Columnists: Return of the Gossip

As I rang the doorbell of the five-bedroom, Spanish-style Beverly Hills house, I braced myself for ghosts. The previous owner, Clifton Webb, reputedly never really moved out. Then, too, I half expected the ghost of Hedda Hopper to come at me with a hatpin. Instead I was greeted by Hedda’s spiritual [as it were] successor, Joyce Haber, Hollywood’s new No. 1 voyeur. I was ushered past an epoxy statue by Frank Gallo of a naked girl [Joyce likes to strip people naked) and a Tony Curtis box made especially for Joyce and featuring an old fashioned toilet chain.

At 38, Miss Haber was trim enough to show her Donald Brooks suit off to best advantage, but her blue eyes had long since lost their little-girl luminosity; it was almost as if they had already seen so much they had turned to marble. Her face had that blowsy, drowsy look, the kind people get when they have slept too long, or not at all. These nights, sleep is scarce. Plopping down on a two-seater sofa in her workroom, Joyce explained: “This is really a Hide-A-Bed. I have to get up at 5:30 to do my column; so I sleep out here instead of bothering my husband. The messenger from the Times comes at 8:30.”

Thus reported TIME Correspondent Jon Larsen on his encounter with the woman who is responsible for reviving a dying institution—the Hollywood gossip column. Even before Louella Parsons’ retirement in 1965 and Hedda Hopper’s death in 1966, movieland chatter seemed to have lost its appeal. Did anyone really care any longer about those dreary Hollywood divorces and adulteries? Still, Haber’s column, syndicated for little more than a year and now running in 93 newspapers, has won a sizable general readership as well as the respect and fear of cinematic celebrities. For good reason. Haber is more intelligent, more accurate—and often more malicious—than her predecessors.

Her column carries the usual trivia about Who Wore What to Whose Party. Although many of her trade items intrigue only insiders, they reflect professional savvy. Above all, she publishes tidbits about twosomes (or threesomes or foursomes) that even today’s permissive society still finds at least mildly tantalizing.

“Hedda Haber,” as she is known in some quarters, often employs the “blind” gossip item, using initials that have meaning in Hollywood and whet curiosity elsewhere. The device makes some of her columns look like alphabet soup. But, she insists, “the public loves to guess.” In one of her columns, she told how “Miss PP” (for Prim and Proper) berated “Mr. VV” (Visually Virile) for what she called “his on-screen presence” while shooting a picture. “But I’m the leading lady, dear,” the actress was reported to have remarked to her costar. To many in Hollywood, the initials meant Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson. If most of her items involve sex, well, explains Joyce, “I value things that are offbeat, and I guess a lot of offbeat things are sexual.”

Wall-to-Wall Hips. For the Times’s Sunday supplement, Haber usually does interviews expanded by well-researched background material. Often sympathetic, especially about her favorites, she can also be sarcastic, as she showed when she cut up Julie Andrews: “There is a kind of flowering dullness about her, a boredom in rosy bloom—she is about as seductive as the average waitress at a teahouse.” At times, she can be downright mean. Melina Mercouri, she reported, “had wall-to-wall hips, an ear-to-ear mouth, and more teeth than a pretzel has salt.” Occasionally, the sarcasm cuts closer to home. Before she married Douglas Cramer, who is now head of TV production at Paramount, in 1966, Joyce described him in her column as “the kind of man who takes traveler’s checks to Santa Barbara.”

Some of her victims wish they had a column in which to call her something like Miss VV (Vile and Vicious) or BB (Biting and Bitchy). Sweet Julie Andrews drops her Mary Poppins mask and says of Haber: “She needs open-heart surgery—and they should go in through her feet.” Director Blake Edwards charges that “Haber’s writing is so blatantly vicious and her motivation so disturbed that she really adds up to a psychiatric case.”

Such animosity does not keep her from all the best parties, a rich source of Hollywood dirt, and she does not let her readers forget it. “You sort of get the impression that most parties Joyce writes about are being given for her,” says one student of her column. “Not that she thinks so, but so many people are coming up to her to say this or that or sitting next to her (Joyce does not sit next to people; they sit next to her) that you get the feeling she must be the most important person there. It is a little like following the adventures of Mary Worth’s niece, who is making it in Hollywood.”

Columnist Haber has a sure instinct for social snobbery. As she analyzes it, Hollywood has two kinds of parties: “A” and “B”. An A party is served by the host’s staff, starts at 9 p.m., and calls for either no tie or black tie. A B party is catered by Chasen’s, starts at 7:30, requires a dark suit and has a receiving line. As for her own parties, they are a mixture that rates about B 4-.

Double Check. The daughter of a Philco executive who died in 1942, Joyce Haber is a product of Manhattan’s Brearley school for girls and Barnard College. Although her judgment is erratic (she put Candy on her list of last year’s ten best movies), she learned as a researcher and Los Angeles correspondent for TIME from 1953 to 1966 to double-check her facts. She now earns nearly $50,000 from the Times and the syndicate, but claims, weepishly, that this only puts her and Husband Doug into a higher tax bracket, so “the column is really an indulgence.” Still, she has just indulged herself further by signing to do another column for Motion Picture magazine for an additional $12,000 a year.

Every top Hollywood columnist needs a rival with whom to feud, and Haber has found one in Rona Barrett, a TV gossipist for the Metromedia stations. She watches the Barrett show with competitive pride. “Oh, that’s all wrong,” Haber will scoff at one of Rona’s items. Or “I had that but didn’t use it.” In her success, Haber may face a danger. It was she who wrote in an unkind piece on Barbra Streisand: “Once you are a superstar, there are two choices open to you: you can become a bore or a monster.” As she climbs into celebrity status, Columnist Haber is determined not to become a bore.