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Hedda's Whoppers. It has been suggested that, for all Hedda's slash & dash, her wild but indisputable charm and her whizzing success at her job, the head beneath the hats is something of an air pocket. In her very first column, she perpetrated a lulu to the effect that Greta Garbo, who was soon, she said, to marry Leopold Stokowski, had undergone inspection by Stokowski's patrician Philadelphia relatives. Stokowski has no patrician Philadelphia relatives. A rudimentary instinct for checking sources would have spared Hedda that blooper.
One publicity man, who has dealt with both Hedda and Louella, says: "You have to watch yourself with Hedda. When Louella has a story, she knows when it is dangerous and will check it. But Hedda will plunge in and print it, and go away in complete innocence that she has done anything wrong in being wrong." Hedda claims that she has never been sued.
Her critical perceptions are sometimes bemusing: she once described Bob Hope as "our American Noel Coward." "For more than 2,000 years," she once intoned reverently, "Jews and Christians all over the world have tried to follow in the footsteps of our Saviour."
Hedda's Weapons. With all these handicaps—and after all, Beethoven was deaf—Hedda has some wicked weapons, and knows how to use them. She can print what she does about Hollywood people because she knows still fancier stuff that the mails would not carry, and because her own private life is blackmail-proof. And she knows how to turn her most outrageous mistakes into a joke. To one "planter's" hurt question why she had reduced his exclusive scoop to one line, low in her column (it was one of her mistakes), she crowed: "Bitchery, baby, pure bitchery!" Hedda delights, in fact, in calling herself The Bitch of the World.
Home Life. She lives in a typical Beverly Hills house just across the street from Lady Mendl and around the block from Mike Romanoff. It is complete with swimming pool, five phones, a dachshund nostalgically named Wolfie, and several hundred hats. There, Hedda promotes cozy Sunday morning breakfasts with leading ladies of the screen. Instead of Hedda's calling on them for an interview, it is customary for them to call on her (though she is not quite as insistent on this point as Louella).
Every so often she throws a party. Visiting stage celebrities are likely to be the guests of honor. The town turns out obediently. In turn, Hedda expects to be asked to all major parties and weddings of any size. People like to have Hedda at their parties, because she is amusing and inevitably the center of attention.
Hedda always asks Louella to her parties. Louella never comes. While the two get along fairly well, "our love," according to Hedda, "is not exactly demonstrative." Relations have been a little shaky lately because of the May Day baby incident. When Bette Davis had her May Day baby, she flew the coop and refused to talk to the press. Hedda, suspecting that Bette had gone to Laguna, climbed into her grey Cadillac and simply drove down. Finding the door ajar, she walked in. Bette was delighted to see her and they talked for two hours. Said Lolly in her column the next week: "Since Bette Davis has had so many unwelcome visitors, she has had to have her gate padlocked."