Hedda Hopper's Hollywood

Hedda Hopper was, to use the author Jennifer Frost’s euphemistic term, a “publicist of private talk” (p. 32). With her rival Louella Parsons, Hopper fully earned a reputation as one of the “guardian furies” of classical-era Hollywood, one of Tinseltown’s twin “gargoyles of gossip” (pp. 1, 19). At the height of Hopper’s fame in the 1950s, her column reached an estimated 32 million readers. She encouraged movie fans to enjoy the cheap thrills of Hollywood, but always at arm’s length and always with a word or two of admonition. In Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood Frost takes a look at a new set of primary materials: published and unpublished letters written to Hopper by her faithful readers. The letters are most interesting when they reveal the public’s love/hate relationship with movie stars and less interesting when they truck in Hopper’s facile, far-right American conservatism. There is little give and take in these letters; what makes them interesting is how much and how often Hopper was pandered to and how appealing her self-righteousness was to a whole lot of American women (who composed the vast majority of her readership

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• Gossip as News

  Open Access•Kathleen Feeley•History Compass•2012

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