The First Lady of Hollywood
Chapter One
Essanay
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen
Your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true
I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of
Women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
CARL SANDBURG, "Chicago," 1916
Louella was no stranger to this city of big shoulders, this
gritty metropolis that, in 1910, over two million residents called home. Like
Frank Cowperwood of Theodore Dreiser's 1914 novel The Titan, she had seen
from the train window the flat brown land that ringed the city's outskirts, the
Chicago River "with its mass of sputtering tugs and its black oily water," and
the "little one and two story houses" that stood on the edge of town. Before,
on her visits from Freeport with Helen, Louella had enjo ... read full excerpt from The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons ebook
