The Press: Hedda Makes Hay

"The Queen is dead, long live the Queen!" whooped Hollywood's Daily Variety. While Variety whooped, the movie pressagents trooped to lunch with Gossip Columnist Hedda Hopper. New "Queen" Hedda had just signed a contract with the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate—a contract that nearly tripled the number of her readers.

The old queen—Hearst Gossip Columnist Louella Parsons—is not exactly dead. But her whims no longer command Hollywood. She still has 17,000,000 newspaper circulation, according to Hearst's I.N.S., through "several hundred outlets." But at one stride Hedda had reached a circulation of 5,750,000 daily (7,500,000 Sunday) through only 27 papers.

Hedda's triumph was a triumph for gossip over news. On June 1 her column will supplant that of the New York Daily News's John Chapman. During his two years in Hollywood he stuck to news, not gossip, "tried to report on the making of movies and let it go at that." In the end, instead of letting the gossip go, Chapman's column was let go.

By contrast with Chapman, who was his own legman and even typed his own copy, Hedda Hopper is real Hollywood. Not by accident has she risen in four years to challenge Lolly Parsons as chief outlet for Hollywood publicity. At 52, brown-haired, boisterous Hedda, who started life as plain Pennsylvania Quakeress Elda Furry, has been nearly 25 years in the movies (acting in over 100 pictures), was the fifth of the late Actor DeWolf Hopper's six wives, between times got "kicked around plenty" while staging fashion shows, coaching actors, selling real estate, even running for political office.

Much better liked than Lolly Parsons, when she started Hedda had to pit friendships and wits against the powerful inertia of Lolly's 20-year reign on Hollywood's gossip roost. Choice studio stories went first, automatically, to Lolly; actors phoned her first and eloped afterwards lest she sideswipe them ever after. In addition to her column, Hedda's schedule now includes three CBS broadcasts weekly for Sunkist Oranges over 42 stations (none in Los Angeles, which eats second-grade oranges), occasional magazine pieces, six movie shorts a year, some bit parts (latest: Reap the Wild Wind). To manage this 135-hour week she employs two legmen, one rewrite woman, two girl clerks to handle fan mail, two secretaries to whom she dictates at the top of her lungs, from such characteristic jottings as: "Catalina and sleep . . . Stinkey Pinky . . . Test Pilot ... he has to have three steps to get on the love . . . Marie Antoinette . . . Mrs. Chauncey Olcott. . . ." Eighth member of Hedda's staff is a "brain" named Dema Harshbarger.