For many in Hollywood, this was the last straw. In May 1951, when Hopper was serving as an emcee for the American National Theater and Academy's fourth annual celebration, she was heckled by the audience and drew "instrumental raspberries" in the form of "hoots and toots from the orchestra pit," according to Variety. Variety speculated that this was "presumably either because of general right-wing political sympathies ... or her recent specific attack on the film colony in messages to the Un-American Activities Committee. "'0' By 1952, she had become so bitter and vengeful that she was an embarrassment not only to her publishers but also to fellow red-baiters. The New York Daily News, which carried her column, was so irked by her political comments that it "warned her to stick to the job at hand and not try to settle international affairs." After she made a speech in Chicago before the Motion Picture Theater Owners ofAmerica that urged exhibitors not to run films by actors, producers, or writers with alleged subversive ties, the notoriously right-wing Hearst columnist George Sokolsky told Variety, "People with Miss Hopper's obsession are very dangerous people for us [anticommunists]. They hurt us all over the country by taking an almost bloodbath attitude. They give the cause of anticommunism a bad name." 109
Throughout the 1950s, the communist witch-hunt dragged on, and Hopper continued her starring role. Several right-wing groups, including the Motion Picture Alliance and the American Business Consultants, which published Red Channels, a list of alleged Communist Party members in Hollywood, assisted the studio executives by creating a blacklist of those who had been suspected of involvement in communist front organizations and a "graylist" of activists who had been involved in liberal politics or causes. The three-million-member American Legion, which threatened to boycott films to which suspected communists had contributed, compiled the names of 2,98 alleged Hollywood subversives, which it passed along to the studio executives. In all, 2,x2, were black- or graylisted. In her column, Hopper regularly published the names of suspected communists that she had received either from various Hollywood informants or from the Anti-Communism Voters' League, the Committee to Proclaim Liberty, and the Americanism Educational League. 10 Tips she felt too incendiary for her column she passed on to the American Legion for use in its magazine."'
Though Louella was concerned with what she now genuinely believed to be a looming political threat, she was content with more marginal involvement in the anticommunist battle. Her passion was reporting, not politics, and at the time, she had other, more pressing interests. She had her religion. She had her radio show, a possible television deal, and, as ever, the column. More than anything, she sought pleasure with a vengeance. In her seventies, she was determined to enjoy the last years of a life that seemed more precious and fragile each day.
HEARST AND HARRY WERE GONE. So was the old Hollywood. In 1952, film admissions hit a record low of fifty-eight million a week, down nearly forty million since 1947- Over three thousand theaters had closed since 1950, the number ofstu- dio workers regularly employed had declined 15 percent since 1947, and the studios had drastically pared their lists of contract performers. Most of the former top names were freelancing, and a crop of brash newcomers-Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others-shattered Hollywood's image of genteel glamour with their tough swagger and edgier, more naturalistic acting style. To keep up with the competition from television, the studios introduced 3D film, the widescreen exhibition formats Cinerama and Cinemascope, and even Smell-O-Vision, in which scents corresponding to screen images were wafted through the theater. Nothing worked. One pundit suggested that exhibitors show movies in the street, thereby driving people into the theaters. To the moguls, it wasn't funny. By 1955, film attendance had plummeted to forty-six million tickets a week, and over 65 percent of American families owned a television set.'
It was the end of an era for Hollywood and for Louella. Like many of the old-timers, she refused to accept the film industry's decline and persisted in a state of denial. In her column in September 1951, Louella attacked an article in Life magazine that claimed the movie industry was "doomed." It was "completely erroneous," Louella told her readers. "Never in our history have we had as fine a product as this year. Do you think for a moment that Life would dare attack the steel, the woolen, or the automobile business as it does motion pictures? Certainly not. Yet our studios put down the red carpet for this publication, which has always taken a derogatory attitude towards Hollywood. If the picture business doesn't take some stand on an article of this type, which seeks to destroy it, then they deserve the treatment they have received from Time and Life in the past."2
Though the studios initially had been reluctant to go into television production, by 1952, according to Newsweek, they had capitulated, apparently under the theory "If you can't beat 'em, swallow 'em."3 Universal and Columbia were producing television programs, the Republic studio and independent producer David Selznick had sold their films to TV stations, and the major TV networks had opened up studios in Hollywood. In March 1951, ABC, which was beginning television production in Hollywood, approached Louella for a possible TV series, but the deal never materialized.4 Later that fall she made a test film for a proposed half-hour television gossip show to be sponsored by Jergens-Woodbury. When Jergens passed on the show, Louella, upset, told them that she would not renew her radio contract with them.s On December 23, 1951, Louella did her last Jergens radio show, an episode with one of her favorite actors, Bing Crosby, who sang "Silver Bells."6 But she was not off the air for long. In early March 1952, she signed a contract with Colgate for a Tuesday night radio gossip show to debut at 6 P.M. on April i on CBS. By October, the program aired on more than two hundred stations.?
In addition to her newspaper and radio work, she was still doing articles for Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine and the fan magazine Modern Screen. In a 1951 piece in Modern Screen, Louella, still smoldering from Citizen Kane after nearly ten years, attacked Orson Welles. "Many years back, I had heard that Welles was making a picture about someone I love very much. He said (and I shall remember his words always), `It couldn't be farther from the truth.' And from that day to this, I have never forgiven him. I can take darts directed at me. I have felt the sting of many of them. But I cannot bear to see anyone I love hurt," she wrote in a piece titled "The Truth about My Feuds."' Louella may have still been defending the Chief, but he was no longer around to defend her. She was upset to find many of her articles for Hearst's Cosmopolitan edited and rewritten. "It's a bit of a shock to pick up the magazine and find a rewrite," she told the editors in 1951. "That has never happened with any of my stuff on the ... papers."9
Despite her age and worsening health, Louella kept up a rigorous schedule. Each morning she woke at eight and, after coffee and a walk with her cocker spaniels, Jimmy and Woodbury, worked for six hours before taking a nap. She rarely went down to the studios and instead installed a projector in her house for film screenings and conducted interviews at her well-stocked bar.10 "You never know if Louella is interviewing the star, the press agent ... or maybe her two cocker spaniels which are running about," recalled one publicist. "But somehow through all the gibble-gabble, she gets the core and comes up with the story."" The Maple Drive house was cluttered with crystal sconces, gold-leafed mirrors, and display cases filled with old silverware that Collins, Louella's butler for over twenty years, spent hours dusting. One visitor, commenting on Louella's penchant for collecting expensive antique knickknacks, claimed to have detected "the influence of Mr. Hearst." Louella had turned two upstairs bedrooms into offices equipped with five telephones, and her assistants, Dorothy Manners, Dottie May, and Neil Rau, came daily to work. She had a "perfume bar" installed in her bedroom to display the many bottles she received as gifts, and on top of her dresser she had prominently mounted two silver-framed pictures, of the Virgin Mary and Hearst.12
Always on the heavy side, Louella began dieting during the 1950s. As she commented in a 1956 newspaper interview, her weight had become her "big personal problem": "
Fat people have less chance of living to be old than thin people. Well, I want to live to be old. Old as old can be." She worried that she was overeating for emotional reasons. "When my husband died my interests narrowed," she recalled, and "the fat piled on." She began crash dieting in the winter of 1951. She also enlisted the services ofTerry Hunt, a former boxer who ran a fitness studio or "healthatorium" on La Cienega Boulevard in Beverly Hills and who had helped condition Rita Hayworth, Claudette Colbert, Ingrid Bergman, and Hedda Hopper, among more than 750 others. 11 But Louella's strenuous weight-loss efforts only exacerbated her health problems.14 In February 1952 she had a serious bout of flu that developed into bronchial pneumonia. Then, in July, she was back in the hospital after having suffered a minor seizure.15 Following her recuperation at San Simeon, where she spent time with Hearst's sons and a few visiting Hearst editors, she returned to Hollywood and, by mid-August, was out on the town with her new beau, Jimmy McHugh, dining and dancing on Sunset Strip. 16
For nearly two decades, Jimmy McHugh had been one of the most successful and prolific composers in Hollywood. The son of a plumbing engineer, McHugh was born in 1894 in Boston and began his career in music as a rehearsal pianist at the Boston Opera House. After writing the popular World War I song "Hinky Dinky Parlez Vous," McHugh was hired as house composer for Harlem's Cotton Club, where he worked for nine years. At the Cotton Club he met lyricist Dorothy Fields, and together they wrote several pieces for Broadway productions, including "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" and "On the Sunny Side of the Street." When McHugh was wiped out by the Great Depression, George Gershwin gave him a piano, and McHugh then wrote the hit "I'm in the Mood for Love." After subsequently winning an offer from MGM to compose for films, McHugh went on to score more than fifty movies, working for practically every studio in Hollywood. Among McHugh's film compositions that became popular standards were "Dinner at Eight," "I'm in the Mood for Love," "I Feel a Song Coming On," and "Thank You for a Lovely Evening." For his wartime hit "Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer" and his work producing the 1945 war bond "Aquacade," which sold $28 million in war bonds in one night, President Truman awarded McHugh the Presidential Certificate of Merit.'? McHugh, who had a son, had separated from his wife in 1949.
Louella and McHugh, who appeared on her radio show in December 1945, had been friends for years. McHugh had written the song "Louella, Louella, Louella" for her 1948 testimonial dinner. One of Harry's favorite songs-he sang it often at parties-was McHugh's "I Can't Give You Anything but Love." Louella and McHugh were not romantically involved before Harry's death, but by the summer of 1952 "Louella and Jimmy" had become an item. In July 1952, Judy Garland prodded Louella to "tell the truth. When are you and Jimmy McHugh getting married?"" Louella then became "all flustered and schoolgirlish." At parties, the Hollywood Reporter noted, "Jimmy tastes Louella's cocktails first to see that they're just right. It's LOVE!" The romance seemed so intense that Walter Winchell wrote in his column that they would wed. When Louella denied the rumor, it was crossed out of Winchell's column at the last 19
As just about everyone in Hollywood knew, the relationship was almost entirely utilitarian. Louella was lonely, and she wanted an escort. McHugh, who managed several young actors and singers, wanted publicity for his proteges and his own budding nightclub career. Mc Hugh took Louella out almost nightly and flattered her shamelessly. While a guest star on the Larry Finley radio show, he dedicated "I'm in the Mood for Love" to Louella. And he made his song "Louella, Louella" a staple of his Hollywood nightclub act.20 When McHugh opened at Ciro's nightclub in Hollywood, Louella attended every night for several weeks, sometimes staying out until 4 or 5 A.M.21 A fellow Catholic, McHugh gave Louella what became one of her most cherished possessions, an electrically wired statue of the Virgin Mary for her back lawn. Louella returned McHugh's favors by buying him dozens of expensive suits and, in 1953, a costly watch engraved "To Jimmy from Louella with Love."22 Even more valuable to McHugh was her constant promotion of him in her column. In 1952, Louella mentioned him more than twenty times.21
Perhaps because of her age or because of McHugh's attentions, Louella seemed more relaxed in the 195os and expressed fewer worries about her image and the feud with Hopper. Nonetheless, she continued to flex her muscles in Hollywood. When Louella arrived late to a 1951 Photoplay magazine awards dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel and was given a poor seat, she became loud and demanding and was quickly moved to a better table.24 Later that year, several Hollywood journalists witnessed Louella in action when they got together to stage a spoof of the Academy Awards called "The Mickey Awards." (The Mickeys were designed in the shape of a Mickey Finn martini glass and had a skull and crossbones painted on them.) When Y. Frank Freeman, head of Paramount, at the last minute pressured scheduled hosts George Jessel, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis not to emcee the show, the reporters called an emergency meeting. One of the columnists suggested getting in touch with Louella, who was one of the sponsors of the Mickeys. Louella then called Freeman and told him that if he did not allow Martin and Lewis to officiate the program, he would "never hear the end of it." Freeman quickly capitulated. To thank her, at the ceremony "a down-front chair for her was zealously guarded in the rush-hour throng by a couple of stalwart reporters," remembered LosAngeles Daily News columnist Ezra Goodman, who was at the event.25 In April 1953, Louella was feted by four hundred members of the all-male theatrical organization the Masquers, which threw a party to celebrate her thirtieth anniversary with the Hearst Corporation. Jimmy McHugh sang "Louella, Louella, Louella," and Eddie Cantor described her as "an honest person" and "one who has endeared herself to millions." "You may question at times her literacy but not her integrity," Cantor said, and the crowd broke out into spontaneous applause.26
Though newspaper circulation increased nationally during the early 1950s, the Hearst papers were on the decline. Between 1951 and 1955, as a result of poor financial and editorial management, circulation dropped by 5 percent, and in 1954 alone Hearst's eleven newspapers lost $1.5 million in circulation revenue and $4 million in advertising accounts.27 The losses, however, had little effect on the readership of Louella's column for the International News Service, which appeared daily in over twelve hundred papers throughout the world and had an estimated 40 million readers. In 1952, Time, which had, since Hearst's death, reversed its stance on Louella, referred to her in a fulllength feature as "queen of the Hollywood gossip columnists." "Every producer, director, and actor reads her column in the Los Angeles Examiner every morning, and each knows that all the others are reading it. That makes ... Louella a Very Important Person," Time wrote. Newsweek called her "the town's best reporter." Hopper, "Lolly's closest rival," it reported, had 32 million readers.21
In 1952 Hopper published From under My Hat, an autobiography that was serialized in the Woman's Home Companion and that went on to become a national best-seller. The book took several shots at Louella, who came off, predictably, as shrewish, possessive, and spiteful. "Louella and I have been offered a fistful of money to appear on radio and in pictures together. I always accept; she always declines," Hopper claimed. "Even when our mutual friend Charles Brackett wanted us to appear together in [the 1951 film] Sunset Boulevard, she refused. I appeared, and for months she didn't mention the picture or the name of its star in her column." Louella had, in fact, declined the role, and the parts were then rescripted as one role for Hopper. It was not because she was afraid to appear with Hopper but because she felt that the part, as a crooning, predatory press gossip, would tarnish her reputation. Louella had recently been parodied in the MGM film Singin' in the Rain as Dora Bailey, an addlepated silent-era columnist who swoons over the heartthrob Don Lockwood, played by Gene Kelly.29
By the early 195os, Hopper and Louella had become cultural icons-symbols, albeit much criticized and lampooned, of the nation's uneasy romance with celebrity culture. In the immediate postwar period, a number of cultural critics had decried the ubiquity of "star news" and "star images" in popular cult
ure and what they perceived, correctly, as a national fascination with media stardom that was metastasizing to incredible proportions. By 1950, Americans could choose from a pantheon of mass-mediated icons and see and read about them in a dizzying array of formats, including radio talk shows, television variety hours, newsreels, newspapers, and mass market magazines. No longer were movie stars the nation's premiere entertainment figures; they were joined by, and in some cases their popularity was surpassed by, radio personalities, television stars, and pop musicians. Social critics claimed that the fascination with entertainment celebrities masked deep feelings of malaise. The New Republic announced that millions of Americans, bored by the workaday world, stale marital relationships, and the unfulfilled promises of consumer culture, were attempting to satiate their spiritual yearnings and "hunger for heroes" through larger-than-life media figures. Through film and music icons, they found "escapism and substitution," wrote the New Yorker, but even the most fervent star crush could not provide adequate release for the legions vexed by "mass frustrated love." Readers en joyed celebrity gossip, declared the New York psychiatrist Gregory Zilboorg, because they were emotionally immature, having "never reached a grown-up level." "Mechanical civilization keeps people busy, and when they stop working, there is a pseudo-literary pill they can take for relaxation," he told Newsweek. Movie magazines and gossip columns eased daily tensions but eventually became part of the "blacking out of the individual." According to Zilboorg, Louella and Hopper churned out a kind of literary Valium for a disenchanted nation that salved its emotional shortcomings through simulated intimacy with pop idols.30
The First Lady of Hollywood Page 41