American Beauty roses arrived from K. T. Keller, president of Chrysler
Motors Corporation. When I got back to my house, I called Louis Lurie,
a friend of Louis B. Mayer, told him what had happened, and asked him
to mail a check to Ida immediately, so she’d have it Christmas Day. He
wrote a check on the spot for $250.
She lived to see King Louis deposed from his throne. It couldn’t
have given her any joy, because she wasn’t that kind of woman. The
mammoth studio, in spite of all its stars and resources, was being
driven to the wall by this thing called television, which Hollywood
despised. Metro lost millions when Mayer was in charge of production
in the late forties. When Schary took over the job, there were some
early money-makers, but not enough to offset the other kind, which he
couldn’t resist making.
Time and again he crossed swords with Louis. If the dueling threatened
to go against him, he was quick to appeal to Nick Schenck for support.
In the end Schenck had to choose between Mayer and Schary. He chose
Schary, who in turn was ousted years later and, when he left, collected
a million dollars. Louis spent the rest of his life burning with
hatred, trying in vain to take over MGM in legal battle he could never
win. At his funeral Jeanette MacDonald appeared to sing “Ah, Sweet
Mystery of Life.”
The fight against communism waxed and waned; so did the newspaper
headlines. It took me off on a two-year lecture tour of twenty-four
cities. I found myself the second vice president--the first was Charles
Coburn--of an organization called the Motion Picture Alliance for the
Preservation of American Ideals. John Wayne was president. As the
Congressional probing continued, the studio bosses, true to form,
shoved their heads into the sands like ostriches and, to protect the
millions invested in unshown movies, hoped that trouble would simply
go away. People like me, who dared to mention that trouble was still
hanging around, discovered that strange things happened to them. Like
the subpoena from Washington that didn’t exist.
_Variety_ weighed in to report news of trouble ahead for Hopper:
HEDDA’S RED RAP
STIRS STUDIO TALK
OF FILM REPRISAL
Hedda Hopper’s columnizing that she “knows” the names
of many Reds in Hollywood--with a resulting subpoena by
the House Un-American Activities Committee--has some
publicity-advertising toppers of major companies doing a quiet
canvass among themselves of what their studios’ attitude should
be toward the syndicated writer.
Their thought is that Miss Hopper has a perfect right to say
whatever she pleases. However, she is largely dependent on
studio press aid for news, and there’s some question as to
whether such cooperation should be continued....
Although the pub-ad chieftains--and presumably company heads
and other execs--are sizzling at Miss Hopper for further
needling the Washington probe, probability is that there will
be no concerted action to cut off her news sources or otherwise
penalize her. Similar thoughts have arisen in the past
concerning other columnists and have never worked out.
Industry execs feel that not only Miss Hopper, but all writers
whose living depends on Hollywood should take a cooperative
attitude.
The truth was that no subpoena had been issued, and none ever was.
Someone had planted the story on that unsuspecting publication. Of all
the items about me that were printed in its columns over the months
ahead, only one hurt. That was a front-page, banner-lined interview
with George Sokolsky, the Hearst political commentator and an old
friend. He’d wept openly on my shoulder--I top him by an inch or two
in high heels--at the 1952 Republican convention in Chicago when Ike
Eisenhower walked off with the nomination instead of Bob Taft.
When George arrived in Los Angeles on a lecture tour, he was nabbed by
a _Variety_ reporter and quoted as saying that Hopper was a political
babe in arms. That stung. A year went by before I got a chance to set
him straight--in an elevator descending to the lobby of the Waldorf
Towers in New York. I felt better when he wrote me afterward:
I was asked a question which did not include your name and
which I answered without knowing it referred to you. When the
question and answer appeared in print, I was chagrined to find
that it was made to apply to you personally.... We differ
slightly on methods, but that is not as important as that we
agree in principle. I regard myself as a missionary trying to
win back the lost souls.... Perhaps your sterner creed is more
correct than mine, and I do not want ever to quarrel with you
over this particular difference. You must do it your way, and I
shall have to do it mine. Please forgive me.
The pot shots loosed off in my direction from some quarters of our
town didn’t cost me any sleep. I was raised to believe in the stern
tradition of “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can
never hurt you.” Abraham Lincoln put it a touch more graciously: “If
I were to read, much less to answer, all the attacks on me, this shop
might as well be closed for any other business.” I believe in that,
too; the quote is printed on a sign that stands on my desk.
Hollywood’s top brass is used to buying things, but they couldn’t buy
me or my silence. Dore Schary once offered to put the Hopper name up on
a big Broadway sign, but it wasn’t hard to refuse that bit of coaxing.
All the major producers threatened to pull their advertising out of the
Los Angeles _Times_ unless I sweetened up my printed opinions of their
pictures. That suited Publisher Norman Chandler just fine. Advertising
space was very tight, Norman told them. “I like the way Miss Hopper
expresses herself, and you’ll be doing me a service if you cut back on
ads.” They didn’t cancel a line. I didn’t hear about this until three
years later. Everybody should have a friend like Norman Chandler.
I was flattered in a different way to learn that _Confidential_ had its
West Coast gumshoe toiling for six months to find something to pin on
me, past or present. Howard Rushmore reported that they finally quit
empty-handed. “We wasted our time,” he said dolefully.
“I could have told you that before you started. I’ve never knuckled
down to anyone in Hollywood. I’m not beholden to anybody, and I’ve
never had romances with any one of them from the day I came out here.”
* * * * *
It’s impossible to talk about movie politics without finding John Wayne
on camera hammering away with both fists. He’s a rock-ribbed Republican
who wears his creed like a medal. It’s affected his popularity no more
than Frank Sinatra’s been hurt by his sympathies for the other side of
the street.
Duke Wayne had no hand in politics until he smelled that Communists
were infiltrating the movie business. Then he sat down in James
McGuinness’ house one night with Sam Wood, Adolphe Menjou, writer
Morris Ryskind, Ward Bond, Leo McCarey, and Roy Brewer of the A.F. of
L. That’s how the Motion Picture Alliance was born.
Duke likes to tell about a producer who warned him the next morning:
“You’ve got to get out of that MPA. You’re becoming a controversial
figure. It will kill you at the box office. You will hit the skids.” He
says: “I hit the skids all right. When I became president of the MPA in
1948, I was thirty-third in the ratings of box-office leaders. A year
later I skidded right up to first place.”
He occasionally hankers after the days, thirty-four years and more than
150 movies ago, when he was the easygoing ex-prop man making his first
Monogram picture on a total budget of $11,000. “We couldn’t afford more
than one horse. So in the first scene I had to knock out the heavy and
steal the horse.” His political faith is simple enough. For America:
“I’m for the liberty of the individual.” Overseas: “We’ve permitted the
world to think of us as big soft jerks who’re trying to buy our way
with money.”
For all the burning of midnight oil he’s done as a hard-hitting
businessman producing movies like _The Alamo_, he hasn’t managed to
reap great profits. “I have a pretty tough partner in Uncle Sam. I’m
not squawking, but he’s taken a little of it.” _The Alamo_, on which he
gambled his entire bankroll of $1,500,000, has done well in the United
States and cleaned up overseas.
Duke’s a kind of patriarch, with four children born to his first wife,
Josephine Saenz, whom he married when he was toiling in the slave
market of cowboy serials. Those children have now supplied him with
four grandchildren, and by his third wife, Pilar Palette, he has a
delightful daughter, Aissa, and a son, John Ethan. When Aissa was in
her cradle, he set the beatniks around Schwab’s drugstore on their ears
by striding in straight from work in full Western regalia one evening
demanding: “Give me an enema nipple, small size, for a sick baby.”
His middle wife was a Mexican tamale named Esperanza Baur. As a warm-up
to grabbing headlines with vitriolic accusations against him, “Chata”
Wayne dispatched two detectives to spy on him in her native land, where
Duke was filming _Hondo_. The two not-very-private eyes unfortunately
got themselves arrested and thrown into jail. It took Duke to get them
out.
“One had acute appendicitis. The doctor wanted to operate. You know
the reputation of Mexican doctors. If anything had happened, I’d have
been blamed. So I got a plane and got them out of there, over to the
American side of the border. Then there could be no reflection on me if
anything happened.”
Today, at fifty-five, he still stands six feet six in his Western
boots (“Most comfortable things in the world if you have them made to
order”) and behaves like a twenty-five-year-old when the script calls
for action and he’s “on.” For _Hatari_, shot in Africa in 1962, he was
pulling stunts like lassoing rhinos, missing disaster by inches when
one of them charged his open truck.
He isn’t a man who goes out much, though he always comes to my parties
early and stays late, talking a blue streak. “I don’t think the
industry is going on the rocks,” he decided not long ago. “We’ve hit as
low a point as we can go, and we can’t get anything but better.”
How does he explain his own popularity? “It’s very simple. I never do
anything that makes any guy sitting out there in the audience feel
uncomfortable. So when the little woman says, ‘Let’s go to the show,’
the guy says, ‘Let’s see the John Wayne picture,’ because he knows I
won’t humiliate him. I think the guys pull the girls in.”
He wanted to get into Russia to make _The Conqueror_, the first United
States picture shot there, but the deal fell through. When a certain TV
celebrity received the Kremlin’s permission to film a television show
behind the Iron Curtain, Duke asked: “If they let you in, why not me?”
“We’ve never said anything about the Russians.”
Duke Wayne grinned. “That’s the difference. I have.”
_Seventeen_
Maybe I look like Mother or Grandma Moses to Americans in uniform if
they’ve been away from home long enough in far-flung places. That’s the
only reason I could ever find for Bob Hope’s wanting to take me along
on his Christmas shows overseas. The first time he invited me, I was
too delirious to ask why. I haven’t asked him since, and he hasn’t told
me. But whenever he calls: “Pack your things, Hedda, we’re off,” I’m
always rarin’ to go.
You think you know what Bob’s like, but you don’t until you’ve seen him
on one of these safaris. We once had to wait six hours while the fuel
was drained out of our plane and replaced. When the pilot had stepped
aboard, he’d sniffed and said: “My God, they’ve filled it with jet
fuel.” Which would have blown us to hell and gone at a few thousand
feet. Have you ever had black coffee and Tootsie Rolls for breakfast
at 6 A.M. five days running? No complaints from Hope. When I got home,
I’d drunk so much of the stuff I developed coffee poisoning and didn’t
recover for a month.
I’ve watched him put on a performance in a base hospital for patients
who looked better than he did after he’d been driven half blind with
fatigue by army wives who wouldn’t let him rest because he helped their
husbands’ chances for another promotion. Bob can’t say no to anybody.
He would rather entertain five hundred GI’s than be handed $50,000.
He’s looked after the money he’s earned, too, though he pays as high
as $2000 a week apiece to his team of writers. They deserve it. This
unpredictable character, high over the Pacific, hours out on our way
to the Far East, asked two of the team, John Rapp and Onnie Whizzen:
“Have you got that script about a sergeant and a private you wrote six
years back but we didn’t use?” So help me, they fished it out of one
of their bags and passed it to him.
He can joke about his money, along with religion, politics, and the
Kennedys. “Since it was reported that I’m worth around $30,000,000,” he
told me recently, “busloads of relatives have arrived at the house. We
have ’em standing in corners instead of floor lamps.”
He’s irreverent, but never a dirty word does he utter, nor does he
take the Lord’s name in vain. I’ve been with him days on end, and I’ve
yet to hear a cuss word out of him. Came the night that Hollywood and
America honored him at a banquet as the number-one citizen of our
industry, and Jack Benny stood up to make a speech. “I hadn’t seen Bob
for ten months until I ran into him on the golf course,” said Jack,
who’d arrived an hour late for the celebration after dining at home.
“He stood there and said: ‘I’ve had the god-damndest time with this
ball today....’” We sat there in silence, not believing it.
Bob can’t stay home, can’t sit still any more than Jack can. And at
parties Jack’s the champion floor pacer, stanchly refusing to dance. “I
don’t have to,” he says. “I don’t have to prove myself. I did that in
my youth.”
Dolores Hope--they were married twenty-eight years ago--and their
four adopted children haven’t seen Bob at home for the past eight
Christmases. If there’s any loneliness in her life, which I doubt,
religion fills it--she’s a devout Catholic, who used to preach to me.
We spent an hour and a half together driving from Beverly Hills to
Santa Ana during the war. My mind was on my son, Bill, who was away
in the Pacific, so when she started on religion, Dolores did all the
talking by default.
At the end of the ride, she apologized: “I guess I talked too long
about the faith.”
“Only about ninety minutes too long,” said I. Now she leaves the
attempts at conversion to another good friend of mine, Father Edward
Murphy, but we’ll come to him farther along.
I spent wonderful Christmases with Bob and his troupe. There was Thule
Air Base, where our servicemen hadn’t seen a woman in two years except
five homely nurses. Anita Ekberg was one of our party. For stark
horror, you couldn’t beat the looks on those GI faces when she was
told to cover up in a fur coat because her gown had a low-and-behold
neckline.
Not a dry eye in the house when we sang “Auld Lang Syne.” A colonel got
carried away and said to me: “Do you mind if I kiss you? You remind me
of my mother.” He couldn’t have been a day over fifty-five.
The following year it was Alaska, with Hopper wrapped up against the
cold like an Eskimo. “If you want anything, just ask,” they told Ginger
Rogers and me, so we had breakfast in bed in rooms as hot as hell’s
boilerhouse. Outdoors, even cameras froze if you lingered longer than
fifteen minutes.
One year we discovered that the rain in Spain fell mainly on us; that
day Gina Lollobrigida and the John Lodges joined us. Another Christmas
Day we spent at a missile base in Vicenze, Italy; put on a show on the
deck of the aircraft carrier, _U.S.S. Forrestal_. There was a bronze
bust of James Forrestal aboard. I stood and wept for our country’s
injustice to this fine man. One of our group asked: “Who was he?”
There was the year we covered the South Pacific. Jayne Mansfield
was along, a girl it’s impossible to dislike, who’s kind, anxious
to please, and willing to do anything but cover herself up. Mickey
Hargitay came, too. In the plane I peered over at the two of them in
the seat behind me. He was painting her toenails firehouse red. “She’d
do the same for me,” he said.
Her fan letters followed her all through the Pacific. She’d read
a fresh batch before she’d eat, then gulp down a stone-cold meal
perfectly happy--her fans had fed her. On Guam seven thousand GI’s
stood up, cheered, and took pictures of her when she walked on stage,
parading her monumental shape. Then, at my suggestion, Bob introduced
Mickey. I should have kept my mouth shut. All seven thousand GI’s
booed him to the echo.
Twelve thousand marines on Okinawa marched downhill in formation to sit
on the ground in a great natural bowl and watch the show. Jayne kicked
off her shoes and stood barefoot for an hour and a half because she
looked cuter that way, posing with everyone who wanted a picture taken
with her. She signed every autograph book, too, drawing a little heart
instead of a dot over the “i” in “Mansfield.”
“Who’s going to pay to see it,” I asked Bob, “when she gives it away?”
Years later Jayne came up with a yarn about being stranded off Nassau
in allegedly shark-infested waters, which I can testify are so shallow
she could have walked to the mainland. I examined her later for
mosquito bites; nary a dent on her back or legs. “They’re higher up,
Hedda,” she whispered.
I had a special reason for feeling mighty privileged to join Bob on the
South Pacific tour, and I used to explain it in talking to our fellows.
It made me the only woman in the world able to follow the route her son
took journeying from island to island to fight the Japanese.
Bill Hopper, not a bit like his father, is a shy one. The fact that he
reached his full growth and height of six feet four when he was fifteen
may have something to do with it. He won’t talk about the war, won’t
let me write in my column about playing Paul Drake on the “Perry Mason”
show or the movies he makes. “If I can’t make it on my own, I don’t
want to make it” is his theme song.
In the war he made it strictly on his own as a skin-diving member of
the Navy’s Team Ten, Underwater Demolition. Their job was first to
sneak in under water and survey the best spots for our landing craft
to put ashore on islands held by the enemy. Then their mission was to
blast clear paths through the coral, swimming through the reefs with
eighty pounds of dynamite apiece on their backs.
One Christmas my family and friends sent off to Bill and his buddies
packages with such silly, homey things as miniature bottles of scotch
and bourbon, a sniff of his wife’s favorite perfume. Also included was
a little bag of earth, a publicity gimmick from one of the studios,
labeled “The latest dirt from Hollywood.”
Bill, who doesn’t lack a sense of humor, took the last item along when
he and his nine teammates crept ashore on one island. He left behind
the tiny sack as a kind of calling card. Team Ten chuckled for weeks
imagining the face of the first invading U. S. marine who found it on
the beach, asking himself: “How in the name of all that’s holy did this
get here among these Japs?”
The team discovered there was nothing to beat one particular latex
item, government issue, for keeping sticks of dynamite good and
waterproof. It was pure joy for them to figure what the Pentagon must
have thought about the statistics piling up in the quartermaster
general’s office concerning the kind of war Team Ten was apparently
fighting. Bill, as the tallest and huskiest, was the last aboard the
waiting pickup boats after the charges had been set--you had to swim
fast because the boat couldn’t hang around waiting for you. On one
excursion he happened to turn his head. He saw some loose dynamite
protectors bobbing up and down in the water after him and nearly
drowned laughing.
Their captain was a grandson of Joseph H. Choate, once ambassador to
Britain and the godfather of DeWolf Hopper, Bill’s father. Team Ten
received some leave to say good-by to their families. I found out later
they’d been chosen for the invasion of Japan. Thank heaven, they were
in America when the war ended.
A sense of humor is one of the essentials of this life. You can be
rich, powerful, famous, but without a bit of fun in your nature, you’re
something less than human. I’m not fond of psalm-singing, solemn piety
in anybody. But match devotion with kindness and laughter, and you’ve
company after my own heart. It’s time to talk about Father Murphy.
He was born in 1892 in Salem, Massachusetts, one of an Irish laborer’s
eight children, and he followed an older brother into the priesthood.
At one time he was a student together with Fulton Sheen, but one went
on to convert the rich, the other the poor. They’ve both exercised
their persuasions on me, their faith, I guess, bolstering their hopes
for the impossible.
Any danger of conversion by the then Monsignor Sheen was limited to
an elevator ride I took with him from the thirty-fifth floor of the
Waldorf Towers down to the entrance level. We’d just been introduced
by Clare Boothe Luce, who was a fellow passenger. The monsignor,
now bishop, has hypnotic black eyes and a magnetic presence that’s
inescapable. I was fascinated by him and his words. Then the elevator
reached our destination. “Saved by the basement!” I exclaimed. “Ten
more floors and you’d have had me a Catholic.” He roared with laughter.
Father Murphy, bless his heart, has tried longer. I hadn’t known many
Catholic priests until I met him at a party in Hollywood, when he was
in our town lecturing. I fell under the spell of the soft voice and
gentle spirit of this giant-spirited little man. In the Josephite Order
of Missionary Priests to the Negro, he served as pastor of the St. Joan
of Arc Church in New Orleans, was dean of the department of philosophy
and religion at Xavier University there. He did as much for the Negro
in that city as anyone alive today.
There was a young man in his parish who had gone as far as he could
studying sculpture in New Orleans, though it was plain to Father Murphy
that he could become an important sculptor, so funds were raised to
send him to New York. Some time later the priest found himself in that
city on his way to Rome by way of Paris, and he invited the young
sculptor to luncheon. The student had a request to make--would the
priest please serve as his eyes and report back to him every possible
detail, from the chisel marks to the play of light, of how the statues
looked in the Louvre and St. Peter’s?
Father Murphy went straight from the luncheon to the steamship office,
where he exchanged his first-class ticket for two tourist berths, with
a little spending money left over. He telephoned the young Negro to
join him and spent two inspiring weeks in Europe seeing the greatest
art treasures of the world through his young companion’s starry eyes.
On the voyage home they also shared a cabin.
“Father,” said the young man, “may I ask you a very personal question?
I understand that to white people we Negroes have a distinctive odor.
What do I smell like exactly?”
Father Murphy’s eyes must have twinkled, as they do constantly. “It’s
a little bit like burnt chestnuts.” They both laughed at that. “Now,”
said the priest, “we must have a special odor to you. What do I smell
like?”
“Well, Father, I’d say it’s--it’s a little bit like an old goat.”
Before he had left Hollywood, it had been arranged that a party of us
would meet at the next spring’s Mardi Gras and I’d bought him a suit to
replace the one he was wearing, which was turning green with age. He
wrote me about both items soon after he got home:
Brace yourself. This is probably your first “mash” note from
a dignified, almost funereal representative of the cloth, on
which you made a positively ripping impression. (Me for the
ecclesiastical tailors!) Your casual conversational reference,
for instance, to someone as an equine posterior (remember? even
though those two words are not exactly the ones you used) left
me limp with inner mirth.
Girl, I’m envious for the first time in my life. With your gift
of gusto, what a ministry I’d have had! I’d have blown Negro
prejudice in N’Orleans to smithereens and been an electrified
Abe Lincoln to the lowly. Henceforth mouse Murphy shall assume
stature and verve. In sheer defiance of incipient arthritis, he
shall frisk.
Don’t forget our date for Mardi Gras. It is said on the Delta
that all good Americans go to N’Orleans when they die, and that
all wise ones come while they are living. You are very wise,
_ma chère_....