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.