The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  The studios were filled with new names and faces, and this upset Louella, who regularly complained in her column about the changing of the guard. Many of Louella's old friends and colleagues-Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, D. W. Griffith-had retired from film. "Their withdrawal from active participation in the business they gave so much to gives me a genuine pang," she told her readers in 1937. Louella admitted that she was "often intolerant of intruders-newcomers who have little love for an industry [1] have watched grow from a small despised thing to the world's third greatest business. "41 Each week she put aside a portion of her salary to help friends from the silent era who had fallen on hard times. This was partially out of generosity, but also a shrewd business decision, since the recipients of her donations often repaid her with gossip.42 The old Hollywood was passing, and with it, Louella feared, her own commanding position.

  Somewhere in the halls of the MGM studio, her enemies were indeed plotting to unseat her. The scheme involved Louella's old friend, Hedda Hopper. In 1937, Hopper was a down-and-out actress, a bit player fallen on hard times. After her contract at MGM was canceled in 1932, she tried work in real estate and theater, and even sold cosmetics, before walking into an offer that would make her Louella's most formidable rival.

  Louella and Hopper had known each other for over fifteen years. In New York, Hopper and Louella had been friends, and Louella had frequently mentioned Hopper in her Morning Telegraph column. When Hopper moved to Hollywood following her divorce from DeWolf Hopper in 1923, she and Louella corresponded regularly. During the 192os, Hopper appeared in several films for MGM, including Zander the Great, which starred Marion Davies. Never a star in her own right, Hopper had supporting roles in more than seventy-five productions, and Louella nicknamed her "Queen of the Quickies. "43

  In 1919 Hopper was interviewed by Photoplay magazine, which described her as "a tall, extraordinarily tall woman with a finely poised head on broad shoulders. She had a large crooked humorous mouth, which parted to show very small and excellent teeth, a patrician nose, arched eyebrows, and the most impossible eyes!" On the screen, she had played "intellectual and artis tic vampires" and was "the worst cat on the screen; the woman who steps in and breaks up the home; who had no heart, no soul, no scruples-but a brain, and wit, and a deadly fascination." But "the feline queen is anything but a catty woman off," the magazine assured its readers.44 Hopper's friends and acquaintances knew better. Hopper was indeed catty-shrewd, conniving, outspoken, and flamboyant. A regular at Hollywood parties, she was one of Hollywood's best gossips. "You can't keep any secrets from Hedda Hopper," claimed fan magazine writer Gladys Hall, who in a 1931 Motion Picture magazine article described her as "the lady who knows it all."45

  Hopper's contract with MGM brought her into contact with Hearst and Davies, and she was a frequent guest at San Simeon. Known for her fashion sense-MGM loaned her to other studios when they needed a "dressy dame"-Hopper was praised by Louella for the "clothes one sees her wearing at the Embassy and the other places where the stars congregate." Secure in her "steady job" at MGM, Hopper "can afford to buy herself a becoming frock now and then," Louella wrote in her column in 1930.46 But the fancy clothes were not for long. The stock market crash of 1929 had wiped out her bank account, and MGM, as part of its cost-cutting measures in the depression, did not renew her contract. She then spent the next five years scrambling to make ends meet. In 1932, Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer's secretary, encouraged her to run for one of the seven seats on the Republican Central Committee from the Fifty-seventh Assembly District, and though Louella had been a registered Democrat, she endorsed Hopper in her column. ("Even if we differ with her in politics, we can't help but hope that Hedda will be elected," Louella wrote in August 1932.)47 After losing the race, Hopper turned to selling real estate, then, in 1934, she went to New York to appear in a Broadway production called Divided By Three. When the show ended, she stayed in New York and worked at a branch of the Elizabeth Arden cosmetic company for a few months, then spent several months traveling in Europe with the screenwriter Frances Marion and her children.

  Shortly after Hopper's return to Hollywood in 1936, she approached Dema Harshbarger, head of the NBC Artists' Bureau, hoping to find work in radio. Hopper impressed Harshbarger with her knowledge of Hollywood gossipin forty-five minutes, according to Harshbarger, Hopper told her "as much about Hollywood as I could have learned in two years"-and Harshbarger secured for Hopper a fifteen-minute Hollywood gossip show sponsored by the makers of Maro Oil shampoo. She appeared for twenty-six weeks at $15o a week, but "the consensus was that she was awful," Time magazine later wrote, and her contract was not renewed.41 She then appeared in a radio show called Brenthouse, and critics mocked her stilted delivery and phony British accent. Howard Denby of the Esquire Features Syndicate saved her from an uncertain future in radio. In 1937 he went to a press agent at MGM claiming that he was looking for someone to unseat Louella. Andy Hervey of MGM's publicity department suggested Hopper. "Why don't you talk to Hedda Hopper? I don't know if she can write. All I can tell you is that whenever we want to know what's going on with our stars we call her," Hervey said.49 Hopper then sent Denby samples of her writing, and Esquire signed her later that year.

  It was not the first time Hopper had authored a Hollywood gossip column. In 1935, she had written a movie column for Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson's Washington Herald, a Hearst-owned paper. Patterson met Hopper at San Simeon and decided that "anyone who could talk as fast as Miss Hopper would make a good columnist." But the column lasted only four months. Hopper claimed that she backed out of the column because she wasn't being paid enough, but she later admitted that Patterson canned her because the columns "weren't very good." 50

  Her new column for Esquire appeared in thirteen papers, including the Los Angeles Times. When the Times editor saw a sample column, he complained that it was "badly written. No news value. Might be all right for a small town weekly. Has nothing to offer a great metropolitan newspaper like the Times."5' The editor was later overruled, and Hopper's first column in the Times appeared on February 14, 1938. "Just twenty-three years ago my son was born," she wrote. "Since then I've acted in Broadway plays. Sold Liberty Bonds in Grand Central Station.... I've worked with practically every star in Hollywood. Sold real estate here-made it pay, too, but not lately. Was a contributor to one of the monthly magazines. Did special articles for the Washington Herald. And today I begin laboring in a new field and am hoping it will bring me as much happiness as that major event which took place twenty-three years ago." "Hollywood is mad, gay, and heartbreakingly silly," she concluded, "but you can't satirize a satire. And that's Hollywood."52

  Saccharine and poorly written, the column was the butt of jokes in Hollywood. But Hopper persisted. At the end of her second month with Esquire, Ida Koverman, who resented "people's snickering at Hedda," held a "cat party," a gathering of actresses and prominent female journalists and screenwriters that was intended to toughen the hide of the novice columnist. Koverman invited Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Sophie Tucker, and Harriet Parsons, among others; Louella was not on the list. "It was a night to remember. A forest fire was blazing in the hills, and the sky was lit with flame. I was burning, too," Hopper recalled in her autobiography. The guests told her, "They've laughed at you long enough. You've been too nice to people. Now start telling the truth."53 Koverman had been encouraged to back Hopper by Louis B. Mayer, who saw her as potential leverage against Louella. Naively, Mayer believed that Hopper would become an ally, docile and easily controlled.54

  But Hopper soon proved herself a freethinker unafraid of contradicting the studios. Not long after the "cat party," Hopper started to "dig up some dirt," in her words, and began running items that criticized the studios. According to Hopper, the "one that hit home in Hollywood was a little piece on the caste system in our town." "What star in Hollywood, getting five thousand a week, would sit at the same table as an actress getting a mere on
e hundred dollars?" she had written.55 Times publisher Norman Chandler began receiving complaints about Hopper, including a threat from one producer to cancel his advertising in the paper. But readers appreciated the change in tone. Hopper's column was picked up by sixteen papers within a month of Koverman's party.56

  By mid-1938, Hopper was doing seven columns a week, a fan magazine story each month, and a radio show. By the summer of 1939, she had become so successful that she began looking for a New York outlet for her column. In July 1939 she wrote to Hearst about the possibility of running the column in his New York tabloid, the Mirror. Though the Mirror already ran Jimmie Fidler's column, Hopper hoped that her column might run alongside Fidler's, as it did in the LosAngeles Times. She wrote to Hearst several times during 1939, before he responded, "[I would] like to see [the] column in the Mirror and will do what I can to place it there."57

  Louella was concerned by Hopper's entrance into the gossip field, but she was not initially threatened. Louella considered Hopper a poor writer and inexperienced reporter, and, given her limited readership, she presented relatively little competition. But in 1939 there were signs that Hopper was becoming a force to be reckoned with. One indication came in March, when Louella was visibly "outscooped" in one of the season's biggest stories-the wedding of Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, who had lived together, unmarried, for several months. When early in 1939 they announced that they were thinking about finally tying the knot, Louella forced them to promise that, when the time came, they would give her the news exclusively. They agreed, though they hinted that they might put off the wedding until the summer. In early March, Louella told the Gable fans among her readers that they could "relax," since the wedding would not be for several weeks, "unless there is a sudden elopement, which I doubt."58

  Throughout March 1939, Louella waited for the call from Gable, but it never came. Then, unbeknownst to Louella, on the morning of March 29, Gable and Lombard, accompanied by Gable's publicist, Otto Winkler, drove to Arizona and eloped. Immediately after the ceremony, Winkler called Howard Strickling at MGM, who planned a press conference for the following day at Lombard's home.59

  They had wanted to marry in peace, without the usual press circus that surrounded celebrity weddings. Happy with their quiet elopement, the newlyweds had a peaceful drive back to Los Angeles-that is, until Lombard began to panic. Louella would be furious that they had broken their promise, she predicted, and she demanded that Gable pull over at the nearest gas station, where she tried to phone Louella. But Louella was still in San Francisco, with most of the other Hollywood columnists on a "press junket" funded by the Twentieth Century Fox studio, and Lombard called Marion Davies for advice. After chastising her for not giving Louella the news, Davies urged Lombard to send Louella a telegram, and for good measure, one to Hearst, too. "Married this afternoon," the dispatch read. "Carole and Clark."

  But the note only added insult to injury. When Louella returned home the following day and found the telegram, it was already old news. The United Press and Associated Press syndicates had gotten the break, and headlines announcing the Gable-Lombard marriage appeared in publications around the world.60 Embarrassed, Louella told her readers that "among the first to receive a telegram from the newlyweds was William Randolph Hearst," that she had "had their promise [they] would telephone me and they did." But everyone knew that she had been outscooped.6' Gable and Lombard had betrayed her, and the snubfrom her friends, no less-upset her. Feeling weaker than she had in months, she was unprepared for the blow that hit her that summer.

  The article appeared in the July 15, 1939, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. Titled "The First Lady of Hollywood" and illustrated with several photos of Louella posing with stars and studio bigwigs, on the surface it seemed like a tribute. It was anything but. The article began by attacking Louella's writing and appearance. Calling Louella the "most consistently inaccurate reporter who ever lived," the Post claimed that "in her own field, where bad writing is as ... common as breathing, Louella's stands out like an asthmatic's gasps.... Plump and breathless," Louella perpetually wore an "expression of blank bewilderment" and was "twenty minutes late mentally." Though everyone in Hollywood detested her, the Post wrote, Louella, "a damply sentimental woman," believed that she had hundreds of friends-31z, to be exact, Louella had claimed.62

  After implying that she was an alcoholic-that she "started her day with a tumbler of whisky," it claimed inaccurately-the piece went on to attack Harry and Harriet. "A beautiful quality about [Louella's] success was that it turned out to be contagious.... Through osmosis, other members of her family became infected with prosperity. Harriet, her daughter, developed a talent for producing shorts at $50o a week." "The same happy experience befell Louella's husband, Dr. Harry Martin," it continued. "Relatively obscure before this marriage, after it he became the sensation of the local medicocinematic world. Studios vied with one another for his services ... and as honor followed honor he became chief of staff of the Motion Picture Relief Fund, civil-service commissioner, and chairman of the State Boxing Commission-heights to which a simple urologist has rarely soared." "A gruesome aspect of the matter," the Post added, "is that Louella addresses him-and in public-as `Docky-wocky."'63

  Though the byline read "Thomas Wood," in reality the article was a threeway collaboration by Wood, screenwriter-producer Nunnally Johnson, and Sidney Skolsky. Wood, who had worked for Louella briefly in 1937 as a legman, interviewed Louella for an article scheduled to run in the New Yorker in early 1938. When Harold Ross, the editor, turned down the piece on "literary grounds"-the article, he claimed, was poorly written-Wood approached Johnson to assist him with a rewrite. Johnson disliked Louella, and he added spite to the piece. When Skolsky heard of the project, things turned ugly. In early 1939 the Post purchased the revamped article with Wood's solo byline (Johnson and Skolsky insisted on remaining anonymous), and the magazine was so delighted with the piece that it commissioned Wood to write a series of articles on the private lives of the studio executives. Joked the Hollywood Reporter, "Who was it that suggested some studio ought to buy the Satevepost article on Louella as a vehicle to star Hedda Hopper?"64

  It was the most critical public attack to date. The Post, with a circulation of three million, seriously damaged Louella's public reputation. The accusations of nepotism were justified, and the intimations of alcoholism nearly believable, since Louella, under Harry's influence, had become a heavy imbiber. Perhaps even more upsetting to Louella, the article indicated a loss of control over her public image. Since the beginning of her career with Hearst, she had used her access to his multimedia empire-newspapers, magazines, radio, and film-to create her public persona as an innocent yet glamorous "friend to the stars." Wood's piece shattered the facade, and it heralded more damning things to come.

  Determined to fight back, Louella called the noted Hollywood lawyer Jerry Geisler and discussed the possibility of filing suit against the Post. Though Geisler warned her that it would be difficult-the article technically was not libelous, since nothing in it could be proven false-Louella insisted, and by the end of the month, he and Louella had filed a suit against the Post for a million dollars. Geisler filed it in the wrong court, however, and the case stalled. Rather than refile and pursue a lengthy and most likely unsuccessful legal battle, Louella, who was by that fall immersed in other projects, decided to drop the case. Instead, she planned to punish Johnson, Skolsky, and particularly Wood in other ways. Wood found himself on an unofficial Hollywood blacklist and had trouble finding work for several years; Wood's spouse, the actress Lee Patrick, received only critical reviews in the Examiner for the rest of her career. Since it was difficult for Louella to strike back against the popular and well-entrenched Johnson, she attacked his wife, actress Dorris Bowdon. "I ran into Dorris Bowdon last night," Louella wrote in her column. "She used to be such a pretty girl before she married."65

  She took a minor respite from her campaign of spite that September, when Harriet and the socia
lly prominent actor-playwright King Kennedy ("He is a charming boy," Louella described him, "witty and clever") were wed in a lavish ceremony in the garden at Marsons Farm.66 Upon Louella's request, Louis B. Mayer had postponed the premiere of the film Elizabeth and Fssex, at the expense of ten thousand dollars to the studio, so that celebrities could drive up to Northridge for the four-hundred-person affair. Described by Newsweek as one of the most elegant Hollywood weddings in recent years, it was attended by "more stars ... than there are in the Milky Way." Both Louella and Kennedy's mother were thrilled by the marriage, which was an obvious front, since both Harriet and Kennedy were homosexual.67 Not long after the wedding, they stopped living together and were involved with other lovers. After the couple's divorce, which Louella blamed on Kennedy, he went to work as a legman-for Hedda Hopper.

  By the time of Harriet's wedding, Hopper had gone from being a minor annoyance to being a serious threat. Though her column still appeared only in the Esquire syndicate, in September 1939 she announced that she would be going on the air three times a week with a gossip show underwritten by Sunkist, Louella's former sponsor. Being without a radio show herself since Hollywood Hotel went off the air, Louella feared, quite rightly, that the new Sunkist program would give Hopper the edge.

  Hopper also had other advantages that troubled Louella. Unlike Louella, who came to California as a member of the Hearst press, Hopper, a former actress, had always been an insider. She was loud, gregarious, and naturally theatrical-qualities that endeared her to her many friends, and that Louella, less relaxed and more reserved, had always wished for herself. And though she was only four years younger than Louella, natural good looks and a meticulous beauty regime had kept the tall, blond Hopper youthful and photogenic. She was perfectly poised to become a name in her own right, and Louella worried that it would be only a matter of time before Hopper's talents propelled her into the spotlight.