Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons: Hollywood's Killer Queens by Catherine Hokin

Christmas may be over but for movie buffs, fashion lovers and celebrity spotters, the tinsel is still well and truly sparkling. The Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, the Oscars: awards season is upon us. Actresses badly in need of pies are praying their chosen designer doesn't suddenly decide to go 'edgy' (aka mad, see poor Sophie Turner at the Globes); everyone's 'of course I'm happy I lost' smile clashing beautifully with their crazed eyes and reporters stalking their victims for that one illicit look or drunken mishap which will write their mortgage off.

It may not be one of our more attractive traits but human beings love gossip. The word itself was first used in a tattling context by Chaucer when the Wife of Bath refers to a 'gossib dame' and the National Archives provide a rich source of libel cases such as Ellen Bowden's in 1574 when she took Ann Venables to court for calling her a "whore, arrant whore, wedded mans whore and William Colsolls whore" and won 8 shillings for her pains. We gossip and we write it down. Pity the poor Mesopotamian mayor only now remembered because his affair with a married woman in 1500 BC coincided with the time and place of the development of Cuneiform, one of the world's earliest writing systems.

 Scandal Sheets at Mrs Humphrey's Print Shop

Scandal sheets as a source of gossip came into their own in London in the eighteenth century. They were poured over in coffee houses and tea shops by men and women alike who thrilled to snippets about the fabulously named Madame Slendersense and her French dancing master, "Mrs. Manlove, who generally searches into the bottom of such an affair, solemnly protests she saw them go up one pair of stairs together. What they did there, she can't tell, but the lady has been ailing ever since" (The Female Tatler) and comments on fashion as bitchy as anything Joan Rivers used to litter the Oscars' red carpet with, "Mrs. Tawny alias Tawdry, is desired not to be so fantastically whimsical in her dress...nothing is more disagreeable and ridiculous than to see a woman of her years affect the gay, youthful airs of their daughters."

Once the floodgate was opened, there was no stopping it. The circulation battle in the USA between publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer was an excuse to see who could print the most scandalous news items. Penny papers in the nineteenth century thrived on lurid gossip and the author Roger Wilkes, in his book Scandal, credits the 1886 divorce case of Lady Colin Campbell with inflaming public demand for society scandals and giving birth to the first newspaper gossip column. Society tittle-tattle is one thing but it was the birth of the film industry that really saw the explosion in the demand for the 'celebrity' gossip machine and created some of its biggest monsters.

 Hedda Hopper & Louella Parsons, Vanity Fair

Wielding a cleverly catty pen is an art. Historian Gary Wills has identified some of our best known classical authors as also being the earliest gossip columnists, including Catullus for this snappy epigram on the subject of an invitation from Julius Caesar: “Join your party?/I might, mighty Czar,/Could I remember/quite who you are.” Step forward a couple of centuries and the pen was being wielded by two of the most dangerous star-makers and star-breakers Hollywood would ever see: Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.

It was fan magazines that helped create the idea of "movie stars". Motion Picture Story Magazine was launched in 1911 during the era of silent films and the appetite was insatiable: this magazine was the first of what would become nearly 300 titles in the genre. At the height of their power in the 1940s, Hopper and Parsons' rival columns had a combined readership of 75 million people (half the population of the USA) and the industry was just as much in thrall to them, if not more so, than the public, as Bob Hope said: “Their columns were the first thing we looked at every morning to see what was going on.” Both women had a long association with Hollywood and powerful connections which they exploited ruthlessly, against the stars and each other. Hopper began as a bit-part actress. She appeared in around 120 films, hit hard times (probably because she refused to entertain LB Mayer on his casting coach) but retained enough industry friends to eventually be hired by MGM as a journalist to offset the power of Parsons, her one time friend. Parsons, by contrast, was a journalist from the start whose career went stellar after she forged a friendship with publisher William Randolph Hearst's film actress mistress Marion Davies.

 Time satirising Hopper's trademark hats

Both women were highly skilled at blurring both their own pasts (editing their marriages and their birth dates) and their colourful lives. When it came to their quarry, however, nothing was off limits. Louella’s columns were sprinkled with racist terms such as“swarthy Mexicans” and she once cited Mussolini as her favourite hero. Hedda was viciously vocal about racial intermixing, hated and hunted Communists (she led the attack that drove Chaplin out of the States and destroyed Donald Trumbo) and had no mercy for anyone who gave a story to Parsons rather than her. Louella had informants everywhere, from studios to hairdressers’ salons and doctors’ offices. When Louella received a tip that Clark Gable and his second wife, Ria, were going to divorce, she“kidnapped” Mrs. Gable and held her hostage at her home until she was sure the story was hers first. Hopper ruined Ingrid Bergman's career after she had an affair with Roberto Rossellini and became pregnant - not because of the affair but because she gave the story to Louella. Hopper's attacks on Marilyn Monroe were so vicious, fans wrote letters after Monroe's death blaming Hopper for the suicide - apparently she didn't give a damn about that or about the skunk Joan Bennett sent her as a Valentine's gift. When she was asked by actress Merle Oberon “What inspired all the vicious things you’ve been writing about me?”, her response was simple and really rather chilling: “Bitchery, dear. Sheer bitchery.”

The end of the studio system in the 1950s, the spread of television and the rise of tabloid magazines such as Confidential which was notorious for making up stories with no basis in fact at all (I'm resisting all references to Trump here) changed the relationships between Hollywood, its stars and the public. Parsons and Hopper faded away and, while gossip and some of its perpetrators seem to find continuously new lows in this 24/7 internet world, no other individual writers since have held such long-lasting and dangerous power over other people's lives. I can highly recommend the film Trumbo if anyone wants to know more, Helen Mirren's portrayal of Hopper captures her awfulness to perfection. The Golden Age of Hollywood, or so this period is so often called: proof that layers of gilt and polish and pretence can't hide the poison under the surface. Avoiding a Trump reference really was too much to hope for.

Gossip from the table of Thomas à Becket - by Katherine Langrish

Witty, urbane Walter Map was a clerk, courtier and man of letters at the court of King Henry II.  He was eventually made arch-deacon of Oxford, and died some time between 1208 and 1210.  During his lifetime he wrote many books - he's even reported to have had some share of authorship in the Arthurian romances - but the only one which has survived is De Nugis Curialium (Of Courtly Trifles), a brilliant mixture of memoir, gossip, stories and opinions – and one of the liveliest accounts of that lively era.

Walter Map himself describes De Nugis Curialium – with mock-deprecation – as ‘A whole forest and timber yard, I will not say of stories, but of jottings… I am but your huntsman, I bring you the game, it is for you to make dainty dishes out of it.’

Map is our source for the story of Wild Edric, for the story of King Herla, and for other wild and magical tales from the Welsh borders (I used him extensively in research for my 12th century historical fantasy Dark Angels), but he is also a brilliant raconteur with a pen dipped in acid and a happy way of letting all his prejudices rip.  He satirises the court.  He dislikes the Knights Templar.  He disapproves of the Cistercians and pokes fun at the over-the-top names of their abbeys:

Thus they ... spread into many establishments; and the names of these always contain some spice of the divine, as Godscot, Godsdale, Port Salvation, Scale-heaven, Wondervale, Lantern, Brightvale (Clairvaux).  From this last rose Bernard [St Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux] and began to shine among, or rather above, the rest, like Lucifer among the stars of night. A man of ready eloquence he was, and used to have carts driven round through the towns and castles, in which to carry off his converts to the cloister.  …And as for the miracles which were done by his means, why, they were written by Geoffrey of Auxerre: believe ye him.

How he jabs in the knife! - comparing Bernard to the bright evening star but also of course to Satan, whose pride Bernard rivals - revelling in the absurd hubris of 'carts full of converts' - and then that sly, dry comment at the end. 

Walter Map even treats us to his opinions on the practicality of underpants - sensible garments which all monks ought to wear, especially in strong winds.  He illustrates this with a story in which of course a 'white monk' - a Cistercian - is the comic victim:

The lord king, Henry the Second,  of late was riding as usual at the head of all the great concourse of his knights and clerks, and talking with Dom Remic, a distinguished monk and an honourable man.  There was a high wind, and lo! a white monk was making his way on foot along the street and looked round, and made haste to get out of the way.  He dashed his foot against a stone and was not being borne up by angels at the moment, and fell in front of the feet of the king's horse, and the wind blew his habit right over his neck, so that he was entirely exposed to the unwilling eyes of the lord king and Reric...

Our view of the Middle Ages is - inevitably - telescoped, simplified, partial.  We are unaware, or forgetful of, the politics and rivalries which divided what can seem, at this distance, a monolithic structure: the Mediaeval English Church. The lucky survival of Walter Map's 'Courtly Trifles' preserves at least some detail of the very modern bitchery that was in fact going on.  And here is Map, at the dinner table of  Archbishop Thomas à Becket, letting us in on a conversation in which some famous names are being dropped. 

I was once present at the table of the Blessed Thomas, then archbishop of Canterbury; next to him were sitting two white abbots who were telling of many wonders done by that man, I mean Bernard  – the occasion being that a letter of Bernard’s was being read about the condemnation of Master Peter Abelard, the Prince of the Nominalists, who went further astray in dialectic, by the way, than he did in theology.  The latter was the study of his heart; in the other he laboured against the grain…

Well, a letter was being read of Dom Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, to Pope Eugenius, who had been a monk of his – and no second monk of that Order has followed him in that see. In that letter it was said that Master Peter was as proud as Goliath, and Arnold of Brescia [a disciple of Abelard and preacher of apostolic poverty, executed 1155] was his standard bearer, with much more to the same vicious effect.  The two abbots seized the occasion to praise Bernard, and extolled him to the stars.

So John Planeta [one of Thomas à Becket's clerks], hearing what vexed and pained him, remarked, “I saw a miracle at Montpellier which made many men marvel.”

He was asked to relate it, and said he:  “That great man whom you so justly extol had a demoniac, bound, brought to him at Montpellier to be healed, and seated as he was on a great she-ass, he commanded the unclean spirit – the assembled crowd keeping silence – and finally said, “Loose the man and let him go.” But the madman, on feeling himself freed, began to throw stones at the abbot as hard as he could, chased him through the streets, and even when the people caught him, still kept his eyes on Bernard, though his hands were held.”

The archbishop was not pleased with the tale, and said threateningly to John, “These are your miracles, are they?”

“Well,” said John, “those who were present said it was a very memorable miracle, because the madman was kind and generous to every one, and only vicious to humbugs, and it still seems to me that it was a judgement on presumptuousness.” 

Is it just me, or can you too still hear the table erupt in unkind laughter? 

(The quotations in this post are from the translation by M.R.James, published by the Cymmrodorion Record Series, 1923)

Picture credits: 

Dining room scene from the Luttrell Psalter Wikimedia Commons http://www.silkewerk.com/wire2.htm

Clip from 'Janvier' from Les Tres Riche Heures du Duc de Berry