Chapter III: Part 3

Steve McQueen was one young actor I managed to extricate from the Clan. I took him under my wing when he was driving racing cars around like an astronaut ready for orbit. “You could kill yourself when you were single, and it was only your concern. But you’ve got a family and responsibilities now. Think of them.” Between his wife and myself, we got him away from overpowered automobiles.

I took to Steve as soon as I saw him in “Wanted Dead or Alive.” I liked his arrogant walk, the don’t-give-a-damn air about him. So did Frank. When he sent Sammy Davis, Jr., into temporary exile for indiscreet talk to a newspaper about other Clansmen, Frank had Sammy’s part in _Never So Few_ rewritten for Steve. When Frank is in a movie, he becomes casting director, too.

He took Steve on a junket to New York when the picture ended, and Steve took along a big bundle of Mexican firecrackers, which he cherishes. He hadn’t previously been any kind of drinker, but in Frank’s crowd you drink. From the tenth floor of his hotel Steve had a ball tossing lighted firecrackers into Central Park. When the police ran him to earth, it took all of Frank’s influence to keep him out of jail.

As a peace offering, Steve had a live monkey delivered to my office in advance of his return. He wasted his time. I don’t like monkeys, so I gave it away and summoned Steve for some Dutch-aunt lecturing when he got back. “I know all about your trip. You were loud, boorish, and probably drunk. You have to make up your mind whether you’ll have a big career as Steve McQueen or be one of Frank Sinatra’s set. Think it over.”

Twenty-four hours later he gave me his answer. “I was out of line. I was flattered that Mr. Sinatra wanted me, but I’d rather stand on my own feet.”

* * * * *

I sometimes wonder about the Leader. His face lit up like a neon sign when he broke the news to me that he was going to marry Juliet Prowse, the South African dancer to whom he was engaged for an hour or so. “I haven’t seen that light in your eye for ten years,” I told him.

But I suspect the men around Frank went to work against Juliet. It’s easy enough to work the trick if you’re determined and unscrupulous. A word dropped into the conversation here and there will plant the doubts. “Do you think she really goes for you, Frank?” “She’ll probably figure on keeping her career.” “You should have met that family of hers--strictly nothing.” Frank was convinced eventually that Juliet wasn’t for him.

With all his talents and power, I sometimes wonder who’s the Leader and who’s being led.

_Four_

When Louella Parsons heard that I’d started work on this book, she telephoned to ask what its title was going to be. “Come, Louella,” I said, “you don’t expect me to reveal that to you, do you?”

“I hoped you would. And I hope you’ll be kind to me in your book because I was very nice to you in mine.”

“You certainly were--you got the facts about me so mixed up that I haven’t finished reading it.”

“Well, anyway, what are you going to write about?”

“I’m just going to tell the truth.”

“Oh, dear,” she wailed, “that’s what I was afraid of.”

* * * * *

In the days when I earned my living as a motion-picture actress, I was one of Louella’s regular news contacts. I had an insatiable curiosity about the town I’d known for years. I got around a lot, and lots of people talked to me. I salted down stories by the barrel load.

Louella would call up and say: “I understand you went to so-and-so’s party last night. Tell me something about it.” I was glad to oblige. Payment came in kind, not cash, when she inserted my name in her column, which helped a working actress.

She really was the First Lady of Hollywood then, for one good reason which nobody was allowed to forget. She was William Randolph Hearst’s movie columnist, and he was lavishing millions of dollars and acres of publicity space on his motion-picture properties, bent on making himself the greatest of all impresarios and Marion Davies the greatest star.

With the Hearst newspaper empire behind her, Louella could wield power like Catherine of Russia. Hollywood read every word she wrote as though it was a revelation from San Simeon, if not from Mount Sinai. Stars were terrified of her. If they crossed her, they were given the silent treatment: no mention of their names in her column.

When Hearst let himself be lured by Louis B. Mayer into putting his own production company, Cosmopolitan Pictures, under MGM’s wing, Louella’s power was apparently complete. She could get any story she wanted front-paged in the Los Angeles _Examiner_ and all other Hearst papers, none of them accustomed to making much distinction between real news and flagrant publicity.

At San Simeon, Hearst’s $40,000,000 Shangri-La in San Luis Obispo County, Louella mingled with the stream of visiting celebrities, stars, and producers that poured every weekend into the fabulous, twin-towered castle or the surrounding marble “bungalows” at the summons of W.R. or Marion. So did I. At the fifty-four-foot table in the Renaissance dining hall, you’d see Garbo, John Gilbert, Errol Flynn, Norma Shearer, Nick Schenck, Beatrice Lillie, Cissy Patterson, Frank Knox, Bernard Baruch. Name the biggest and they’d be there, including, on one occasion, Mr. and Mrs. Cal Coolidge and Bernard Shaw.

Nobody would deny that Louella has talent. She showed at her best with GBS, who was writing some articles for Hearst. All of us invited to San Simeon that weekend had been warned against asking Shaw for an interview. That didn’t stop Louella. He yielded to her persuasions only on condition that he have the right to approve every word of her article after he’d talked to her.

When she went back with the typescript he had her read it to him. After the first few words, he interrupted sharply: “But I didn’t say that.”

“Oh, Mr. Shaw,” she said, batting her big brown eyes, “I’m so nervous just being in your presence. What was it you said before?” He repeated the sentence, which she carefully inserted, and then read another line or two before the irate Irishman pulled her up short again.

This performance went on for some minutes longer before GBS took the manuscript from her hand. “Give it to me--I’ll write it myself,” he said firmly, proceeding to do just that. But Louella wasn’t through yet. When he handed back the completed article to her, she asked: “Oh, Mr. Shaw, won’t you please autograph it for me? It will be such a wonderful keepsake for my daughter, Harriet.”

He couldn’t refuse; he was writing for Hearst, too. So Miss Parsons scored in a triple-header. She collected the only interview Bernard Shaw gave in the United States. She subsequently sold the article to a Hearst magazine. And she has the autographed interview, which someday will sell for another tidy sum.

Some of us San Simeon regulars discovered that Louella isn’t slow to take credit. When W.R. and Marion went abroad on one of the many voyages they made together, we decided to throw a party for them on their return. We intended it as a gesture of thanks for all the parties of theirs that we’d enjoyed. We put on a terrific evening at the Ambassador Hotel, with its rooms crammed with flowers and cockatoos, and split the bill between us: $175 apiece. Louella was one of the party, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t write an article for a national magazine taking credit for it.

She owed a lot to Marion Davies. It was an article praising Marion in _When Knighthood Was in Flower_ that got Louella started with Hearst. It caught W.R.’s eye and prompted him to hire her away from her $110 a week as movie reporter on the New York _Telegraph_ into working for him at more than twice the salary. Over the years Marion shielded Louella from boss trouble more than once. After W.R. died in 1951, she was among those who didn’t exactly hurry to give Marion sympathy.

She did ring the doorbell, however, immediately after Marion had appeared on my television show. She arrived at her house bearing as a gift a photograph of herself in a heavy silver frame. She proceeded to place it in full view on a table in the front hall, taking star position ahead of an autographed portrait of General Douglas MacArthur.

Marion asked me to take a look when I arrived soon after Louella had left. I carried it back to the library, where Marion was sitting. “Do you want this?”

“No,” she said quizzically. I took the frame home to substitute a photograph of Marion standing beside me on the TV show, returning the old frame and new picture to her the following day.

* * * * *

Louella didn’t regard me as a serious rival when I got started as a columnist in 1938. Andy Harvey, in MGM’s publicity department, had recommended me to Howard Denby of the _Esquire_ syndicate: “When we want the low-down on our stars, we get it from Hedda Hopper.” I was signed by Mr. Denby and sold to thirteen papers straightaway, the first to buy being the Los Angeles _Times_.

The betting in town after column number one appeared was that I wouldn’t last a week. My mistake was being too kind to everybody. I didn’t tell the whole truth--only the good. I set out to write about my fellows in terms of sweetness and light, not reality. I began:

Just twenty-three years ago my son was born. Since then I’ve
acted in Broadway plays. Sold Liberty Bonds in Grand Central
Station. Knitted socks for soldiers--which they wore as
sweaters. Made very bad speeches on the steps of the New York
Library. Helped build a snowman on Forty-second Street ... when
the streetcars were frozen solidly in their tracks. Earned
money for one year as a prima donna in _The Quaker Girl_ with
only two tones in my voice, high and low--very low. Played in
_Virtuous Wives_, Louis B. Mayer’s first motion picture.

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_. With a friend, wrote a
one-act play. Through pull had it produced at the Writers’ Club
and was it panned! Ran for a political job here; thank goodness
the citizens had a better idea! Coached Jan Kiepura in diction.
Learned about the beauty business from Elizabeth Arden in her
Fifth Avenue salon. Made three trips abroad, one to England on
business. Put on fashion shows. Have a radio program.

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. I can only write about
the Hollywood I know. About my neighbors and fellow workers.
Amazing stories have been written--many true. Hollywood is mad,
gay, heartbreakingly silly, but you can’t satirize a satire.
And that’s Hollywood....

I was green as grass, and the town jeered at me. Luckily, I had a good friend at my side. Wonderful Ida Koverman carried the title of executive assistant to Louis B. Mayer, but she was the real power behind his throne. To all intent and purpose, she ran MGM. Two months after my launching, when I was sinking slowly in an ocean of kind words for everybody, she gave a hen party for me. On the guest list were Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald, singer Rosa Ponselle, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Sophie Tucker, press people, public-relations people--every woman you could think of. There was only one holdout--Louella.

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. Ida had just set me straight about column writing. “They’ve laughed at you long enough. You’ve been too nice to people. Now start telling the truth.”

That was the best advice she ever gave me. It marked a turning point. My telephone started ringing like a fire alarm every day soon after.

“Hedda,” the callers would moan, “how can you print such things about me?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but you’re my friend. I didn’t think you’d tell.”

“I’m earning my living with my column. I’ve got to tell the truth. You didn’t call when I wrote sweet nothings about you, did you? If you can’t face facts, then I’m sorry.”

The column began to grow almost instantly, on the way up to its present readership of 35,000,000 people, which came about after I switched from _Esquire_ to the Des Moines _Register & Tribune_, then in 1942 to Chicago _Tribune_-New York _News_ syndication. (If I stop to think of that audience figure, I get so scared I can’t write a line until I’ve pushed the arithmetic out of my mind.)

Louella prepared for a fight. She had an intelligence service that included telegraph operators, telephone switchboard girls, beauty-parlor assistants, hotel bus boys, doctors’ and dentists’ receptionists. Her medical-intelligence chief was her husband, Dr. Harry Watson Martin. She called him Docky or Docky-Wocky. He was often known as Lolly’s Pop. His special field earlier had been venereal disease and urology, his hobby was show business, and he retired as head of the Twentieth Century-Fox medical department.

Docky had the friendship of everybody, along with a certain nonchalance. He once took a dive into the Bimini Bath pool when it lacked a single drop of water, broke his neck, and lived to marry Louella in 1929. He displayed a similar unconcern about water one morning when Louella, dressed up to go ashore for Mass, made her cautious way down the gangplank of a yacht in Catalina Harbor straight into the sea. Docky was waiting in the dinghy, engrossed in the Sunday papers. “Ready to go, dear?” he asked, not raising his head until her splashing drew him to her rescue.

Leaving a party, Docky once fell flat on the floor and lay there, comfortable enough. When a friend came forward to hoist him up, Louella put out a restraining hand. “Oh, don’t touch him, please. He has to operate at eight o’clock this morning.”

Through Docky’s good offices, Louella had a tie-in with testing laboratories, notably those making rabbit tests for pregnancy. This private line into the womb could give her news that a star was pregnant before the girl knew it herself.

But I had sleuths on my side, too. As an actress, I knew directors, producers, stars, and the men and women who worked on the other side of the cameras. One special ally was Mark Hellinger, a hard-boiled columnist for the New York _Daily News_ before he became a gentle, kind, and great producer for Warner Brothers and Universal.

He called me over to his house for an off-the-record conference and offered to help “because you’re going to need it.” He said: “I don’t somehow care for what Miss Parsons stands for. Whenever I hear a story at the studio, I’ll pass it on to you. I shan’t be able to call you through the switchboard, so I’ll give it to you from a private booth. There won’t be time for questions, but you’ll get the truth.”

The scoops I had on the affairs of Warner Brothers nearly drove Jack Warner out of his cotton-picking mind. He could never make out how it happened. When he reads this, he’ll know.

Louella watched her monopoly start to crack. If she was asked to a party, she’d want to know whether I was going to be invited. If I was, she’d demand that I be excluded “or else I certainly shan’t come.” Some timid hostesses fell for that. I laughed in their faces for their cowardice.

Anxious to break her hold, producers were steering my way more and more of the items that had previously been hers alone--the news of engagements, weddings, pregnancies, and divorces that made up a fat share of her daily diet. An engagement announced first to Louella had been good for six months of smiles for the happy couple. An exclusive on a pregnancy was even better--the mother-to-be could count on nine months’ favorable notice, which could be extended if she gave Lolly a beat on the birth announcement, too.

The competition she was getting didn’t make her any fonder of me. When Jean Parker was about to marry for the second time, she telephoned me: “I want you to have this exclusively.”

“No,” I warned her, “you must tell Louella.”

“But I don’t want her to have it.”

“You can’t afford to give it to me alone. Call her and tell her I have the news, too. For your career’s sake, you must.”

Ten minutes later she called back, weeping. “I did what you said and told her I’d given it to you. She said: ‘Get it back from her, or I won’t print it.’”

“Tell her she’s got it exclusively, if it means so much to her,” I said. “What’s one story among friends--and you’ll need friends.”

If a studio passed along a story to me that Louella thought she should have, she raised the roof, if necessary going over everybody involved to the studio head himself: “Hopper was given that. I should have had it. Don’t let it happen again.”

Even a producer as peppery as Darryl Zanuck had reservations about doing anything that might antagonize her. Zanuck, at that time Twentieth Century-Fox production chief, thought nothing of squaring off and mixing it in a fist fight with a director who argued with him. But when Bill Wellman, after three days of shooting on _Public Enemy_, urged that Eddie Wood, who was the star, should be replaced in that gangster epic by a newcomer who had the second lead, Jimmy Cagney, the fiery Zanuck flinched.

“My God, we can’t do it, Bill. Eddie’s engaged to Harriet Parsons, Louella’s daughter. Parsons will raise hell.”

“You son of a bitch,” answered Bill, who’s a flinty character. “You mean you’re going to let that decide it?”

“Damn it, no,” said Zanuck, put on his metal. “You go and put Cagney in.” And that’s how two men with guts turned an ex-chorus boy into a star.

Harriet married not Eddie Wood but King Kennedy. There were more stars in attendance than there are in the Milky Way when the two of them became man and wife at Marsden Farms in the San Fernando Valley in September 1939. Some of the guests were old-timers like Rudy Vallee, Billy Haines, Aileen Pringle, Frances Marion, and myself. The photographers ignored us completely, to the point where Billy got spitting mad.

He went up to Hymie Fink, who had been the town’s best still photographer since Valentino’s day. “We’ll each give you five bucks if you’ll take a picture of us,” Billy offered. But Hymie couldn’t do it. He had his orders, he said. After Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy were divorced in 1944, King came to work for me as leg man, covering the studios for a while, but I insisted that he get Louella’s consent before I hired him.

Not many men had the courage of Bill Wellman and Darryl Zanuck. I was in a roomful of faint hearts at a party the Gary Coopers gave when Gene Tierney made a beeline for me: “I’ve been trying to get you all afternoon to tell you I’m going to have another baby.”

That was wonderful news. Louella and I both knew that Gene’s first child, a beautiful little girl, had been born with a sleeping mind--it was one of the many blows that life dealt Gene, who finally cracked under the torment and needed psychiatric care. I hustled to the telephone, but it was tied up with a call to Henry Hathaway, who was a patient at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. By the time I got through to the _Times_ night desk, Gene was nowhere to be found to verify her news for the paper. But Louella had barged over to me and was hanging on like a limpet.

Next morning I heard what had happened. Gene’s studio had given the story of the forthcoming baby exclusively to Louella the previous afternoon. When she heard Gene had told me, she had flounced over to the poor girl and delivered a tongue lashing so violent that Gene had collapsed into tears. Gary Cooper had been in another room and didn’t hear it, but of the whole mob of Hollywood heroes who listened to Louella, not one lifted a voice or a finger to help Gene. Fear of their own precious skins kept them as dumb as mutes at a funeral.

Even Frank Sinatra had to come to terms with Louella in her heyday. He stood high in her disfavor for months. It seemed there was nothing he could do to stop the attacks she made on him. I thought I might be able to help, so I suggested through Perry Charles, his agent, that Frank should call Marion and arrange to meet Hearst. The meeting came about, and Frank made a good impression. The order was passed down from San Simeon, and Miss Parsons suddenly discovered that Sinatra was nowhere near as black as she’d imagined him.

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard flouted the “first to know” rule Louella had laid down when they set their wedding day to coincide with Louella’s absence from town--she’d gone off on a trip to San Francisco. She was on the train coming home when she got the news that they were married. “It can’t be true,” she gasped. “They would have told me first.”

But Clark had given the story to all newspapers simultaneously to avoid any bickering over who should have first whack. She took such a dim view of that, though, that the Gables felt they had to make up to her by means of a distinctly unusual present: They had her bathroom done over with mirrored walls and brand-new plumbing.

Orson Welles is one of the few who never gave a damn for her. When he was making _Citizen Kane_, a picture with a striking resemblance to the life of William Randolph Hearst, he persuaded Louella that the story was something entirely unconnected with her chief. I wasn’t convinced so easily, and Orson finally agreed to let me see the first screening of the finished product in a private projection room of RKO. What I saw appalled me.

W.R. had been a friend to me for years. So had Orson, ever since I’d been a struggling actress and he’d gone out of his way to be kind to my son Bill, who was a struggling young actor. When Hearst learned that I’d been hired as a columnist, he said: “Why didn’t you come to me? I didn’t know you wanted to write a column. I’d have given you one.”

“Have I ever asked you for anything?” “No,” he said. “What makes you think I’d ask for anything as important as this is to me?”

“Everybody else asks for things. Why not you?”

“I don’t ask,” I said. Then he wrote me this, to which I didn’t reply:

My dear Hedda:

I am glad you are going to do some work for the _Esquire_
Syndicate. The _Esquire_ people are very clever. They produce a
fine publication and they know good stuff.

I always thought that the stuff you did for the Washington
paper was extremely good.

It was accurate, interesting, and high-grade. It appealed to
intelligent people, who like the movies--and there are lots
of them. So many moving-picture commentators write down to the
level of the movies, as they call it.

I always figure, however, that these commentators write down
because they cannot write up.

Best wishes. I will look for your column.

Sincerely,
(s) W.R.

After the screening Orson asked how I liked it. “You won’t get away with it,” I said. But he arrogantly insisted that he would. It was his arrogance that decided which of two friendships had to come out ahead. I put in a call to Oscar Lawler, a great friend of mine and one of W.R.’s attorneys, to tell him about _Citizen Kane_ and what Orson was up to.

As soon as word was passed along to W.R., he telephoned Louella. When she heard I’d seen the picture already and that, contrary to the assurances she’d given him, it had a great deal to do with the chief’s affairs, the sky fell in on her. He commanded her to have it screened for Oscar Lawler and herself. After the showing she begged the attorney to go home with her to help describe to Hearst what they had seen, but he declined. She had to get on the telephone herself to San Simeon, just as later she made many calls, including one to Nelson Rockefeller, in a battle royal to keep _Citizen Kane_ out of Radio City Music Hall, which is part of Rockefeller Center, and every other movie theater.

If W.R. had taken Oscar Lawler’s advice to ignore _Kane_, it might never have received the attention it won when, breaking the boycott ten months later, it was shown around the world, won a Best Picture of the Year award, and, as late as 1958, was named as one of the greatest movies ever made. But on W.R.’s orders Orson Welles’ name went on the Hearst Silent List of people about whom Louella could never say a kind word.

The black list constantly makes its presence felt. When Nunnally Johnson aided and abetted in a blistering article about her that appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_, she hit back at his wife.

“I ran into Dorris Bowdon last night,” she wrote. “She used to be such a pretty girl before she married.” Joan Crawford, Nelson Eddy, Jimmy Cagney, and Ava Gardner have all had the treatment.

Bette Davis and I were administered a slap on the wrist after I tracked her down to Laguna, where she holed up, refusing to talk to newspapers, following the birth of her May Day baby in 1947. The door of the cottage was open, so I walked in, and we talked for hours. The next week Louella wrote: “Since Bette Davis has had so many unwelcome visitors, she has had to have her gate padlocked.”

As a present for the baby, Jack Warner sent Bette an add-a-pearl necklace with five pearls on it and space for the donor to add another each birthday. Recently I asked Bette if her daughter’s necklace was still growing. She gave that raucous laugh of hers and replied: “It’s just the size it was the day you came to visit me.”

Personally, like Louella, I’ve found that silence is the greatest blow you can deliver to a Hollywood ego when it needs whacking down to size. Not to mention the name of a star drives him half out of his mind; they live and die by publicity. Not even producers are immune, as Sam Goldwyn demonstrated. He cabled me once from Hawaii, where my day’s eight hundred words apparently were read so faithfully that even when wartime restrictions limited the paper there to four pages, I had to be squeezed in somehow. Sam complained: NAME NOT IN COLUMN FOR WEEK STOP THEY DO NOT THINK I’M IMPORTANT OVER HERE STOP PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Ginger Rogers and Ronald Colman were both excommunicated by Louella for years for their effrontery in refusing to appear on her former radio show, “Hollywood Hotel.” As mistress of ceremonies, she collected $2500 a week and the stars appeared free. If any star balked, the producers hastened to Louella’s aid by putting the pressure on until that star was convinced of the error of his ways. Total value of the free talent has been estimated by better mathematicians than I at $2,000,000. For a while, her sponsor, a soup company, was delighted to pay a weekly tab of about $12,000 for a show which, without her, would have cost well over $30,000.

But after the soup maker had been replaced by a soap maker and the show had been restyled as “Hollywood Premieres,” the Screen Actors Guild plucked up its corporate courage to do what only Ginger and Colman had dared. The Guild ruled that Louella had to pay her guests, and thirteen weeks later the program was off the air.

She showed her power when Mary Pickford organized a radio spectacular, to be sponsored by a milk company, to benefit the Motion Picture Home, where poverty drives so many veterans of the movie business. Gable and dozens of other stars wanted to appear, but Louella got busy on her telephones. Mary had to back down and cancel the program with the stars in her living room waiting to go on.

For one of my radio series I wanted to hit up the competitive theme, which press agents had originally invented. They rubbed their hands when I got started because, by having us fight, they thought they could get double space and play off one columnist against the other.

Louella didn’t seem to sense what they were up to. I said: “Let’s take a tip from Jack Benny and Fred Allen and whip up a feud. We could have a mountain of fun. It would increase our audience ratings, and we might get a salary increase out of it. Supposing on the first show we staged a battle royal and both got carried out on stretchers....” But Louella wouldn’t play.

Habit dies hard with her if she is invited to appear with me for a photograph, still shot, or movie. When Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder wanted us to appear together in _Sunset Boulevard_ as reporters breaking the news of the murder, they extended the first bid to me. I began scheming a scene in which she and I would rush for a telephone simultaneously. Then I would trip and say sweetly: “After you, Louella.”

When she got her invitation and was told I had already been signed, she stormed: “Get her off. I won’t be in it if she is.” They would have none of that, so Miss Parsons did not appear in _Sunset Boulevard_. And she didn’t mention the picture in her column for months.

She didn’t know what to do when _Time_ ran a cover story and a cover portrait along with ten columns of some highly flattering prose about yours sincerely. (Hopper “is a self-appointed judge and censor of all that goes on in Hollywood,” said _Time_, “and she carries out her assignment with a hey nonny-nonny and the old one-two.”) In frustration, Louella took to her bed.

The studios were in a panic. They couldn’t afford to have Louella out of action. She’s too useful to them. They know how to handle her, where I’m a tougher nut to crack. If she lays hold of a scandal, she does not print it unless the studio involved is willing. When scandal comes in range of my telescope, I’ll print it so long as it’s news and true. Press agents can’t stand it; the business they’re in should be called suppress agentry. They’ve suppressed far more than they’ve ever passed out as news. In the olden days, when Louella reigned alone, there was a mighty load to suppress, too.

As she slid into a decline through sheer aggravation over _Time_, her spirits were rapidly restored by a suggestion put up by Adela Rogers St. John, the magazine writer: “Give Louella the most wonderful dinner party Hollywood has seen, then maybe she’ll forget about the cover story.”

Now Louella has accepted every conceivable and inconceivable degree, doctorate, scroll, and plaque held out by college or corporation. Testimonial dinners to her are routine, though Eddie Cantor may have said a little more than he meant at a Masquers Club event celebrating her thirtieth anniversary as a columnist when he conceded: “I am here for the same reason everybody else is--we were afraid not to come.”

The idea of putting on a super-size testimonial caught on with every producer who heard about it. The Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove was hired and treated to a face lift for the big event. It was originally planned to collect $25 from each of the hundreds of guests who sat among the papier-mâché monkeys and imitation palm trees, but when Hearst heard about it, he footed the whole bill.

_Daily Variety_ did the evening up proud: “The guest list was the Who’s Who of motion pictures, and even the oldest old-timer could not recall when so many reigning stars of the past, present, and future, in toto, as well as agents, press agents, producers, directors, authors, distributors, studio chiefs, maîtres d’hôtel, the mayor, and governor all got together in one room. Flanked by industry leaders, Miss Parsons sat on a garland-strewn dais and listened to oratory in which no adjectives were spared.”

As a climax, Louella collected a gold plaque with an engraved inscription to her “courage, accuracy, fairness and curiosity.” _Time’s_ account noted: “Such well-established stars as Clark Gable and Cary Grant allowed themselves the liberty of not attending.”

All I know about it, I read in the papers. I wasn’t invited. Neither was Adela Rogers St. John.

My modest contribution to the welfare of Louella and her family took the form of some column paragraphs that appeared soon after the Cocoanut Grove whingding: “_I Remember Mama_, and you will, too, when you have seen the film. With all the elements of good theater and good cinema, humor, humanity and hominess, it will be hard to forget ... to Harriet Parsons, who found the story and produced the picture, must go a lot of credit....”

That was the final chapter in a story that had started four years earlier. Harriet is an only child; her father was John Parsons, who died following the breakup of Louella’s first marriage, before Docky came on the scene. RKO had signed Harriet as a producer, and she set to work delving into the studio’s files, looking for likely properties. She dug out _The Enchanted Cottage_, had it prepared for the screen, arranged a deal with Sam Goldwyn to borrow Teresa Wright as the heroine. Then suddenly it was snatched away from her and given to another writer-producer.

Undeterred, she went back to the files and excavated a story called _Mama’s Bank Account_, which was retitled _I Remember Mama_, and lined up Katina Paxinou to play in it. That, too, was grabbed from her by RKO. At that point, I stepped in with a column item relating Harriet’s misfortunes and asking: “What goes on? Harriet’s clever, and I think this is shabby treatment, even for Hollywood.”

The day after the item appeared _The Enchanted Cottage_ was returned to her--it was a big success when she produced it--and she got _I Remember Mama_ back, too. Louella had been restored in health and spirit in time to attend the preview, though in a seat removed from mine. “I expect Harriet’s picture will be very good,” she confided to a friend, “but I know one person here who won’t give it a good review.”

Harriet was in New York, where she read my notice in the News. She telephoned her mother. “Have you read Hedda’s column?”

“No, I never read that column,” Louella sniffed.

“She’s done what nobody else would do for me. I want you to call her and thank her for me.” Louella did, and we arranged a peace parley over a luncheon table at Romanoff’s for one o’clock the following day. When she walked in, a bit late as usual, every chin in the place dropped. Hasty telephone calls brought in a mob of patrons who stood six deep at the bar to witness our version of the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty. Nobody moved until we left arm in arm two hours later.

Harriet, whom I’ll always like, wired: YOU AND MA WOULD MANAGE TO TOP ME STOP YOUR HISTORIC LUNCH HAS NOW CROWDED I REMEMBER MAMA OFF THE FRONT PAGE STOP YOU GALS MIGHT HAVE WAITED FOR BABY. After that, she won a ten-year contract at RKO. But peace between Louella and me wasn’t wonderful enough to last very long.

The flames of our relationship blazed merrily one Christmas when a studio head unwittingly poured fuel oil on. Louella and I are on the same list for good-will offerings from studios, which fill my living room from floor to ceiling every season.

One Christmas just before Ernie Pyle went off on his last visit to the South Pacific, he came to call on me with some friends. After a few drinks in the den, I said: “Ernie, do you want to see what fear can bring a female in this town?”

We went into my living room. He looked in wonder at the loot and said softly: “I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.”

Not every female star gets carried away with generosity. Doris Day once sent me boxes of gift-wrapped chocolate-covered pretzels, and Rosalind Russell a fist-sized hunk of coral such as you’d find in a fish bowl. Louella’s loot exceeds mine. Once, I’m told, she collected an automobile.

One unlucky studio chief had bought expensive handbags for each of us, but they got switched in delivery. When I telephoned to thank him and included a glowing description of the bag, I could hear his face fall. “But that’s Louella’s,” he moaned. “Will you be a doll and send it on to her and explain?”

“Like the devil I will,” I countered crisply. Louella is certain to this day that I got a better present than she did. Another store’s mistake brought me two handsome cut-crystal decanters for another Yuletide, one engraved HH, the other LOP. “Would you return hers to me?” said their donor.

“Not for the world. It makes such a gay conversation piece when I can ask a guest: ‘Would you like some Jack Daniels out of Louella’s bottle?’”

I regard her ungrudgingly as a good reporter, though she doesn’t always get her facts straight where I’m concerned. (Nor do I sometimes.) She invariably pretends that I am published only in the Los Angeles _Times_, so her followers won’t know about the syndicate, which gives Hopper a considerable edge in readership.

She has sometimes been tripped by her own prose. When Warners years ago chose Alan Mowbray to play George Washington in _Alexander Hamilton_, she took aim and fired: “It seems strange to me that an Englishman would be cast as the father of our country.” During the days when Mussolini invaded Albania and lives were snuffed out by the thousands, she decided: “The deadly dullness of the past week was lifted today when Darryl Zanuck announced he had bought all rights to _The Blue Bird_ for Shirley Temple.”

In a reminiscent mood she noted: “I don’t know how many of my readers remember John Barrymore and Dolores Costello in _Trilby_, the George Du Maunier story, but my mind goes back to John just loving the part of Svengali, wearing a black beard and hypnotizing the artist’s model who could only sing when he cast his baleful eye on her.” As Irving Hoffman recalled: “There wasn’t a thing wrong in the story except that the name of the picture was _Svengali_, not _Trilby_, the leading lady was Marian Marsh, not Dolores Costello ... du Maurier wrote it, not Du Maunier.”

Louella left me with egg on my face with her exclusive story that Ingrid Bergman was going to have a baby by Roberto Rossellini while she was still the wife of Dr. Peter Lindstrom. This, a few months after I’d interviewed Bergman at the scene of the crime and left Rome convinced by her that Italian newspapers had lied in their linotypes when they called her pregnant.

I will always believe that Joe Steele (the press agent employed both by her and her studio boss, Howard Hughes) subsequently told the truth to Louella. When her scoop appeared and the newspapers were hunting for Joe, they couldn’t find him. Seems she had persuaded him he was in bad shape, made sure he didn’t suffer thirst or hunger, then kept him safe and sound for three days away from her competitors.

After her story had been spread to the world, it seemed like a good idea to do something to help Ingrid, who wanted a quick divorce so that her baby could be spared at least a part of the stigma. I thought that perhaps she could be smuggled by plane out of Italy to some other country, where only friends would know exactly when or if the child was born.

Plans were going beautifully when the plan was broached to Ingrid. She refused to have anything to do with it. She would have her child proudly, she said, and if anyone didn’t like the idea he could lump it.

In 1951, Docky Martin died of cancer in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. It was a crushing blow for Louella. Not long ago, she found herself there, too, for an operation. The feebleness in her voice alarmed me. “I’m so tired of this place,” she said, “and I’m so sick.”

I had a word with Harry Brand, publicity director of Twentieth Century-Fox and a good friend to Louella and Docky: “If you want her to live, you’d better get her out of that hospital. Either she’s in the same room that Docky had or one exactly like it. She’ll never recover until she’s moved.”

Nobody apparently had thought of that. She was out of there and into the Beverly Hills Hotel the next day. Her column power is still potent, but the times and temper of Hollywood have changed. Though she doesn’t change, you can’t help but feel sorry for her. She still belabors her enemies and coos over her intimates: Mervyn LeRoy, Jimmy McHugh, Cobina Wright, all the Catholic “A” group that includes Loretta Young, Irene Dunne, Dolores Hope. She still pretends not to read Hopper, but when I broke the news of Kay Gable’s pregnancy, on the strength of a tip from a crew member on _The Misfits_, Louella must have read the item and put in a call instantly to Kay, begging to be the child’s godmother. At the baptism her hands were so shaky we were scared stiff she’d let young John Clark Gable fall on the floor by the font.

Louella claims that the people she writes about are all her dear, dear friends, a total she once estimated at 312. My taste runs closer to that of Dema Harshbarger, my manager, whom I have known since she first put me on radio. “I have three friends in the world,” says Dema, “and I don’t want any more. The average Hollywood friendship today wouldn’t buy you a ham sandwich.”

_Five_

One of the legends that haunts the typewriters of most of Hollywood’s five hundred resident reporters and columnists insists that our town is just like Podunk, a typical American community with a heart as big as Cinerama. (Are you there, Louella?) This is true, of course--give or take a few billion dollars a year. Provided Podunk can muster three dozen and more Rolls-Royces outside a movie house for a new picture opening. And pay a good cook $500 a week to steal her away from the best friend. And produce half a dozen houses with built-in pipe organs and one with wood-burning fireplaces in both the master and children’s bathrooms--it used to belong to Maggie Sullavan and Leland Hayward but Fred MacMurray owns it now.

If the majority of people in Podunk worship money like a god, then there isn’t much to choose between us. Take a man like Dean Martin. If Podunkians judge their fellows by how many dollars they earn, then Dean would be right at home. There was the day he got to arguing with his press agent about Albert Einstein.

“I made $20,000 last week,” Dean said. “What do you think he made?”

“You’re right,” said the press agent, a thoughtful soul. “That Einstein’s a dummy. I bet he never earned more than $12,000 a year in his whole life. He’s got to be an idiot.” Dean had the grace to grin. In Hollywood, where the love of money can change people’s nature every bit as fast as in Podunk, he has a reputation for cool blood behind his beaming Italian charm.

He isn’t alone in his class. It’s an obvious weakness among singers. Perry Como, for instance, sets few records for making appearances for charity. Bing Crosby, who enjoys almost nothing about his profession except the income it brings him, can’t be dragged to a benefit. It took his fiery little Irish mother, Kate, to push him out of his house to one Academy Awards show when he was at the top of his career. “You’ll go,” she threatened, “or you’ll never hear the last of it from me.” Kate was a woman to be reckoned with and still is. That was the night Bing got his Oscar for _Going My Way_.

Jerry Lewis on one occasion begged one big star to join him in New York on an all-night telethon to raise funds in a muscular-dystrophy drive. “You know what you can do with those crippled kids,” was the response he received from this father of a big family, who has a reputation for charming birds off trees.

Some of our inhabitants cherish the quaint idea that the number of charity performances he gives is an accurate yardstick for measuring an entertainer’s heart. More accurate, anyway, than the size of his bank account. It’s easy to sing a song or two, harder to stand up and be funny for half an hour. Yet the comics measure up well; Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis, George Burns--all knock themselves out in the sweet cause of charity.

Our number-one citizen on that score is Bob Hope, and we’re proud as peacocks of him. There isn’t a place in the world he wouldn’t fly to for charity and work without drawing a nickel. He’s ham enough to love the publicity it brings him, but he does a monumental amount of good. Bob has literally made the millions that everybody believes Bing has stashed away in the vaults.

Money is talked about in our town more than elsewhere, perhaps, because there’s more of it around. Bob, who could safely be called thrifty, has splurged on a private three-hole golf course valued at more than $100,000. Elvis Presley owns fifteen automobiles, including an all-pink Cadillac with a television and hi-fi set. Beverly Hills High School has an oil well on its campus which brings in $18,000 a year.

Beverly Hills is an oasis of thirty thousand inhabitants and thirty thousand trees set in the steppes of Los Angeles. Many of its people earn their living in the entertainment industry or as doctors, lawyers, agents, soothsayers and headshrinkers, living on the backs of the others. Most of the trees that line the sidewalks are palms, though magnolias, eucalyptus, and acacias thrive in the gardens, and the evening scent of pittosporum drifts over the streets as sweet as the song of nightingales.

It’s a separate community with its own schools, police, firemen, and local government. As a contented resident, I’m happy to say that it enjoys the lowest tax rate for miles around. I am not so happy to report that in our town, where there’s at least one Olympic-size pool to the block, and sometimes five, Esther Williams found nobody she asked would give her the regular use of one for classes in teaching blind children to swim. She finally found a pool in Santa Monica, thirty minutes’ drive away, two days a week.

Acting as a kind of buffer between Beverly Hills and Los Angeles proper is Hollywood, with a population of some quarter of a million, which is the workplace of most of the stars who live in Beverly Hills. The rest of our population seems to be Texans, who are flocking in and who can usually leave the movie colony standing with dust on their faces when it comes to worshiping the golden calf.

Up until the early days of this century, Beverly Hills saw more coyotes than dollar bills. It was a Spanish-owned wilderness of remote canyons and tumbleweed. Then in 1906 it was bought for $670,000 by its American founders, who sold off lots at $1000 apiece on the installment plan, $800 if you paid cash; those lots sell now for $50,000. The big spending didn’t start until soon after World War I ended, but long before that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had bought a whole hilltop on Summit Drive together with the hunting lodge that stood there. They spent hundreds of thousands on the place that we called “The White House”--Pickfair.

Doug itched to put a wall all the way around Beverly Hills, but he compromised by simply encircling their estate. He and Mary literally made their home a palace. They were America’s royalty and were treated as such in their own country and overseas. Kings and queens entertained them; they rode in Mussolini’s private train. At Pickfair they entertained visiting bluebloods.

The Duke and Duchess of Alba stayed there, but they left a week early because the duke discovered, to his chagrin, that the armfuls of cuddly Hollywood blondes he’d been expecting were not permitted through Pickfair’s portals.

Pickfair had some rich neighbors. Carl Laemmle, the half-pint immigrant from Bavaria who founded Universal-International, built an estate. So did Will Rogers, Gloria Swanson, Charles Chaplin. Chaplin is notoriously tight-fisted. After he’d furnished most of his home on Summit Drive, including his own bedroom, four or five other bedrooms remained empty. He had the head decorator of our biggest furniture store come to see the rooms and suggest their decor. Charlie had all the recommended furniture delivered and kept it for six months, ignoring the bills. Finally, the store repossessed everything it had “lent” him. He applied the same treatment to another store, with the same final result.

During this period, a titled Englishman with wife and entourage wired the Douglas Fairbankses that they’d be arriving at Pickfair with ten in party; could they be accommodated? Pickfair hadn’t room for everybody, so Mary telephoned Charlie, who said he’d take in six of the visitors.

But he’d forgotten that the furniture in his guest bedrooms had been carted off, leaving only an old chest of drawers and mattresses and bedsprings on the floor of each otherwise empty room. When the guests saw the accommodations he’d provided for them, they were astounded; imagined he must be some kind of crazy health faddist, and departed after one night for a hotel.

Harold Lloyd bought his acreage direct from Mr. Benedict himself--that’s the old-timer who put his name on Benedict Canyon. Then Harold bought more adjoining land from Thomas Ince until he had twenty acres of lawns and woodlands. After he married Mildred Davis, his leading woman in _Grandma’s Boy_, in 1923, he built a forty-room, Spanish-style mansion on the place, with ten bedrooms, two elevators, a theater seating one hundred guests, and a four-room dolls’ house complete with electric light, plumbing, and grand piano. Around the house he had kennels for his great Danes, a swimming pool with fountain, two reflecting pools, and a Greek temple.

Mildred loved it all, then took a second look at the front door and burst into tears. What was the matter? “No keyhole!” she sobbed.

The Lloyds still live there. When he opened the grounds for a local charity a few years ago, today’s generation of stars gasped at this glimpse of how thick the luxury could grow before income taxes gobbled up your pay checks. “How can he possibly afford to keep up this place?” Frank Sinatra asked me.

“Because he’s worth millions,” I said, “and he holds on to them.” That afternoon, though, $69,000 was raised for the Nursery for Visually Handicapped Children. At the suggestion of Walter Annenberg’s mother, when things got dull, I sold endowments for thirteen scholarships to the school at $1000 apiece.

Harold, who is in his late sixties, believes that you can take it with you. There is one servant, a helper and nurse for their grandchild, on the place which used to employ twenty gardeners. Mildred Lloyd does most of the cooking.

Stores and services soon crowded into and around Beverly Hills, to tap the golden stream that poured into the motion-picture industry. You could buy any kind of merchandise or service at a price. Saks Fifth Avenue, J. W. Robinson’s, W. & J. Sloane eventually opened up on Wilshire Boulevard. One lady got in ahead of them with a different kind of establishment on Sunset Strip, just beyond the town line; her girls, dressed to the teeth, were once taken on a conducted tour of the MGM lot. A Metro executive was appalled when, in a moment of confidence, she showed him a wad of rubber checks she’d been given by various male customers. They would have been a prize package for any autograph hound. He offered to collect the debts and split the proceeds with her.

“Oh no, I couldn’t allow that,” she said, shocked to the marrow. “It wouldn’t be ethical.”