The gossip gatherer

Biography: The life of no 20th-century personality showcases the American dream in action as effectively as does that of Louella Parsons. A frigate of a woman from a stultifyingly normal town in the mid-west, Parsons, though a journalist for half a century, had no great gifts as a prose stylist.

Indeed, so potent was her propensity for splitting infinitives and dangling participles that, good-humouredly appropriating an insult flung at her by a rival, she deigned to title her autobiography The Gay Illiterate. Yet, through dint of blinkered determination and unrelenting graft, Parsons somehow managed to remain the most powerful woman in Hollywood for close to 40 years. From the 1920s until the 1960s Louella's position as the movie gossip columnist for Hearst newspapers granted her whims and prejudices the ability to make or break careers. Look, her story says, you really can achieve anything if you work hard enough.

Sadly, since her death in 1972, Parsons's reputation, already compromised, has been steadily debased. Books such as George Eeells's Hedda & Louella, a dual biography of Parsons and her great rival, Hedda Hopper, depicted the columnist as a vindictive fishwife with neurotic tendencies. Countless studies of Orson Welles have told how Parsons, enraged by Citizen Kane's allusions to her boss, William Randolph Hearst, sought to suppress the director's first film.

Her support for the anti-Communist witch-hunts - less vociferous than that of Hopper, but still unambiguous - further damaged her standing with commentators. The final posthumous indignity came in 1985 when Elizabeth Taylor, an enemy since Parsons huffed publicly about the actress prising Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds, was cast as her former tormenter in Malice in Wonderland, a TV adaptation of Hedda & Louella. Interviewed at the time, Taylor described the columnist as "dumpy, dowdy and dedicated to nastiness. Forget anybody that stood in her way. And her voice . . . so irritating. You just wanted to smack her".

With all this in mind, one could be forgiven for approaching Samantha Barbas's diligent biography with expectations of reappraisal. Dr Barbas, an alumna of the University of California, Berkeley, that most impeccably right-on of institutions, is surely the woman to reclaim Parsons for the feminists.

It doesn't quite happen. True, the author finds space to praise her subject for consistently defending the rights of women in the workplace. Born in 1881, Parsons came into newspapers at a time when female journalists were regarded as frivolous novelties. But she stubbornly refused to be patronised and, following her success, helped establish a number of organisations promoting the cause of her gender: the Newspaper Women's Club, the Hollywood Women's Press Club, the Woman Pays Club.

Readers will, however, find little else in Barbas's consistently enjoyable book to encourage them to view Parsons as anything other than a malign influence on her times. The First Lady of Hollywood offers us a middle-brow prude who became ever more conservative as the years progressed. Were her story to be filmed again, Patricia Routledge in full Hyacinth Bucket mode, rather than the more extravagant Taylor, would seem ideal for the lead role.

A native of Dixon, Illinois, Louella Oettinger spent time as a teen reporter on the local newspaper before making a bad marriage to one John Parsons in 1905. Following a divorce, Louella, a movie fan since the medium's arrival, made her way to Chicago where she found work editing scenarios for Essanay Studios. Her first job for Hearst's empire was with the New York Morning Telegraph. Then, following a spell of tuberculosis, she made her way to Hollywood and a position with the LA Herald Examiner. Syndication followed. At the height of Parsons's career her compendia of barely warmed-over studio press releases and mild tittle-tattle were appearing in more than 370 papers worldwide. As late as 1952 she was still reaching as many as 40 million readers. Only television can compete with those figures.

Parsons's role was to enable conservative readers to feel comfortable idolising a community of entertainers whose liberal values and exotic tastes differed so dramatically from those of the good burghers of Anytown, USA. "My neighbours here are hard-working folk who take their work as seriously as the village plumber," Barbas quotes her as writing. "Their home lives are as simple, as wholesome and as natural as if they were living in the thriving cities of Muncie, Indiana or Freeport, Illinois."

Parsons, protective of her picket-fence fantasy, was reluctant to include any genuine scandal in her column. Barbas suggests that her subject's greatest exposé - the news that Ingrid Bergman was pregnant by her lover Roberto Rosselini - was uncharacteristic. The usual punishment for deviance, either social or political, was blacklisting from the column. In an industry that thrived on publicity this constituted a significant penalty. Hedda Hopper, the Rolling Stones to Parsons's Beatles, could be a deal more savage.

Eventually the decline of Hearst's empire, changes in social mores and the ending of the studio system did for Louella and her sort. But the public's interest in the minutiae of celebrities' lives continued to grow. We have now reached a point where - witness the invention of Chantelle on the recent Celebrity Big Brother - the very act of appearing in Louella's successors' copy is qualification enough for superstardom. It is no longer necessary to even fake an aptitude for singing, dancing or ventriloquism.

Meanwhile, unhappy truths (and even more outrageous lies) that the studios would in Parsons's time have kept from the public, circulate on the internet. A great deal of news management still goes on and too many entertainment writers, acting like a great collective Louella, continue to recycle press releases. But, for those with the inclination to separate invention from speculation, the juiciest gossip is now out there uncensored in the electronic ether.

The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons By Samantha Barbas University of California Press, 426pp. $29.95

Donald Clarke writes about film for The Irish Times