Lollipop Licked

Louella ("Lollipop") Parsons cracked her Hearstian whip once too often last week, and Hollywood put a 13-time limit on the number of hoops it will jump through for her gratis this season. Trouble began when she arranged to put on a radio show for Lever Bros, known as Hollywood Premieres. Designed to plug Lifebuoy, the scourge of B. 0., the program called for big-name cinemastars on a par with the actors on the same sponsor's Lux Radio Theatre. But unlike the Theatre, which pays talent as much as $5,000 an appearance, its budget included no cash for celluloid hotshots. The show was to be a kind of command performance for the actors, with Miss Parsons collecting $1,500 a week for assembling the cast.

Promptly the Screen Actors Guild advised its members not to appear and the Motion Picture Relief Fund protested, arguing that if Lollipop got talent free, it would be hard to get $10,000 a week from Gulf Oil for the Screen Guild Theatre, on which actors perform gratis to raise money for the Fund. Lollipop tried to stand fast. Having run Hollywood Hotel in one year from 39th to tenth place in the Crossley rating, she didn't like to see a good thing slip away.

Last week Lollipop got her first Lifebuoy show safely on the air with Marlene Dietrich and Bruce Cabot, but rain that fell outdoors was not the only reason she was shrill and unhappy that night. Earlier that day, in full-page ads in the daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter, she and the Screen Actors Guild had made up, with Lollipop getting the worst of it. Declaring that she didn't want to continue "any radio show which conflicts with the talent regulations of the Guild," she will not continue her show beyond her present 13-week contract.

Having won its skirmish with Lollipop, the Guild prepared to advance against Kate Smith, who uses movie talent on her Grape Nuts show.

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