons retired, at the age of eighty-one.
DOCKY WAS DOWN FOR THE COUNT—again. By now, the ridiculous had become commonplace. Dr. Harry Martin—VD specialist to the stars, Hollywood’s leading urologist, and Louella Parsons’s husband—had taken to ending his evenings out on the town by passing out on his hosts’ floors. On this particular evening, the host was Carole Lombard and the occasion was a toga party. Docky had passed out in front of everyone, the fabric of his outfit arranged in such a way that left little mystery. Lombard pointed in shock: “What is that?” “That,” another guest cracked, “is Louella’s column.”
Louella and Docky (“Docky” was her nickname for him) were big on drinking, big on gambling, big on everything. She’d been part of the party circuit since the 1920s. The Cocoanut Grove, the Brown Derby, Montmartre, Pickfair, Marion Davies’s beach house in Santa Monica—Louella frequented them all. As for Docky, he was famous for breaking his neck on a drunken dive into the shallow pool at the Bimini Baths bathhouse, and then holding his spine in place as he walked to the hospital. That’s not nothing.
The couple were regulars at the Santa Anita racetrack and the Agua Caliente casino in Tijuana. They held parties at their home in Beverly Hills almost every week, with sometimes as many as three hundred guests. It wasn’t that they were terrific fun. People came mostly out of fear of what Louella might write about them if they didn’t show up.
The unspoken but obvious undercurrent was that Hollywood despised the gossip columnist and her clownish husband—and not just because she had the power to make and break careers, marriages, and friendships. Part of their contempt stemmed from the couple’s hypocrisy. Docky was an avowed Catholic who’d converted Louella when they married in 1930; yet it was a not-so-carefully guarded secret that he was house doctor at Lee Francis’s Hollywood brothel and the doctor that Fox Studios called whenever an actress needed an abortion. In her column, Louella would shamelessly moralize when a marriage ended in divorce, yet Docky was her third husband. When the story of Clara Bow’s gambling addiction broke, Louella wrote that she was sorry Bow hadn’t grown up; this from the woman who would bet on eight horses at a time and lose thousands in a weekend.
Thus did the couple’s moments of public humiliation become cherished and oft-told tales. Sometimes Louella joined in the mockery of the ever-misbehaving Docky, perhaps because her reputation was more important to her than her husband’s dignity. On the night that Docky lay on Lombard’s floor with his “column” exposed for any passerby to see, two guests decided to help him to his feet. But Louella, having finally noticed the extent to which her husband was embarrassing himself, interceded.
“Let him sleep,” she said. “He needs to operate in the morning.”
THE MEMBERS-ONLY EMBASSY CLUB was opened in 1929 by restaurateur Eddie Brandstatter in the space next to his hugely successful Montmartre Café, and for about twenty minutes, it was the most exclusive hangout in Los Angeles. Designed by architect Carl Weyl at a cost of $300,000, combining Spanish and Byzantine styles and featuring a glass-enclosed rooftop promenade and lounge, the Embassy Club was limited to three hundred members at any given time. How exactly one became a member was a mystery, but it was generally understood to be by invitation only. On the board of directors sat Marion Davies, Gloria Swanson, Norma Talmadge, King Vidor, Sid Grauman, and Evelyn Brent. Members included Charlie Chaplin (of course); Tod Browning; Paul Bern; Carl Laemmle, Jr.; Harold Lloyd; and Mervyn LeRoy.
Very quickly, however, Brandstatter realized that the Embassy was a very exclusive mistake, with three hundred hand-selected albatrosses to expedite its failure. A crucial component of any see-and-be-seen establishment, it turns out, is the ability to actually be seen.
Sure, it was flattering to be asked to join the Embassy, but once you were in, there was no adoring public like the one that flocked to the Montmartre for a glimpse of your curly locks. Even more damaging, stars who were not invited to join the Embassy stopped going to the Montmartre, too, either in protest or out of embarrassment. Which meant that soon, fans also stopped going to Montmartre—because they wanted to see stars, not to eat. All of this resulted in Brandstatter declaring bankruptcy within three years and being forced to open the Embassy Club to the general public, at which point Brandstatter learned another important lesson: Once anyone could join, no one wanted to.
NOT A YEAR AFTER Brandstatter’s debacle, the Clover Club opened on Sunset to attempt the exact same stunt, except it had one attraction the Embassy Club didn’t: gambling. Opened by Eddy Neales, with mobster Milton “Farmer” Page as his silent partner, the Clover was, on the surface, nothing more than a fancy nightclub. But one-way mirrors and secret panels obscured roulette wheels where VIPs could lose $100,000 a sitting and gambling tables could quickly be flipped over and disguised.
As it happens, a few gambling tables are all that is needed to turn a bad idea into a profitable one. That, and Mob protection. Because even after all the greased palms and shakedowns, the Clover still minted money. Heavy hitters like Carl Laemmle, Jr.; Howard Hughes; Irving Berlin; Samuel Goldwyn; Douglas Fairbanks; Harpo Marx; Louis B. Mayer; Harry Cohn; and MGM security fixer Howard Strickling played there. By 1937 Neales was allegedly handling $10 million a year in bets.
On January 14 of that year, a private investigator and former cop named Harry Raymond was nearly killed when a bomb blew up his car. Raymond had been investigating city hall corruption and underworld ties, and was about to testify to a grand jury that had been convened for the same reason. The bombing investigation led to the conviction of powerful L.A.P.D. captain Earl Kynette, a known city-hall insider, and the public had finally had enough.
The ensuing outcry began a chain of events—citizens voting to recall the city’s mayor; a full-scale Mob turf war; the election of a new anticorruption mayor; and finally the arrival of the FBI, which would shutter the Clover for good. By the 1940s, prominent L.A. underworld figures such as Page, Bugsy Siegel, and Mickey Cohen had relocated to Las Vegas, because who needed this crap when you could build the Flamingo? By then, the Clover Club had reopened as Club Seville, and replaced craps with carp, literally—they installed a glass-bottom dance floor atop an aquarium filled with fish.