Chapter IX: Part 9

Hal was petrified. “What can I do?” he pleaded.

“Stop it before the news gets out.”

He called his partner, Joe Hazen, in for consultation. “How would you handle the situation?” they both asked.

“Telephone the boys right now. Tell them that unless those women get out of Philadelphia immediately, you’ll cancel the contract. And tell them why.”

Hal liked the idea. I sat by his desk while he made the call, and two foot-loose actresses caught the next available plane from Philadelphia to New York.

There is a New York night club with a deserved reputation for high-class entertainment called the Copacabana, formerly conducted by Jack Entratter, who became the impresario of the Las Vegas Sands, and Monte Proser, who went on to operate Broadway’s Lanai. For some years the Copa has enjoyed the services of Jules Podell, who has a gravel voice and a sharp temper.

Not long after the Martin and Lewis breakup Jerry was visiting New York to do a television show, while Sinatra was appearing at the Copa, drawing such crowds that they waited outside in the winter cold for hours in lines that stretched halfway around the block.

Jerry had played the Copa with Dean some three years earlier and quarreled briefly with Podell in the course of the engagement. One day Frank came down with an occupational sore throat, and Jerry agreed to substitute at the Copa for him, though he had no formal act and hadn’t played a night-club date alone since his parting from Dean. He appeared that night ad-libbing like crazy, but that was the last time the Copa ever saw him.

Jerry had a press agent who knew the Copa and Podell well. In a previous job, when he’d had his own public-relations business, the agent represented the place as one of his clients. The agent was in the bar one night watching Podell, in his overcoat, ushering in the customers to the restaurant and floor show downstairs. “You’re doing fantastic business with Sinatra,” the agent said admiringly.

“I need you to tell me?” snapped Podell. “Get the hell out of here.”

The agent snapped right back. The two fell into a shouting match, which ended with the agent spitting at Podell and walking out the front door, back to the Hampshire House suite where Jerry was staying. There was no satisfying Jerry until he’d heard the full account of the set-to. By now it was after midnight, but Jerry picked up the telephone to get two vice presidents of MCA out of bed, with a summons to meet him at ten o’clock the following morning at the Brooklyn studios where he was rehearsing his television show.

The pair of them showed up on the dot. They knew Jerry had a contract for a future appearance at the Copa. “I want you,” he ordered, “to write Mr. Podell a letter saying I will never appear, never set foot there from now on. You can say I don’t give a damn what pressure they try to put on me. I told Podell years ago if he ever talked nasty to any one of my people or laid a hand on one of them, he’d see the last of me.”

Over the next few days Jerry had some interesting telephone calls from all kinds of people promising to straighten things out with Podell. Jerry had a stock answer: “Not if I live to be a thousand will I talk to Podell. Nobody should look to get lucky with me. I’m not going into that place--ever.”

He made that decision stick. One side of Jerry knocks himself out to have people like him. The other side includes a mind like a steel trap; when he says no, he means not bloody likely. He won’t run away from a fight, but he shies away from people who frighten him intellectually because they’re better educated than he is. He’s the son of show-business parents who left school in the tenth grade after swatting a teacher for saying: “All Jews are stupid.”

He makes $3,000,000 a year, and he can’t stand it. Money is something he disdains. He is probably the one entertainer in our business who has never struck out in a movie, and he’s been twenty-six times to bat. Does he have any ideas why? You bet your life he knows exactly:

“I appeal to the kids and ordinary people who spend all their lives under the thumbs of authority and dignity. And I appeal to children, who know I get paid for doing what they get slapped for. I flout dignity and authority, and there’s nobody alive who doesn’t want to do the same thing.

“No matter how high you go, there’s some schnook up over you. Any General Motors vice president, for example, thinks he can do a better job than the guy above him, except he’s down here and his boss is up there. I’m getting even for every little guy in the world. I’m the kid who throws snowballs at dignity in a top hat.”

Jerry, who’ll do anything for anybody he likes, once agreed to fill in for Sammy Davis, Jr., in Las Vegas, because Sammy wanted a few days off over Christmas in Aurora, Illinois. When I got the tip, I realized the fat was in the fire. It happened that Kim Novak was also spending the holidays at her sister’s house in Aurora.

Now Harry Cohn of Columbia, who made Kim everything she is today, had been getting trouble from her. Her favorite weapon was to date men that Cohn detested, either for personal reasons or because they clashed violently with the carefully fostered image of her as a sweet, friendly girl from Chicago. Sammy was a heavy date. I’m sure he occupied quite a few pages in the oversized diary which she keeps in code and carries around with her all the time.

Kim was a girl tied hand and foot by her Columbia contract: “I haven’t got enough money to invest,” she told me one day. “I’ve been under contract on a straight salary for six years. When I’m loaned out, I don’t get anything extra--the salary goes to the studio. On _Man with a Golden Arm_, I was promised a percentage of the picture, but I guess they forgot somehow.”

“You never got a bonus?” I asked.

“One time before _Vertigo_ my agents got me a sort of bonus. They got me a special loan at seven per cent interest for a year so I could buy my house. But I was on my old salary schedule.”

“Don’t you collect for TV?”

“I can’t do TV.”

The house she bought on Tortuosa Drive in Bel Air cost her $95,000. It contains an all-blue bedroom, an all-purple study, an all-gray living room, an all-gray sleeping porch, and a pool where she swims wearing a straw hat. She gets along without a housekeeper, cooks a big pot of chile on Sundays, and dips into it for dinner three or four times a week. “I sometimes get stomach trouble,” she admits, to nobody’s surprise.

Sammy had been a frequent visitor at her house, but not after he returned to Las Vegas from Aurora. Harry Cohn, who collapsed with a fatal heart attack some months later, was not a man who enjoyed being thwarted. His passion for keeping his fingers on everybody’s business led him once to install an intercom system at Columbia so that, by flicking a switch, he could eavesdrop on conversations all over the lot.

The rumor was that it cost him $200,000 to break things up between Kim and Sammy. Truth is that it cost him no more than a single telephone call from his office to Las Vegas, where Harry knew one of the mob with a certain reputation in the business. Cohn was a man you had to stand in line to dislike. A bitter, final jest about him alleged that two thousand people attended his funeral, wanting to make sure it was true.

Over the telephone to Vegas, he said to the man on the other end: “You take care of this for me, will you?”

“Sure,” said the voice on the telephone. “I’ll just say: ‘You’ve only got one eye; want to try for none?’”

Very soon after that Sammy announced his marriage to Lorena White, a Negro show girl in Las Vegas. A few more weeks elapsed before Sammy and Lorena started proceedings for divorce. On November 13, 1960, Sammy married May Britt, who gave him a daughter the following summer, and let me tell you they’re very happy, or were when I wrote this.

Two years after the Sammy incident, Kim told me: “I guess I never really adjusted to being in Hollywood.” She found, she said, that her telephone hadn’t been ringing for quite a while. “I’m not really anti-social. It’s just that I prefer smaller parties to big ones,” she said.

With the help of a house guest, a girl who went to high school with her, she was fixing up her patio, to make it all turquoise. She was also building a fallout shelter in her back yard for herself, her friend, and her dog.

_Thirteen_

The magic word now is “television.” It used to be “Hollywood,” and there was no end to the miracles it could work. It transformed plowboys into princes, peasant girls into goddesses. The stars were American royalty and revered as such by their subjects. The magic word would bring whole villages out on the street to watch a star go by. It opened palace doors, stopped trains, brought you the keys of a city or an audience with the Pope.

Hollywood set the social style for thirty years of our history, until TV came along. Clara Bow wore a cupid’s-bow lipstick job; fifty million women copied her. Clark Gable shucked off his undershirt; so did fifty million men. The studios stuck to a simple rule and coined fortunes with it: “Show the stars like kings and queens in a glamorous setting, and the crowds will flock to see them.” Today it’s a calculated risk to put a man on the screen in evening dress in case the popcorn-munching customers decide that he’s a square.

They follow television stars just as they used to emulate the motion-picture variety. My reader mail proves that. “Is Dorothy Provine a natural blonde?” “Whatever happened to Edd Byrnes?” “When did Richard Boone get married?” Ben Casey’s surgical gown turns out to be a Seventh Avenue fashion hit. The children switch from coonskin hats to space helmets to Soupy Sales. Some of the biggest names in our town--Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and all--go on to let Soupy toss a custard pie in their faces. The children love it and the networks want the child audience.

The impact on the audience--and I don’t mean from the custard pies--is astounding to anybody like me who’s been making pictures since World War I. One of the early ones was a thing called _Virtuous Wives_, in which I sank my entire salary of $5000 on my clothes and got $25,000 worth of the loveliest outfits you ever saw from Lady Duff-Gordon, known professionally as Lucile and one of the greatest dressmakers of them all. The biggest impact I made was on a pudgy little fellow who used to lurk around the set.

When the picture was finished, he sidled up to me. I mistook his intentions. “I don’t want to buy any fur coats,” said I.

“You don’t understand,” said he. “My name’s Louis Mayer. I’m the producer and this is my first picture.”

Making a reputation then was slow going. Producers used to say: “Get what’s-her-name who played the rich bitch in _Virtuous Wives_--she might be good for this one.” But when you go on television the impact is felt overnight. The following morning a cab driver won’t let you pay your fare, a workman on a construction job offers you his hard hat.

Outside Saks Fifth Avenue, after an Easter Sunday appearance on “What’s My Line?”, I found myself surrounded by a crowd of autograph hunters so big that a disgruntled policeman threatened to turn me in unless we all went around the corner into a side street. “You’ll have to call the paddy wagon,” I warned him, “and a picture of Hopper behind bars is all I need for my collection.”

For another “What’s My Line?” appearance I had some fun with Dorothy Kilgallen, who likes to queen it on the panel. I knew I’d have to do something exciting to knock her in the eye, so I asked Marion Davies to lend me a diamond necklace. “Which one?” asked Marion. “Or would you like them all?”

“Just one,” I said. “The small one with the pear-shaped pearl. That will be showy.”

I didn’t allow Miss Kilgallen to see me until just before we were introduced on camera. She gulped, turning slightly enviously green: “Isn’t it wonderful to see real jewels again? It’s so _beautiful_!”

I didn’t let on that I’d borrowed it. “It _is_ rather nice,” I purred. The following week she had to top me. She arrived with her hair dyed bright red.... We females do that to each other.

I’ve made a lot of friends through television and a few enemies. On the whole, I imagine that enemies are better for me. I love them, because they keep me on my toes. That’s one small debt I owe “Stoneface” Ed Sullivan, the Irish Sunday supplement to the American home.

After “Toast of the Town” was launched, Billy Wilkerson made Ed an offer to come out and work for him on the _Hollywood Reporter_. Ed gave in his resignation to Captain Joseph Patterson, who ran the New York _Daily News_ until he died. “I wonder if you know what you’re doing,” said Joe. “You’ll be in a trade paper with maybe 7500 readers instead of a two-million-plus circulation.”

“I think I’ll make a lot of money,” answered Ed. “I’ll know everybody out there and be able to get them for my TV show.”

“If that’s what you want, go ahead; but don’t ask to come back.”

Billy Wilkerson, who could run a dollar to ground as fast as any man, canvassed Hollywood, collecting advertisements for a special issue of the _Reporter_ welcoming Ed Sullivan to his new roost. When that issue appeared, it was thick with page after page of greetings, all proceeds going to Billy as publisher. Somewhere along the line, Ed must have realized who was going to find himself on the better end of his new deal. He went back to Joe and announced that he’d changed his mind.

“Don’t do that again,” Joe chided him. “Another time, if you make up your mind to go, you go.”

When his “Toast” was in its salad days, Ed pursued the practice of inviting Hollywood stars to appear for free. Jack Benny was nudged into appearing for him, Bob Hope went on for the same nonexistent fee five times, until he got his own show, which was programmed opposite Ed’s on a different network. Ed repaid Bob’s earlier courtesies by opening fire on him in his “Broadway” column.

He invited Frank Sinatra to appear for nothing except the sheer joy of it to plug _Guys and Dolls_. When Frank refused, Ed roasted him in a press statement. Sinatra promptly took a full-page in the _Reporter_ to holler:

Dear Ed: You’re sick. Sincerely, Frank. P.S. Sick, sick, sick!

As a newsprint neighbor, his “Broadway” often runs cheek by jowl with my “Hollywood” in the _News_, though the Chicago _Tribune_ won’t print him. I’d been asked several times to go on his show and be introduced from the audience. He received the standard reply: “Mr. Sullivan, when I appear on TV, I go as a guest and get paid for it.” The Screen Actors’ Guild ruled long ago that an interview doesn’t constitute a performance, since it tends to promote the career of the player involved. The union set a minimum pay scale of $210 for interviews.

That was what I paid each of a long list of stars who agreed to appear in interview format on “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” a Sunday television hour that Talent Associates arranged for me to do for NBC, 8 to 9 P.M., while Ed was on CBS at the same time. I took on the show to see how TV and I got along together, on the understanding that there’d be five more similar shows if I liked it. But Ed was told that I was going to do the half dozen for certain. That’s what got his bowels in an uproar.

The rumble gave us a singularly un-merry Christmas. The only time we could hire the big MCA studio we needed for one hour was on Friday, December 25. Use of the sound stage there for sixty minutes cost $1000, plus double pay for the crew. I had another taping session set up for three days later, with _Ben-Hur’s_ Charlton Heston, who had given his promise five weeks earlier and cabled from London that he would land in Hollywood on Sunday, December 27, ready to work with me the following day.

I didn’t know a blessed thing about it until I read it in the _News_, but Ed was scared I was going to steal his TV audience. He’d been busy trying to engage extra stars for his show, including Heston, who turned up that Sunday evening, the twenty-seventh, on Sullivan’s soiree, reading from the Bible for a $10,000 fee.

On the Monday, three other actors from _Ben-Hur_--Stephen Boyd, Francis X. Bushman, and Ramon Novarro--sat waiting with me for Heston, all of us made up and rarin’ to go. At the appointed hour of 2 P.M. a telephone call reached the studio from his agent, Johnny Dugan of MCA. “I have advised Mr. Heston,” he told me, “not to come on your show.”

“That is very kind of you. Might I ask why?”

He had assumed the program would be local, not network, said Johnny. “He’s negotiating for two more shows with Ed Sullivan, and he’s afraid this might jeopardize those two engagements.”

“What about his promise, as a man, that he would appear with me? When did he arrange with Mr. Ed Sullivan to go on last Sunday?”

“I don’t rightly remember,” said Johnny Dugan.

“Is Mr. Heston there?”

A moment’s hush fell between us. “Yes.”

“Put him on,” I said. There was some murmured conversation in the background, then the agent came back: “He’s busy.”

“Then please tell Mr. Heston to go to hell. I never would have asked if I’d known he had a conflicting job at $10,000. I’d have said ‘God bless you’ and certainly not have asked him to give it up.”

The Hearst papers went to town with front-page headlines as Ed continued shooting. TV columnists all over the country started playing up the feud between Sullivan and Hopper. He needed a gimmick to help him. “Heston played Moses in _The Ten Commandments_,” he said. “This week he was the Moses who led all these people out of the wilderness.” “All these people” were the alleged walkouts from my program. The complete list over which he raised hosannas consisted of:

Bette Davis, who was ill;

Steve McQueen, who was in Alaska;

Robert Horton, who left for an engagement at the London Palladium before we ever got started;

Joan Crawford, who was not notified in time by Talent Associates that they could not tape her segment in New York;

Tuesday Weld, with whom negotiations had not reached any conclusion;

Mickey Rooney, who could not match his schedule to ours for taping.

After the show Jack Benny asked me why I hadn’t invited him on. “I don’t know you as well as I do the others,” I replied. “I wasn’t sure you’d respond.”

“I’d have loved to,” said Jack. “You’ve no idea the pressure Ed put on me to appear with him when he started his shows.”

Just for the record, these are the people, in alphabetical order, who did make their appearances on “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood”: Lucille Ball, Anne Bauchens, Stephen Boyd, Francis X. Bushman, John Cassavetes, Gary Cooper, Ricardo Cortez, Robert Cummings, William Daniels, Marion Davies, Walt Disney, Janet Gaynor, Bob Hope, Hope Lange, Harold Lloyd, Jody McCrea, Liza Minnelli, Don Murray, Ramon Novarro, Anthony Perkins, Debbie Reynolds, Teddy Rooney, Venetia Stevenson, James Stewart, Gloria Swanson, King Vidor, and the four Westmore brothers.

Ed blasted me twice before I tried to fire back. He was still banging away like thirty-nine weeks of “Wagon Train.” He tried another tactic. He complained to two show-business unions, the Screen Actors’ Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, that he found me guilty of “the most grievous form of payola.” “Here,” he said, “is a columnist using plugs in a column to get performers free.”

For this, I called him a liar. I have never pressured anybody to do anything for me in my life. On the air on January 10, the Hopper show did fine. Our rating matched Ed’s exactly--and we were brand-new. He didn’t appear that evening on his own show. His ulcer wouldn’t let him.

There was an epilogue. The United Services Organization gave a benefit luncheon at $25 a plate for Mary Martin at the Hotel Pierre in New York. I sat on the dais, due to make a speech, near Ed Sullivan, who was billed to introduce me. At least two hundred people at the other tables knew what had gone on between us, including Mary Patterson of the _News_, Joe’s widow.

Ed mumbled his few opening words without looking at me. I know the whole room was hoping I’d let fly. I said: “Thank you very much, Mr. Sullivan. That is the most beautiful introduction you have ever given me.” Then I went on with my speech.

“I expected fireworks,” Mary Patterson told me afterward.

“I wouldn’t do that to Mary Martin,” said I.

If this was television, they could keep it. Never in my life had anything like the brawl with “Stoneface” happened to me. Maybe a TV camera brings out the worst in people, though some of them do all right without much prompting.

I’ve known Elsa Maxwell for years. I met her long before she came out to Hollywood under contract to Darryl Zanuck to stage a party for him in a picture he was producing with Linda Darnell as its star. Elsa’s inspiration was to dress every male as Abraham Lincoln and have two poodles dancing on a piano. Then she booked herself a lecture at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium on her perennial theme: “How to Give a Party.” For a solid hour, while the audience fidgeted, she eulogized Zanuck. After the performance she found she’d run into a roadblock. The backers of her lecture refused to pay her fee. “Go ahead and sue,” they said cheerfully. “You never got around to your subject. Let Zanuck pay you.”

I dutifully reported this in the column and added: “If she thinks she’s going to collect any money from Zanuck, she’s out of her ever-loving mind.” By way of reply, she sent me a large, fragrant bunch of catnip. Another feud was on.

While she was visiting Hollywood as Evelyn Walsh McLean’s guest, Elsa organized a victory party to celebrate the liberation of Paris toward the end of World War II. It was set up in the garden of the Countess di Frasso, complete with special outdoor stage, footlights, spotlights, and special effects all supplied by Mr. F. B. Nightingale, a minor celebrity of Beverly Hills, sometimes known as “the wizard of light,” who was recommended to Elsa by Lady Mendl.

“Why not make it complete by inviting some GI’s? You’ll have a lot of vacant seats at the back,” I suggested to Elsa.

“I wouldn’t think of it,” she said. “It isn’t a party for them, it’s for my friends.”

Nevertheless, it was a beauty, with top stars singing and dancing in Mr. Nightingale’s extravaganza. He was so proud of his job that he donated his and his assistants’ labor to the cause, and charged only $200 for materials. He sent a succession of bills to Elsa. They went unanswered.

Finally, Lady Mendl called me. “This is dreadful. Mr. Nightingale needs that money.”

“Oh, come on, Elsie,” said I. “Let’s each send him a check for $100 and forget it.” She was willing, but not Mr. Nightingale. He sent Elsa a receipted bill to which he added a postscript: “Your friends Lady Mendl and Hedda Hopper took care of it.”

Within forty-eight hours I had a telephone call from Elsa, and I got a $100 check from her one day after that. Elsie Mendl had to wait two weeks. But she didn’t have a daily column.

Elsa has boasted: “I’m full of beans. You can’t embarrass an old woman like me.” Four of her friends once sat together at luncheon in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Each came from a different city, and each was well up in society. One woman steered the conversation to the subject of their common friend: “I felt desperately sorry for her when Elsa’s mother died in Los Angeles. She sent me a cable from Paris, saying she hadn’t a bean and would I cable $3000 so she could bury her mother. Of course, I was happy to.”

The woman across the table broke in. “But I had the same kind of cable, and I sent the money. It was I who buried Elsa’s mother.”

The third woman could scarcely believe her ears. “But I mailed Elsa a check for the same purpose.”

The fourth of them, who lived in San Francisco, said quietly: “You are all mistaken. My husband knew Elsa and her mother well. He had several cables from Elsa like that over the years. Finally, she convinced him she was telling the truth one day, but he went down to Los Angeles to make certain. Sure enough, her mother had died. My husband took care of her funeral.”

Elsa and I met again in San Francisco, during the birth there of the United Nations in 1945. Ina Claire was giving a party for Averell Harriman, who was then our ambassador to Moscow. As a joke, she confided to six other guests, including Elsa and myself, that each of us was the guest of honor. Harriman told us off-the-record tales of the horrors committed by Stalin and his gang. “How can you talk like that to us,” I demanded, “when you say just the opposite to the newspapers?”

“It couldn’t be printed,” was his only reply.

Elsa sailed away with that party, if you could believe what she wrote about it. She was Ina Claire’s real guest of honor--so Elsa said. Her special brand of self-promotion demands that she has a celebrated name to play on. She built her own reputation by using other people’s names, such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as the drawing card. She took up Maria Callas, and with the burning-eyed prima donna beside her, Elsa could attract virtually anybody into the Maxwell circle.

I was introduced to Callas and her then husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, by Henry Sell, who runs _Town and Country_ magazine. He gave a luncheon for the three of us at Pavillon. I did my bit, in turn, by introducing Maria to some people sitting directly across from us who were members of the board of the San Francisco Opera. “Why don’t you get her to open your season?” I prompted. Later, it was arranged that she would do just that, in _Lucia di Lammermoor_, the coming September and, in October, also launch the Los Angeles season.

But before either event could take place, Callas went to Europe and met Elsa, who fell hook, line, and sinker for her. The verbal bouquets blossomed in every Maxwell column. Overnight, Maria became “my favorite friend ... La Prima Donna del Mondo ... a goddess ... a joy forever.” She was out until all hours, caught up in a hectic round of parties. Preparations for _Lucia_ got lost by the wayside. Only a matter of days before she was due to arrive in San Francisco, she canceled out.

Elsa couldn’t forgive what I promptly wrote about her loved one, Maria: “The day of the temperamental opera star is over; has been for some time. Her rich husband, a businessman, should know you can’t do business that way.” San Francisco opera lovers couldn’t forgive Maria.

She wrote me from Milan: “If I wouldn’t always be in this nervous tension caused by these constant attacks by the papers and dishonest people and dishonest, jealous colleagues and so many other stupid things of artistic life, I would have nothing wrong with me. My nerves can stand just so much and not more. I’m sorry that I’m troubling you with these ridiculous things, but I feel you must know exactly how things are.... If you drop me a line, I’d be grateful, and please consider me your sincere friend.” She proved that in 1961 in Mallorca, when we had a jolly old time together.

Elsa couldn’t let it go at that. Thanks to Jack Paar, she landed herself a new job on his “Tonight” show on NBC and announced: “I have invaded TV. The great American public loves me.” Not every member of it, let it be said. Walter Winchell threatened to sue all twelve of Paar’s sponsors for $2,000,000 apiece after Jack and his companion had raised questions about Walter’s role as a good citizen.

Miss Maxwell decided to take it out on me, though I didn’t see her crowning performance. John Royal, NBC vice president, telephoned me the following morning about it. “She went on and tried to distort you,” he said. “I suggest you call your lawyer and get a transcript of what she said. More than that, make them show you a tape of the show. We tried to get her off the air once before when she talked about somebody on Broadway and made a gesture indicating the woman was crazy.”

“Why don’t you get her off now?”

“We can’t. Paar loves her. But if she slanders you, you can get her off. Put your lawyer on to it.” My New York lawyers are also the _News’_ lawyers. They insisted on a transcription from NBC. Their considered opinion was that Elsa stopped just short of libel. “What she wants,” they said, “is the publicity you and your circulation could give her. Our advice is ‘Don’t let her have it.’”

Not long ago Dave Chasen came across to the table at which I was sitting in his restaurant. In tow he had a dapper young man in a blue blazer with brass buttons. “Hedda,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Jack Paar.”

After we’d exchanged our how-do-you-do’s, I asked: “Mr. Paar, why do you hate newspaper people? They’ve been very good to you. You wouldn’t be where you are today but for them.” I thought he was going into his tears-in-the-eye routine, but I pressed on. “I certainly should hate you for what Elsa Maxwell did to me.”

“What did she say?” he asked, all innocence.

“I have a transcription in my office, though I don’t carry it around in my purse. But tell me, why do you hate newspaper people?” He excused himself and went off. I thought he was going to burst out crying.

By this time Jack Paar and Elsa Maxwell, who belong to the same cradle but a generation apart, had gone their separate ways. The Paar staff told me several times: “He’s very anxious to have you on his show.” But I refused. The inscrutable workings of television may have made Jack a bigger name than Bob Hope or Jack Benny, but insults leave a bad taste in the mouth.

My fellow target on the Paar show, Walter Winchell, did not always see eye to eye with me. We used to suffer from a chronic case of mutual astigmatism as far as the other was concerned. The symptoms developed rapidly during the war, when he was shunted off by the United States Navy on a mission to South America. Walter raised no objections except: who was going to look after his Sunday night radio show for the Andrew Jergens Company?

The chosen candidate to replace him was Hopper. But W.W. screamed in pain at the thought. What happened next is best told in its distinctive press style by _Daily Variety_ dated December 7, 1942, one year precisely after Pearl Harbor:

Hedda Hopper got caught among numerous complications last week
that ended up in John Gunther, Robert St. John and Baukage
taking over the Walter Winchell Jergens spot on the NBC chain
last night instead of she.

Last Monday morning, Lennen-Mitchell agency handling the
account made a deal with Dema Harshbarger, manager for
Miss Hopper, to have the latter replace Winchell on the
fifteen-minute period during his absence abroad. On Tuesday,
confirmation came through from New York on the Hopper deal, and
Jack Andrews, of the agency, was en route to Hollywood to start
the ball rolling.

Miss Hopper in the meantime was preparing to take over the task
when Thursday night she received a wire from New York informing
her that due to complications the deal for her to fill the spot
was off....

In radio circles it is understood that the Jergens outfit had
changed its mind about having Miss Hopper replace Winchell
after Andrews had been authorized to engage her for the
December 6 broadcast. Also that the client had reversed its
plan to engage her for the spot following Winchell, now
occupied by the Parker family, starting January 3.

And that’s how Louella Parsons got the job following Winchell and stayed on the air four years.

It was clearly the moment for me to do a little yelling of my own, with some assistance from my attorneys, Gang, Kopp and Tyre. Our disagreement with Jergens and that company’s advertising agency was settled out of court. I received a check for $16,670. Walter took sly digs at me in his column as part of his own personal war effort clear through V-J day.

Then when the United Nations Charter was being framed in San Francisco, Hubbell Robinson of CBS asked me to fly up there to do two fifteen-minute broadcasts a week. I was to give the woman’s angle on the birth pangs of the world’s new peace baby. “I’d like to try,” I said, “even if it’s a long way from doing a Hollywood column. If I fall on my face, at least I shall have learned something.” I already had a once-a-week show for Armour and Company.

I flew my crew and myself up, expecting that a big network like CBS would have laid on all the necessary arrangements for us, since I was working for nothing and paying all my own expenses there. Not a bit of it. For my first show, interviewing some women delegates and wives of delegates from the founding nations, I learned two minutes before we went on the air that no announcer had been provided.

I scurried into the corridor outside the studio and grabbed the first man in sight. “Can you read?” He nodded, startled. “Then come on in. Here’s the script. I’ll give you a nod when it’s time, and you start reading where it says ‘Announcer.’”

We got on and we got off without casualties. Years later, when I was interviewing that calm, cool, and collected young man, Jack Webb, he said to me: “You know, you put me on radio, where I got started in show business. I was the guy you kidnaped one day in a CBS corridor in San Francisco. I was just out of uniform and needed a job.”

The first hesitant and somehow inspired sessions of the General Assembly were held in the San Francisco Opera House. Only the year before, I’d sat in a box there admiring the ladies and the glitter of a fashionable crowd listening to Puccini. Strictly as an observer of how the world was waging the peace, so I thought, I sat squeezed into one of the boxes of the Diamond Horseshoe with H. V. Kaltenborn on one side, Bill Henry on the other, and Walter Winchell to the rear with his knees digging into my back.

Walter was delivering some staccato comments into a microphone when a sound engineer tapped me on the shoulder: “You’re on next,” said he, “and you’ll have five minutes.” This was Friday.

“But I don’t start until Monday,” I whispered. Too late. I was on. I closed my eyes and prayed. I had no more idea than the man in the moon what I was going to say.

With my eyes closed, I thought how different it was now from the last time I’d been there. I said into the microphone: “The entire Diamond Horseshoe is now taken over by the press, cameras, radio equipment. Not one of the people who sat here a year ago is with us. They’re up in the gallery, and happy to be there because we’re all here for one reason, to help bring peace to a troubled world.”

I went on like that for five minutes. When I’d finished, Winchell thrust out his hand and said: “I’d like to congratulate you. I couldn’t have done that for the life of me.” And so we made up, and we’ve been good friends ever since.

_Fourteen_

Every time I go out on the town twisting, I murmur a silent apology to Elvis Presley. I realize that I’m indulging in the same gyrations that pushed Sir Swivel Hips along the road to fame. I told him in a note not long ago: “You’ll be surprised to know that I’m now doing the twist. Not as well as you, but I’m doing it. I have taken one inch off my waist and two off my _derrière_. Now I know how you keep so thin.”

When I originally saw the act, I was horrified. I said so, loud and clear. He was rolling around on the stage floor of the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Hollywood with his arms and legs wrapped around the microphone as though they were bride and groom. Nine thousand teens shrieked with excitement as he wiggled, jiggled, and bumped, and six husky policemen looked the other way. At the crucial point, from my front-row seat for opening night, I saw him give his bandsmen a broad wink that spoke volumes.

The policemen’s job was to keep the hands of the audience off the boy. He’s been manhandled so often by his frantic fans that he’s scared he’ll be torn to shreds someday, suffering the same fate as his shirts and suits. “If anyone comes down the aisle,” the loud-speakers announced, “Elvis will go off stage and not come back.” In his gold jacket with white lapels, he twisted and writhed for an hour, belting out the whole skull-cracking repertoire, from “Heartbreak Hotel” to “Jailhouse Rock.”

It was like a neighbor of ours in Altoona, who had fits, fell down, and squirmed on the sidewalk. Mother told me it was an illness and not to be upset. I hadn’t heard then about epilepsy.

The next day the Los Angeles police told Elvis to clean it up and tone it down. That night the six cops had their backs to the audience to make sure he did. I’d said my piece in the column: “Every muscle jerks as though he were a marionette. I’ve seen performers dragged off to jail for less. But Elvis’ audience got the emotional impact of the lines and screamed their undying love for the greatest phenomenon I’ve seen in this century.”

Time passed, but it doesn’t necessarily heal all wounds. When Norman Taurog, who directed Elvis in _G.I. Blues_, came up with the idea that his star and I should get together for luncheon, I fancied Presley might be tempted to swat me. “He isn’t what you expect,” Norman promised, so I went along, ready to keep my guard up.

I’ve seldom been more mistaken about anybody. I hadn’t been with Elvis five minutes when we were cozy as old pals who’ve been dragged apart and have a lot of talking to make up. His manners would have put Lord Chesterfield to shame. His face was firm, lean and unlined as a four-year-old’s. “What did you do with sideburns and the pompadour?” I asked.

“The army barber got the sideburns, and I gave the pompadour to the Sealy company to stuff mattresses with.”

“I’m one of those who felt you were a menace to young people who imitate you without realizing what they--or you--are doing.”

I must have sounded defensive. He smiled. “I gathered that. You can’t make everyone like you, but I try.” He toyed with a container of yoghurt, a bottle of Pepsi, and a cup of black coffee--nothing more. I remember how he used to lunch on a huge mound of mashed potatoes and a bowl of gravy, meat, tomatoes, a quart of milk, with half a dozen slices of thickly buttered bread to top it off.

Two years in the Army had brought many changes. I found that out when I talked with his commanding officer in Berlin. “I’d be happy if I had ten thousand more like him,” said the C.O. Sergeant Elvis, the highest-paid entertainer that ever lived, realized only $12 a month of his $145 pay because it was subject to ninety-one per cent surtax. But the trade in Presley souvenirs--a fantastic assortment of shirts, slacks, ties, statues, masks, dog tags, records, and sheet music--brought in $3,000,000 while he was out of civilian circulation.

He’s one of the few new faces in our industry who has been promoted into a living legend, and we need dream stuff like Elvis to survive. He owes his reputation to the labors of “Colonel” Tom Parker, the old-time carny and circus hand who isn’t above peddling photographs and programs at his protégé’s personal appearances to boost the take. He and his wife are childless; he’s quick to say he loves Elvis like a son. The “colonel,” with eyes like ball bearings and a mind like a bear trap, acts the part of the hick from the sticks in business dealings. “I only went to fifth grade” is his line, “so I have to go slow.” Elvis’ role is to create the impression of the country boy whose head is still awhirling from the bedazzling luck that’s befallen him.

“Sometimes a silly tale starts a lot of repercussions,” he told me. “One time I was out at the beach with some fellows throwing baseballs at milk bottles lined up in a booth. I kept on winning Teddy bears, and I gave them to the kids that gathered round. Then somebody printed a story that I owned a collection of Teddy bears. Ever since then they’ve been coming in from all over the world. I’ve got an attic full of them at my home in Graceland, Memphis. All kinds of bears, some in tuxedos, some dressed like me with guitars strapped to them. It’s fantastic.”

Elvis is an identical twin whose brother died at birth. His mother, who could bear no more children after that, is dead, too. That combination of circumstances may go toward explaining his built-in fear of being left alone, which keeps a hand-picked group of wiry young men, roughly his own age, constantly with him as companions, bodyguards, chauffeurs, and partners in judo and karate, two pastimes he picked up in the Army. The group includes his cousin, Gene Smith, an army buddy from Chicago, and boyhood pals from Memphis. If they’re temporarily unwanted in his company, they melt away in the flick of an eye.

The “colonel,” drawing on his circus experience, has seen to it that nobody has ever been hurt in any of the public melees that have a habit of building up around Elvis. But it makes for a secluded private life. When he’s in the mood to roller-skate, another hobby, he escapes the crowds by hiring an entire rink for the evening. He drops in at night clubs with his little gang and their dates only after the lights have dimmed for the floor show, and he leaves in a hurry if he’s recognized.

The same routine applies to his movie going--he sits in the last row and high-tails out if anybody stops by to stare. Every time he leaves his rented Bel Air home for the studio, he and his companions travel in two Cadillacs, one driven hard on the tail of the other. The same compulsion for protection from who knows what sometimes results in his being delivered to an auditorium or arena where he’s singing in a moving van, lying on a couch.

He works conscientiously at a long list of charities in semi-secrecy. In twelve months he will raise as much as $118,000 for benefits; prides himself that every cent of it goes to the chosen cause with nothing subtracted off the top for expenses. “We buy our own tickets, and no free tickets are handed out to anybody. We pay every entertainer on the program. When the benefit’s over, we give local newspapers a story in which every item of money is accounted for.”

Sooner or later, he says, he aims at becoming a good actor. It looks as though he’ll have to pick up his training in front of the cameras as Gary Cooper and many others did. He isn’t depending on the gyrations any longer. “They call it the twist, but it’s the same thing I’ve done for six years. The old wiggle is on the way out now.”

Apart from sensations like Elvis, the only place a young entertainer can get training is in television. The studio schools, where promising beginners were compelled to go to classes in speech, drama, dancing, or what have you, were disbanded years ago. The studios claimed they couldn’t afford them any longer. There’s very little point in a raw recruit trying to crash Hollywood today. My advice, if anybody asks for it, is: “Start in New York; get on TV; do bits on Broadway; then take a stab at movies. Otherwise, you’re going to find California can be a great spot to starve in.”

Elvis is lucky, too, in having an agent like the “colonel,” whose itch for money hasn’t outpaced his protégé’s talents. A good agent doesn’t allow his client to take on more than he can handle. Too many ten per centers slaver for the quick buck. They’re not content to wait a week longer than necessary. So the youngsters are booked into night clubs, TV, personal appearances, fairgrounds, and every imaginable kind of fee-paying frolic. In that rat race, a greedy agent can kill a promising newcomer’s career in two years flat. I’ve seen it happen too often. The agents don’t care. Ten per cent of a boy’s murdered future is zero, but there are always plenty more lambs to lead to the slaughter.

* * * * *

Before I met him, I had an earful of Elvis one day from Natalie Wood. She was tough, very young, starry-eyed and burningly ambitious. All the beaux were after her like a pack of hound dogs--Nicky Hilton, Lance Reventlow, Jimmy Dean, Nicky Adams, Johnny Grant, Dennis Hopper, Bob Neal, and as many more. But she was crazy for Elvis. She has every record he ever made.

She wasn’t only crazy for him. She was mad for stuffed toy tigers, including one that played “_Ach du Lieber Augustine_.” She wouldn’t ride on a plane without taking aboard, to read during the flight, a wad of unopened “good luck” notes written by her friends saying how glad they were that she’d arrived safely. She also took some tigers along as talismans. She went through a phase of wearing nothing but black, clear down to all her underwear. She drove a decorator way out of his mind by ordering black drapes and black furniture for her bedroom, where rugs and walls were chalk white. At that time, she was going on eighteen years old, all but four of them spent making movies.

“My father said he didn’t want his child to be an actress,” she once told me, “but my mother took me on a train to Hollywood to see Irving Pichel, who gave me a bit in _Happy Land_, on location in Santa Rosa. In my scene I had to drop an ice-cream cone and cry.”

There was no turning back after that. She used to pose in the darkness of movie theaters because her mother, youthful-looking Mrs. Maria Gurdin, an ex-ballet dancer, used to pretend the cameras that ground away in the last fade-out of the newsreel were focused on Natalie. By the time she was eight she had appeared in court, calm and collected, to squeeze a pay increase, up to $1000 a week, from her studio.

The build-up toward an earful of Elvis began at breakfast in the new Hilton hotel in Mexico City. A crowd of us had gone down for its opening, including Nicky Hilton and Bob Neal, who qualified in trumps for the phrase beloved of society gossip columnists, “a millionaire playboy.” Over coffee, he came in and whispered that he’d just slashed every tire on young Hilton’s automobile, “so Natalie will have to ride with me.”

Limousines were to take us to catch a plane home to Los Angeles. But Nicky foxed Bob. He took another car, and Natalie, to the airport. If either of the two swains thought he’d furthered his cause, he was dead wrong. En route, we landed for twenty-five minutes to refuel, and I went with Natalie to the waiting room, where a mammoth jukebox stood waiting to be fed. Like a thirsty traveler who’s reached the oasis, she pumped nickels and dimes into the maw of the thing to make it play Presley nonstop from the moment we arrived until we left.

She got as far as riding on the back of Elvis’ motorcycle and staying with Elvis at his home “because I wanted a vacation and a rest--his parents were there all the time.” But the passion soon faded. “Since he’s in town, why don’t you see him?” I asked her soon after her return.

She shrugged. “He’s busy and I’m working.” Did she think the vogue for him would last? She shrugged again. “That depends on how he does in his next picture.” Within a matter of weeks she had married Robert Wagner.

This pair of newlyweds made lovebirds look like scorpions. This was the couple that invented “togetherness.” In private or in public made no difference; they held hands, kissed, clutched each other in an altogether nauseating display of coltish affection. The fan magazines drooled over Bob and Natalie as the symbol of all young lovers. They bought a boat and painted it together. They bought a $175,000 house with marble floors and went into debt together.

When Warners suspended her for eighteen months, she sat out her time on the sets of Bob’s pictures, nuzzling him between takes. The marriage lasted three years. In that time, the career of Bob Wagner, who started out as a caddie carrying clubs for Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy at a Beverly Hills country club, slowed down considerably, while his wife’s took wings. Togetherness turned into that delight of the divorce attorneys, “mutual incompatibility,” and Natalie cut fan-magazine interviews out of her life completely.

As an actress, she’s always been a child wonder. Orson Welles remembers her vividly in her first major part, with him in _Tomorrow Is Forever_: “She was so good she was terrifying. I guess she was born a professional.” In her teens, when there was nothing better to do, she’d collect a bunch of young actors together to improvise scenes with her, which she immortalized on her tape recorder. On top of the world at twenty-three, she drew $250,000 for _West Side Story_, with more money promised from Warners.

She yearns to do more live TV, which her contract allows, as a prelude to Broadway. “The last five minutes before you start, while you’re waiting for the first cue, is like being poised on a roller coaster, before it swoops down. When it’s over, you feel you’ve really accomplished something.”

Off camera, she is a ninety-eight-pound kitten who gazes adoringly upward from her 5 feet 2 inches at the current man who takes her fancy. Warren Beatty jumped into that category when they worked together in _Splendor in the Grass_, and he dumped Joan Collins after two years of going steady. Joan turned down four pictures so she could stay with her ambling heartthrob. They’d talked about a wedding.

This very sexy member of the new male generation came to me to ask: “Do you think I should marry Joan?” He received a quizzical look. “If you can put that question, you know the answer.”

Warren isn’t alone among young actors of any generation in having an eye for the publicity mileage to be obtained from a newsy romance. As for Natalie, she wasn’t talking about marrying anybody, by her account. Like most young actresses, she can’t be taken seriously on the subject. Two months before she married Bob Wagner, she was saying much the same thing.