(From the dawn of the studio system to the decade it all c...)
From the dawn of the studio system to the decade it all came crashing down, Hedda Hopper was one of the Queens of Hollywood. Although she made her name as a star of the silent screen, she found her calling as a gossip columnist, where she had the ear of the most powerful force in show business: the public. With a readership of 20,000,000 people, Hopper turned nobodies into stars, and brought stars to their knees. And in this sensational memoir, she tells all. In her career, Hopper crossed some of Hollywood’s biggest bold-faced names, from Joan Crawford and Bette Davis to Charlie Chaplin and Katherine Hepburn, and her feud with rival gossip columnist Louella Parsons became the stuff of legend. In The Whole Truth and Nothing But, we get Hedda’s side of the story—and what a story it is. Hedda Hopper is portrayed by Judy Davis in the Ryan Murphy TV series Feud.
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(Excerpt from From Under My Hat Once upon a time there wa...)
Excerpt from From Under My Hat 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 a look at him. At the time when my six-teed cousin and I were in busi ness, I was Elda Furry. I was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, a peaceful, pretty town fourteen miles out side the industrial city of Altoona. In the West we'd call it a suburb, although the Hollidaysburg citizens might want to hang me for using that term. I made my entrance into this world June 2 (i'll skip the year because I don't want anyone following me around with a wheel chair) during one of the gaudiest electrical storms ever seen in the community. The heavens opened up and so did I. It is said that I came in screaming. Mother didn't rightly know which was making the most noise, but she found out soon enough. The elements quit, but I didn't. Born with good lungs, I've never stopped exercising them. Today I can outshout any producer in Hollywood. When I was three we moved to Altoona. My growing pains were done to the rhythm of hard work; I never had it easy. What school learning I got was as sketchy as my knowledge of men. I didn't make a high school, and boys didn't seem to like me much. I had only one beau in Altoona, but I won't fool you, I've had several since. When life became intolerable at home, I ran New York and went on the stage. There I met Hopper. Inasmuch as I left home to escape being a butcher's daughter, it seems ironical Spend the rest of my life dealing in ham. But for De Wolf Hopper, this been written. Life with him was a liberal education. He set my feet upon the way. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Hopper was born Elda Furry in Hollidaysburg, Pa. , in 1885, the daughter of David E. Furry, a butcher, and Margaret Miller. When Hopper was three, her German Quaker family moved to Altoona, where she went to public school and worked in her father's butcher shop.
Hopper's schooling ended with the eighth grade.
She determined on a stage career in 1902 after seeing Ethel Barrymore in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. Then, as later, clothes captivated her more than the content of the play, and to the end of her life she could recall Barrymore's ermine tippet and barrel muff. Hopper left home in 1903 to attend the Carter Conservatory of Music in Pittsburgh. At the age of twenty-two she moved to New York without her parents' blessing, and with the help of the stagestruck daughter of the director of the Carter Conservatory, she landed a $15-a-week job in the chorus of the Aborn Light Opera Company. Hopper joked about her limited vocal range and never felt that she was pretty, but she was a tall (five feet, seven and a half inches) blonde with green eyes, a peaches-and-cream complexion, and, according to a contemporary, "the most beautiful legs in the New York theater. "
In 1915 Hopper and went to Hollywood to make her first film, The Battle of Hearts (1916). Returning east, she became a favorite supporting actress in early movies, including Virtuous Wives (1919), Louis B. Mayer's first picture, as well as on the Broadway stage. Between 1907 and 1918 she used five different names but, with the help of a numerologist, settled on the name Hedda Hopper. She also changed her date of birth to June 2, 1890.
In 1923 Mayer drew Hopper to Hollywood with a ten-year contract for $250 a week. Attracting attention with flashy hats and stylish dresses, she scrambled to work for other studios when Mayer could not provide parts for her. She kept up with inside-Hollywood stories, which she sometimes shared with the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who gratefully listed Hopper in 1932 as one of the "six reigning favorites. " Ambitious but unable to parlay her assets into better roles, Hopper trod the borderline between success and failure. Although she made most of her 110 movies during these years, she never received top billing.
One close friend, Mayer's assistant, Ida Koverman (who had been Herbert Hoover's secretary), encouraged Hopper to try Republican politics. (Hopper's one attempt at electoral politics in 1932 doubled her troubles, for she lost her bid for a Los Angeles County Central Committee seat just when Mayer failed to renew her movie contract. ) Another friend was the actress Marion Davies, who was the mistress of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. It was at Hearst's ranch in 1935 that Eleanor Medill ("Cissy") Patterson, intrigued by Hopper's Hollywood talk, asked her to write a letter for Patterson's Washington Herald. Aware that Hopper was making fewer films and needed help, Parsons plugged her Hollywood letter, calling it a fashion article. Hopper dropped her Hollywood letter when the pay shrank from $50 a week to $35.
In 1937 she started her first radio gossip program and met Dema Harshbarger, who was working for the National Broadcasting Company. Harshbarger took over Hopper's career and later managed it full-time. Hopper's radio program quickly failed, but Mayer, hoping to diminish Parsons' power, took Koverman's suggestion that Hopper write a rival gossip column. With Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's publicity department supporting Hopper, the Esquire Features syndicate signed her to do a column. Hopper's gossip column first appeared on February 15, 1938, in five newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, which was the most important local paper of the movie industry. With Harshbarger's help, Hopper also succeeded in radio. Her radio programs for national networks ran from 1939 to 1951 and featured both gossip and drama.
Writing gently at first, Hopper was scarcely noticed, but when she started ruthlessly reporting on celebrities, her popularity grew by leaps and bounds. In 1940, "Hedda Hopper's Hollywood" was taken over by the Des Moines Register Tribune syndicate and two years later by the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News syndicate. She now had some 30 million readers, and her income neared $200, 000 annually. Hopper, who often overacted her parts, played the stereotypical newspaperwoman with gusto. With her new fame, she received roles in first-rate films, including The Women (1939) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). In three years Hopper raced to a position similar to the one it had taken Parsons thirty years to attain.
Despite the two columnists' celebrated feud and tendency to chastise each other's favorites, each thrived on the publicity and competition the other provided. Unable to spell or type, Hopper dictated her chatty column while pacing her office in stocking feet. She unashamedly called herself "a ham trying to be a columnist" and referred to her rival as "a newspaperwoman trying to be a ham. " Because Hopper was the more sophisticated of the two, her flaunted prejudices, relentless attacks, and petty snooping were more difficult to forgive. She could be inaccurate and malicious; in 1965 libelous statements cost her $50, 000 in an out-of-court settlement with the actor Michael Wilding. Hopper called her Hollywood home "the house that fear built" and gloried in harassing big stars.
Yet, she also helped the careers of newcomers and little-known actors, writers, and directors. She insisted that the war hero Audie Murphy play the lead in the movie version of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and she campaigned for better working conditions for film extras. Always a crusader, she attacked sexual license, alleged Communists, and pointed-toed shoes. She joined the ultra-right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, hailed the Hollywood visit of Martin Dies and his House Un-American Activities Committee, and boosted Richard Nixon's career by sticking a "pink" label on the actress Helen Gahagan Douglas, his 1950 rival for the Senate. Disgusted that Charlie Chaplin had never shown any inclination to become a United States citizen, she helped hound him out of Hollywood.
Parsons' retirement in 1964 left Hopper the undisputed top Hollywood columnist, but little more than a year later Hopper died in Hollywood.
Hopper's gossip column brought her the stardom that had eluded her as an actress: the World War II C-47 ambulance plane was named for her, and she graced Republican conventions, entertained American service personnel abroad with Bob Hope during four Christmas seasons, and made frequent guest appearances on television. She also wrote two best-sellers, her autobiography, From Under My Hat (1952), and The Whole Truth and Nothing But (1963; written with James Brough), and she appeared on the cover of Time magazine.
(From the dawn of the studio system to the decade it all c...)
(Excerpt from From Under My Hat Once upon a time there wa...)
Outrageous hats, many of them sent to her by fans, were her trademark, and each year she purchased about 150 additional ones, for which she received a $5, 000 tax deduction. Resisting change in everything but hats, Hopper lamented "the death of glamour, " the coming to Hollywood of "the dirty-postcard boys, " and the realism that "strangled the dream stuff. "
In 1908 she met DeWolf Hopper, an established actor who was four years older than her father. She became his fifth wife on May 8, 1913. He derided her Altoona accent and taught her to clip her r's so short that she sounded "like an inbred British dowager. " He also helped her create the stock character of the brittle, worldly-wise society woman. In 1915 Hopper had a son, William DeWolf Hopper, Jr. (who later played the detective Paul Drake on the "Perry Mason" television series). Her success apparently offended her more experienced husband, and they separated in 1920 and divorced in 1922.
