Hedda Makes Hay

"The Queen is dead, long live the Queen!" whooped Hollywood's Daily Variety. While Variety whooped, the movie pressagents trooped to lunch with Gossip Columnist Hedda Hopper. New "Queen" Hedda had just signed a contract with the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate--a contract that nearly tripled the number of her readers.

The old queen--Hearst Gossip Columnist Louella Parsons--is not exactly dead. But her whims no longer command Hollywood. She still has 17,000,000 newspaper circulation, according to Hearst's I.N.S., through "several hundred outlets." But at one stride Hedda had reached a circulation of 5,750,000 daily (7,500,000 Sunday) through only 27 papers.

Hedda's triumph was a triumph for gossip over news. On June 1 her column will supplant that of the New York Daily News's John Chapman. During his two years in Hollywood he stuck to news, not gossip, "tried to report on the making of movies and let it go at that." In the end, instead of letting the gossip go, Chapman's column was let go.

By contrast with Chapman, who was his own legman and even typed his own copy, Hedda Hopper is real Hollywood. Not by accident has she risen in four years to challenge Lolly Parsons as chief outlet for Hollywood publicity. At 52, brown-haired, boisterous Hedda, who started life as plain Pennsylvania Quakeress Elda Furry, has been nearly 25 years in the movies (acting in over 100 pictures), was the fifth of the late Actor DeWolf Hopper's six wives, between times got "kicked around plenty" while staging fashion shows, coaching actors, selling real estate, even running for political office.

Much better liked than Lolly Parsons, when she started Hedda had to pit friendships and wits against the powerful inertia of Lolly's 20-year reign on Hollywood's gossip roost. Choice studio stories went first, automatically, to Lolly; actors phoned her first and eloped afterwards lest she sideswipe them ever after. In addition to her column, Hedda's schedule now includes three CBS broadcasts weekly for Sunkist Oranges over 42 stations (none in Los Angeles, which eats second-grade oranges), occasional magazine pieces, six movie shorts a year, some bit parts (latest: Reap the Wild Wind). To manage this 135-hour week she employs two legmen, one rewrite woman, two girl clerks to handle fan mail, two secretaries to whom she dictates at the top of her lungs, from such characteristic jottings as: "Catalina and sleep . . . Stinkey Pinky . . . Test Pilot ... he has to have three steps to get on the love . . . Marie Antoinette . . . Mrs. Chauncey Olcott. . . ." Eighth member of Hedda's staff is a "brain" named Dema Harshbarger.

Dema, 57, is a squat, tweed-suited, 210-lb. woman who discovered Hedda's gos-sipotency while talent-scouting in Holly-wood for NBC Artists' Service. "In 45 minutes," said Dema, "Hedda told me as much about Hollywood as I could have learned in two years." When Hedda blurted "I want to get on that air," Dema was sold. But it took a year to get her there. Some people in Hollywood said Hedda was a has-been. Says Dema in her deep voice: "I told them nobody's a has-been who ever was." Before Hedda's first broadcast (for Mar-O-Oil Shampoo) Dema warned NBC: "She'll stink up the air at first, but with that great personality it's up to us to bring it out."

Convinced that "going Hollywood is the only cancer in this industry," Dema counseled Hedda to regard Hollywood as her "feed trough" rather than as her reading public. "There's no difference," Dema advised her, "between the public in New York and the public in Abingdon, Ill., where I was born--only more of it." Hedda's only trouble, says Dema, is that "she doesn't care about money--I care about the money." (Hedda's reported income: $110,000 a year.) Sighs Dema: "If Hedda were only triplets I'd have the most marvelous time."

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