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newspapers and fan magazines did the most to help their female readers imagine these movie personalities as women-made women.³ The “moving picture has opened a great new field for women folk” where her “originality,” “perseverance,” and “brains are coming to be recognized on the same plane as [a] man’s,” declared Gertrude Price, one of several prominent female “moving picture experts,” in the Toledo News-Bee.⁴ In Breaking into the Movies (1927), publicist Virginia Morris explained how the industry’s preoccupation with the female fan turned publicity writing into a field open to both sexes. Since “the large majority of film audiences consisted of women” eager to know about “the feminine star,” producers decided “that the woman picture patron could be most easily reached by information written from the feminine angle.”⁵ The strategy of using women writers to appeal to other women was one of multiple tactics devised to attract more women into movie audiences during the 1910s. By 1914 motion picture editors and publicity departments advised theater owners that “women and girls” were the most avid followers of “motion picture news.”⁶ By the early 1920s, Photoplay claimed that women composed 75 percent of movie fans. One editorial extolled the movies as a “blessed refuge” for “the lonely girl” without “the money for expensive drama” after a hard day’s work.⁷ As a result, insiders imagined their ideal spectator as a young white woman eager to identify with role models who, however fantastically, reflected the changed condition under which they lived, worked, played, and dreamed.⁸

      These writers created new western myths that appealed to these fans’ desires, blending wish fulfillment and social reflection.⁹ Journalists downplayed some aspects of women’s accomplishments, such as their managerial roles, and exaggerated others, such as the frequency with which extras became stars. But, as women experts explained to women readers how ordinary women became extraordinary new women, they created a female-centered leisure space that reinforced two impressions: the movies aimed to help women satisfy their new desires, and fans’ support of the industry furthered their ambitions as a sex. The social imaginary that emerged as a consequence mostly described these women-made women as shedding traditional ways of acting female to become “twentieth century,” “modern,” or “New Women,” to use Photoplay’s preferred terms.¹⁰ The common use both of contests that promised readers the chance to work alongside their favorite scenario writer, “cutter” (editor), or star in Los Angeles, and of inspirational interviews with female movie personalities allowed fans to imagine experimenting with their own self-transformation.¹¹

      No single writer in this era did as much as journalist and publicist Louella Parsons to explain to readers who mattered to the movies and why. This chapter uses Parsons’s reporting to track the development of the celebrity discourse aimed at female fans. Parsons honed her craft by giving form to the figures inhabiting the movie landscape before the business of making pictures and Hollywood were synonymous.¹² Between 1915 and 1920, Parsons was among the first, and certainly the most successful, reporters to write a nationally syndicated daily column focused not on films, but on the news surrounding the industry and its stars. The industry had provided Parsons with the means to effect the kind of melodramatic, near-magical personal transformation that she later specialized in selling to readers. As a producer of this fan culture, she earned a following by describing the professional and personal activities of the industry’s assertive, in de pen dent, resourceful, and glamorous female protagonists. And, increasingly, Parsons described the industry’s new home in Los Angeles as a novel kind of western frontier that sought women adventurers. In helping to set the tone and content of the movie industry’s relationship with women fans, she fashioned an image and role that afforded her a great deal of power. In the process, Parsons became at once agent and symbol, cause and consequence, of the industry’s production of new ideas about femininity.

      I

      Born in 1881 in Dixon, Illinois, Parsons was the granddaughter of a woman’s rights activist and the daughter of a “stage-struck girl.”¹³ Her first heroine was Nellie Bly, the stunt reporter who championed workingwomen and traveled the world, alone, in fewer than eighty days. Part of the first generation of middle-class women who benefited from broader access to higher education, Parsons attended college while working sporadically as a reporter and teacher. Like most of this cohort, she married later, at twenty-four, and then relinquished her ambition to write, moving with husband John Parsons to Burlington, Iowa, where she gave birth to her only child, Harriet. Her choices mirrored those made by most privileged white women in the era, women who skirted the volatile topic of mixing work outside the home with a family inside it by seemingly sacrificing one for the other.¹⁴ Her decision to leave her philandering husband and move to Chicago in 1910 set Parsons on a path closer to the one trod by less privileged urban migrants. Working as a secretary at the Chicago Tribune, her $9-a-week salary barely supported her small family. Yet, like many workingwomen, she managed almost nightly trips to the movies, reveling in a fan culture that nurtured her ambition to write.

      The few fan magazines that existed in the early 1910s touched lightly on the lives of famous personalities, but lavished attention on scenario writing, offering tips to hopefuls, contests with cash prizes for the best stories, and tales about women who succeeded at the job. Female-authored scenarios poured into film studios, convincing Essanay to hire an editor to evaluate the material.¹⁵ Parsons got the job. Now earning $20 a week, she brought her mother to Chicago to care for Harriet. Parsons loved the work. She read scripts and wrote more than one hundred scenarios. Most important, she turned herself into an authority on the new field, publishing How to Write for the Movies in 1915. The book was a hit and Parsons sold the serialization rights to the Chicago Herald-Record. With her job at Essanay threatened by an “efficiency man,” she flirted her way into a part-time gig at the newspaper, writing the Sunday column “How to Write Photo Plays.” After the series’ success, she talked her way into a job as a columnist who offered a “behind the scenes look” at the “personalities ‘up front’ ” in motion pictures.¹⁶

      The nationally syndicated daily column that Parsons wrote beginning in 1915 partially presented the movies in ways that prefigured how Hollywood’s star system helped to spread the consumer ethos that exploded during the 1920s.¹⁷ Her coffee-klatch tone and “just folks” manner suited the needs of expanding corporate media structures that sought to preserve an intimate feel despite their scale, blurring the lines separating hard (political) from soft (cultural) news, city from country, working from middle class in order to attract the largest possible market audience. As a late-Victorian middle-class woman from the countryside turned single working professional middle-aged mother in the city, Parsons was ideally suited to address the target consumer culture coveted: a cross-class, multigenerational audience of white women with a modicum of disposable cash.¹⁸ All these women led “monotonous and humdrum lives” and craved “glamour and color,” according to the advertising trade journal Printer’s Ink.¹⁹ Parsons’s column presented the industry’s female celebrities’ personal relationships and work lives as designed to fill these needs.

      Yet in ways that pointed to the industry’s Janus-faced relationship to modern femininity, the mass-mediated fan culture of the movies that Parsons helped to create also treated readers as intimates in a conversation about the pleasures and perils of modern womanhood. A special new series in the Herald-Record, “How to Become a Movie Actress,” demonstrated the relationship that Parsons cultivated. The paper’s announcement of the series assured readers that Parsons’s “technical knowledge of the game” and status as “an intimate of all the big movie stars” made her uniquely “qualified to give inside information to girls who are eager to enter the motion picture field.” Thus Parsons used the rhetoric of expertise to establish her authority as an instructor in the art of composing a successful personality.²⁰ But she adopted the stance of a warm, motherly guide rather than the distant scold who later became classic to advertising. Her chatty, tongue-in-cheek style encouraged readers to consider themselves her intimates, thereby nurturing the kind personal connection that fans sought with movie stars.²¹ The column’s promotion also emphasized that Parsons sold lessons in nothing less than personal transformation. “Others have become rich and famous. Why not you?”²² The assumptions built into the column testified to the limits of the kind or romantic

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