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Alone on the Throne. She seemed to delight in feuds. She and Ed Sullivan enjoyed a mutual loathing; he called her "downright illiterate"; she replied calmly that he was "scared to death" of her. Joan Bennett once sent her a skunk "to answer back for the years I have been a victim of her nasty remarks."
A determined Republican, she stumped vigorously for every G.O.P. candidate from Hoover to Goldwater, so lambasted the Hollywood left that Lauren Bacall finally spoke aloud the words that others were reluctant to say: "I think Hedda ought to shut up." But Hedda never did. In November 1965, aging (72) Louella Parsons hung up her spites and retired to a nursing home, making official what even Hedda's enemies admitted: when it came to columnists, Hedda was alone on the throne. In the end, everyone in Hollywood knew she had meant it when she warned them years before: "You can't fool an old bag like me." And in the end, most of them stopped trying.
Bag of Flour. If Hopper was never old, Keaton was never young. When Harry Houdini saw six-month-old Joseph Francis Keaton fall down a flight of stairs and burst into tears, he nicknamed the bawling infant "Buster." The sobriquet stuck, and Buster's expression never came unstuck again. His father took him into his vaudeville act at four, billed him as "the Human Mop," and literally swept the floor with him while Mom blew the saxophone downstage. While Buster kept his pan dead, Keaton senior threw him through the scenery and out into the wings, then dropped him down on the bass drum in the orchestra. Buster never moved his mouth.
In 1917, the Mop broke up the act to go it alone, inaugurated his long film career with The Butcher Boy, a two-reeler with Fatty Arbuckle in the title role. In the first scene, Arbuckle hit Keaton full force with a bag of flour —and Buster's career was on the rise. Keaton promptly withdrew from a $250-a-week job in vaudeville to act in the movies for $40. His agent congratulated him: "Learn everything you can about that business, Buster," he advised. "The hell with the money."
Pratfalls. Buster obeyed. He learned everything he could about the business, and he said the hell with the money. He climbed from bit player to star in two years, established himself as the Great Stone Face, the melancholy but unflinching victim of machines, animals, policemen—of life itself. Though he made as much as $200,000 a year, he spent it lavishly and he drank hard. In 1932, his first marriage ended in a $400,000 divorce settlement. Keaton backslid into alcoholism, was soon fired by MGM. He declared bankruptcy, listed assets of $12,000 and liabilities of $303,832. A second marriage lasted less than three years, and his career failed too. The silents had flickered and gone out; the talkies left him in the dark, an embarrassing memory of the '20s.