One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley interviewed an actress who had just arrived in town with a new contract from producer Louis B. Mayer and fresh from a happy divorce:
“My gracious no—I’m not thinking of being married again! I’m enjoying my freedom too much!” So said Hedda Hopper, fifth divorced wife of De Wolfe Hopper, as she greeted me at the Hollywood Hotel yesterday. Mrs. Hopper looks as charming and pretty as she did that first time I met her, more than nine years ago, when as a very young leading woman she told me blushingly that she was going to marry De Wolfe Hopper.
“But Mr. Hopper is a very wonderful man,” she said, “only not as a husband. But I admire his good qualities.”
“I’m so thrilled at being out here in Hollywood that I could not sleep last night,” declared Mrs. Hopper. “I arrived yesterday, you know. All my old friends have been calling on me all day. I haven’t been in the West since Mr. Hopper was in pictures here seven years ago.”
Of course Kingsley had no idea she was speaking to her eventual successor in the Hollywood gossip racket. That didn’t happen for many years, not until 1938 when the L.A. Times picked up Hopper’s syndicated column, four years after Kingsley retired. In 1923, Hedda Hopper was yet another working actress aspiring to stardom.
Born Elda Furry in 1885, Hopper started out as a chorus girl and she toured with matinee idol De Wolfe Hopper’s theater company. He was an actor, comedian, singer, and producer most famous for performing “Casey at the Bat.” She got the opportunity to act in a touring company of The Country Boy, then she became Hopper’s fifth wife in 1913. Her film debut was in The Battle of Hearts in 1916 with William Farnum. She was a freelance actress in New York City until 1923 when she signed that contract and moved to Hollywood. She kept her word, and never did marry again. She appeared in over 120 movies during her career.
When her acting career waned in the mid-1930’s, she tried writing a Hollywood gossip column. On February 14, 1938, the L.A. Times first published “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood.” Now she’s famous for writing salacious details about personal lives of movie stars that occasionally landed her in libel court, her anti-Communist agenda, her work to suppress Citizen Kane to help out her boss William Randolph Hearst, and her attempts to ruin people’s careers, but it wasn’t all borderline evil. Hopper’s first column was all about visiting Norma Shearer on the set on Marie Antoinette, and she concluded “Norma Shearer is Hollywood at its best. Dignified star, happy marriage, perfect mother.”
Fashions in Hollywood news changed a lot from Kingsley’s time to Hopper’s, and what the former wrote about the latter is a sample of the difference. In November of 1926 she had the newsy note that “Hedda Hopper has been engaged by Paramount for and important role in Children of Divorce,” and her alter-ego Stella the Star Gazer mentioned seeing her at a Christmas party at Billie Dove’s house later that year:
“Oh, I know Hedda Hopper is here!” cried Stella. “She will be right in the center of that crowd of men over there!” Sure enough, Stella’s Sherlockholmesing was right. Hedda was bright, pretty, and witty as ever.
People weren’t afraid of what Kingsley might write. She wasn’t the only writer with this style; Fanny the Fan in Picture Play Magazine had a column called “Over the Teacups” that ran from November 1919 through May 1931 (they were so similar that for awhile I thought it was Kingsley writing them anonymously!). In June 1920 the tag line was “Fanny the Fan proves that gossip can be interesting and yet not malicious.” So these sorts of breezy stories about famous people were popular.
I haven’t seen Kingsley comment on the new trends in her industry. After 1934, she spent her retirement working part-time for the L.A. Times, occasionally writing nostalgia pieces and reviewing vaudeville and movies that other writers didn’t want to cover until she was 83 (which seems like a pretty nice retirement to me).
An awful lot has been written about Hedda Hopper, especially about her rivalry with Louella Parsons. There was even a Ryan Murphy TV show, Feud. If you like podcasts, be sure to check out Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This season called Gossip Girls.
Unlike Hopper, Kingsley didn’t only write news and gossip, she was also a reviewer. She got to see a classic this month, and she appreciated it thoroughly. First she aired out her grievances about the good comics moving to feature-length films, then she said that she didn’t mind Harold Lloyd, who’d figured out how to do it right:
Lloyd gives you three times the length of the old pictures, and he doesn’t soldier a bit on the job, but just offers you three times as many laughs.
Solemnly to narrate comedy or to dissect it is to break in utterly on a wheel. You won’t have to take my word for it that Safety Last is funny. All you’ll have to do will be to pause outside the door of the California and hear the yells of glee issuing forth.
To the poor reviewer it is only left to trail along behind and pick up the laugh points. The story is a real story, however, even if it is merely about the poor country boy who goes to the city to make good.
She didn’t need to worry: Safety Last is spoiler-proof because words are no match for seeing Lloyd. Nevertheless, she had to say something about what happened in the movie:
Then there is the poor young man and his pal in his boarding house, and the scene where they hang themselves up on pegs to look like old clothes when the landlady comes to collect the rent.
There’s a flash of fresh gags like that all along the line, with some snappy farce when the girl in the country decides not to wait any longer for her sweetie to send for her, but comes right along and trails him to the department store where he is working. That’s where some of the loudest joy noises are paged, because he pretends to be the manager, and his various efforts to show off before the girl are a howl.
But the greatest punch of the comedy comes—the part where you laugh and thrill until you are fairly hysterical—when Harold Lloyd climbs a ten-story building.
As for Lloyd, we always knew he was funny, but we never realized how funny until this one. It isn’t only that he does funny stunts; his comedy method itself is perfect of its own original kind. He has only to turn his head and cock his eye to make you laugh.
Safety Last was a great big hit, playing in Los Angeles until August 24th.
Now it’s surprising her editor didn’t review it himself, but even Harold Lloyd’s movies weren’t ‘important’ enough for him. Now it’s considered a classic. If you’re looking for a movie to introduce newcomers to silent films, it’s a great choice and you can still hear yells of glee outside the theaters where it plays.
Hedda Hopper, “Norma Shearer Intelligent in Handling Career,” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1938.
Grace Kingsley, “Ah, Christmas,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1927.
Grace Kingsley, “Flashes: Star Heads West,” Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1923.
Grace Kingsley, “Star in Another French Farce,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1926.
“Safety Last to end run tonight,” Los Angeles Times, August 24, 1923.
Grace Kingsley's Hollywood 