Through a Keyhole Darkly

In the spring of 1948, two formidable ladies met over a luncheon table at Romanoff's restaurant in Hollywood. "When she walked in," recalls one of the other, "every chin in the place dropped. Hasty telephone calls brought in a mob of patrons. Nobody moved until we left arm in arm two hours later." After a decade of scorched-earth warfare, Louella ("Lollipop") Parsons had sat down to public lunch with her rival, Hedda Hopper.

The entente cordiale did not last, of course--as Hedda makes abundantly clear in a newly released confessional. The Whole Truth and Nothing But (Doubleday, $4.95), which is Hedda's answer to Lolly's Tell It to Louella (TIME, Nov. 24, 1961). Nothing really wrong with Louella, says Hedda, except that she mangles her facts, plays favorites, and through her husband, Dr. Harry ("Docky-Wocky") Martin, used to wangle reports of the results of rabbit tests on the stars' pregnancies, so that Lolly sometimes knew of their delicate condition before the poor girls themselves. Maybe, Hedda hints, Louella's trouble is that her daily prattle now goes to only 70 newspapers, while Hedda's reaches 130 as the result of her contract with the Chicago Tribune-New York News syndicate. But for all that, Hedda insists that she genuinely likes Lolly, at least enough to feel sorry for her.

Lonely Sleep. Hedda, in fact, sees her role as "The Dutch Aunt" of Hollywood--as much a creator as a chronicler of the news. If there is more of an air of self-congratulation about her book than there was about Lolly's ("It's a terrible book," said Lolly candidly of her own, "I wrote every word of it"), it is perhaps because it was written with the help of an assistant named James Brough. Hopper-Brough briefly sketch in Hedda's early life--born Elda Furry in Hollidaysburg, Pa., marriage to and divorce from elderly Musical Comedy Star DeWolf Hopper, a so-so career in films, and finally a column in 1938--and then turn to the kind of keyhole chitchat about "mad, gay, heartbreaking" Hollywood that has fueled the Hopper for years.

A Hopper story starts with a call from her downtown (Hollywood) office: "Elizabeth, this is Hedda. Level with me, because I shall find out anyhow. What's this Eddie Fisher business all about? You're being blamed for taking Eddie away from Debbie. What have you got to say?" In that particular case, recalls Hedda, "Elizabeth's voice was as innocent as a schoolgirl's: 'It's a lot of bull.'" But later, Elizabeth was taking a non-bullish, un-schoolgirlish sort of line: "What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?"

The remark so enraged Hedda, she says, that she saw to it that the story--minus the offensive quote--was plastered across the front page of the Los Angeles Times. "I had no regret," she adds. "If she'd been my own daughter, I'd have done it. Without a sense of integrity you can't sleep nights."

Broad-Minded. It was Hedda, Hedda says, who, after all, told Mike Todd how to make a movie, told Sam Goldwyn how to cast one, and helped Bernie Schwartz become Tony Curtis. By reasoning with Actor James Dean she saved the production of Giant at a time when Dean was absenting himself from the set in a fury at Director George Stevens. By Hedda's testimony, practically the only Hollywood personality she has never been able to charm, bully or cajole is Marlon Brando. Her single, memorable interview with him lasted half an hour, during which she did all the talking. Finally, "with a snap of the fingers, I brought him out of his trance: 'Have you been listening, Mr. Brando?' 'Sure.' 'Do you care to answer my questions?' 'I don't believe so.' " Hedda never saw Marlon again.

For readers who like to hoard their Hollywood gleanings like green stamps, Hedda has a wildly scattershot collection: Clark Gable had not a tooth of his own in his head; Sinatra, Jerry Lewis and Doris Day all shower at least three times a day; Mario Lanza roamed the streets of Beverly Hills at night in his Cadillac to batter down the mailbox of a movie mogul he thought had betrayed him; Harry Cohn broke up the romance of Sammy Davis Jr. and Kim Novak by having a thug threaten to work Sammy over. And if such racy bits never appeared in her column, it must be because hard-cover publishers are more broad-minded than editors of family newspapers.

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