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This chapter chronicles Hedda Hopper's rise to fame as a celebrity gossip columnist. Topics covered include how she made a name for herself via an “exclusive” interview with James Roosevelt, eldest son of the sitting president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a producer and executive vice president at Samuel Goldwyn Studios, about his impending divorce; the syndication of her column “Hedda Hopper's Hollywood”; her feud with rival columnist Louella Parsons; Hopper's contributions to the film industry; Hopper's coverage of hard news, i.e. developments in domestic politics and foreign policy; and her Republican Party activism.

This chapter focuses on Hedda Hopper's relationship with her readers, respondents, and fans. Hopper recognized the importance of her readers, respondents, and fans to her gossip career and political agenda, and she crafted her columns, as well as other writing and performances, with this importance in mind. She sought to foster a sense of community and participation among her readers and listeners by asking for and answering letters from members of her audience, and encouraging others to participate by writing letters of their own. These efforts paid off, as Hopper used her mail with newspaper editors, radio executives, and movie producers to support her positions and demonstrate her influence. In Hollywood, the volume of Hopper's mail allowed her to represent herself as “speaking for the public” in an industry uncertain of “what the public wanted”.

This introductory chapter discusses Hedda Hopper's career. Hopper rose to fame as a nationally syndicated Hollywood gossip columnist. Published in eighty-five metropolitan newspapers as well as small-town dailies and weeklies in the 1940s, she had an estimated daily readership of 32 million (out of a national population of 160 million) in the mid-1950s and remained influential into the next decade. Her nasty reputation dominated her career and overshadows her historical significance. Industry participants attributed Hopper's malicious gossip to her jealousy as a failed actress toward others' success; to her strident conservatism that propelled her on political witch hunts; and to her bitter rivalry with Louella Parsons, who preceded and competed with her in the movie gossip business. The remainder of the chapter describes Hopper's determination, starting at a young age, to leave the town where she had been raised, Altoona, Pennsylvania; her theatrical and early motion picture work; and beginnings of her gossip career.

This chapter focuses on the gossip columnists of fan magazines. The most notable, most respectful, and most reliable was the pseudonymous Cal York in Photoplay. By the 1950s, York was fighting for space in the pages of Photoplay with several other gossip columnists, including Sidney Skolsky (“That’s Hollywood for You”), Edith Gwynn (“Hollywood Party Line”), Herb Stein (“What’s Hollywood Whispering About”), and Mike Connolly with a semi-gossip column titled “Impertinent Interview.”

This chapter describes the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the in 1950s and 1960s, and with it the decline of Hedda Hopper's career. The studio system provided Hopper with regular and consistent products as subject matter for her column, with the “behind-the-scenes” access to films and film stars that gave her column cachet and made it more than just another studio press release, and with a large, national movie audience potentially interested in reading it. With the decline of the studio system Hopper's subject matter and potential readership narrowed. Her power and relevance worked in tandem with the major studios, and she saw her power and relevance shrink over time. By the 1960s Hopper was no longer seen as all-powerful within the film industry or celebrity journalism. The placement of her column in newspapers became less prominent over time, with some papers dropping her column altogether.

This chapter discusses how nostalgia was a frequent theme in Hopper's gossip throughout her career. Nostalgia for small-town America, where everyone knew and monitored each other's private lives, informed and justified her mass media gossip about public figures. Nostalgia for the era of her early years of acting in Hollywood helped her distinguish herself in the crowded field of celebrity journalism and benefited her gossip career. Nostalgia for the values and principles of an earlier time in the United States fueled her various campaigns for moral and political conservatism, and nostalgia for both the Hollywood and the United States of yesteryear became a way to bond and build her relationship with her audience. Through her constant references to an imagined, older world, Hopper constructed and repeated a narrative that presented the history of the twentieth-century United States as one of decline, due to the triumph of liberalism in politics and morality.

This chapter focuses on Hedda Hopper's political activism. As a columnist, Hopper reported on the country's most powerful form of popular culture, and, as a political figure, she had greater credibility and standing in public life. Hopper took on two campaigns during World War II. First, she launched a defense of Lew Ayres, star of the antiwar film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), when he decided to become a conscientious objector, demonstrating Hopper's commitment to protecting private conscience in a time of war that did not translate into the Cold War era. Her second campaign involved an attack on Charlie Chaplin's professional, political, and personal life, which culminated in his leaving the United States in the early 1950s. Both campaigns stood precisely at the intersection of public and private life, sparked discussion and garnered support from Hopper's respondents, and demonstrated the power and politics of Hollywood gossip during the World War II and Cold War eras.

This chapter focuses on Hopper's post-World War II Red Scare politics. Using her influence as a gossip columnist and an anti-Communist activist, she made private talk public by exposing Communist beliefs among members of the film industry. She firmly believed that “naming names,” and thus publicizing private information, was the only way to get rid of them. With the support of the vast majority of her respondents, Hopper never worried about false accusations as she worked to establish, extend, and enforce the Hollywood blacklist, which was aimed at ensuring that no persons espousing or supporting leftist, or even liberal, political ideas and efforts were employed in the motion picture industry.

This chapter describes how Hedda Hopper sought to establish connections between the American family and the nation during the Cold War. In the latter half of the 1940s and during the 1950s, anxieties about the state of the American family and what it meant for the nation as a whole heightened. During these years, the well-being of the American family and its role in “nurturing national health and American values” became a major topic of concern and commentary. Hopper endorsed the importance of what she called “home life and good citizenship” and, together with the rest of the motion picture industry, worked hard to promote movie star families as the postwar American ideal of domestic comfort and happiness. She did this by pressing the “master plot of celebrity journalism” into new service, demonstrating how stars sought “true success,” or self-fulfillment through home and family life. However, high-profile Hollywood sex scandals and star divorces belied this era as one of successful family togetherness, and, for Hopper, further justified her incursions into private life as a way to defend the American family.

This chapter considers Hedda Hopper's racism. Hopper believed in and was comfortable with white superiority. But despite being known within the motion picture industry as “deeply bigoted,” she eschewed virulent expressions of racism in public. The African American actors of whom Hopper approved were all performers associated with racially stereotypical and often demeaning roles. Her interactions with them were characterized by paternalism and condescension, demonstrating her beliefs in black inferiority and inequality. For blacks in the post-World War II period who challenged Hollywood's old stock stereotypes, offered new images of African Americans, and refused her paternalism, such as Sidney Poitier, Hopper's support came much more slowly, if at all. She also joined with her anti-Communist allies in the motion picture industry to link proponents of racial change on the film screen and in American society with Communism, bringing together her Red Scare politics with her anti-civil-rights agenda.

This chapter discusses Hedda Hopper's Cold War Americanism. “Americanism” was the term she used to convey her political perspective and positions. Her Cold War Americanism shaped the content and contours of her political advocacy and activism and deeply resonated with her audience at the height of her career in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Hopper fervently believed that she stood and spoke for “real” Americans, thus anyone who disagreed with her was, by definition, un-American. Along with her anti-Communist allies, she considered the most disloyal and dangerous un-Americans to be members of the Communist Party USA and Communist sympathizers or “fellow travelers”.