December 20, 2023 • 35 mins
Though she started out acting, what really made Hedda Hopper famous was her work in newspapers. For several decades, she could make or break a movie career with her gossip column, sending statements to print regardless of whether there was any actual proof of what she claimed.
Research:
- Collins, Amy Fine. “The Powerful Rivalry of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.” Vanity Fair. April 1997. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/02/rivalry-hedda-hopper-louella-parsons-gossip-columnists
- Eells, George. “Hedda and Louella.” W.H. Allen. Virgin Books. 1972.
- Ephron, Nora. “Hedda and Louella.” New York Times. April 23, 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/23/archives/hedda-and-louella-by-george-eells-illustrated-360-pp-new-york-g-p-p.html
- FROST, JENNIFER. “‘GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD COMPANY’: HEDDA HOPPER, HOLLYWOOD GOSSIP, AND THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST CHARLIE CHAPLIN, 1940-1952.” Australasian Journal of American Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 2007, pp. 74–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41054077
- “Hedda Hopper, Columnist, Dies; Chronicled Gossip of Hollywood.” New York Times. Feb. 2, 1966. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/02/02/79310265.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
- “Hollywood’s Godmother to Give Views on Past, Present, Future.” The Tampa Tribune. Jan. 10, 1960. https://www.newspapers.com/image/329731973/?terms=hedda%20hopper&match=1
- Hopper, Hedda. “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood.” The Shreveport Journal. October 4, 1938. https://www.newspapers.com/image/600365053/?terms=hedda%20hopper&match=1
- Peak, Mamie Ober. “Social Butterfly of Screen a Different Person at Home.” Hartford Courant. Jan 10, 1932. https://www.newspapers.com/image/369469825/?terms=hedda%20hopper&match=1
- Sbardellati, John and Tony Shaw. “Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America.” The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Nov., 2003), pp. 495-530. University of California Press. https://web.viu.ca/davies/H323Vietnam/CharlieChaplin.McCarthyism.pdf
- “William Randolph Hearst’s Campaign to Suppress Citizen Kane.” American Experience. PBS. April 30, 2021. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/kane-william-randolph-hearst-campaign-suppress-citizen-kane/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we are
talking about Head of Hopper. And although she started out acting,
(00:24):
what really made her famous was her work in newspapers.
For several decades, she literally could make or break a
movie career with her gossip column sending statements to print,
regardless of whether there was any actual proof of what
she claimed or the behavior she alleged that people are
participating in or not. I find her super fascinating. I
read both of her books growing up. She has been
(00:48):
in a kajillion movie and TV projects. Most recently was
the show Feud, which is a Ryan Murphy show, But
it's largely a lot of her. Discussion of her is
about her and Luella Parsons because they were kind of
the two big power players in terms of gossip columns
(01:11):
in Hollywood in the early part of the twentieth century.
And I am forever just I marvel at the power
that they both had and how much they created ways
of consuming information about movies and movie stars that we
(01:32):
are still wrapped up in today, even though they're kind
of nonsensical. We could talk about this more behind the scenes,
because I feel like I have Chicken or the Egg
thoughts about the movie industry and how it has developed
in this way. But she just is like a wild
story of her own. So I thought we would talk
(01:53):
about her today. We may do an episode on Luella
Parsons in the future because she's also pretty interesting, and
we'll talk about her some on this, but we're not
going to go into her backstory. They are often, as
I said, discussed kind of as a payer. Even one
of the biographies I read is a simultaneous biography of
the two of them that came out in the seventies.
(02:14):
And yeah, so we'll talk about Luella some today, but
really we're going to talk about head of Hopper and
how she got to this point pretty late in her
life of being a gossip columnist and having just such influence,
and also how she used that influence sometimes in just
really cruel ways. So she started life with a completely
(02:38):
different name, which was Elda Furry. She was born June second,
eighteen eighty five, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. She described that sort
of as a suburb of Altoona, Pennsylvania. Later on, she
wrote that she was born during an electrical storm, and
she also fudged her age and routinely said she was
born in eighteen ninety. Her father was a butcher, and
(03:01):
she described her upbringing as hard. She had eight siblings,
although not all of them lived to adulthood, and she
made it sound as though she never really got much
praise or encouragement. When her brother sherman got hired away
from their father's butcher shop, she was made to pick
up his duties, and this is something that she said
made her tough enough to be unafraid of anyone in Hollywood.
(03:25):
Later in her life, while she was still a teenager
in Altoona, Elda acquired an accessory which defined her style
for the rest of her life. She bought herself a
hat with her own money, and she wrote of that
hat quote, it was a thing of beauty, of bright
green straw with red velvet geraniums. It made me feel
rich as a queen. That hat was a greater attraction
(03:47):
on Easter morning than the choir or the preacher's sermon.
I said, if a hat can get the attention of
this many people, I'll never go bareheaded, and she stuck
to that because she was known for her hat collection
and the money she spent on it throughout the rest
of her life. When she was seventeen, Elda saw a
touring company performed the play Captain Jinks of the Horse
(04:10):
Marines that involves a love triangle with a bet and
an opera star and a lot of complications before a
happy ending. Ethel Barrymore starred in the play. It's often
credited with being the show that made her famous, and
Elderfurry thought that this was amazing, and after seeing the play,
she knew she wanted to act, so in nineteen oh seven,
she left Pennsylvania for New York, intent on a stage career.
(04:34):
In her autobiography, she describes this exit from Pennsylvania as quote,
when life became intolerable at home, I ran away to
New York and went on the stage. But really, and
you'll often see like she saw this play and then
she left, But really she took some time before that
to get some education that was going to benefit her
in her acting career. She didn't actually get formal education
(04:58):
past eighth grade because she had to work in the
family business. But once she got the acting bug. She
did manage to get her father to let her enroll
in music school in Pittsburgh, so she did that for
a while. But she did make that move from Opportunity
to New York, kind of in a spur of the moment,
way after an incident in which, according to her, her
(05:18):
brother broke her favorite chair, and that was just the
last straw for her. She had been secretly saving up money,
and she got that money. She packed a suitcase and
she left without telling anyone. And she wasn't though, without
a place to go in New York, because her uncle
lived there and she just kind of showed up on
his doorstep. In New York, she got a job working
as a chorus girl with the Aborn Opera Company. She
(05:41):
was not naturally talented, but she was determined. As she
moved in the social circles of the theater, she met
one of the most successful actors of the day, de
Wolf Hopper. He's most famously remembered today for his recitation
of the Ernest Lawrence Thayer baseball poem Casey at the Bat.
Hopper was twenty seven years older than Elda, and he
(06:03):
clearly captivated her. She later wrote quote. To me, Hopper
was something special, something new under the sun. His massive size,
his voice, his storytelling gift. Wolfe was a six foot
three riot. From the moment I saw him, he fascinated me.
She wrote a lot of very adoring things about him,
even long after the marriage had ended, describing how his
(06:24):
voice was something you couldn't help but fall in love with,
and describing it as sounding quote like some great church organ.
Hopper had his own acting company and Elda joined it,
and though they soon started a romance, they were really
not open about it. No, he had a little bit
of a history with women. He had already been married
(06:46):
a divorce four times at this point. She was so
much younger. They just kind of kept it quiet initially,
And when Elda, who had gotten frustrated with chorus rolls,
managed to land a lead part in a touring production
of The Country Boy, which meant she no longer with
de Wolf's company, he sent her letters throughout her eight
month tour, and then when that tour ended, she decided
(07:07):
she also wanted to be in musical theater. Instead of
doing straight acting again, not as chorus girl. She wanted
to be a main player, and so she started studying voice,
and then she landed a role in The Quaker Girl,
so once again she went back on tour, and again
Wolfy wrote to her constantly. She continued to keep the
secret of their romance, even as her colleagues asked who
(07:29):
this man was who so dutifully wrote to her and
was obviously just adoring of her, And she later said
that the strain of keeping this secret of their romance
was so great that she was never able to keep another.
By the time the tour of The Quaker Girl ended,
Elda and Wolfe were secretly engaged. She went to a
jewelry store and bought her own ring by herself, and
(07:50):
the next morning she took the earliest train from Albany
to Grand Central station, where De wolf and his chauffeur
were waiting. The couple headed to New Jersey and they
got me read in secret. They only told the manager
of the Algonquin Hotel where mister Hopper was living, so
that he could arrange for Elda to have separate but
adjoining rooms with her new husband. As Holly said earlier,
(08:13):
this was De Wolfe's fifth marriage. As they started telling people,
Elda told one of the couple's closest friends, Alice Miller,
and the response was that she burst into tears because
she was worried about what her young friend had done.
Their other close friends, who were slowly let in on
the secret, ended up celebrating with a private dinner, and
(08:33):
eventually Elda telegraphed her parents and her father, who was
several years younger than her new husbandd wolf was so
angry that he put out a statement to the press
that the marriage quote pains me greatly. Essentially, everyone kind
of thought that de wolf had taken up with such
a young woman to stroke his own ego, and that
(08:53):
he was going to soon cast her aside. The family
statement meant that soon that news was everywhere. There was
no keeping any kind of secret, and the newly weds
were suddenly having to patch up a lot of friendships
with people who were shocked by this news or just
kind of hurt at having been left out of the loop.
De Wolfe's previous wives had been named Ella, Ida, Edna,
(09:14):
and Nella, and she found that their similarities led to
her new husband calling her by all of their names
and not her own. She wrote, quote, I didn't have
much personality of my own then, but I'd be darned
if I was going to give up the shred I
did possess. So she consulted a numerologist who came up
with the name Heda de wolf Hopper did not like this,
(09:36):
but she said he never called her the wrong name again. Yeah,
she loved it and he was not pleased, but it
worked out, I guess. On January twenty sixth, nineteen fifteen,
Hedda and De Wolf had a son, William de wolf
Hopper Junior. She had been touring Withdwolf on his current tour,
but she returned to New York early because her pregnancy,
(09:56):
which they had also kept secret, had just become too
uncomfortable for life on the road. The birth of their
son came several weeks early, and De Wolf was not
in New York with her at the time. He actually
found out that she had had the child while he
was on stage in Chicago, and then once he returned home,
the family traveled with a nanny to Nantucket and there
(10:16):
they spent the summer. Later that same year, the couple
decided to move to Hollywood, something a lot of stage
actors were doing to try to get into the new
and growing film industry. De wolf had been offered a
contract with Triangle Film Corporation. Initially, do wolf had wanted
Heda to give up her career when they married, and
she acquiesced, but then she took a part, allegedly as
(10:40):
a favor to their friend William Farnham. In nineteen sixteen,
she made her on screen debut in the film Battle
of Hearts. It was the first of many movies for her.
By the end of the nineteeneen, she had been in
eleven films and the work continued to come. This was
good because de Wolfe's talent didn't really translate to the screen.
His best feature was his voice, and the films were silent.
(11:04):
Plus he was old enough that he just didn't look
good on film, according to Heada's account. Later, when his
contract was up, he went to New York and she
stayed in California, where the work was steady for her.
She did eventually go back to New York, and the
Hoppers bought a house on Long Island so that their
son could have a home outside of the city. De
Wolfe had gone back to acting on the stage, and
(11:26):
Hetta also did some stage work too, and then Sam
Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn opened a studio in Fort Lee,
New Jersey, to make movies, and they called headed to
see if she'd like to make some films on the
East Coast, and she did, and she also established her
reputation as a woman with a sharp tongue very early
on in these movies. In nineteen eighteen, she appeared in
(11:47):
the film Virtuous Wives that was actually the first film
made by Lewis B. Mayer. She tells this story in
her book about how there was this weird guy kind
of lurking around the set and they kept having to
tell him to get out of the shot, and nobody
realized it was Lewis B. Mayer and he had to
tell people at the end, like, oh, I'm the producer.
But Elda, who at this point was going by Heada,
(12:09):
but she was also being billed as Missus d wolf Hopper,
which is how she's credited in that film, fought constantly
with her co star Anita Stewart. Hedda made a point
to have custom clothing made for every scene out of
her own pocket. She spent her entire salary, which is
quoted as five thousand dollars for this project on new
clothes and it upstaged the much more famous Stuart with
(12:33):
her wardrobe, and this caused a huge calamity. In a moment,
we'll talk about the end of Heada's marriage and her
life after De Wolfe, but first we will take a
quick sponsor break. According to Hedda's account, she began to
(12:56):
fall out of love with her husband when she told
him that she had gotten a raise the studio and
was finally making the same amount of money as he was.
His response to this was anger instead of happiness, and
he said some very insulting things. They had already been
living on very different schedules and not spending as much
(13:16):
time together, and then Hadda started to find evidence that
he was having an affair or multiple affairs. She eventually
caught him in one of these, and she filed for divorce.
In nineteen twenty two. D Wolfe Hopper got married again
to his sixth wife, Lily and Glacier, right after the
divorce was final. Soon after, Hetta was offered a year
(13:37):
long contract in Hollywood and she took it. She was
in a lot of projects, but was always a supporting player.
Over time, she found she wasn't getting offered contracts and
she needed to figure out what to do. Interestingly enough,
during this time, she was friends with the woman who
would later become her most bitter rival, Luella Parsons, and
(13:57):
would sometimes slipper information for her gossip column in exchange
for a little good press. For a while, Hopper jumped
from job to job, just trying to make a living
and support herself and her son. In nineteen thirty two,
she made a move into a new arena, and that
was politics. She ran for Los Angeles City Council that year.
She did not win, but she did remain politically interested,
(14:20):
and sometimes that interest became part of her columns. We're
going to talk about that a lot more in a minute.
After foundering for a bit, Heda got a radio agent
and they worked on getting a show together. But her
first effort was bad. She wasn't used to being on
mike rather than on a stage, and she ended up
using an affected British sounding accent. But she worked on
(14:42):
it and in nineteen thirty six had us started a
radio show, The Head of Hopper Show, which was a
short form gossip program. Mostly she cataloged Hollywood divorces and weddings,
using her connections in the industry for insider information. Luella
Parson's show A Hollywood Hotel had debuted two years earlier,
and based on the head of Hopper Show, Heda was
(15:04):
offered a column by the Esquire syndicate. They specifically wanted
a gossip column to compete with the one written by
Lluella Parsons. Hedda couldn't type, but she could dictate, and
soon her column, HEADA Hopper's Hollywood, was running in more
than a dozen papers. She soon was writing seven columns
a week and still doing her radio show. She got
(15:27):
busy and successful enough to move her work out of
her house to an office on Hollywood Boulevard. She kept
that office, I think for the rest of her life.
She listed her number and address so people could drop
in or call if they had a hot tip or
any inside information, and they did, and she shared it
all without fact checking, later saying she didn't know anything
(15:47):
about libel laws. But her radio show was with CBS,
and their legal team would actually cut her scripts before
she went on the air. They would review it and
edit them if they thought something was unverifiable or could
get them trouble. But she kind of found a way
to work around that. Problem by using her delivery to
suggest when she was hinting at something salacious, even if
(16:08):
she couldn't say it. Hetta's work was, as we mentioned,
not known for fact checking. The New York Times wrote
of her after her death, quote, Ordinarily, there was a
fake quality to miss Hopper's columns, tracing perhaps to the
fact that she did not like to have her staff
tamper with her dictated output, and to the fact that
she did not always check out her information. The result
(16:31):
was that she got names confused, such as Switching Shirley
Temple and and Shirley and Judy Garland and Judy Canova.
She sometimes misattributed pregnancies or engagements or love affairs. Uh,
this gets a yikes. Yeah. I mean that's a pretty
fast way for somebody to like have their phone ring
(16:52):
and be like, I didn't know you were having an affair,
to be like, what are you even talking about? That's
not me, but it's in print, and people will start
to believe it. That's a problem. Right. In nineteen forty,
Hopper's writing had become so popular that she was able
to take a more lucrative offer at the Des Moines Register.
In Tribune syndicate, but they released her from it when
(17:13):
the Chicago Tribune New York News syndicate made her a
better offer. This was just after Hedda had pulled off
something that seemed unthinkable. She had scooped Luella Parsons that
was regarding the divorce of Jimmy Roosevelt, the President's son,
And this was hot gossip because Jimmy, who worked for
the Goldwyn Studio, was having an affair that precipitated that divorce.
(17:36):
It made front page news all over the US, and
it sparked a feud between Hopper and Parsons that persisted
for decades. By the early nineteen forties, the column was
getting so much mail from readers that Hopper needed two
full time assistants to wade through it all. Hedda became
an integral part of the studio star system. That system
(17:57):
is something we've brushed up against on the show before,
but we've never really talked about it in depth. Basically,
being an actor in Hollywood from the nineteen twenties to
the nineteen sixties usually involved going in for a screen test,
and if the studio liked what it saw, that actor
would be signed to a contract. The contracts were often
seven years long, and during that time the actor was
(18:20):
essentially an employee of the movie studio. They acted in
the films they were assigned. They were usually held to
morality clauses that were meant to curb any reckless, lascivious,
or other behavior that could embarrass the studio, and in return,
the studio made that actor a star. This usually meant
the concoction of a false backstory and name, essentially meaning
(18:42):
that that actor had to play a character anytime they
were out in public, and part of that system was,
of course, pr The studio essentially introduced these actors as stars,
and gossip columns became a way to get the word
out about their doings that were wholesome and image affirming.
For example, Clark Gable was one of the stars who
(19:03):
became famous in the star system. He was already famous
by the time we're using this example, but it shows
how this whole thing worked. In nineteen thirty eight, so
that was the year Too Hot to Handle came out,
and while plans were being laid for Gone with the Wind,
a breezy mention of the already well known actor appeared
in head of Hopper's Hollywood. It read quote Clark Gable
(19:24):
is taking all his pals up to the rodeo in Victorville,
October fourteenth, long before he knew Carol Lombard. Yuko Lomo
was his old camping ground. He'd go out every night
rabbit shooting with all the kids. When celebrity seekers found
out about it, Clark moved on. Nice to know he's
going back because the gang up there adore him. So
(19:44):
it's basically like, isn't he the best guy ever? We
all think he's amazing, which just Garner's more public favor
for that actor so that when their films come out,
people want to go see it. On the flip side,
if a star was caught in a scandal and it
was about to go to press, the studio would pay
off papers or the columnists to suppress this story. There's
(20:06):
one story about Luella Parsons where they bought a screenplay
from her to suppress the story that never got made,
but she basically got a big hunk of money to
not talk about something she knew about an actor. This
all meant that Hetta and her rival Luella Parsons were
able to wield an incredible amount of power. If an
actor did something that one of them didn't like, they
(20:27):
could easily tank their careers by reporting it or even
fabricating unfounded gossip in the guise of an inside tip.
Actors who violated the morality clauses in their contracts were
fired and left with no real recourse. In a nineteen
ninety seven interview with Vanity Fair, actor Roddy McDowell noted
that being mentioned positively by Hetta or Parsons was a
(20:50):
sort of currency, and actors saved their clippings and showed
them to studios, so they were a negotiating tool to
prove the value of the actor. Hetta Hopper's sometimes manifested
in ways that were actively harmful to the people she
wrote about. Both she and Parsons could be incredibly conniving
in ways that are kind of hard to stomach for
(21:11):
anyone with scruples. Frankly, after Orson Wells had convinced Luella
Parsons that his upcoming film Citizen Kane was not based
on her boss William Randolph Hurst, Hetta was able to
see an early screening and immediately reported to Hurst that
it was obviously based on him, and that she was
surprised Luella had not given him a heads up. Hurst
(21:33):
was so angry he commanded Luella to launch a full
scale attack on the film. To squash it. Parsons threatened
to expose all of the secrets she knew about RKO executives,
that was the studio where it was made, and that
she would black out any coverage of it or Radio
City Music Hall where it was set to premiere, and
as a consequence that premiere was canceled. There is more
(21:56):
to this story. There are so many ins and outs
of just cruel and unkind behavior and canniming, but the
short version is that citizen Kane tanked initially due to
the work of Parsons at the behest of Hurst, which
he started with a tip off from head of Hopper,
and although HEADA Hopper did not work for her. She
called the movie quote a vicious and irresponsible attack on
(22:18):
a great man. Writing for the Australasian Journal of American
Studies in two thousand and seven, Jennifer Frost described the
way that Hopper used her column to blur the lines
of public, private, and political. Quote gossip was understood to
be private talk talk about those things which ought to
be kept private, voiced often illegitimately in the public realm.
(22:42):
Yet as in traditional societies, Hollywood gossip also had a
public function. It shared information and knowledge, contributed to a
sense of community among moviegoers, and, in Hopper's case, provided
a platform and an audience for her political views. As
practiced by and her reader's, Hollywood Gossip became an arena
(23:03):
for discussion and debate about significant and contested issues of
public and private life and their intersection in mid twentieth
century America. So coming up, we will talk about the
way head of Hopper used this whole function of her
writing to target Charlie Chaplin in her column. But first
we're going to pause for a sponsor break. The most
(23:34):
famous victim of Heada's poison pen was Charlie Chaplin. She
had many times written about other celebrities with a good
bit of venom, but Chaplin was someone she targeted repeatedly
in what has often been called a decades long campaign
against him. Some of her write ups were honestly the
sort of boring critiques of his films that may have
(23:56):
been an irritant, like she would say he's a good actor,
but his films are bad, but soon she started attacking
him on a personal level. Some of this seems to
have largely been initiated as a grudge for Chaplain not
really caring about Hollywood gossip or playing the games that
she typically required of stars if they wanted to stay
(24:16):
in the good graces of her column. He also was
mora aligned a little bit with Luella Parsons. There are
things that place him socially near Luella Parsons, which of
course she would not have liked. He also didn't work
within the Hollywood system right He was making his films independently,
so it wasn't as though his job was in danger
if he didn't play nice with her, at least not directly.
(24:40):
Chaplain was very liberal in his politics, and Hopper was
very conservative, and she characterized his every move as suspicious.
He also was and is notorious for his pursuit of
underage girls and his extremely poor treatment of them. This
is not a matter of dispute, but Hopper seemed to
conveniently forget while lambasting him for that behavior, that her
(25:03):
own husband, who was much older, had started seeing her
when she was still very young, and that he was
married six times. She often referred to Chaplin as quote
the man who came to dinner and stayed forty years,
as a way to criticize the fact that he lived
and worked in the US but never became a citizen.
She also made antisemitic comments about him. He wasn't Jewish,
(25:26):
but she made the case that he seemed Jewish and
was hiding it. There were a couple of major and
deeply damaging moments in Hopper's print attacks on Chaplain. The
first was when she broke the story of a paternity lawsuit.
In June of nineteen forty three, an actor named Joan
Berry had approached Hopper and told her that she had
(25:46):
a sexual relationship with Chaplain. That was true, and that
he had broken up with her, which was also true,
and that she had gotten pregnant by him. That was
not true, and blood tests proved it, but Hopper had
gone full force against him, characterizing him as having abandoned
a pregnant Joan Berry. In the early nineteen forties, blood
(26:06):
tests were not admissible evidence in California praternity lawsuits. That
is a little mind blowing, and while the first trial
ended in a hung jury, a second trial found in
favor of Barry, and Chaplain was ordered to pay support
for a child that was not his own. Throughout this
entire thing, Hopper had stoked public opinion against him as
(26:28):
immoral and irresponsible, and that deeply hurt his reputation with audiences.
That was not the end of the Joan Berry problems
for Chaplain. Hopper also helped get Chaplin indicted under the
Man Act that made it illegal to transport a woman
across state lines with immoral intent. We've talked about this
(26:48):
on the show before. It pretty much only applied to
white women. Chaplain had paid for cross country train fare
for Barry at one point and had a testified against
him before a grand jury after she had already fed
the FBI information about his activities with Barry. When the
case went to trial, she covered every moment in her column.
(27:09):
Chaplin was acquitted, but had a Hopper did not print
that particular detail. During the Cold War, Hopper, noting Chaplain's
leftist politics, accused him of being a communist and of
donating huge sums of money to the Communist Party. She
also stated that he was slyly including communist propaganda in
his films. Chaplin was subpoena to appear before the House
(27:31):
an American Activities Committee in fall of nineteen forty seven,
although he was never actually called to testify. Simultaneously, his
film Monsieur Verdeu was released, and Hopper and the FBI
both called it Soviet propaganda, which led to picketing and
boycotts and a massive failure for the film at the
box office. The FBI's investigation ended. Chaplain ultimately turned up
(27:55):
no connections to the Communist Party, but Hopper had already
convinced a girl great many of her readers that the
actor director was in fact a Communist or Communist sympathizer,
so findings otherwise just kind of fed into this idea
that there might be a conspiracy at work. Hopper's last
major blow to Chaplain came in nineteen fifty two, when
(28:16):
her work to paint him as a danger to the
United States led to his permit to return to the
US being revoked after he'd been abroad. He had gone
to Europe to promote the film Limelight, and Hopper had
suggested that the Truman administration, which was democratic, had given
him special treatment in giving him a permit to travel
abroad and then return. They had not gotten his travel
(28:38):
papers through any special channels, but because of Hopper's insinuation,
the Attorney General stepped in and canceled his return permit.
He never returned to the United States, although he tried
to appeal the situation for a year before giving up. Yeah,
she was kind of trying to subtly make this connection
that not only was he a communist, she never gave
(29:00):
up on that, but that also he was in cahoots
with the Democratic Party who was sympathetic to communists, Like
she was really building this entire house of cards around
his identity. The flip side of her treatment of Charlie
Chaplin and other stars that she thought should go on
the Blacklist as communists was the way that she sometimes
used her column to support stars that were accused of
(29:22):
the very same thing we mentioned in our episode about
Lucille Ball that she had also been accused of potential
communist ties, and it was actually head of Hopper who
published the rebuttal to that accusation, including the quote from
Ball's husband Desi Arnez that stated quote, the only thing
read about her is her hair, and even that is
not legitimate. Incidentally, not long after that, Hopper got to
(29:46):
appear on I Love Lucy playing herself I had It
continued to be successful by writing about Hollywood. In the
nineteen fifties, she had a reported readership of thirty five
million people, with her column running in eighty five metropolitan
newspap and thousands of smaller publications. Her autobiography, titled From
Under My Hat, was published in nineteen fifty two. Maybe
(30:09):
true to form, she opens it by not talking about
herself exactly, but a family member and how she leveraged
their unique characteristic for her own gain. It begins quote,
once upon a time, there was a six toed cousin mine.
When I first saw him, I knew I was in
show business. Kids in the neighborhood couldn't afford pennies, but
I made them pay five pins every time they got
(30:31):
a look at him. It's not exactly a book where
you can trust that all the facts are accurate, but
it definitely makes her look good, but it also offers
some insights into how she felt about herself and the
people in her life. She wrote another book that sometimes
categorized as an autobiography in nineteen sixty three that was
titled The Whole Truth and Nothing But it's really more
(30:53):
of a stream of consciousness, tell all of all the
various people she knew in Hollywood. Yeah, she spends a
lot of time talking about all of Elizabeth Taylor's personal
business because she had known her for years and years.
On Friday, January twenty eighth, nineteen sixty six, Hedda came
down with what seemed to be a bad cold or flu.
On Sunday, she felt bad enough to go to the
(31:14):
hospital two days later. She died on Tuesday, February first,
nineteen sixty six, of quote, double pneumonia with heart complications.
Just days before her death, Hopper had told a friend
that she heard Charlie Chaplin was trying to return to
the US and that he had to be stopped. She
had maintained her grudge against him all the way to
(31:35):
the end. When Hopper died, her obituary in The New
York Times ran under the subheader confidant of leading Stars,
noted for flamboyant hats and caustic comments. That same write
up also called her the movie colonies mad Hatter and
described her work this way quote. With frequent disdain for grammar, logic,
and often accuracy, Hedda Hopper produced a Hollywood gossip column
(31:58):
for twenty eight years that contributed to the insecurity and
vanity of the movie industry and to the titillation and
amusement of millions of readers across the county. Yes, there
is a bit of comedy that in the very same
paragraph where the obituary writer criticized her work, there is
a misspelling of county when it should be country. I
(32:20):
feel like she might have laughed at that. Uh. That's
a very brief version of heada hopper. She had her
hand so deep in the Hollywood pie that I feel
like you can do entire series of podcasts about her.
It intersects with literally everyone we have ever talked about
in Hollywood history, and she has many wild adventures in
(32:47):
her life because of her connections to that industry and
to the stage industry in New York. But that is
our coverage of her for today. I have a light
and fun listener. Oh good, This is from our listener, Elizabeth,
and it is about Advent Calendars. She writes, Hi, Holly
(33:08):
and Tracy, I enjoyed your recent episode on Advent Calendars.
As always, my twelve year old son has done a
lego Star Wars Advent Calendar for the past few years,
and they are so much fun and such a great
way to take the edge off of the anticipation of
Christmas Day. But my favorite thing about it is that
he calls it microdosing Christmas. He's not wrong, and now
we refer to it that way all the time. Thanks Elizabeth.
(33:30):
I love this. That's a beautiful way to look at it.
And I really had not This may sound foolish because
I don't have kids. I had not thought about it
as a way to kind of entertain kids, because I
you know kids. I mean I remember I would get
like fever pitch starting December fifth and just drive my
parents crazy for the next twenty days. And so I
(33:52):
had not thought about that function of Advent calendars, being like,
here's a tiny gift, please go to your room. I
can see this as like a blessing and a curse,
because I remember the year my brother and I were
getting new snowboots for Christmas and we were gonna go
to a Christmas Eve service and the weather was awful
(34:14):
and slushy and gross that day, and so my mom
let us open that one present before we went to
the service, and then that just became you let us
open a Christmas Eve present last year. Now it's a requirement.
Yeah yeah, I finangled a Christmas Eve situation as well.
(34:39):
Thank you so much, Elizabeth. I do like the concept
of microdocing Christmas. That makes me gagle. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find
us on social media as missed in History and if
you have not subscribed yet, that's a super easy thing
to do. You can do it on the iHeartRadio app
or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
(35:04):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we are
talking about Head of Hopper. And although she started out acting,
(00:24):
what really made her famous was her work in newspapers.
For several decades, she literally could make or break a
movie career with her gossip column sending statements to print,
regardless of whether there was any actual proof of what
she claimed or the behavior she alleged that people are
participating in or not. I find her super fascinating. I
read both of her books growing up. She has been
(00:48):
in a kajillion movie and TV projects. Most recently was
the show Feud, which is a Ryan Murphy show, But
it's largely a lot of her. Discussion of her is
about her and Luella Parsons because they were kind of
the two big power players in terms of gossip columns
(01:11):
in Hollywood in the early part of the twentieth century.
And I am forever just I marvel at the power
that they both had and how much they created ways
of consuming information about movies and movie stars that we
(01:32):
are still wrapped up in today, even though they're kind
of nonsensical. We could talk about this more behind the scenes,
because I feel like I have Chicken or the Egg
thoughts about the movie industry and how it has developed
in this way. But she just is like a wild
story of her own. So I thought we would talk
(01:53):
about her today. We may do an episode on Luella
Parsons in the future because she's also pretty interesting, and
we'll talk about her some on this, but we're not
going to go into her backstory. They are often, as
I said, discussed kind of as a payer. Even one
of the biographies I read is a simultaneous biography of
the two of them that came out in the seventies.
(02:14):
And yeah, so we'll talk about Luella some today, but
really we're going to talk about head of Hopper and
how she got to this point pretty late in her
life of being a gossip columnist and having just such influence,
and also how she used that influence sometimes in just
really cruel ways. So she started life with a completely
(02:38):
different name, which was Elda Furry. She was born June second,
eighteen eighty five, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. She described that sort
of as a suburb of Altoona, Pennsylvania. Later on, she
wrote that she was born during an electrical storm, and
she also fudged her age and routinely said she was
born in eighteen ninety. Her father was a butcher, and
(03:01):
she described her upbringing as hard. She had eight siblings,
although not all of them lived to adulthood, and she
made it sound as though she never really got much
praise or encouragement. When her brother sherman got hired away
from their father's butcher shop, she was made to pick
up his duties, and this is something that she said
made her tough enough to be unafraid of anyone in Hollywood.
(03:25):
Later in her life, while she was still a teenager
in Altoona, Elda acquired an accessory which defined her style
for the rest of her life. She bought herself a
hat with her own money, and she wrote of that
hat quote, it was a thing of beauty, of bright
green straw with red velvet geraniums. It made me feel
rich as a queen. That hat was a greater attraction
(03:47):
on Easter morning than the choir or the preacher's sermon.
I said, if a hat can get the attention of
this many people, I'll never go bareheaded, and she stuck
to that because she was known for her hat collection
and the money she spent on it throughout the rest
of her life. When she was seventeen, Elda saw a
touring company performed the play Captain Jinks of the Horse
(04:10):
Marines that involves a love triangle with a bet and
an opera star and a lot of complications before a
happy ending. Ethel Barrymore starred in the play. It's often
credited with being the show that made her famous, and
Elderfurry thought that this was amazing, and after seeing the play,
she knew she wanted to act, so in nineteen oh seven,
she left Pennsylvania for New York, intent on a stage career.
(04:34):
In her autobiography, she describes this exit from Pennsylvania as quote,
when life became intolerable at home, I ran away to
New York and went on the stage. But really, and
you'll often see like she saw this play and then
she left, But really she took some time before that
to get some education that was going to benefit her
in her acting career. She didn't actually get formal education
(04:58):
past eighth grade because she had to work in the
family business. But once she got the acting bug. She
did manage to get her father to let her enroll
in music school in Pittsburgh, so she did that for
a while. But she did make that move from Opportunity
to New York, kind of in a spur of the moment,
way after an incident in which, according to her, her
(05:18):
brother broke her favorite chair, and that was just the
last straw for her. She had been secretly saving up money,
and she got that money. She packed a suitcase and
she left without telling anyone. And she wasn't though, without
a place to go in New York, because her uncle
lived there and she just kind of showed up on
his doorstep. In New York, she got a job working
as a chorus girl with the Aborn Opera Company. She
(05:41):
was not naturally talented, but she was determined. As she
moved in the social circles of the theater, she met
one of the most successful actors of the day, de
Wolf Hopper. He's most famously remembered today for his recitation
of the Ernest Lawrence Thayer baseball poem Casey at the Bat.
Hopper was twenty seven years older than Elda, and he
(06:03):
clearly captivated her. She later wrote quote. To me, Hopper
was something special, something new under the sun. His massive size,
his voice, his storytelling gift. Wolfe was a six foot
three riot. From the moment I saw him, he fascinated me.
She wrote a lot of very adoring things about him,
even long after the marriage had ended, describing how his
(06:24):
voice was something you couldn't help but fall in love with,
and describing it as sounding quote like some great church organ.
Hopper had his own acting company and Elda joined it,
and though they soon started a romance, they were really
not open about it. No, he had a little bit
of a history with women. He had already been married
(06:46):
a divorce four times at this point. She was so
much younger. They just kind of kept it quiet initially,
And when Elda, who had gotten frustrated with chorus rolls,
managed to land a lead part in a touring production
of The Country Boy, which meant she no longer with
de Wolf's company, he sent her letters throughout her eight
month tour, and then when that tour ended, she decided
(07:07):
she also wanted to be in musical theater. Instead of
doing straight acting again, not as chorus girl. She wanted
to be a main player, and so she started studying voice,
and then she landed a role in The Quaker Girl,
so once again she went back on tour, and again
Wolfy wrote to her constantly. She continued to keep the
secret of their romance, even as her colleagues asked who
(07:29):
this man was who so dutifully wrote to her and
was obviously just adoring of her, And she later said
that the strain of keeping this secret of their romance
was so great that she was never able to keep another.
By the time the tour of The Quaker Girl ended,
Elda and Wolfe were secretly engaged. She went to a
jewelry store and bought her own ring by herself, and
(07:50):
the next morning she took the earliest train from Albany
to Grand Central station, where De wolf and his chauffeur
were waiting. The couple headed to New Jersey and they
got me read in secret. They only told the manager
of the Algonquin Hotel where mister Hopper was living, so
that he could arrange for Elda to have separate but
adjoining rooms with her new husband. As Holly said earlier,
(08:13):
this was De Wolfe's fifth marriage. As they started telling people,
Elda told one of the couple's closest friends, Alice Miller,
and the response was that she burst into tears because
she was worried about what her young friend had done.
Their other close friends, who were slowly let in on
the secret, ended up celebrating with a private dinner, and
(08:33):
eventually Elda telegraphed her parents and her father, who was
several years younger than her new husbandd wolf was so
angry that he put out a statement to the press
that the marriage quote pains me greatly. Essentially, everyone kind
of thought that de wolf had taken up with such
a young woman to stroke his own ego, and that
(08:53):
he was going to soon cast her aside. The family
statement meant that soon that news was everywhere. There was
no keeping any kind of secret, and the newly weds
were suddenly having to patch up a lot of friendships
with people who were shocked by this news or just
kind of hurt at having been left out of the loop.
De Wolfe's previous wives had been named Ella, Ida, Edna,
(09:14):
and Nella, and she found that their similarities led to
her new husband calling her by all of their names
and not her own. She wrote, quote, I didn't have
much personality of my own then, but I'd be darned
if I was going to give up the shred I
did possess. So she consulted a numerologist who came up
with the name Heda de wolf Hopper did not like this,
(09:36):
but she said he never called her the wrong name again. Yeah,
she loved it and he was not pleased, but it
worked out, I guess. On January twenty sixth, nineteen fifteen,
Hedda and De Wolf had a son, William de wolf
Hopper Junior. She had been touring Withdwolf on his current tour,
but she returned to New York early because her pregnancy,
(09:56):
which they had also kept secret, had just become too
uncomfortable for life on the road. The birth of their
son came several weeks early, and De Wolf was not
in New York with her at the time. He actually
found out that she had had the child while he
was on stage in Chicago, and then once he returned home,
the family traveled with a nanny to Nantucket and there
(10:16):
they spent the summer. Later that same year, the couple
decided to move to Hollywood, something a lot of stage
actors were doing to try to get into the new
and growing film industry. De wolf had been offered a
contract with Triangle Film Corporation. Initially, do wolf had wanted
Heda to give up her career when they married, and
she acquiesced, but then she took a part, allegedly as
(10:40):
a favor to their friend William Farnham. In nineteen sixteen,
she made her on screen debut in the film Battle
of Hearts. It was the first of many movies for her.
By the end of the nineteeneen, she had been in
eleven films and the work continued to come. This was
good because de Wolfe's talent didn't really translate to the screen.
His best feature was his voice, and the films were silent.
(11:04):
Plus he was old enough that he just didn't look
good on film, according to Heada's account. Later, when his
contract was up, he went to New York and she
stayed in California, where the work was steady for her.
She did eventually go back to New York, and the
Hoppers bought a house on Long Island so that their
son could have a home outside of the city. De
Wolfe had gone back to acting on the stage, and
(11:26):
Hetta also did some stage work too, and then Sam
Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn opened a studio in Fort Lee,
New Jersey, to make movies, and they called headed to
see if she'd like to make some films on the
East Coast, and she did, and she also established her
reputation as a woman with a sharp tongue very early
on in these movies. In nineteen eighteen, she appeared in
(11:47):
the film Virtuous Wives that was actually the first film
made by Lewis B. Mayer. She tells this story in
her book about how there was this weird guy kind
of lurking around the set and they kept having to
tell him to get out of the shot, and nobody
realized it was Lewis B. Mayer and he had to
tell people at the end, like, oh, I'm the producer.
But Elda, who at this point was going by Heada,
(12:09):
but she was also being billed as Missus d wolf Hopper,
which is how she's credited in that film, fought constantly
with her co star Anita Stewart. Hedda made a point
to have custom clothing made for every scene out of
her own pocket. She spent her entire salary, which is
quoted as five thousand dollars for this project on new
clothes and it upstaged the much more famous Stuart with
(12:33):
her wardrobe, and this caused a huge calamity. In a moment,
we'll talk about the end of Heada's marriage and her
life after De Wolfe, but first we will take a
quick sponsor break. According to Hedda's account, she began to
(12:56):
fall out of love with her husband when she told
him that she had gotten a raise the studio and
was finally making the same amount of money as he was.
His response to this was anger instead of happiness, and
he said some very insulting things. They had already been
living on very different schedules and not spending as much
(13:16):
time together, and then Hadda started to find evidence that
he was having an affair or multiple affairs. She eventually
caught him in one of these, and she filed for divorce.
In nineteen twenty two. D Wolfe Hopper got married again
to his sixth wife, Lily and Glacier, right after the
divorce was final. Soon after, Hetta was offered a year
(13:37):
long contract in Hollywood and she took it. She was
in a lot of projects, but was always a supporting player.
Over time, she found she wasn't getting offered contracts and
she needed to figure out what to do. Interestingly enough,
during this time, she was friends with the woman who
would later become her most bitter rival, Luella Parsons, and
(13:57):
would sometimes slipper information for her gossip column in exchange
for a little good press. For a while, Hopper jumped
from job to job, just trying to make a living
and support herself and her son. In nineteen thirty two,
she made a move into a new arena, and that
was politics. She ran for Los Angeles City Council that year.
She did not win, but she did remain politically interested,
(14:20):
and sometimes that interest became part of her columns. We're
going to talk about that a lot more in a minute.
After foundering for a bit, Heda got a radio agent
and they worked on getting a show together. But her
first effort was bad. She wasn't used to being on
mike rather than on a stage, and she ended up
using an affected British sounding accent. But she worked on
(14:42):
it and in nineteen thirty six had us started a
radio show, The Head of Hopper Show, which was a
short form gossip program. Mostly she cataloged Hollywood divorces and weddings,
using her connections in the industry for insider information. Luella
Parson's show A Hollywood Hotel had debuted two years earlier,
and based on the head of Hopper Show, Heda was
(15:04):
offered a column by the Esquire syndicate. They specifically wanted
a gossip column to compete with the one written by
Lluella Parsons. Hedda couldn't type, but she could dictate, and
soon her column, HEADA Hopper's Hollywood, was running in more
than a dozen papers. She soon was writing seven columns
a week and still doing her radio show. She got
(15:27):
busy and successful enough to move her work out of
her house to an office on Hollywood Boulevard. She kept
that office, I think for the rest of her life.
She listed her number and address so people could drop
in or call if they had a hot tip or
any inside information, and they did, and she shared it
all without fact checking, later saying she didn't know anything
(15:47):
about libel laws. But her radio show was with CBS,
and their legal team would actually cut her scripts before
she went on the air. They would review it and
edit them if they thought something was unverifiable or could
get them trouble. But she kind of found a way
to work around that. Problem by using her delivery to
suggest when she was hinting at something salacious, even if
(16:08):
she couldn't say it. Hetta's work was, as we mentioned,
not known for fact checking. The New York Times wrote
of her after her death, quote, Ordinarily, there was a
fake quality to miss Hopper's columns, tracing perhaps to the
fact that she did not like to have her staff
tamper with her dictated output, and to the fact that
she did not always check out her information. The result
(16:31):
was that she got names confused, such as Switching Shirley
Temple and and Shirley and Judy Garland and Judy Canova.
She sometimes misattributed pregnancies or engagements or love affairs. Uh,
this gets a yikes. Yeah. I mean that's a pretty
fast way for somebody to like have their phone ring
(16:52):
and be like, I didn't know you were having an affair,
to be like, what are you even talking about? That's
not me, but it's in print, and people will start
to believe it. That's a problem. Right. In nineteen forty,
Hopper's writing had become so popular that she was able
to take a more lucrative offer at the Des Moines Register.
In Tribune syndicate, but they released her from it when
(17:13):
the Chicago Tribune New York News syndicate made her a
better offer. This was just after Hedda had pulled off
something that seemed unthinkable. She had scooped Luella Parsons that
was regarding the divorce of Jimmy Roosevelt, the President's son,
And this was hot gossip because Jimmy, who worked for
the Goldwyn Studio, was having an affair that precipitated that divorce.
(17:36):
It made front page news all over the US, and
it sparked a feud between Hopper and Parsons that persisted
for decades. By the early nineteen forties, the column was
getting so much mail from readers that Hopper needed two
full time assistants to wade through it all. Hedda became
an integral part of the studio star system. That system
(17:57):
is something we've brushed up against on the show before,
but we've never really talked about it in depth. Basically,
being an actor in Hollywood from the nineteen twenties to
the nineteen sixties usually involved going in for a screen test,
and if the studio liked what it saw, that actor
would be signed to a contract. The contracts were often
seven years long, and during that time the actor was
(18:20):
essentially an employee of the movie studio. They acted in
the films they were assigned. They were usually held to
morality clauses that were meant to curb any reckless, lascivious,
or other behavior that could embarrass the studio, and in return,
the studio made that actor a star. This usually meant
the concoction of a false backstory and name, essentially meaning
(18:42):
that that actor had to play a character anytime they
were out in public, and part of that system was,
of course, pr The studio essentially introduced these actors as stars,
and gossip columns became a way to get the word
out about their doings that were wholesome and image affirming.
For example, Clark Gable was one of the stars who
(19:03):
became famous in the star system. He was already famous
by the time we're using this example, but it shows
how this whole thing worked. In nineteen thirty eight, so
that was the year Too Hot to Handle came out,
and while plans were being laid for Gone with the Wind,
a breezy mention of the already well known actor appeared
in head of Hopper's Hollywood. It read quote Clark Gable
(19:24):
is taking all his pals up to the rodeo in Victorville,
October fourteenth, long before he knew Carol Lombard. Yuko Lomo
was his old camping ground. He'd go out every night
rabbit shooting with all the kids. When celebrity seekers found
out about it, Clark moved on. Nice to know he's
going back because the gang up there adore him. So
(19:44):
it's basically like, isn't he the best guy ever? We
all think he's amazing, which just Garner's more public favor
for that actor so that when their films come out,
people want to go see it. On the flip side,
if a star was caught in a scandal and it
was about to go to press, the studio would pay
off papers or the columnists to suppress this story. There's
(20:06):
one story about Luella Parsons where they bought a screenplay
from her to suppress the story that never got made,
but she basically got a big hunk of money to
not talk about something she knew about an actor. This
all meant that Hetta and her rival Luella Parsons were
able to wield an incredible amount of power. If an
actor did something that one of them didn't like, they
(20:27):
could easily tank their careers by reporting it or even
fabricating unfounded gossip in the guise of an inside tip.
Actors who violated the morality clauses in their contracts were
fired and left with no real recourse. In a nineteen
ninety seven interview with Vanity Fair, actor Roddy McDowell noted
that being mentioned positively by Hetta or Parsons was a
(20:50):
sort of currency, and actors saved their clippings and showed
them to studios, so they were a negotiating tool to
prove the value of the actor. Hetta Hopper's sometimes manifested
in ways that were actively harmful to the people she
wrote about. Both she and Parsons could be incredibly conniving
in ways that are kind of hard to stomach for
(21:11):
anyone with scruples. Frankly, after Orson Wells had convinced Luella
Parsons that his upcoming film Citizen Kane was not based
on her boss William Randolph Hurst, Hetta was able to
see an early screening and immediately reported to Hurst that
it was obviously based on him, and that she was
surprised Luella had not given him a heads up. Hurst
(21:33):
was so angry he commanded Luella to launch a full
scale attack on the film. To squash it. Parsons threatened
to expose all of the secrets she knew about RKO executives,
that was the studio where it was made, and that
she would black out any coverage of it or Radio
City Music Hall where it was set to premiere, and
as a consequence that premiere was canceled. There is more
(21:56):
to this story. There are so many ins and outs
of just cruel and unkind behavior and canniming, but the
short version is that citizen Kane tanked initially due to
the work of Parsons at the behest of Hurst, which
he started with a tip off from head of Hopper,
and although HEADA Hopper did not work for her. She
called the movie quote a vicious and irresponsible attack on
(22:18):
a great man. Writing for the Australasian Journal of American
Studies in two thousand and seven, Jennifer Frost described the
way that Hopper used her column to blur the lines
of public, private, and political. Quote gossip was understood to
be private talk talk about those things which ought to
be kept private, voiced often illegitimately in the public realm.
(22:42):
Yet as in traditional societies, Hollywood gossip also had a
public function. It shared information and knowledge, contributed to a
sense of community among moviegoers, and, in Hopper's case, provided
a platform and an audience for her political views. As
practiced by and her reader's, Hollywood Gossip became an arena
(23:03):
for discussion and debate about significant and contested issues of
public and private life and their intersection in mid twentieth
century America. So coming up, we will talk about the
way head of Hopper used this whole function of her
writing to target Charlie Chaplin in her column. But first
we're going to pause for a sponsor break. The most
(23:34):
famous victim of Heada's poison pen was Charlie Chaplin. She
had many times written about other celebrities with a good
bit of venom, but Chaplin was someone she targeted repeatedly
in what has often been called a decades long campaign
against him. Some of her write ups were honestly the
sort of boring critiques of his films that may have
(23:56):
been an irritant, like she would say he's a good actor,
but his films are bad, but soon she started attacking
him on a personal level. Some of this seems to
have largely been initiated as a grudge for Chaplain not
really caring about Hollywood gossip or playing the games that
she typically required of stars if they wanted to stay
(24:16):
in the good graces of her column. He also was
mora aligned a little bit with Luella Parsons. There are
things that place him socially near Luella Parsons, which of
course she would not have liked. He also didn't work
within the Hollywood system right He was making his films independently,
so it wasn't as though his job was in danger
if he didn't play nice with her, at least not directly.
(24:40):
Chaplain was very liberal in his politics, and Hopper was
very conservative, and she characterized his every move as suspicious.
He also was and is notorious for his pursuit of
underage girls and his extremely poor treatment of them. This
is not a matter of dispute, but Hopper seemed to
conveniently forget while lambasting him for that behavior, that her
(25:03):
own husband, who was much older, had started seeing her
when she was still very young, and that he was
married six times. She often referred to Chaplin as quote
the man who came to dinner and stayed forty years,
as a way to criticize the fact that he lived
and worked in the US but never became a citizen.
She also made antisemitic comments about him. He wasn't Jewish,
(25:26):
but she made the case that he seemed Jewish and
was hiding it. There were a couple of major and
deeply damaging moments in Hopper's print attacks on Chaplain. The
first was when she broke the story of a paternity lawsuit.
In June of nineteen forty three, an actor named Joan
Berry had approached Hopper and told her that she had
(25:46):
a sexual relationship with Chaplain. That was true, and that
he had broken up with her, which was also true,
and that she had gotten pregnant by him. That was
not true, and blood tests proved it, but Hopper had
gone full force against him, characterizing him as having abandoned
a pregnant Joan Berry. In the early nineteen forties, blood
(26:06):
tests were not admissible evidence in California praternity lawsuits. That
is a little mind blowing, and while the first trial
ended in a hung jury, a second trial found in
favor of Barry, and Chaplain was ordered to pay support
for a child that was not his own. Throughout this
entire thing, Hopper had stoked public opinion against him as
(26:28):
immoral and irresponsible, and that deeply hurt his reputation with audiences.
That was not the end of the Joan Berry problems
for Chaplain. Hopper also helped get Chaplin indicted under the
Man Act that made it illegal to transport a woman
across state lines with immoral intent. We've talked about this
(26:48):
on the show before. It pretty much only applied to
white women. Chaplain had paid for cross country train fare
for Barry at one point and had a testified against
him before a grand jury after she had already fed
the FBI information about his activities with Barry. When the
case went to trial, she covered every moment in her column.
(27:09):
Chaplin was acquitted, but had a Hopper did not print
that particular detail. During the Cold War, Hopper, noting Chaplain's
leftist politics, accused him of being a communist and of
donating huge sums of money to the Communist Party. She
also stated that he was slyly including communist propaganda in
his films. Chaplin was subpoena to appear before the House
(27:31):
an American Activities Committee in fall of nineteen forty seven,
although he was never actually called to testify. Simultaneously, his
film Monsieur Verdeu was released, and Hopper and the FBI
both called it Soviet propaganda, which led to picketing and
boycotts and a massive failure for the film at the
box office. The FBI's investigation ended. Chaplain ultimately turned up
(27:55):
no connections to the Communist Party, but Hopper had already
convinced a girl great many of her readers that the
actor director was in fact a Communist or Communist sympathizer,
so findings otherwise just kind of fed into this idea
that there might be a conspiracy at work. Hopper's last
major blow to Chaplain came in nineteen fifty two, when
(28:16):
her work to paint him as a danger to the
United States led to his permit to return to the
US being revoked after he'd been abroad. He had gone
to Europe to promote the film Limelight, and Hopper had
suggested that the Truman administration, which was democratic, had given
him special treatment in giving him a permit to travel
abroad and then return. They had not gotten his travel
(28:38):
papers through any special channels, but because of Hopper's insinuation,
the Attorney General stepped in and canceled his return permit.
He never returned to the United States, although he tried
to appeal the situation for a year before giving up. Yeah,
she was kind of trying to subtly make this connection
that not only was he a communist, she never gave
(29:00):
up on that, but that also he was in cahoots
with the Democratic Party who was sympathetic to communists, Like
she was really building this entire house of cards around
his identity. The flip side of her treatment of Charlie
Chaplin and other stars that she thought should go on
the Blacklist as communists was the way that she sometimes
used her column to support stars that were accused of
(29:22):
the very same thing we mentioned in our episode about
Lucille Ball that she had also been accused of potential
communist ties, and it was actually head of Hopper who
published the rebuttal to that accusation, including the quote from
Ball's husband Desi Arnez that stated quote, the only thing
read about her is her hair, and even that is
not legitimate. Incidentally, not long after that, Hopper got to
(29:46):
appear on I Love Lucy playing herself I had It
continued to be successful by writing about Hollywood. In the
nineteen fifties, she had a reported readership of thirty five
million people, with her column running in eighty five metropolitan
newspap and thousands of smaller publications. Her autobiography, titled From
Under My Hat, was published in nineteen fifty two. Maybe
(30:09):
true to form, she opens it by not talking about
herself exactly, but a family member and how she leveraged
their unique characteristic for her own gain. It begins quote,
once upon a time, there was a six toed cousin mine.
When I first saw him, I knew I was in
show business. Kids in the neighborhood couldn't afford pennies, but
I made them pay five pins every time they got
(30:31):
a look at him. It's not exactly a book where
you can trust that all the facts are accurate, but
it definitely makes her look good, but it also offers
some insights into how she felt about herself and the
people in her life. She wrote another book that sometimes
categorized as an autobiography in nineteen sixty three that was
titled The Whole Truth and Nothing But it's really more
(30:53):
of a stream of consciousness, tell all of all the
various people she knew in Hollywood. Yeah, she spends a
lot of time talking about all of Elizabeth Taylor's personal
business because she had known her for years and years.
On Friday, January twenty eighth, nineteen sixty six, Hedda came
down with what seemed to be a bad cold or flu.
On Sunday, she felt bad enough to go to the
(31:14):
hospital two days later. She died on Tuesday, February first,
nineteen sixty six, of quote, double pneumonia with heart complications.
Just days before her death, Hopper had told a friend
that she heard Charlie Chaplin was trying to return to
the US and that he had to be stopped. She
had maintained her grudge against him all the way to
(31:35):
the end. When Hopper died, her obituary in The New
York Times ran under the subheader confidant of leading Stars,
noted for flamboyant hats and caustic comments. That same write
up also called her the movie colonies mad Hatter and
described her work this way quote. With frequent disdain for grammar, logic,
and often accuracy, Hedda Hopper produced a Hollywood gossip column
(31:58):
for twenty eight years that contributed to the insecurity and
vanity of the movie industry and to the titillation and
amusement of millions of readers across the county. Yes, there
is a bit of comedy that in the very same
paragraph where the obituary writer criticized her work, there is
a misspelling of county when it should be country. I
(32:20):
feel like she might have laughed at that. Uh. That's
a very brief version of heada hopper. She had her
hand so deep in the Hollywood pie that I feel
like you can do entire series of podcasts about her.
It intersects with literally everyone we have ever talked about
in Hollywood history, and she has many wild adventures in
(32:47):
her life because of her connections to that industry and
to the stage industry in New York. But that is
our coverage of her for today. I have a light
and fun listener. Oh good, This is from our listener, Elizabeth,
and it is about Advent Calendars. She writes, Hi, Holly
(33:08):
and Tracy, I enjoyed your recent episode on Advent Calendars.
As always, my twelve year old son has done a
lego Star Wars Advent Calendar for the past few years,
and they are so much fun and such a great
way to take the edge off of the anticipation of
Christmas Day. But my favorite thing about it is that
he calls it microdosing Christmas. He's not wrong, and now
we refer to it that way all the time. Thanks Elizabeth.
(33:30):
I love this. That's a beautiful way to look at it.
And I really had not This may sound foolish because
I don't have kids. I had not thought about it
as a way to kind of entertain kids, because I
you know kids. I mean I remember I would get
like fever pitch starting December fifth and just drive my
parents crazy for the next twenty days. And so I
(33:52):
had not thought about that function of Advent calendars, being like,
here's a tiny gift, please go to your room. I
can see this as like a blessing and a curse,
because I remember the year my brother and I were
getting new snowboots for Christmas and we were gonna go
to a Christmas Eve service and the weather was awful
(34:14):
and slushy and gross that day, and so my mom
let us open that one present before we went to
the service, and then that just became you let us
open a Christmas Eve present last year. Now it's a requirement.
Yeah yeah, I finangled a Christmas Eve situation as well.
(34:39):
Thank you so much, Elizabeth. I do like the concept
of microdocing Christmas. That makes me gagle. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find
us on social media as missed in History and if
you have not subscribed yet, that's a super easy thing
to do. You can do it on the iHeartRadio app
or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
(35:04):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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