Bring on the empty horses Page 3

  The two major flaws in that story were, first, that Ince in fact left the yacht in San Diego, suffering from indigestion, took the train to Los Angeles and died there two days later of a heart attack. Secondly, Louella Parsons was never a member of the yachting party. The truth of her beginnings with Hearst was that she was a very good reporter who appreciated the excitement that was being generated by the infant film industry and Hearst knew a good reporter when he saw one.

  Hedda's emergence as a newspaper woman came some ten years after the beginning of Louella's reign as the undisputed Queen of the Hollywood scene. In 1935, Hedda was in trouble. She was fifty years old and a very bad actress. She was a striking looking woman, however, who spent every cent on her clothes: sparkling company too, always equipped with the latest juicy pieces of information, but she was hardly ever offered a part in films. She somehow kept going, doing anything that came along including modelling middle-aged fashions and a stint with Elizabeth Arden and on the proceeds she managed to give her son a good education and to run an attractive little house near the Farmer's Market. She had some staunch friends, among them the beautiful and talented writer, Frances Marion, who took her along with her on trips to Europe. On one of these she picked up a bogus 'English accent', complete with the broadest 'A' in the business. On her return she informed me that London was arbsolutely farntarstic.

  Another champion of hers at that time was Louella Parsons who frequently mentioned her activities in her column and introduced her to W. R. Hearst and Marion Davies. It was at the Hearst ranch at San Simeon that a fellow guest, Mrs. Eleanor Patterson, the publisher of the Washington Post, became so captivated by Hedda's brittle and spicey observations about Hollywood that she invited her to write a weekly newsletter, and Hedda's first step towards becoming Louella's arch rival was taken.

  Once it was available for syndication, the number of newspapers subscribing to Hedda's column was far from spectacular until lightning struck in 1937… she was bought by the Los Angeles Times. Now she was read by everybody in the motion picture industry and overnight sources of information were opened to her that had remained firmly closed when her output was only being glanced at in remote corners of the country. As news and gossip flooded in upon Hedda from hundreds of Press agents and private individuals, her column received a blood transfusion and improved immeasurably. Within a very short time it was syndicated in as many newspapers all over the world as that of an increasingly resentful Louella Parsons.

  The arrival on the Hollywood scene of a second queen who had to be pandered to, pacified, or prodded, posed some very tricky questions for the publicity-hungry citizens. How to 'plant' a story with one while still keeping the amiability of the other? How to arrange a private showing of a new film for one without offending the other? And above all, how to give the story of an impending marriage or divorce to one without incurring the implacable wrath of the other? It seems incredible but in a town with a herd instinct and a concentration of insecurity, it only needed one of these ladies to hint that an actor or actress was 'box office poison' for contracts to be terminated and studio doors to be slammed. Discretion was, indeed, the better part of valour and the great majority of us played a humiliating game of subterfuge and flattery having long since decided that it was far less troublesome to have them with us than against us. If they were susceptible to flattery, they were also very astute and it was fatal to try to get by with an untruth… for that there was no forgiveness.

  They could help careers and they could hinder careers and they could make private lives hell, but if there was talent they could not stop people getting to the top and, as Hedda knew from experience, if there was no talent, they could not manufacture it.

  Hedda should have been the easier to deal with. Having been so long a frustrated actress herself, she understood, but she was unpredictable and ruthless in her championship of causes and in her attacks. With her private list of 'pinkos', she made Senator McCarthy sound like a choirboy.

  Louella was a much softer touch, easily humoured by a bunch of roses, but also erratic because she was apt to listen to the last voice before her deadline and many of her 'scoops' were a long way off target as a result. On one occasion she announced that Sigmund Freud, 'one of the greatest psychoanalysts alive', was being brought over from Europe by Director Edmund Goulding as the technical adviser on Bette Davis' picture Dark Victory. This posed a difficult logistical problem because Freud had been dead for several months.

  When conducting interviews for her big Sunday full page story, Louella, in her comfortable house on Maple Drive, invariably set the oldest of tongue-loosening traps — she plied her subject with glasses the size of umbrella stands, filled to the brim with whisky or gin but, often, she trapped herself by keeping the subject company and her notes became illegible.

  Hedda used the same technique and plied her subjects with booze, but she shrewdly sipped tonic water herself. She always swore that her short marriage was the only sexual foray of her life; she certainly had a long procession of admirers but she stoutly maintained that she had preserved her near-virginity against overwhelming odds and probably because of this Puritan outlook, she attacked ferociously those she suspected of any extra-curricular activities. She infuriated Joseph Cotten, and greatly disturbed his wife Lenore, when she printed heavy hints that Joe had been caught by the Malibu Beach Patrol in the back seat of his car astride the teenage Deanna Durbin. Joe Cotten, the epitome of the Southern Gentleman from Virginia, warned Hedda that if she added one more line on the subject, he would 'Kick her up the ass!' Sure enough Hedda went into action again a few days later and the next time Cotten saw Hedda's behind entering a party, he lined up on the target and let her have it.

  In spite of this lesson she became a little power mad and soon after the War laid herself wide open to lawsuits when she wrote a book, The Whole Truth and Nothing But. In it she wrote that she had summoned Elizabeth Taylor to her house and tried to dissuade her from marrying Michael Wilding because not only was he too old for her but he had also long indulged in homosexual relations with Stewart Granger. She had some qualms about printing this passage, however, and one Sunday afternoon she called me and asked me to come and see her urgently.

  Her address had changed with her fortunes: she had left the Farmer's Market neighbourhood and was now settled in a charming, white house on Tropical Avenue in Beverly Hills — 'The House that Fear Built', she called it. As usual, I was given a hefty gin while Hedda toyed with the tonic. Then she came to the point.

  'Isn't it true,' she asked, 'that Michael Wilding was kicked out of the British Navy during the War because he was a homosexual?'

  When I had got over the shock of this nonsense, I told her of Michael's gallant record and explained the true meaning of being 'invalided' out of the service.

  'Well,' she sniffed, 'I know that he and Granger once had a yacht together in the South of France and I know what went on aboard that yacht.'

  'So do I,' I answered, 'and it's a miracle that the population of France didn't double.'

  She let out her great hoot of laughter—and then read me the passage she had written.

  I told her I thought she was mad to print it and was bound to get sued if she did, but she said that the publishers wanted her to spice up the book and be more controversial — 'They won't sue me,' she said airily, 'it would only make it worse for them to drag it into court — they'll be sore for a while then they'll forget it.'

  In the event, Hedda and her publisher were sued for three million dollars and had to cough up a hefty settlement and an abject apology.

  The two ladies were made of very durable material. Producing an interesting column every day and a feature story on Sunday entailed an immense amount of hard work and very long hours. True they employed 'leg' men and 'leg' women who scurried about on their behalf digging for gossip, but all the 'openings' and major social events they attended themselves. They, also, manned the telephones for hours each day, sifting pieces of information, a
nd tracking down stories. Each nurtured an army of part-time informants who worked in restaurants, agents' offices, beauty parlours, brothels, studios and hospitals, and no picture started 'shooting' without its complement of potential spies eager to remain in the good books of Hedda and Louella.

  Neither of them was above a little gentle blackmail through the suppression technique. People dreaded an imperious telephone message — 'Call Miss Parsons/Hopper — urgent', but it was better to comply because at least there was a chance to stop something untrue or damaging being printed; if the call went unanswered, the story was printed without further ado.

  COLUMNIST: 'Who was that girl you were nuzzling in that little bar in the San Fernando Valley at three o'clock this morning?'

  ACTOR: 'I was with my mother.'

  COLUMNIST: 'You were not with your mother, you were with Genie Garterbelt. I suppose she told her husband you were both working late?'

  ACTOR: 'Well, we were — we just dropped in for a nightcap on the way home.'

  COLUMNIST: 'According to my information, you had one of her bosoms in your hand.'

  ACTOR: 'It fell out of her dress… I was just helping her put it back in.'

  COLUMNIST: 'Rubbish!… but I won't print because I don't want to make trouble for you.'

  ACTOR: 'Bless you — you're a doll.'

  COLUMNIST: 'Got any news for me?'

  ACTOR: 'Afraid I haven't right now.'

  COLUMNIST: 'Call me when you hear anything dear.'

  ACTOR (wiping brow): 'You bet I will.'

  And he would too.

  Both had their favourites and these were the happy recipients of glowing praise for their good looks, talent, kindness and cooking but when they fell from grace, retribution was horrible — and millions were informed that they could do nothing right. Sometimes, however, because of the good ladies' antipathy one towards the other, pedestals broken by one would be pieced together by the other and life for the fallen idol would go on much as it had before.

  Jealousy might have been the reason Hedda failed to appreciate great creative talent but Louella had no excuse for joining her in scoffing openly at such giants as Garbo, Hepburn,

  Olivier and Brando, and out of the ranks of the super talented, each chose a target for real venom. For Louella it was Orson Welles, for Hedda — Charlie Chaplin.

  When she discovered that Citizen Kane was modelled on her boss, W. R. Hearst, and Marion Davies, Louella screamed in print like a wounded peahen and flailed away at Welles on every occasion, accusing him of avoiding war service, stealing Rita Hayworth away from brave Victor Mature (who was in the Coast Guard) and dodging tax by moving to Europe. She pilloried R.K.O. Pictures who had financed the film, and backed by the power of the Hearst press, campaigned so effectively to have the picture destroyed before it was shown to the public that the heads of the industry got together and offered R.K.O. three million dollars for the negative. Fortunately, the offer was spurned and a movie milestone was preserved but Welles was only infrequently invited to display his talent in Hollywood thereafter.

  Hedda's stream of bile played for years upon Chaplin. She hounded him in print because of his avowedly liberal politics, for the fact that after making a fortune in the United States, he was still, forty years later, a British subject, and, having been herself married to a man twenty-seven years her senior, for some reason she nearly went up in flames when she heard that Eugene O'Neill's eighteen-year-old daughter, Oona, was planning to marry Chaplin who was thirty-six years off the pace. When she published a string of stern warnings and dire prognostications, harping always on Chaplin's suspected preference for young girls, Chaplin ignored Hedda completely and went ahead with his wedding plans.

  One day a weeping, pregnant girl appeared on Hedda's doorstep and announced that she was the bearer of startling news — Chaplin's child.

  According to Joan Barry, she had been engaged by Chaplin to play in a film with him. She had been seduced by him and when she became pregnant, Chaplin cancelled the film and had her arrested on a vagrancy charge for which she had received a suspended sentence.

  Hedda reacted like a fire horse. She took the girl to hospital and had her examined. She was indeed pregnant. Then she despatched her post-haste to Chaplin's home on Summit Drive to tell him that 'Hedda Hopper knows everything'. Chaplin's answer to that was to call the Beverly Hills Police who arrested Joan Barry and put her in jail for three weeks.

  Thanks to the publicity, however, Chaplin was now involved in a paternity suit and Hedda crowed when his marriage was postponed. She may have stopped crowing when blood tests proved that Chaplin could not have been the baby's father but she bypassed this in her writings and concentrated instead on the fact that Joan Barry had been awarded child support: Chaplin rose above the whole episode, gave no indication that he even knew of Hedda's existence and made the announcement of the new date of his marriage — in Louella's column.

  If our heroines were long on self-importance, they were also the possessors of very short fuses when it came to having their legs pulled. Thanks to the aforementioned carefully cultivated informers, stars heading for an illicit love affair ran the risk of reading about it before they had undone the first button and happily married couples having a difference of opinion about the number of shots taken on the eleventh green at the Country Club could read the next morning about their impending divorce.

  Ida Lupino and Howard Duff had been happily married for several years: so had Hjordis and I but for some reason both couples had lately been subjected to a spate of printed rumours so we decided to have a little fun with Hedda and Louella. We chose as the battleground, Ciros, the 'hot' restaurant of the moment and one of the most spy infiltrated, and after dinner at Ida's home, I called the head waiter.

  DN: 'Could you keep a table for me around midnight?'

  HW: ‘Oh, yes, indeed, Mr. Niven — it'll be a pleasure — on the dance floor… and for how many?'

  DN (In conspiratorial tones): 'No… not on the dance floor… in a dark corner… just for two — you understand.'

  HW: 'Oh! yes, indeed, Sir, just you and Madam… leave everything to me.'

  Around midnight I arrived with Ida Lupino on my arm and the head waiter's eyebrows shot up into his hair-line. Vibrating with suppressed excitement, he led us to a dark corner at the far end of the room and stood with eyes glistening as Ida started nibbling my ear.

  Somebody wasted no time in getting to the phone because by the time Ida and I had finished our second drink, a battery of photographers was massing in the bar.

  Howard and Hjordis timed their arrival perfectly and the entire restaurant watched spellbound as a jittery head waiter led them to a table as far away as possible from Ida and myself.

  They made a lovely couple and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Howard draping himself over Hjordis like a tent.

  Howard had quite a reputation as a brawler and as I was pretending to be quite 'high', there was an expectant hush when Howard judging his moment with great expertise suddenly pushed his table over with a crash and rose to his feet pointing at me across the room with a dramatically accusing finger.

  Hjordis tried to restrain her partner as did Ida when I staggered to my feet, though I thought she over-acted a bit by screaming, 'No, no! Darling! You must flee!… he'll kill you.'

  Shrugging off the ineffectual clutching hands of women and waiters, Howard and I advanced upon each other from opposite sides of the restaurant. The place was deathly quiet and the photographers headed by the veteran, Hymie Fink, moved expectantly into position for the scoop, when like two cowboys in the classic ending of Westerns stalking each other down the empty street at sunset, we moved inexorably forward through the crowded and silent tables. At the edge of the now deserted dance floor, with eyes immovably locked, we removed our jackets and rolled up our sleeves. Then we advanced again and circled each other a couple of times. You could have heard a pin drop… people at the back were standing on chairs. Suddenly, we sprang, grabbed eac
h other round the waist, kissed on the lips and waltzed slowly round the floor. A disappointed head waiter set up a new table for four and the ensuing revelry was recorded by the more sporting among the photographers but the two queens of the columns were not amused… I got calls from both the next day telling me that they would not tolerate being woken up in the middle of the night over a false alarm.

  Louella and Hedda were not averse to a little 'payola'. Louella had earlier 'conned' important stars into appearing on her radio show 'Hollywood Hotel'. Hedda had been less successful with her programme ‘Hedda Hopper's Hollywood’ but later made a successful transition with it to television, where she 'persuaded' the biggest names in movieland to appear with her. This programme stole a lot of viewers away from The Great Stoneface (Ed Sullivan) appearing at the same time on a rival network, and Sullivan complained bitterly that he was paying full salary to the performers on his show whereas Hedda was paying nothing to the line-up she had announced for hers Gary Cooper, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Lucille Ball and Charlton Heston.

  Some of Louella's pay-offs were subtle… she persuaded Twentieth Century Fox to buy the film rights to her unfilmable autobiography and made it quite clear to producers that whenever her husband, Dr. Harry Martin, was hired as 'technical adviser' on their films, they would not lack for publicity.