You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood's Golden Age

by Wagner, Robert J

  All these people had careers that lasted far longer than most stars. Hedda and Louella were still ruling the roost when I got into the movies after World War II, and they remained on the job until the 1960s.

  Louella was a sweet, vague creature who lived for scoops and had only the dimmest idea of anything that went on outside of Hollywood. In April 1939, just after the Italians invaded Albania, and war was clearly looming on the horizon, she wrote, “The deadly dullness of the last week was lifted today when Darryl Zanuck admitted he had bought all rights to Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird.”

  The extent of my courting of Louella involved accompanying her to the racetrack a few times. She had a special relationship with Fox because her husband “Docky” was the staff doctor at the studio.

  That’s me with Sophia Loren and Louella Parsons. On the far right is Clifton Webb.

  Courtesy of the author

  There was nothing vague about Hedda Hopper, ever. She was a committed conservative who had forgone romantic entanglements after she divorced the stage star DeWolf Hopper in order to concentrate on raising her son, Bill, who would later play Paul Drake on the Perry Mason TV series. With Hedda as a mother, Bill’s life could not have been easy, but in my opinion he turned out to be a very fine man.

  Hedda’s own acting career bottomed out in the 1930s, but in 1938 the Los Angeles Times tapped her to provide some competition for Louella Parsons, who had been writing for the Hearst papers since the silent days.

  Hedda was a far more intimidating person than Louella, but it was best not to mess with either of them. Both of them cultivated a wide array of informants within the industry who, then as now, tipped off the newspapers. If an actor sent flowers to an actress, the florist could call Hedda or Louella and let her know that the parties in question were having an affair, or were about to.

  One of Hedda’s great friends was Ida Koverman, who was Louis B. Mayer’s private secretary. It was Ida Koverman who brokered a wide acceptance of Hedda among many of the stars and enabled her to freshen her columns with up-to-date news and a more biting attitude. Most of Hedda’s best contacts were initially MGM stars such as Jeanette MacDonald or Norma Shearer. Hedda started attracting more attention, and consequently more papers, and she and Louella settled down to a feud that would continue for the next twenty-five years.

  A rare shot of the rival gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, circa 1948.

  Photofest

  Very few people really liked either Hedda or Louella, but very few people could afford to make it obvious. Generally, the attitude the studios had toward them was public deference and nervous laughter behind their backs. Louella would come to the set to talk to you, but if Hedda wanted an interview, Mohammed had to go to the mountain. I went to her house several times over the years, usually lugging flowers and chocolates.

  It was part of the game. You could get tired of it, but you couldn’t show it. That’s why they call it acting.

  While it was primarily women who functioned as the pipeline to the public, the people who funneled the information to the pipeline—the heads of publicity at the studios—were all men: Howard Strickling at MGM and Harry Brand at Fox, among others. I knew Harry quite well, because I was signed to a contract at Fox in 1949.

  Harry was born in 1896 in New York. When he was a child he broke his leg, but it was incorrectly set, leaving him with a slight limp for the rest of his life. Harry didn’t come from the movie business, but from politics and journalism. He had worked with Howard Strickling at the Los Angeles Express and the Los Angeles Tribune, where they were both sportswriters. That trade will teach you the importance of winning and losing, and both Howard and Harry meant to be on the side of the winners. In fact, Harry always dressed more like a sportswriter than an executive in the movie industry—he wore a slouch hat.

  After he left newspapers, Harry went to work for Warner Bros., then got hired by Joe Schenck at United Artists, where he even produced a couple of pictures. But Harry preferred publicity.

  When Schenck joined forces with Darryl Zanuck to form 20th Century, which later merged with Fox, Harry became head of publicity there. By that time, he had been working with Joe Schenck for twelve years, and everybody in Hollywood knew and liked him.

  Just about the same time as Schenck and Zanuck were joining forces, Harry joined forces with Sybil Morris, the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles family. Sybil and Harry were married in 1933. She was the right woman for him—idealistic, philanthropic, a doer. For a long time, Sybil’s pet project was the Motion Picture Relief Fund, but years later she turned her interest toward rehabilitating female convicts. Sybil eventually raised more than eight million dollars for the Sybil Brand Institute for Women.

  Because of Harry’s background in journalism, he knew a lot of people who knew a lot of people—everyone from politicians and law enforcement officials (Harry’s brother was a judge) to bartenders and racetrack touts. Sometimes Harry knew what was going on before the people who were involved did. Everybody liked him because he was genuinely likable; among his friends were both the ardent Democrat Harry Truman and the equally ardent Republican Richard Nixon (who loathed each other), not to mention a couple of governors and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.

  The influence of these publicity men eventually spread over the town. If journalism is all about figuring out who can give you the information you need for a story, the job of head of publicity at a movie studio is about figuring out how to keep the person who has the information from spilling it. Half the time, a press agent is really a suppress agent. In her memoirs Hedda Hopper wrote about how MGM spent nine thousand dollars keeping the reputation of one of its stars intact after he was caught propositioning an underage boy. Hopper didn’t mention his name, but it was William Haines. On those rare occasions when a star actually did make the papers for bad behavior—Robert Mitchum for smoking marijuana, Robert Walker or Frances Farmer for being drunk and disorderly—it was usually either a setup (Mitchum) or the studio washing its hands of a performer that was just too damn much trouble (Farmer).

  Usually, though, every bar patronized by any actor knew that if an actor got drunk and disorderly, proper procedure involved calling the studio, not the cops. A publicist would show up quickly, some folding money would be exchanged, and the offender hustled away. If the star was actually taken in by the police, they in turn would call the studio and the star would be quietly taken home, with a corresponding standing order for a large batch of tickets for the next fund-raiser to the Police Athletic League. Charges were rarely brought.

  The studios didn’t believe they were exercising influence; they believed they were simply accepting favors from old friends. For a time Harry Brand even gave the dangerous gossip columnist Walter Winchell an office on the Fox lot, which made it unlikely that Winchell would write anything destructive about any of the stars.

  Harry retired in 1962, in the middle of the Cleopatra debacle. The studio was pouring all its resources into the Rome location of the wildly overbudget epic, and the Fox publicity department was cut in half. (Not coincidentally, this was also the time when I made the decision to leave the studio, which focused on nothing but getting Cleopatra finished. Everything and everybody else had to fend for themselves, and I decided I could do better on my own, which indeed proved to be the case.)

  Harry Brand died in 1989. He wanted no service, and requested that people who cared about him make a contribution to the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills. It was a typically generous gesture on the part of one of the genuinely good men of the movie industry, one who just happened to also know a great deal of the secret history of Hollywood.

  Press agent Harry Brand posing for a picture.

  Time + Life Pictures/Getty Images

  As for Howard Strickling, he maintained his position with the people at MGM long after the
y, and he, had retired. It was Strickling who organized Spencer Tracy’s funeral. Spence had left the studio a good dozen years before his death, and Howard was retired by then, but the family knew that only one man could organize the funeral in a way that Spence would have wanted. True to form, Howard kept the press away in a manner that didn’t enrage them, and managed the entire day masterfully.

  (That was typical of the people who had made up the MGM hierarchy: Kay Thompson, the vocal coach, was always on call to help out at MGM for years after she left the studio, and I believe Margaret Booth did a lot of “consulting” long after she was no longer the head of the MGM editorial department and had gone to work for Ray Stark.)

  Another subculture that swarmed around the movie business consisted of press agents. One of the longest-serving, as well as one of the best, was Richard Gully. Richard was illegitimate, a cousin of Anthony Eden’s, and extremely British. How he ended up in Hollywood I don’t know, but Richard was involved in higher duties than just placing items in columns or keeping items out of them.

  One of his gifts was introducing clients into Hollywood society. He worked for Jack Warner for a long time, and it was Richard who made a lady out of Ann Warner and a half-assed gentleman out of Jack. Richard knew everybody, and knew not only where all the bodies were buried, but what size shovels had been used. Yet he never said a word about any of it. My wife, Jill, adored him, as did most people who knew him.

  These publicity men had to have their noses to the wind at all times; at the very least, they were street smart, and some of them were considerably more than that. Roughly speaking, their job could be divided into two parts: the nominal keeping of a star’s name in front of the public, and crazed ballyhoo. The master of the latter was a man named Russell Birdwell, who masterminded David Selznick’s search for Scarlett O’Hara, which made the entire nation even more conscious of Gone with the Wind than they would have ordinarily been.

  Birdwell was a freelancer, and very expensive; he would charge a client as much as a hundred thousand dollars for a year of his services, plus overhead. He was brilliant but erratic. One day Carole Lombard heard a director complaining about the taxes he had to pay; she told him that, considering how much money she made, she felt that her tax bill was pretty reasonable. Birdwell promptly forwarded the remark to the IRS, which publicized it, and before you knew it Carole Lombard was being praised for her patriotism in being happy to pay her taxes.

  It was Birdwell who devised the publicity campaign that promoted Jane Russell in The Outlaw, which centered almost completely on her chest, and who also handled the equally over-the-top campaign for John Wayne’s The Alamo.

  He likewise devised an innovative campaign for the Burt Lancaster film Elmer Gantry, having “Elmer Gantry was here” written all over sidewalks in Los Angeles and New York. The movie didn’t have anything to do with sidewalks, or even with cities, but Birdwell inserted the movie’s existence into the public’s consciousness in a way that made him worth every penny he got.

  In the early 1950s, when I became a star at Fox, the studio protected us very well. If a fan magazine was doing a feature, it was controlled by Fox. Back then, when Natalie and I went to our favorite restaurants, La Scala and Chasen’s, there would often be guys standing outside asking if they could take a photograph. But it was all very well mannered, and we always let them shoot. It was nothing like it is now, with roving wolf packs of photographers and videographers trolling the streets of LA.

  By the middle of the decade, though, the publicity business had begun to change. Before then, the studios wouldn’t muscle Hedda or Louella, because they didn’t have to; rather, they would finesse them. In return for keeping quiet about something the studio didn’t want publicized, the columnists would be given a film for free for some charity show they were involved in. A couple of contractees would also be asked to attend and provide some star power. Between pleasing the studio and pleasing Hedda or Louella, it was a twofer.

  Looking back, it was clearly a culture of back-scratching.

  Hopper did have her pet hates, which she vented about often enough. She was particularly venomous about Charlie Chaplin’s politics and bent for young girls, but Chaplin was an independent who prided himself on his independence, and didn’t have the protection of a studio. If he had been under contract to a major studio, I can assure you Hopper would have criticized him in a more muted fashion.

  But with the mid-1950s came the rise of magazines like Confidential, which the studios couldn’t control. On top of that, the business was becoming decentralized, with the studios themselves now less important than the stars—a complete reversal of what Hollywood had been only twenty years before.

  The rise of scandal sheets like Confidential meant that the studios had to learn to play defense. When Confidential was going to print a story about Rock Hudson’s homosexuality, Rock’s agent, Henry Willson, gave them Rory Calhoun instead—Calhoun had been busted for robbery as a juvenile—to protect Hudson, a far more important client. Most people thought that it had been Universal, the studio where both actors worked, who’d acted in this craven manner, but the culprit was even closer.

  It was a simple calculation on Willson’s part—10 percent of Rock’s salary meant a lot more than 10 percent of Calhoun’s. Ultimately, it didn’t make much difference. Willson, who was not only grossly unethical but unsavory as well, died broke. The relevant point here is that, twenty years earlier, or even ten, nobody would have dared print the truth about either actor.

  While the monopoly that Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, and the rest of the founding moguls had enjoyed was disappearing, television was making serious inroads into movie attendance. This meant that fewer movies were being made, which in turn meant that the rosters of actors, writers, and directors under studio contracts were severely pared. More people began operating as freelancers, losing the protection of the studio as they did so. When both stars and studios lost control over publicity, they quickly discovered that power could disappear very quickly.

  In the 1960s Kodak introduced the Instamatic, a light camera that fit in a pocket and used film cartridges that could be quickly switched, making picture taking easier than it had ever been before. I remember talking to Cary Grant once about the proliferation of new cameras, and he paused and said, “That’s the end of celebrities.”

  He was speaking about a celebrity’s loss of control of his or her own image. And he was right, although that loss involved a lot more than just the Instamatic.

  The transition from an orderly process regarding publicity to the law of the jungle became obvious with Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Cleopatra. I was in Rome when that film was being shot there, and that’s all anybody talked about. Along the Via Veneto, the paparazzi ignited. And suddenly the paparazzi mattered more than they ever had, because for the first time there was real money at stake for the right picture of the illicit lovers together. That was the beginning.

  Fifty years later, there are more stars than there used to be. Besides TV, there’s cable, and then there are celebrities who don’t do anything but be famous—the Kardashian sisters are the new Gabor sisters, but less amusing. There are also far more outlets for photographs of celebrities than there used to be, as the Internet has spawned countless gossip sites and blogs.

  The shift in attitude is stunning. People used to be happy to see celebrities if they encountered them in public, and they were correspondingly pleasant. Going out to shop or get a meal was not a grueling run of the gauntlet. Very few photographers were allowed into the dining areas of restaurants or into hotels; unless a fan magazine set up a layout in advance at the Beverly Hills Hotel, you were in a zone of privacy.

  Now photographers are looking for any opportunity to bust somebody, because that picture is worth so much. They’re desperate to get shots of people drunk or angry, so they bait them, trying to provoke an incident. In so many ways it has become a culture of vi
olation. It’s true not just in show business, but in everything. If you’re in politics, you’re fair game as well.

  A year or so ago Jodie Foster wrote an article whose central point was that, if she were a kid starting in the movie business today, she’d get out. According to her, it’s just not worth it. I’ve begun to think that maybe she’s right. If I were a young man today, I might just follow my father into business, and not the movie business.

  I think that this adversarial relationship—the way that cameras shadow you every time you leave your house—is why a lot of celebrities have gotten out of Hollywood. George Clooney spends a great deal of his time in Italy; Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie go to New Orleans or a château in France. There, the media are less viperous, and the celebrities have a greater ability to move around.

  It’s something I know all about. It’s even worse when tragedy strikes.

  Intellectually, I understand the perception that the rich and privileged are invincible. That’s why some people need to believe, for example, that Marilyn Monroe was murdered by the Kennedys or Princess Diana was killed by the British royal family.

  The documented facts—a long history of alcohol and narcotic abuse in the case of the former, a drunken chauffeur in the latter—seem insufficient. The randomness of life and death can be terrifying, so a certain kind of person seizes on minor discrepancies of memory or the garbled recollections of marginal personalities to cast doubt on a reality they don’t want to acknowledge.

  And you can never use facts or logic to argue somebody out of a position that fantasy got them into.

  What’s different is that our culture allows for these fantasies to be disseminated at will in real time. What’s the line—“A lie can go halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on”? Nowadays, a lie can go all the way around the world six times before you’re even out of bed.