Cinema: The Gossipist

(See Cover)

Early one bright Hollywood day that dawned on rumors of a romance between Joan Crawford and Don Barry, the cowboy actor, Miss Crawford’s telephone tinkled. From the other end swooshed a Niagara of italicized insinuation:

“Hello. This is Hedda Hopper. Put Joan on….Hello, Joan?…All right, dear, tell me all about it….Well, he says it’s pretty serious. . . . Oh, come on, you can’t fool me. Are you in love with him? . . . Now look, dear, I always ask personal questions….Well, how do you get a man to hang that much mink around your neck if you’re not serious about him?…I know you’re hedging. You can’t fool Hopper….Well, you can answer whether you’re in love with the guy and intend to marry him….Now look, Joan, I’ve known you for a great many years and you’ve never been a gold digger in your life. I just don’t think you’ve got it in you. So when you go accepting expensive ice from this guy I know there’s something up. So you might as well spill it, baby. … All right, dear, you’ve given me your answer by indirection….By the way, I hear you’re adopting two more children. How old are they this time?…”

Hedda Hopper is the handsome, headlong gossip whose syndicated column, usually titled “Hollywood,” written in prose of an inspired spasticity, daily gives her 22,800,000 readers the illusion that they have been behind the sets, the bushes and deep into some of Hollywood’s better bed-&-bathrooms. This eminence Columnist Hopper shares (reluctantly) with her rival in revelation, Hearstian Columnist Louella (“Lollipop”) Parsons, fat, fiftyish, and fatuous, whose syndicated column reaches some 30,000,000 readers.

The story which Miss Hopper derived “by indirection” from her terrifying conversation with Miss Crawford was, as it turned out, dead wrong. But that was immaterial. For headlong Miss Hopper and pudgy Miss Parsons are two of the mightiest publicity powers on earth, and even their whispers can reduce the $250,000-a-year padishahs of pictures to masses of quivering jelly. For a few words from Hedda, set down with the same swooping abandon with which she selects the hats that have become her trademark, or one of Lolly Parsons’ little shark-toothed prose smiles, can make or break a director or an actor, cool or clinch a deal. Hedda’s chit-chat can materially affect the outcome of schemes involving millions of dollars. She is a self-appointed judge and censor of all that goes on in Hollywood, and she carries out her assignment with a hey nonny-nonny and the old one-two.

How It Works. “For several months,” Hedda casually announced urbi et orbi one day last spring, “I have been plugging a young singer named Doris Day, who, I believed, had fine talent. . . . Mike Curtiz tested her for the lead in Romance in High C. She’d never been before a camera previously, but Mike told me her test was sensational. Even so, the studio wanted a star name—Mary Martin, Lauren Bacall, or Ginny Simms—for the role, but Mike held out for Doris and got her. . . .”

On the morning that this deceptively innocuous bit of trivia became print, Warner Brothers’ ace director, Michael Curtiz, arrived at his office promptly at 9:30 in a state bordering on collapse. At 9:45 the phone rang; it was Jack Warner, in an even higher state of agitation. And Michael Curtiz was on the ropes. At exactly 10, with his remaining strength, Curtiz sped a distraught wire to Beverly Hills:

“Dear Hedda: It is very unfair to state that I was against testing Mary Martin and Lauren Bacall and insisted on Doris Day. … It is entirely untrue. You have put me in an embarrassing position with the studio and both the above-named actresses, and I don’t think I deserve such treatment after all the kindness and friendship I have always extended towards you. I … regret very much that in attempting to break a so-called unauthorized scoop, you found it necessary to misquote me and cause me so much discomfiture.”

Hedda let him stew for a couple of days before dictating her reply:

“Dear Mike: Thank you for your telegram of May 10. It was quite revealing. You said in your wire I misquoted you. On the contrary, you misquoted me. If you will please read the article again you will see that I never said you were against testing Mary Martin and Lauren Bacall. . . . Now that we’ve got that straightened out. . . may I ask you a question? When, where and how have you ever thought fit to give me an exclusive story? I’ve always liked you; I respect you as a director—you’re one of the tops. But the friendship, I’m afraid, my dear Mike, has been more on my side than yours. Since Jan. 1, 1947, my records show that I have used your name in my column 13 times. And it is rather disappointing that this is the first time any item has brought a reply from you. . . .

“Now, would you please set me straight on what an ‘unauthorized scoop’ is. Who is supposed to give a scoop—you, the Deity or the studio? Is being photographed with Doris Day in the Brown Derby a private or a public matter? . . . Your protest is so childish, I’m amazed.”

“My Dear Hedda.” Ten days later “Hollywood” ran another thought-provoking item about Miss Day. It exclaimed that this young actress had broken with tradition by insisting on tying her own shoelaces instead of leaving that task to the wardrobe department.

This intelligence electrified Director Curtiz. “My dear Hedda,” he wrote, “I want to thank you for the wonderful break you gave Doris Day in your column this morning. This is the type of publicity that rising young stars need and which their sponsors appreciate so much. Please accept my sincere gratitude for your generous and thoughtful story.”

Gossip, as practiced by Hedda and Louella, is big business, and it has become as indispensably bound up in the making of U.S. movies as cameras, kaolin smiles and surfboard-sized eyelashes. For Hollywood is a town doing a business based on vanity. It is full of men whose intellectual and spiritual capacities do not always match their physical resources. Insecurity is the common disease. The sufferers from this dreadful ailment feel a gnawing need to be told constantly that they are right. Hollywood does not want a considered opinion; it wants to be reassured. And it will endure almost anything to get reassurance.

This is one source of Hedda’s power. When self-doubt stabs, she and Lolly, her redoubtable counterpart, pour on the balm. But the hand that drops the balm is also armed with claws. And Hedda’s claws have grown long and sharp since she discovered her powers.

Fighting Quaker. Where did this terror of the tycoons, this gorgon of gossip, spring from? Like most great legends, Hedda’s girlhood, as she recalls it, is swirled in mist, lit by occasional flashes of fire. She was born Elda Furry, in Hollidaysburg, Pa. (near Altoona), in 1890. Her father, a meat dealer descended from a long line of Quaker ministers, begot a long line of children (nine), of whom Elda was No. 5.

She was a fighter from the start. She fought her father because he was stingy. She fought her grandfather, who owned 20 farms, because he was even stingier. After a delicious sneak into Altoona to see Ethel Barrymore in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, Elda (then 17) fought her way out of the family, once & for all, and headed for Manhattan and the stage. She brought with her from Hollidaysburg two permanent assets: her talons, and an inviolable core of Quaker staidness. “Hedda,” says a friend, “is a Quaker from the mouth down.”

In 1913, Elda replaced Ina Claire in the road company of The Quaker Girl. The show closed in Buffalo, and as Elda stepped off the milk train in Manhattan, DeWolf Hopper, having just divorced his fourth wife, was waiting on the platform to marry her. From that sensationally popular musical comedy star, Elda acquired a dressing-room knowledge of practically everybody on the stage. She also acquired a son, William DeWolf Jr., and a new first, as well as a new last name. For in their honeymoon days,

“Wolfie,” who had some difficulty getting Elda’s name straight, used to rub the bloom off their tenderest moments by murmuring into her hair, “Ella,” or “Ida,” or “Edna,” or “Nella” (the names of his previous wives). With the help of a numerologist, she converted Elda into Hedda and Wolfie never barked up the wrong tree again.

Movie-Mad. Nevertheless, in 1922, Hedda divorced DeWolf, who objected to her movie career and resented her equal earning power ($1,000 a week). For Hedda was there when the flickers were born. She knew Hollywood in 1915, when it was a village near Los Angeles. She knew Sam Goldwyn when his name was Goldfish, and played in several of his pictures in the Biograph studio on New Jersey’s Palisades.

During the shooting of a thing called Virtuous Wives, a silent little man prowled about, peering at everything. Nobody seemed to know who he was, or why. When the picture was finished, the little man approached Hedda and thanked her handsomely for all she had done for the show. “That’s very nice,” said Hedda, in her rather imperial way, “but who are you?” “I’m Louis Mayer. I’m the producer, and this is my first picture. And,” he added respectfully, “I know everything that’s gone on.”

Fustest with the Mostest. Hedda spent most of the rest of her movie career in Hollywood, working for Louis B. Mayer. She was the screen’s first best-dressed woman, and for years its official sophisticated society dame. In those years, without even trying, she salted down an incredible knowledge of Hollywood’s strange ways & means. She can tell off-the-record stories that make Suetonius look like a cub from the Christian Science Monitor. She even knew what the inside of Garbo’s dressing room looked like (“the black hole of Calcutta”). Studio publicity men, hard up for a story, always knew where to get it: go out and latch a siphon on to Hopper.

She had been one of MGM’s brighter satellites. Then she dimmed. She was making a nice living, but chiefly as a loan-out. One day Irving Thalberg (Hedda remembers when L.B. hired him) decided: no more loan-outs. “Irving,” she cried, “you don’t mean me?” “Yes, Hedda,” he replied, “I mean you too.” As an actress, she was finished.

She took it gallantly. She dabbled in real estate, but that bored her. Then one day she flounced into the hotel suite of Dema (“The Brain”) Harshbarger, an ample and astute business woman, founder and manager of the NBC Artists’ Bureau, who had gone to California to retire. Said Hedda: “I want to get on that air.” “In half an hour,” says Dema, “she told me more about Hollywood than I could learn in two years of constant study.” Dema decided to become Hedda’s manager.

Hedda’s first radio show (1936) was 26 weeks of chitchat for Max-O-Oil Shampoo, at $150 a week. Hedda was terrible. But the next year she did a little better. Then, in 1938, Howard Denby of the Esquire syndicate came along—primed, the story goes, by the Metromen who wanted to set up a rival to Lolly Parsons. Hedda’s first columns were terrible too. Hedda was too nice to people. “Look,” Dema told her, “as long as everybody says you’re fine, I like you, you’re going to starve to death. Wake up. Be yourself.” So Hedda honed her talons.

With the first appearance (1938) of her column in the Los Angeles Times, Hedda was made. In 1940 she switched from Esquire to the Des Moines Register & Tribune syndicate; in 1942, she pulled off her grand coup of wooing & winning syndicating contracts from the New York Daily News’s Joe Patterson and the Chicago Tribune’s Bertie McCormick. On that day, June 1, Lolly Parsons arched her back but moved over on the fence. Hedda had become a major Hollywood gossip.

Last year, quite aside from her newspaper work, Hedda made $2,500 a week as a kind of traffic director on This Is Hollywood, a radio show. Last week, she could add up—or rather, Dema could add up for her—a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of annual business. Says Dema, who runs Hedda’s business affairs completely (which includes issuing her a $25 weekly allowance): “I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface yet.”

Day’s Work. Hedda is one of the few columnists in Hollywood who has a downtown (Hollywood) office and a number listed in the phone book. The anteroom might well be that of a dentist who had fallen into a cavity and never managed to climb out. With its bare radiators, scarred doors and desks, signed photographs and careless gadgets, the whole suite resembles an oldtime theatrical booking agency.

When Hedda walks into this shabby maelstrom at 9:30 in the morning, she sets the tone of the day’s activities with a brisk “Good morning, slaves,” to her staff, sweeps into her office, climbs into more comfortable shoes, and settles down to the morning mail and the notes prepared by her legman, a University of North Carolina Phi Bete named David (“Spec”) McClure.

The phone begins trilling almost immediately. It is Joan Crawford, it is Orson Welles, it is Jerry Wald, it is Doris Day, it is Y. Frank Freeman (a Paramount vice president), it is Hedda’s great friend Bing Crosby, it is every story “planter” in town. Hedda talks rapidly and constantly, hammering and wheedling angles out of reluctant stars, practically Claghorning the pressagents off the wire. At 11 she calls her secretary, Treva Davidson, and begins to dictate. It takes her about an hour and a half to do 800 words. Sometimes she does two or three columns in a day. Two or three days a week she takes off for the studios. If it is a personal interview, Spec goes along. Hedda does the talking; Spec takes the notes. Evenings, she is hard at work too—at some of the 50 parties a week she is invited to.

Visiting the sets, Hedda is usually a better show than what is going on in front of the camera. She is a great crowd-pleaser. Her radio warm-up is one of the phenomena of the business. Her personality, italicized by her manic hats, stimulates the autograph hounds. They fawn on her at the studio gates. “Oh, g’wan with you,” says Hedda brusquely. “I’m not a celebrity.”

But she knows she is, and she glories in it. Hedda once suggested on the air that interested listeners might design and send her some nice new hats. She received 65,000—none quite the equal of her latest, by Artist Chaliapin (see COVER). Louella Parsons never had it like that.

Fifty-Fifty. Hedda’s ascent has created a serious problem for the studios. Once the question was: How do we make sure that Louella is the first to know? Now it has become: How do we manage to let Louella know first without getting Hedda hopping? Some publicity chiefs tried giving both girls the story at once. The result, neither would print it. Finally they tried doling out “scoops” on a nominal 50-50 basis (actually, Louella is given about 60%, and that is probably the clearest measure of her edge on Hedda).

The same meticulous protocol applies at banquets and in billing. Hedda and Louella must sit equidistant from the principal speaker. In advertising displays, the problem is impossible to solve by simple geometry. Top billing is better than bottom, and left is better than right; so it has become customary to reproduce only one woman’s blurb at a time.

Hedda’s Whoppers. It has been suggested that, for all Hedda’s slash & dash, her wild but indisputable charm and her whizzing success at her job, the head beneath the hats is something of an air pocket. In her very first column, she perpetrated a lulu to the effect that Greta Garbo, who was soon, she said, to marry Leopold Stokowski, had undergone inspection by Stokowski’s patrician Philadelphia relatives. Stokowski has no patrician Philadelphia relatives. A rudimentary instinct for checking sources would have spared Hedda that blooper.

One publicity man, who has dealt with both Hedda and Louella, says: “You have to watch yourself with Hedda. When Louella has a story, she knows when it is dangerous and will check it. But Hedda will plunge in and print it, and go away in complete innocence that she has done anything wrong in being wrong.” Hedda claims that she has never been sued.

Her critical perceptions are sometimes bemusing: she once described Bob Hope as “our American Noel Coward.” “For more than 2,000 years,” she once intoned reverently, “Jews and Christians all over the world have tried to follow in the footsteps of our Saviour.”

Hedda’s Weapons. With all these handicaps—and after all, Beethoven was deaf—Hedda has some wicked weapons, and knows how to use them. She can print what she does about Hollywood people because she knows still fancier stuff that the mails would not carry, and because her own private life is blackmail-proof. And she knows how to turn her most outrageous mistakes into a joke. To one “planter’s” hurt question why she had reduced his exclusive scoop to one line, low in her column (it was one of her mistakes), she crowed: “Bitchery, baby, pure bitchery!” Hedda delights, in fact, in calling herself The Bitch of the World.

Home Life. She lives in a typical Beverly Hills house just across the street from Lady Mendl and around the block from Mike Romanoff. It is complete with swimming pool, five phones, a dachshund nostalgically named Wolfie, and several hundred hats. There, Hedda promotes cozy Sunday morning breakfasts with leading ladies of the screen. Instead of Hedda’s calling on them for an interview, it is customary for them to call on her (though she is not quite as insistent on this point as Louella).

Every so often she throws a party. Visiting stage celebrities are likely to be the guests of honor. The town turns out obediently. In turn, Hedda expects to be asked to all major parties and weddings of any size. People like to have Hedda at their parties, because she is amusing and inevitably the center of attention.

Hedda always asks Louella to her parties. Louella never comes. While the two get along fairly well, “our love,” according to Hedda, “is not exactly demonstrative.” Relations have been a little shaky lately because of the May Day baby incident. When Bette Davis had her May Day baby, she flew the coop and refused to talk to the press. Hedda, suspecting that Bette had gone to Laguna, climbed into her grey Cadillac and simply drove down. Finding the door ajar, she walked in. Bette was delighted to see her and they talked for two hours. Said Lolly in her column the next week: “Since Bette Davis has had so many unwelcome visitors, she has had to have her gate padlocked.”

But Louella’s chagrin runs deeper than that. Hedda keeps chipping away, and is distinctly too ubiquitous for Louella’s tastes. While Lollipop is still the acknowledged queen of Warners, Columbia and 20th Century-Fox, which employs her husband, Urologist Harry (Docky-Wocky) Martin, Hedda is well set up everywhere else. She gets news of Paramount from Metro, and Metro from Paramount. Then there are her myriad personal contacts outside the high command. Hedda is the only columnist in town who can get the elusive Bing Crosby on the phone day or night. The monopoly on Hollywood gossip has slipped from Louella’s control.

Son Bill is the biggest fact in Hedda Hopper’s life. When he grew up, Hedda was determined that he should enter into the social life of Hollywood in the same way she did. She could not understand why he did not step right up to people and shine.

Bill, a tall, handsome boy who looks like his father, made his movie debut (billed as DeWolf Hopper Jr.) in 1937, and his last picture in 1943, just before going into the Coast Guard. He was never really a success, for obvious reasons: he did not want to be a movie star. After the war he kicked over the traces. He began selling automobiles. He married and acquired a son. His mother, with heroic lack of understanding, offered to back him in a Mercury dealership of his own. Bill is currently jobless. Hedda still insists on buying his suits for him.

Next to her son and grandson, Hedda’s greatest interest is her hats. She buys about 150 new ones every year. She estimates that she spends at least $5,000 a year on hats. Currently, Hedda’s hats are on tour of the country’s leading department stores, and drawing record crowds everywhere. Her syndicate is working on a plan to use a new picture of Hedda at the top of her column every day. She will wear a new hat in each picture. Dema thinks the commercial possibilities are endless.

Recently Hedda has discovered the grass roots. Last week she, Spec McClure and Treva Davidson set out, in Hedda’s 1940 Cadillac coupé, on a barnstorming tour of the U.S. Hedda wants to meet the people. The party will drive, Hedda dictating her column to Treva as they zip along. Hedda will pop in unawares on small-town newspaper editors and city fathers and “introduce myself, by God! I want to mingle with the crowd, and I’ll do it if it kills me.” The trip, of course, will be no vacation. But then, Hedda never takes one anyway. She once explained why. “Dear,” she snapped, “I’m too much of a ham not to want to pick up the paper tomorrow morning and find out what Hedda Hopper has to say.”