Dish (11 page)

In September 1964, Louella Parsons, the greatest Hollywood gossip columnist who ever lived, broke her hip. Louella had been feeble for a while both physically and mentally; but after she broke her hip, she never fully recovered. For a while she gallantly tried to continue writing her column, making the slow, painful trip from her bedroom down the hall to her office, but she never really wrote again, and the next year, at age eighty-three, the grand dame of gossip went into a Hollywood nursing home.

The dowager ruler of Hollywood had finally left her throne. “She was Queen of Hollywood,”
Life
magazine proclaimed, “the very embodiment of its hopes, its dreams, its fears and its responses … her home on Beverly Hill’s Maple Drive was the closest thing to Buckingham Palace the movie industry ever boasted.”

When word of Louella’s retirement reached her nemesis Hedda Hopper, the slightly younger, always less powerful Hopper spent the night celebrating. It was Lucille Ball Day at the New York World’s Fair, and the seventy-nine-year-old former showgirl literally kicked off her shoes and danced until dawn. Her rivalry
with Louella was so all-consuming that Hedda didn’t notice that the kingdom she had inherited had all but vanished. Two years later, on January 30, 1966, Hedda caught double pneumonia and died within two days. News of Hedda’s death reached Louella at her Hollywood nursing home, where the former queen of gossip had become virtually mute, silently watching old movies on TV all day. When she was told that Hedda had died, however, a smile crossed Louella’s face and she spoke for the first time anyone there could remember. “GOOD!” she said.

If the gossip industry had a golden age, it coincided with the “golden age” of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s. And, like Hollywood during those years, the gossip industry had its constellation of fixed stars. Chief among them was Walter Winchell, who is often credited with inventing the gossip column. Just below Winchell in the firmament were “the ladies,” as the syndicated columnists, and legendary rivals, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper were referred to jointly. Like Winchell, “the ladies” were more famous and more powerful than many of the movie stars they covered. Louella, the more influential of the two, was, by most accounts, Hollywood’s first gossip columnist (Winchell started out as a Broadway columnist). “Hollywood loved her,” noted writer Paul O’Neil. “She was Queen—the one it deserved—and she reigned for forty years.”

Indeed, the accolades and honors bestowed upon Louella during the years when her power was at its peak routinely invoked royalty. When Louella’s boss, William Randolph Hearst, threw a party for her in 1948, eight hundred of Hollywood’s most famous movie stars and most powerful moguls jammed Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel to pay homage.

“No queen,” Louis B. Mayer toasted her, “could wish for richer jewels than the bright crown of friendship you possess.”

“You have a heart,” Darryl Zanuck declared, “as big as the church itself.”

It wasn’t, of course, Louella’s heart that Hollywood loved, but the one thousand or so newspapers that carried her daily column. During the 1930s through the 1950s, she and Hedda were an unofficial but essential part of the Hollywood studio systerm.
Studio executives, well aware that the public curiosity the columnists fed with their items about the stars heightened the box office appeal of those stars and thus increased studio profits, parceled out items to Hedda and Louella every day. They also forced stars to cooperate in giving exclusives to the two women. In return, Hedda and Louella were careful never to antagonize the studio moguls themselves. And in fact, they were ardent defenders of the studio system.

Louella often referred to Hollywood as “this marvelous town” and sang the praises of “our magnificent industry.” Although she is remembered as a shrewish harridan, she was, in fact, a protector of the stars. She knew much more about them than she ever revealed. In fact, since her husband, Docky, was a urologist for Twentieth Century Fox and frequently administered tranquilizers or testosterone shots to stars, she often found out about their medical conditions before the stars themselves did—and she usually kept quiet about them. While she did, from time to time, chide or even attack stars, the scoldings usually took place when actors and actresses violated moral codes—as when Ingrid Bergman scandalized American moviegoers by becoming pregnant out of wedlock—or when they disobeyed the orders of studio executives. “This is the first time I have publicly spanked Judy,” Louella wrote in 1949 after Garland failed to lose fifteen pounds as directed by MGM. “But I can’t understand her attitude after all that has been done for her.”

Hedda Hopper was more caustic than Louella, but even she saw herself as a champion of Hollywood, as a promoter of its stars and its values. She liked to think she played the role of a stern—but loving—aunt. Hedda, for example, felt that she had practically discovered Elizabeth Taylor, and would privately advise the star on her wardrobe and her love life. When Taylor confided to Hedda that she was having an affair with Eddie Fisher, Hedda broke the story as though she had a moral obligation, not only to her readers but to Hollywood at large and the actress herself, to do so. “I had no regret,” she said. “Without a sense of integrity, you can’t sleep at nights.”

The two columnists’ truly vicious behavior usually involved their rivalry, their fights over scoops. For example, when Clark
Gable and Carole Lombard got married in 1939, Louella banned them from her column for several months because they didn’t give her the story exclusively. Joan Crawford was careful not to make the same mistake; when she got married to Philip Terry in 1948, she notified Louella immediately. That, of course, infuriated Hedda. Upon reading Louella’s scoop, Hedda telephoned Crawford and declared: “I will ruin you!” When Crawford ran into Hedda at a Hollywood party, she stretched her arms toward the columnist and begged for forgiveness. Hedda abruptly walked away. So when Rock Hudson married Phyllis Gates in 1955, they played it smart. As soon as vows were exchanged, Rock got on the phone and called the story in to Louella Parsons while Phyllis was on the other line, giving it in to Hedda Hopper.

In the 1950s, when stars like Jimmy Stewart and Bette Davis began defecting from the studios and hiring independent agents, the studio system that had produced so many classic movies began to fall apart. New stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean held the system, and Hedda and Louella, in contempt and refused to cooperate with them. The columnists, for their part, continued writing about aging studio stars like Clark Gable—Louella invariably referred to him as “the king”—and ridiculed the new generation.

At the same time, many of the newspapers that carried their columns began to fold. In late 1962, a printers’ strike that lasted 114 days killed or seriously crippled a number of New York papers, including the New York
Mirror,
Winchell’s home base. Louella’s hometown outlet, the
Los Angeles Examiner,
folded in 1962. In 1966, the great
Herald Tribune
folded. In 1967, the
World Journal Telegram,
a conglomerate of papers hoping to join forces in an effort to stay alive, collapsed. Most towns were left with only one newspaper—usually the more established, upscale paper—and the tabloid wars that had characterized the pretelevision era disappeared. Editors in one-paper towns began to reevaluate the role of their publications. Without the need to use blaring headlines, scandal, and gossip in the old daily competition for circulation with other papers, they could afford to refine the definition of news, to distinguish it more sharply from entertainment, to make it more serious and more sober. Socially conscious
editors and reporters also became openly disdainful of Hollywood and celebrities. The once feared and revered Louella, in particular, became a source of ridicule, an aging and somewhat daffy relic. In one oft-repeated, perhaps apocryphal incident, some friends dropped by Parsons’s home to take her to a movie screening and the gossip diva answered the door buck naked except for red shoes and a matching hat and handbag. She then excused herself, went into the rest room and ten minutes later came out declaring, “Well that was the worst damn picture I ever saw!” John Barrymore called her “that old udder” and Marlon Brando referred to her as “The fat One.” “[Louella’s] column limited itself almost completely to trivia—production news from the studios and items concerning the love affairs, marriages, quarrels, divorces, peccadilloes and pregnancies of featured players,” a snide
Life
piece noted at the time of her retirement. “But if she was narrow, semi-illiterate and often moved by blubbering sentimentality, so were many of her peers in the movie colony.”

With Hedda and Louella gone, many assumed that the era of gossip was dead. “Who shall replace the Mmes Parsons and Hopper?” Bob Thomas, the veteran Hollywood correspondent for the Associated Press, wondered in an article in 1968. “Probably no one. Their successors are pretenders to thrones that no longer exist. Gone are the days when Hollywood was a tight little town that ruled the entertainment world and hence could be ruled by feminine columnists.”

There was, however, a small but determined group of gossip columnists who were ferociously vying for the position. They were a peculiarly determined lot, trying against the odds to persuade reluctant editors around the country that gossip still mattered. One of them was Cindy Adams.

The former Cindy Heller was an almond-eyed former beauty queen and stand-up comic from Queens who had a string of fifty-seven dubious beauty titles, including Miss Coaxial Cable 1949, Miss Torso of 1949, Miss Upswept Hairdo of 1948, Miss Brooklyn Dodgers of 1947, Queen of the Night Club Division of the March of Dimes, Miss Bagel, Miss Manischewitz Wine of 1948, and Miss Bazooka Bubble Gum of 1948. Cindy had tried to use her string of
unlikely titles to break into show business—performing stunts like blowing Bazooka bubbles at Bergen Junior College in Teaneck, New Jersey, to demonstrate inflation. Then, in 1951, Cindy Heller met comedian Joey Adams, who was on the periphery of Sinatra’s Rat Pack and was married to Walter Winchell’s sister, Mary. She became Cindy Adams on Valentine’s Day, 1952. Although she would later claim that she was seventeen when she got married, according to an announcement at the time, she was twenty-one. A friend insists that even then, she was shaving off a few years.
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Joey introduced Cindy to his friend Frank Sinatra and various political leaders he had entertained, and, after failing to make it as a singing and dancing sidekick in Joey’s stand-up comedy act, the young Mrs. Adams decided to cash in on these contacts by becoming a gossip columnist. By 1960, her column “Cindy Says” was syndicated in ten newspapers, including the Miami Beach
Sun
and the Bridgeport
Herald
in Connecticut. Although her success was modest, the beautiful young wife of the older Borscht Belt comedian cut quite a figure, and she played it to the hilt. She wore stunning jewels, rode in a limousine, decorated her apartment in red, dressed only in red clothes and wrote only with a red pen. “I even think in red,” she told
Editor and Publisher
in 1960. “I go out seven nights a week, go to all the plays on opening night. I know everybody, go to parties all the time and report it all in a brassy and breezy way.”

In 1961, Joey and a group of performers were chosen to make a “Good Will Tour” of Southeast Asia on behalf of Kennedy’s Cultural Exchange program. Cindy Adams came along and addressed the crowds in their native tongues, just like Jacqueline Kennedy had done, Joey said. “The payoff was to be a better understanding of the democracy that is America,” he noted. “It was my thought that maybe we could bring a little joy to a troubled world.”

Not everyone agreed. A House appropriations subcommittee questioned the wisdom of spending more than $250,000 on a vaudeville act. It also expressed outrage that the “goodwill” mission was characterized by feuding among its members, that Cindy
Adams addressed the Prime Minister of Afghanistan as “honey,” and that she wrote a column calling three members of the Laotian royal family “those three cranky princes.” Rival gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen ridiculed Adams and company in her column, calling it a waste of taxpayers’ money. “Mrs. Adams is bombing around the globe,” she wrote. Kilgallen wrote:

A gossip feud erupted, and Cindy accused Dorothy of being jealous of her, as a younger, sexier gossip columnist. Cindy called Dorothy “a vulgar old crone” and wrote a vitriolic attack in which she accused Kilgallen of being an alcoholic. Kilgallen filed a $1 million suit against Adams, and Cindy and Joey countersued.
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