You Must Remember This (22 page)

T
he fan magazines wanted you to believe that stars were forever nightclubbing, moving effortlessly from their costumes into evening clothes and back again with no time left for sleeping. The movies themselves helped promote this image. We’ve all seen the films that Hollywood made about itself—a wide shot of the town from somewhere up in the hills, followed by a montage of the town at night, with an orgy of neon signs, usually featuring the Trocadero and the Cocoanut Grove.

Actually, nightclubbing was the norm only when you were between pictures or “on layoff.” (Layoff was a brilliant invention of the studios whereby you were paid only forty weeks a year. The other twelve weeks were unpaid, and were tossed at you whenever the studio felt like it.)

If you were shooting a picture, you’d be up at five or six in the morning in order to be on the set at eight, and those days would stretch until six p.m. or later. In television, if you were doing an hour-long show every week, the hours were even longer—basically, whatever it took to get the episode finished on time.

Otherwise most of the clubbing took place on Saturdays, although there were times when the studio would want you to attend
a premiere or an event on other days—even if you were working at the time—if they knew the photographers would be out in force.

For special occasions like that, a studio limo would pick you up on the set at five p.m. or so, then deposit you wherever you were to be seen. You rarely spent more than an hour at the place. The lights would go down, you’d duck out, and the limo would take you back home in order to be back on the set for your early call.

When the pictures ran, it looked as if you were a paid-up member of café society, when you’d actually been a frantic commuter, thinking only of getting home in time to memorize the next day’s lines and then tumble into bed for five or six hours of sleep.

Before I began working at the studios, publicity was centered on Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, although there were other gossip columnists, such as Jimmy Fidler and Sheilah Graham.

It’s odd how your mind associates certain people with certain events. In August 1962 I was in Montecatini, Italy, at the same time as Sheilah Graham. I was on the terrace of my hotel when she leaned out a window and yelled, “Marilyn Monroe died! Marilyn Monroe died!,” to the world at large, in exactly the same way she would have announced that her building was on fire. That was how I found out that the girl I had worked with twelve years earlier, and who had since become a legend in a way nobody could have foretold, was gone.

Hedda and Louella had syndicated columns that made them very important to the industry, as did Fidler and Graham. There were also local columnists whose influence didn’t extend much beyond Los Angeles but who were regarded as fairly significant. I’m thinking of Harrison Carroll at the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
, for instance, who really covered his beat. He was out every night,
saw everybody, knew everybody, and had a way of communicating the truth without savaging people.

Beneath this group were the platoons of writers who filled up the pages of dozens of monthly fan magazines.

These publications started at just about the same time the movies did—the first one seems to have appeared in 1909. They printed copy supplied by a roster of freelancers, who numbered in the hundreds, although the bulk of their material was written by an elite group of thirty or forty writers who could produce as many as six pieces a month, some pseudonymously.

The reason they wrote so much was only partly burning ambition. Mostly, they were just trying to make a living. A writer like Adela Rogers St. John might make $125 or $150 for a lead piece, but the average fee was about half that.

The early versions of the fan magazines had periods of comparative independence, but that wasn’t really in the best interests of the studios. You have to remember that, in that era, the stars were almost all under exclusive contract to one studio or another, so each studio had a vested interest in protecting its corporate assets.

After about 1934 the studios always had a publicist sit in on every interview, and most of the questions were submitted in advance. Likewise, the article itself was vetted by the studio publicity department before it was printed, to ensure that nothing indelicate found its way into print. At 20th Century Fox, there was an entire division of the publicity department that did nothing else but work with the fan magazines, and I can assure you the studio took it very seriously.

All that began to break up in the 1950s, when the studios began to divest themselves of their contract rosters as a means of saving
money in the face of declining cinema attendance. Without the protection of the studio publicists, actors were forced to fend for themselves, or to rely on the independent publicists they hired, some of whom were better than others. The subsequent rise of scandal-mongering publications such as
Confidential
was a pure reaction to the decades of rigid control on the part of the studios.

In their heyday, though, the columnists existed on the highest plane of the publicity machine. Jimmy Fidler patterned himself after Walter Winchell—he had the same staccato
rat-tat-tat
verbal delivery and, like Winchell, was a presence on the radio, more so than any of the female columnists.

Fidler was so paranoid about his sources that if one of his informants called him, he identified himself by a code number rather than a name, just in case the line was tapped. Fidler was unusually frank, and would call out celebrities who he felt misbehaved. One day Errol Flynn decked him, which was a huge publicity boon, and Fidler went around town with a bodyguard for months afterward.

All these people had careers that lasted far longer than most stars. Hedda and Louella were still ruling the roost when I got into the movies after World War II, and they remained on the job until the 1960s.

Louella was a sweet, vague creature who lived for scoops and had only the dimmest idea of anything that went on outside of Hollywood. In April 1939, just after the Italians invaded Albania, and war was clearly looming on the horizon, she wrote, “The deadly dullness of the last week was lifted today when Darryl Zanuck admitted he had bought all rights to Maurice Maeterlinck’s
The Blue Bird
.”

The extent of my courting of Louella involved accompanying
her to the racetrack a few times. She had a special relationship with Fox because her husband “Docky” was the staff doctor at the studio.

That’s me with Sophia Loren and Louella Parsons. On the far right is Clifton Webb.

Courtesy of the author

There was nothing vague about Hedda Hopper, ever. She was a committed conservative who had forgone romantic entanglements after she divorced the stage star DeWolf Hopper in order to concentrate on raising her son, Bill, who would later play Paul Drake on the
Perry Mason
TV series. With Hedda as a mother, Bill’s life could not have been easy, but in my opinion he turned out to be a very fine man.

Hedda’s own acting career bottomed out in the 1930s, but in 1938 the
Los Angeles Times
tapped her to provide some competition for Louella Parsons, who had been writing for the Hearst papers since the silent days.

Hedda was a far more intimidating person than Louella, but it was best not to mess with either of them. Both of them cultivated a wide array of informants within the industry who, then as now, tipped off the newspapers. If an actor sent flowers to an actress, the florist could call Hedda or Louella and let her know that the parties in question were having an affair, or were about to.

One of Hedda’s great friends was Ida Koverman, who was Louis B. Mayer’s private secretary. It was Ida Koverman who brokered a wide acceptance of Hedda among many of the stars and enabled her to freshen her columns with up-to-date news and a more biting attitude. Most of Hedda’s best contacts were initially MGM stars such as Jeanette MacDonald or Norma Shearer. Hedda started
attracting more attention, and consequently more papers, and she and Louella settled down to a feud that would continue for the next twenty-five years.

A rare shot of the rival gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, circa 1948.

Photofest

Very few people really liked either Hedda or Louella, but very few people could afford to make it obvious. Generally, the attitude the studios had toward them was public deference and nervous laughter behind their backs. Louella would come to the set to talk to you, but if Hedda wanted an interview, Mohammed had to go to the mountain. I went to her house several times over the years, usually lugging flowers and chocolates.

It was part of the game. You could get tired of it, but you couldn’t show it. That’s why they call it acting.

While it was primarily women who functioned as the pipeline to the public, the people who funneled the information to the pipeline—the heads of publicity at the studios—were all men: Howard Strickling at MGM and Harry Brand at Fox, among others. I knew Harry quite well, because I was signed to a contract at Fox in 1949.

Harry was born in 1896 in New York. When he was a child he broke his leg, but it was incorrectly set, leaving him with a slight limp for the rest of his life. Harry didn’t come from the movie business, but from politics and journalism. He had worked with Howard Strickling at the
Los Angeles
Express
and the
Los Angeles
Tribune
, where they were both sportswriters. That trade will teach you the importance of winning and losing, and both Howard and Harry meant to be on the side of the winners. In fact, Harry always dressed more like a sportswriter than an executive in the movie industry—he wore a slouch hat.

After he left newspapers, Harry went to work for Warner Bros., then got hired by Joe Schenck at United Artists, where he even produced a couple of pictures. But Harry preferred publicity.

When Schenck joined forces with Darryl Zanuck to form 20th Century, which later merged with Fox, Harry became head of publicity there. By that time, he had been working with Joe Schenck for twelve years, and everybody in Hollywood knew and liked him.

Just about the same time as Schenck and Zanuck were joining forces, Harry joined forces with Sybil Morris, the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles family. Sybil and Harry were married in 1933. She was the right woman for him—idealistic, philanthropic, a doer. For a long time, Sybil’s pet project was the Motion Picture Relief Fund, but years later she turned her interest toward rehabilitating female convicts. Sybil eventually raised more than eight million dollars for the Sybil Brand Institute for Women.

Because of Harry’s background in journalism, he knew a lot of people who knew a lot of people—everyone from politicians and law enforcement officials (Harry’s brother was a judge) to bartenders and racetrack touts. Sometimes Harry knew what was going on before the people who were involved did. Everybody liked him because he was genuinely likable; among his friends were both the ardent Democrat Harry Truman
and
the equally ardent Republican Richard Nixon (who loathed each other), not to mention a couple of governors and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.