Hedda Hopper

Hedda Hopper, born Elda Furry on June 2, 1885, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, was an American actress and gossip columnist whose influence extended across Broadway, Hollywood, and the American press for more than five decades. The daughter of Margaret Miller Furry and David Furry, a butcher, she was raised in a family of Pennsylvania Dutch descent and German Baptist Brethren faith. The family relocated to Altoona when she was three years old. She died on February 1, 1966.

Hopper left home for New York City and entered the Broadway stage through chorus work, where her early efforts met with limited success. Florenz Ziegfeld rejected her bids to appear in his Follies, dismissing her as a "clumsy cow." She subsequently joined the touring theater company of matinee idol DeWolf Hopper, with whom she traveled the country while continuing in chorus and understudy roles. Recognizing that such positions offered no real acting experience, she sought out Edgar Selwyn, who was casting a road tour of The Country Boy, and secured the lead role through a direct audition. That production toured for thirty-five weeks across forty-eight states. She followed it by studying singing and then touring in The Quaker Girl in the second lead, a prima donna role, before that show closed in Albany.

In 1913, she married DeWolf Hopper, becoming his fifth wife. Because his previous four wives had all borne names similar to Elda — Ella, Ida, Edna, and Nella — the confusion that arose prompted her to pay a numerologist ten dollars to suggest a new name. The answer was Hedda, and she adopted it professionally from that point forward. Her Broadway career spanned from 1908 to 1934 and included appearances in the plays That Day, Be Calm, Camilla, Divided By Three, and Six-Cylinder Love, as well as the musical A Matinee Idol, among other productions.

Hopper began working in silent films in 1915, with her credited motion picture debut coming in The Battle of Hearts in 1916 alongside William Farnum. Her performance in Virtuous Wives in 1918 established her screen persona as a society woman, a type she would continue to play throughout her film career. To outshine the film's lead actress, Anita Stewart, Hopper spent her entire five-thousand-dollar salary on a wardrobe from the boutique Lucile. By 1920 she was earning one thousand dollars per week as a free agent in New York, and in 1923 she moved to Hollywood and signed with Louis B. Mayer Pictures. Over a twenty-three-year acting career she appeared in more than one hundred twenty films.

As her film work declined in the mid-1930s, Hopper turned to journalism. In 1935 she began writing a weekly Hollywood gossip column for The Washington Herald at fifty dollars a week, an arrangement that ended after four months when she refused a fifteen-dollar pay cut. In 1937 she was offered a column by the Los Angeles Times, and "Hedda Hopper's Hollywood" launched on February 14, 1938. Unable to type or spell with confidence, she dictated her column by telephone to a typist. Her contacts from decades in the entertainment industry supplied her with material, and her first major national scoop came in 1939 when she reported that James Roosevelt, son of President Franklin Roosevelt, was divorcing his wife after an affair. At the height of her reach in the 1940s, more than thirty-five million people read her columns, and her annual income reached two hundred fifty thousand dollars, supporting a mansion in Beverly Hills she described as "the house that fear built."

A signature element of Hopper's public image was her collection of extravagant hats, for which the Internal Revenue Service granted her a five-thousand-dollar annual tax deduction as a professional expense. During World War II, Nazi propagandists used photographs of her wearing those hats as a symbol of American decadence. Her only child, actor William "Bill" Hopper, served in the Navy in Underwater Demolitions during the war.

Hopper was a vocal supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, named individuals she suspected of Communist affiliations, and played a prominent role in advancing the Hollywood blacklist. She had led efforts to blacklist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, and at the 1965 premiere of The Sandpiper, when she objected to seeing Trumbo's screen credit, Elizabeth Taylor, who was present with her husband Richard Burton, told Hopper to be quiet. Hopper also lobbied for African American actor James Baskett to receive Academy recognition for his performance in the 1946 film Song of the South, and Baskett ultimately received an honorary award.

Hopper's column carried measurable industry weight. When Joan Crawford's career had stalled in the early 1940s following her departure from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hopper reprinted a press release in 1945 describing Crawford as a leading contender for the Best Actress Oscar for Mildred Pierce. Crawford won the award, and Hopper's intervention has been identified as the first known instance of lobbying the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on behalf of a specific nominee.

Her column also generated legal consequences. After she published assertions about a sexual relationship between actors Michael Wilding and Stewart Granger — claims she repeated in her 1962 book The Whole Truth and Nothing But, which she promoted on the CBS television program What's My Line? — Wilding sued her for libel and won. Actor Joseph Cotten, after Hopper printed a story about an alleged extramarital affair involving him and Deanna Durbin, physically pulled a chair out from under her at a social event and kicked her, an act for which he received congratulatory telegrams from numerous industry colleagues. Cotten subsequently warned Hopper he would repeat the action if she continued to make false claims about him.

Hopper maintained a long and well-documented feud with fellow gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who had been her rival throughout her years as a Hollywood journalist. Hopper continued writing her column until her death on February 1, 1966.