- Godmother of Mia Farrow
- Carole Lombard's nickname for her was Lollypops.
- Founder of the Hollywood Women's Press Club.
- Became a syndicated Hollywood columnist for William Randolph Hearst, so her "Los Angeles Examiner" column appeared in over six hundred newspapers the world over and made her one of the most powerful voices in the movie business (1925).
- Played by Elizabeth Taylor in Malice in Wonderland (1985), Brenda Blethyn in RKO 281 (1999) and Jennifer Tilly in The Cat's Meow (2001).
- Caricatured as an opossum named Louella Possums in Frank Tashlin's 1937 cartoon The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos (1937).
- James Mason, who once called Parsons "not such a bad old slob, really", reported in his autobiography that she spent her last years in a nursing home in the throes of dementia, talking into a Fisher Price toy telephone and pretending she was chatting with assorted movie stars, mostly dead ones.
- She falsified her year of birth to 1893. But that would have been impossible, as her father died in 1890.
- Her memoir, "The Gay Illiterate", published in 1944, became a bestseller and was followed by "Tell It to Louella" in 1961.
- She was awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one for radio at 6300 Hollywood Boulevard; and for motion pictures at 6418 Hollywood Boulevard.
- After the death of her first husband in 1911, she moved to Chicago and got a job as a script reader for Essanay Studios. She later created the first movie column for The Chicago Herald, before moving on to The New York Morning Telegram, where she remained until joining William Randolph Hearst's organization in 1922.
- Smarmy-tongued Hollywood gossip columnist of the 40s and 50s who was often in imbroglios with not only her subjects but her professional rivals as well.
- Is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, California.
- She had one child, Harriet Parsons (August 23, 1906-January 2, 1983) who grew up to be one of Hollywood's first woman film producers.
- Ex-mother-in-law of King Kennedy.
- A dual biography of Hedda Hopper and Parsons, "Hedda and Louella" by George Eells, was published in paperback by Warner Books in 1972.
- Her longtime residence on North Maple Dr. in Beverly Hills is shown in Hollywood Mouth 2 (2014).
- The third and longest-lasting of her husbands was a well-known California doctor, usually described as an "urologist", though many Hollywood memoirs refer to him less flatteringly as a "clap doctor". He was alleged to be an alcoholic and to be extremely indiscreet in private (especially when speaking to his wife) about the afflictions of his celebrity patients. As a result, Louella Parsons often knew about sexually-transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and suchlike among the members of the Hollywood community, making her an even more powerful figure.
- She served as the inspiration for the character Elinor St. John in feature film "Babylon" (2022).
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content