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Hollywood celebrities feared her. William Randolph Hearst adored her. Between 1915 and 1960, Louella Parsons was America's premier movie gossip columnist and in her heyday commanded a following of more than forty million readers. This first full-length biography of Parsons tells the story of her reign over Hollywood during the studio era, her lifelong alliance with her employer, William Randolph Hearst, and her complex and turbulent relationships with such noted stars, directors, and studio executives as Orson Welles, Joan Crawford, Louis B. Mayer, Ronald Reagan, and Frank Sinatra-as well as her rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell. Loved by fans for her \"just folks,\" small-town image, Parsons became notorious within the film industry for her involvement in the suppression of the 1941 filmCitizen Kaneand her use of blackmail in the service of Hearst's political and personal agendas. As she traces Parsons's life and career, Samantha Barbas situates Parsons's experiences in the broader trajectory of Hollywood history, charting the rise of the star system and the complex interactions of publicity, journalism, and movie-making. Engagingly written and thoroughly researched,The First Lady of Hollywoodis both an engrossing chronicle of one of the most powerful women in American journalism and film and a penetrating analysis of celebrity culture and Hollywood power politics.

Tara Gordon, una amiga de [Louella Parsons], la describe en su epoca casada en Dixon, al inicio de la decada de 1910: \"Louella era amable y tierna. Aunque detestaba cocinar y la vida en Dixon, siempre tenia palabras amables para sus amigas. Era trabajadora y leal, y jamas escuche de su boca una mala palabra sobre nadie. Una ama de casa absolutamente respetable\". Pero hay otra opinion referida a la decada de los cuarenta, de Hedda Hopper, su rival periodistica: \"Con el imperio de [William Randolph Hearst] a sus espaldas, Louella ejercia el poder de una Catalina de Rusia. Hollywood leia cada una de las palabras que escribia como si se tratara de una revelacion divina desde el monte Sinai. Las estrellas, los directores y los directores estaban aterrorizados cada vez que abrian el periodico. Todos temian al infierno de su conocido \"tratamiento silencioso\", o, peor aun, sus desmanes y sus criticas. Con una sola linea interrumpia producciones, obliga a casarse a amantes ocasionales que querian salvaguardar sus carreras cinematograficas o a divorciarse a matrimonios bien avenidos. Una sola critica negativa, y una debutante de talento se veia obligada a hacer la maleta y volver a su poblacho de origen en el Medio Oeste; una critica positiva, y las alfombras granates comenzaba a bailar bajo los pies con la rapidez de la luz\".

[Orson Welles] se embarcó en la tarea con una obsesión que ya es parte de la historia. Cuenta la leyenda que aprendió a dirigir viendo películas, como la alemana \"El gabinete del doctor Caligari\" (1920), de Robert Wiene -copia que mandó a pedir al MoMA-, y \"La diligencia\" (1939), de John Ford, que habría visto 40 veces. También vio filmes de Frank Capra, Fritz Lang y Jean Renoir, entre otros. Al parecer, aprendió bien, porque el resultado, \"El ciudadano Kane\", se convertiría en uno de los filmes más influyentes, considerado hoy, 75 años después de su estreno, uno de los mejores de la historia. Aquel joven novato logró realizar una cinta que resultó innovadora en términos técnicos y artísticos. Se dice que Hearst, más que por el retrato que se hacía de su persona, estalló en cólera cuando llegó a sus oídos la imagen que se daba de la actriz Marion Davis, su amante. El millonario prohibió toda publicidad de la película en sus diarios, y además amenazó a otros estudios de exponer secretos de sus estrellas si no se sumaban a su boicot. Para esto último, [William Randolph Hearst] utilizó a su columnista de chismes de Hollywood, Louella Parsons, que incluso antes de recibir la orden de su patrón ya estaba empeñada a cobrar venganza de Welles.

Other awards included a tie between Ann-Margret and Barbara Stanwyck for Female Star of the Year. Ann-Margret had appeared in the tv movie \"Who Will Love My Children\" and Stanwyck was in the tv miniseries \"The Thornbirds.\"

Miss Graham's real name was Lily Shiel, which ''to this day horrifies me to a degree impossible to explain,'' she wrote in ''Beloved Infidel.'' When she was an infant, she said, her father died of tuberculosis, and her childhood was characterized by a string of Dickensian hardships. For six years she lived with her mother, a domestic, in a rented basement room, then wound up in an orphanage. As a young woman, she put in a brief stint as a domestic, which she hated, and then went to work in Gamage's department store as a toothbrush demonstrator. Miss Graham said she got the job because she was pretty and had a dazzling smile and perfect teeth, ''thanks to a sweets-deprived childhood in the orphanage.'' Miss Graham also produced several more books, three of them centering on [F. Scott Fitzgerald] - ''The Real Scott Fitzgerald,'' ''The Rest of the Story'' and ''College of One.'' That volume, published in 1967, after Miss Graham found the handwritten Fitzgerald ''curriculum'' he created for her, listed his favorite books and musical works that he insisted she become familiar with. Other Graham books included ''The Garden of Allah,'' ''Confessions of a Gossip Columnist'' and the steamy autobiographical novel ''A State of Heat'' (1972). She also published ''Hollywood Revisited'' in 1985.

\"I can't remember what year it was,\" related Beach Boy Mike Love, \"but we came here to the White House when the former occupants still lived here. And after a benefit we went to a birthday bash at the vice president's house. We have a videotape of us trying to teach George Bush how to sing \"Barbara Ann.' It was a great moment in history.\" Then Love said, \"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to sing this song.\" Honored Gen. Colin L. Powell has agreed to be honorary grand marshal for the annual King Week parade Jan. 21 in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s hometown of Atlanta. Powell is the first black to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He often quotes the slain civil rights leader in his speeches. Falk talk Actor Peter Falk told the New York Times about a meeting he had with Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, at the beginning of his career. \". . . I was trying to sell him on how great I was, and Cohn interrupted and said, `Son, for the same price I'll get an actor with two eyes!' \" Falk was 3 years old when he lost an eye to cancer. Advice Entertainer Whitney Houston has some advice for young singers trying to make their mark. This is how she did it: \"When I was a kid, I would listen to [Aretha Franklin] and sing to her every note and her every riff and every ad-lib. If you can keep up with Aretha Franklin, then you can sing.\" In court Robin Leach, host of TV's \"Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous,\" is suing a Buffalo, N.Y., radio station over a commercial that he said imitated his voice. Leach filed a $350,000 lawsuit against WMJQ-FM of Buffalo and the Niagara Frontier Homebuilders Association for the commercial advertising a home show in June. Mr.

Would you believe that gossip is good for you, and that most printed gossip is positive? In a rare academic study of the changing face of gossip it has been found that the stuff of gossip columns has helped people more than it has harmed them. Today, gossip is bigger than ever, no longer regarded as a strictly feminine pursuit, and according to experts on the psychology of gossiping, is as essential to our well-being as breathing.

[Orson Welles] was 25 when he made \"Citizen Kane.\" His astonishing vigor remains fixed in every frame. It is there in the screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles, in the nervy way they take on the legend of [William Randolph Hearst], the publishing giant who was very much alive at the time, in a narrative that leaps forward, curls back and around, then leaps forward again. [Gregg Toland] had already shot deep-focus scenes for \"The Long Voyage Home\" (1940) and would do so again for \"The Little Foxes\" (1941) and \"The Best Years of Our Lives\" (1946). Stanley Cortez's deep-focus work in Welles's great if mutilated \"Magnificent Ambersons\" (1942) is even more spectacular than Toland's for \"Citizen Kane.\" From beginning to end, \"Citizen Kane\" proclaims its impatience with the way movies had come to look and sound at the time Welles moved from New York and Hollywood. Welles originally planned to adapt Joseph Conrad's \"Heart of Darkness\" as his first film. When that project proved too expensive, he settled on \"Citizen Kane,\" which is not exactly \"Heart of Darkness\" but possibly more congenial movie material.