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Early one bright Hollywood day that dawned on rumors of a romance between Joan Crawford and Don Barry, the cowboy actor, Miss Crawford's telephone tinkled. From the other end swooshed a Niagara of italicized insinuation:
"Hello. This is Hedda Hopper. Put Joan on....Hello, Joan?...All right, dear, tell me all about it....Well, he says it's pretty serious. . . . Oh, come on, you can't fool me. Are you in love with him? . . . Now look, dear, I always ask personal questions....Well, how do you get a man to hang that much mink around your neck if you're not serious about him?...I know you're hedging. You can't fool Hopper....Well, you can answer whether you're in love with the guy and intend to marry him....Now look, Joan, I've known you for a great many years and you've never been a gold digger in your life. I just don't think you've got it in you. So when you go accepting expensive ice from this guy I know there's something up. So you might as well spill it, baby. ... All right, dear, you've given me your answer by indirection....By the way, I hear you're adopting two more children. How old are they this time?..."
Hedda Hopper is the handsome, headlong gossip whose syndicated column, usually titled "Hollywood," written in prose of an inspired spasticity, daily gives her 22,800,000 readers the illusion that they have been behind the sets, the bushes and deep into some of Hollywood's better bed-&-bathrooms. This eminence Columnist Hopper shares (reluctantly) with her rival in revelation, Hearstian Columnist Louella ("Lollipop") Parsons, fat, fiftyish, and fatuous, whose syndicated column reaches some 30,000,000 readers.
The story which Miss Hopper derived "by indirection" from her terrifying conversation with Miss Crawford was, as it turned out, dead wrong. But that was immaterial. For headlong Miss Hopper and pudgy Miss Parsons are two of the mightiest publicity powers on earth, and even their whispers can reduce the $250,000-a-year padishahs of pictures to masses of quivering jelly. For a few words from Hedda, set down with the same swooping abandon with which she selects the hats that have become her trademark, or one of Lolly Parsons' little shark-toothed prose smiles, can make or break a director or an actor, cool or clinch a deal. Hedda's chit-chat can materially affect the outcome of schemes involving millions of dollars. She is a self-appointed judge and censor of all that goes on in Hollywood, and she carries out her assignment with a hey nonny-nonny and the old one-two.
How It Works. "For several months," Hedda casually announced urbi et orbi one day last spring, "I have been plugging a young singer named Doris Day, who, I believed, had fine talent. . . . Mike Curtiz tested her for the lead in Romance in High C. She'd never been before a camera previously, but Mike told me her test was sensational. Even so, the studio wanted a star name—Mary Martin, Lauren Bacall, or Ginny Simms—for the role, but Mike held out for Doris and got her. . . ."