The First Lady of Hollywood

by Samantha Barbas

  She used the Dixon event, with its connotations of heartland Americanism, to promote not only herself but also Hollywood, which had recently been the subject of three well-publicized congressional investigations. In 1940, Texas congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (later known as the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC), began investigations into what he claimed was communist infiltration of the film industry. In spring of 194o, Dies heard testimony from a number of former Communist Party members, including the former Party organizer John L. Leech, who claimed falsely that Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Franchot Tone, Frederic March, and a dozen other actors were communists.85 At the same time, Congress had been debating the Neely Bill, which if passed would have ended the studios' block booking, a practice that forced exhibitors to purchase a studio's entire annual output, sight unseen, in order to get its top, class A films.86 The hearings ultimately led to an October 1940 consent decree that allowed block booking to continue, but in blocks no larger than five films.87 Then, in September 1941, not long before Louella left for Dixon, two isolationist senators, Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye, claimed that the major studios had produced seventeen "war mongering" feature films that had urged the United States to become involved in the conflict in Europe and Asia and to declare war on the Axis powers. Hollywood, they claimed, was a "propaganda machine."88 In Salt Lake City on her way to Dixon, Louella, commenting on the accusations, told the Deseret News, "It's the first time I've ever heard of anyone being indicted for being patriotic. We follow public trends and give people what they want. The whole thing is silly."89

  Hearst had called Louella in Dixon during the festivities, and she was touched. "I want to thank you again for telephoning me in Dixon," she wrote to Hearst when she returned to Hollywood.9° Harry had assured Louella that the event would be good publicity, but the press coverage of Louella Parsons Day was anything but flattering. In its coverage of the event, Henry Luce's Time magazine printed an unattractive photo of Louella that accentuated her weight and double chin. This particularly irked her, since she had been gaining weight steadily over the past five years and was sensitive about her appearance. Earlier that year, she had complained to Hearst about an unflattering picture of her in the Examiner. "Honest Louella I can't see anything offensive in the picture[,] but I have told all our people to let you alone and not bother you with pictures or anything. I am sure that nothing you can criticize will be published hereafter," Hearst wrote back in response to her protests." The horrible photo in Time was the last thing she needed. "It is not pleasant to have fun poked at your appearance in national magazines," she wrote in her autobiography. "After ... [seeing] myself in a Luce publication[,] I feel like something out of a horror movie."91

  Time's article was even worse. In it, the magazine accused Louella of having arranged the event solely to undermine a publicity event that Hopper was hosting the same day. On the same weekend as Louella Parsons Day, it turned out, Hopper was serving as the mistress of ceremonies at an "all star fete" sponsored by the American Legion at its national convention in Milwau- kee.93 That the two competing events had been scheduled for the same weekend was genuinely coincidental. Though both were planned over a year in advance, Hopper had sent out her invitations first, and during the summer several actors agreed to accompany her to Milwaukee. A few weeks later, when Louella sent out her own invitations for Dixon, eyebrows were raised. Torn between their friendship with Hopper and their fear of Louella, the actors were in a bind. Many-Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Jane Withers, and Carole Landis, among others-went with Hopper. Others, including Bob Hope, Jerry Colonna, and Joe E. Brown, went to Dixon on Saturday, then flew to Milwaukee to appear with Hedda. Most of the actors, fearing reprisals either way, declined both invitations and stayed in Hollywood. In the end, there were "hard feelings all around," Variety reported, though most felt that Louella was to blame.94

  Emotionally and physically weak, in mid-October 1941 Louella wrote personally to Hearst asking for a vacation. "I have no doubt that you are tired," Hearst wrote back. "You do too much work." A week later, with Hearst's blessings, Louella and Harry were off to the East Coast, where they planned to rest "for a week or ten days" before heading off for a monthlong rest in Bermuda. She had wanted to go to Europe, and had tried to convince Joe Connolly of the International News Service to send her to report on the war from London, but Connolly turned her down, having already assigned reporter Inez Robb.95 Instead Louella and Harry went to Baltimore, where Harry was to receive treatment at the Johns Hopkins hospital for what Louella described as lingering complications from a bad case of pneumonia.96 After Baltimore, Louella and Harry traveled to New York, where they spent weekends with Hearst's son Bill Hearst Jr. at his Long Island home, attended Broadway shows with Hearst executive Dick Berlin, and held parties for the film and publishing elite in her suite at the Waldorf Astoria.97

  The festivities came to a sudden end on December 7, 1941. On her way back from a football game with Bill Hearst and Harry, she heard over the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese. The following day, while Louella was at a Broadway performance of The Land Is Bright, President Roosevelt broadcast his declaration of war against Japan, which was followed three days later by a declaration of war against Germany and Italy, Japan's European allies. After making hasty plans to return to Los Angeles, she telegrammed Hearst with congratulations on his editorial of December 9. "Well fellow Americans, we are in the war and we have got to win it," Hearst had written. "Before the war is over we will have burned up all the paper houses in Japan and sunk most of their scrap iron battleships and put this bunch of Oriental marauders back on the right little tight little out of sight little island where they belong." "I was very proud when I opened the [paper] this morning to find that ... we had the greatest writer in America," Louella immediately wrote to the Chief. "Your column was terrific the first day of the war. Doctor read it aloud to me not only once but twice, and [we] quoted it to everybody we met.... I guess this knocks my radio show higher than a kite, for I don't see how they can sell soap when I'm told very likely there will be a shortage," she continued. If there were a dearth of war re porters, she added-or for that matter, a shortage of movie news-she would be happy to write "about the war, instead of the movies, but I imagine you have experts."98

  In spite of the war, public interest in Louella's column and in Hollywood Premiere continued. Hollywood Premiere, she learned, had earned approximately fourteen hundred fan letters per week, six hundred letters ahead of the Hollywood Hotel record.99 But Hedda Hopper's star was rising faster. In late 1940, Hopper had signed with the Des Moines Register syndicate, giving her nearly three million readers in fifty papers. She had also made six short films about Hollywood for Paramount, called Hedda Hopper's Hollywood.

  The feud between the two columnists grew more vicious and more public. In December 1941, Variety reported a "spat" between the columnists at KNX radio, where both Hopper and Louella recorded their programs. When Hopper went down the hall from her studio to visit Paulette Goddard, who was rehearsing with Louella for Hollywood Premiere, Louella "refused to speak another line" until Hopper left. An article in Pic magazine dramatized the conflict, describing it as a "war of the words." The piece described Louella as a "roly poly matron" with more than a few skeletons in her closet. "In her wide circle of acquaintances, there are scores of persons who would like nothing better than to write a biography of the columnist, but ... the biographers usually succumb to literary laryngitis," it remarked. "Even Hedda Hopper hasn't stepped over the hedge into Louella's private life." The sparring continued daily, Pic reported, with ongoing "sniping in the trade papers, on the airwaves, and in other columns," and it was only a matter of time, the magazine predicted, until one of the rivals got the upper hand.'°°

  It happened that spring. In May 1942, newspapers across the country announced that Hopper had signed a three-year contract with the Chicago Tribune-New York New
s syndicate. The extraordinary contract, based on the popularity of her column at the Los Angeles Times, granted her an additional twenty-seven papers and tripled her readership, bringing it to 5,750,000. Though Louella, with her 409 papers and her readership of seventeen million, still had greater exposure, "her whims no longer command Hollywood," Time announced. Both Hollywood loyalties and public tastes, it remarked, were shifting toward the "better liked" Hopper. 101 Indeed, the ink had hardly dried on the new contract when studio publicists began knocking at Hopper's door bearing gifts and promises. "Once a week, for some time now ... publicity departments all over town have gathered at a command lunch to pay court to Louella Parsons at what is quaintly known as the `Parsons idea meeting,"' Variety announced. "Lolly has been the only columnist to rate this kind of attention. Yesterday, the heads of publicity departments, all of 'em except one who was out of town, without command attended a private luncheon with Miss Hopper, expressing their wish to `cooperate fully' with her, now that she has risen to the ranking position as a columnist. " 102

  While Louella traversed the depths of her personal hell, Hollywood celebrated. Louella's fifteen-year hold over the film industry had been broken, and on studio lots actors, directors, and executives cheered. Variety expressed the feelings of many when it described the shift in power as no less than the passing of a dynasty. "The Queen Is Dead," it announced triumphantly. "Long Live the Queen!" 103

  IN HOLLYWOOD, there were two schools of thought on the Hopper-Louella feud. The first was that it was hype-that Hopper and Louella didn't hate each other but had staged the war for publicity. This was clearly false; Hopper and Louella resented each other, and they always would. The second was that the feud consumed them, and that each wanted nothing more than her rival's defeat. This, too, was a myth. Certainly Louella would not have shed tears had Hopper lost her lucrative new contract, and Hopper would not have lost any sleep if papers stopped carrying Louella's column. But both women had much more on their minds than destroying one another. They hated the rivalry but tolerated it, and they went on, indefatigably, getting their scoops, writing their news, and promoting themselves with all the finesse of a circus barker.

  The second myth owes its persistence, in large part, to the exaggerated press put out by the Luce publications, which shamelessly dramatized the rivalry as a "war of the words" between two neurotic women. Playing on the stereotype of aggressive females as catty, the stories rallied public antifeminist sentiment and drew readers eager to see two "career women" destroy each other in a fit of bitchy competition. The feud stories were also good ammunition in Luce's ongoing attack on Louella. Though both women came off looking foolish, it was Louella, not Hopper, who became the queen shrew in these stories. In an anxious time of international conflict, the tale of the gossip battle was a welcome diversion from Americans' war woes, and in the early 1940s it became one of the splashiest and most sensational stories to come out of Hollywood.

  The Luce campaign began in the summer of 1941, when Life published a photo layout, "Life Goes to a Hollywood House Moving," on Hopper's move from her small Fairfax Avenue bungalow to the "swankier" Beverly Hills home she had recently purchased with earnings from her column and radio show. "Hedda Hopper is a gay, boisterous, impulsive woman in her fifties who knows more Hollywood gossip than any person alive," it began. Along with a "vast, devoted following," Hopper had "two qualities" that made her one of the "top gossip purveyors of her day: she has been in movies 25 years and she never forgets." In the spring of 1942, Time celebrated Hopper's Chicago Tribune-New York News contract with an article, "Hedda Makes Hay," that celebrated the "demise" of "Louella Parsons ... [whose] whims no longer command Hollywood." According to Time: "Much better liked than Lolly Parsons, when she started Hedda had to put friendships and wits against the powerful inertia of Lolly's 20 year reign on Hollywood's gossip roost." But Hopper triumphed through "great personality," a thick skin that came from having been "kicked around plenty," and her intimate knowledge of Hollywood social life. "Hedda Hopper," the article assured readers, "is the real Hollywood."'

  The Luce articles portrayed Hopper as an underdog who had triumphed through hard work and talent, and Louella as an underhanded schemer who owed her success solely to Hearst. "Until the ascendancy of Hedda Hopper, there was the unique phenomenon of a great American industry cringing and genuflecting before the redundant figure of Louella `Lollipop' Parsons, a Hearst columnist whose power at one time was so great she could not only demand-and get-a 24 hour break on every important news story in every studio, but who could-and did-bully the biggest stars in the business into appearing without pay on her radio program, Hollywood Hotel," Time wrote. Wrote Life, "the Screen Actors' Guild eventually put a stop to the latter practice, and Hedda Hopper was largely instrumental in breaking Parsons' stranglehold on the studios. Louella Parsons is not a has-been, but neither is she any longer the ringmaster of the Hollywood circus. Hedda Hopper has a whip of her own and cracks it more expertly."2 According to Life, Hopper was a hardworking journalist who "starts gathering gossip as soon as she gets up ... and doesn't stop work till midnight." Louella received her news from studio press agents who had been blackmailed into compliance and actors who "phoned [Louella] first and eloped afterwards lest she sideswipe them forever after."3

  The articles then went after Louella's looks. Hopper, wrote Time, was tall and blond and statuesque (a "handsome, headlong gossip"), while Louella was short, pudgy, and crooning-"fat, fifty, and fatuous."4 "Prettier, wittier, more kindly by instinct," Hopper was an "actress trying to be a columnist," while Louella was "a columnist trying to be an actress.... Louella ... has demonstrated in her few appearances in the movies that she is a little shaky in the acting department. Hedda Hopper, on the other hand, has tasted sweet success in both fields."5 Hopper's radio voice was "caressingly rhythmic," while Louella's suffered from "unmusical shrillness."6

  There were, in fact, real differences between Hopper and Louella that bore little resemblance to Time's and Life's dark-versus-light, Manichaean descriptions. As many in Hollywood recognized, Louella was a much more skilled, thorough, and experienced reporter than Hopper. "Hedda and Louella were not comparable," remembered one studio publicist. "They worked differently, thought differently." In particular, he claimed, Hopper "had no idea what a storywas." Hopper was much more willing to play "fast and loose with facts" than Louella and wrote in a blunt and critical style. "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 had done anything wrong," said one publicist.? It was Hopper's lack of experience in journalism, according to many of her acquaintances, that led to her deep-seated insecurity about her position in Hollywood. "To me, Parsons was honest. Hedda lived by her wits and tried to carry herself by being bright and amusing.... With Hedda there was this great facade," claimed one actress.8

  Despite, or perhaps because of, her lack of confidence, Hopper was tough, flamboyant, and outspoken. She was known for her outrageous hats-some were illuminated by battery-operated lights, and one of her favorites had a miniature Eiffel Tower on it-and each year purchased approximately 15o of them, which the IRS allowed her to deduct as a business expense.9 In Hollywood, she worked out of a cluttered office half a block from Hollywood and Vine that was filled with hat boxes, battered furniture, and scrapbooks. "The anteroom might well be that of a dentist who had fallen into a cavity and never managed to climb out," Time wrote. "With its bare radiators, scarred doors and desks, signed photographs and careless gadgets, the whole suite resembles an oldtime theatrical booking agency." She had an assistant, a graduate of the University of North Carolina named David "Spec" McClure, and a secretary, Treva Davidson.10 "Every morning she'd come in and she'd usually have her arms loaded with magazines and stuff, and she'd talk with people along the street and in the elevator. She'd talk to people in traffic. She'd come in the morning and say, `good morning slaves!'
It was the first damn thing," McClure remembered." Jaik Rosenstein, who worked for Hopper as a legman in the 1940s, described her as "unpredictable and perverse and temperamental and argumentative and bigoted and biased and an incurable ham ... [and] captious and impetuous and cold and conniving and vindictive and cruel."" In an oft-repeated anecdote, when one studio publicist asked why Hopper had reduced his exclusive scoop to one line low in her column, she said: "Bitchery, baby, pure bitchery!" She nicknamed herself "the Bitch of the World." 'I

  Her reporting style was no-holds-barred. When Lana Turner married Bob Topping, Hopper telephoned the press agent of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the couple was staying, and demanded the number of their bungalow. Her plan was to enter disguised as a maid in the hopes of catching the newlyweds in bed together.14 Not surprisingly, many actors had little patience for her outrageous tactics and what they claimed to be the many inaccuracies in her column. After Hopper printed an unflattering comment about Joan Bennett in her column, Bennett sent Hopper a skunk as a Valentine gift. The card that accompanied it read: "Here's a little Valentine, that very plainly tells the reason it reminded me so much of you-it smells!" 15 In 1943 Hopper falsely accused Joseph Cotten of having romanced teen star Deanna Durbin while they made the film Hers to Hold together. Cotten ordered Hopper to stop the rumors, but she refused. Shortly afterward, Cotten, who saw Hopper at a party, kicked her in the behind and Ann Sheridan dumped a dish of mashed potatoes on her.16 The next day Cotten received hundreds of telegrams and bouquets from actors impressed by his bravado. 17 A conflict with Joan Fontaine in the Brown Derby restaurant, over unflattering comments Hopper had made in her column, became so heated that Fontaine threatened to "meet Hopper in the alley.""