Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism

Notes

| 225 Notes Introduction 1. Hopper quoted in Francis Sill Wickware, “Hedda Hopper: She Became a Leading Hollywood Columnist by Telling What She Knew about Her Movie Friends,” Life, 11/20/44, 63; David Niven, Bring on the Empty Horses (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), 71; George Eells, Hedda and Louella (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972), 23; Geri Nicholas, quoted in Donald Bogle, Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography (New York: Amistad, 1997), 245; “Women We Love: The 1940s,” Esquire (August 1993), Hedda Hopper Clippings File (hereafter HH Clippings), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California (hereafter Herrick Library). 2. Hopper quoted in Eells, Hedda and Louella, 209. 3. Eells, Hedda and Louella, 210. 4. Ibid., 16; Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 439–440. 5. Correspondence from readers to Hopper is in the Hedda Hopper papers, Herrick Library (hereafter HHP). Although these letters are public and not private letters, given Hopper’s practice of publishing readers’ letters in her column, I am protecting the privacy of these letter writers by using no names in the text and using only initials in citations. For well-known persons, I use their full names in citations and text. 6. Jackie Stacey discusses the difficulties of uncovering “real cinema spectators” from the past, what she calls “the lost audience.” Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1994), 49–79. 7. As David A. Gerber points out, due to such limitations, it is impossible to render “a precise determination about the representativeness of any particular letter or letterseries .” Gerber, “Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in Immigrant Letters: Personal Identity and Self-Presentation in Personal Correspondence,” Journal of Social History 39 (Winter 2005), 316. 8. Eells, Hedda and Louella; Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Knopf, 1994); Samantha Barbas, The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); Kathleen A. Feeley, “Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: The Rise of the Celebrity Gossip Industry in Twentieth-Century America, 1910–1950,” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2004. 9. Quotes from Alice Kessler-Harris, “Why Biography?” American Historical Review 114 (June 2009), 626. See also Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88 (June 2001), 129–144. 226 | Notes to the Introduction 10. Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 79. 11. Nicholas Emler, “Gossip, Reputation, and Social Adaptation,” in Robert F. Goodman and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, eds., Good Gossip (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 117–118. 12. Gabler, Winchell, 256. 13. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). 14. Hiroshi Kitamura, “Hollywood’s America, America’s Hollywood,” American Quarterly 58 (December 2006), 1263. 15. A Gallup poll later proved this assumption wrong. Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 150. 16. Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge , 1993); Gaylyn Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure? Fan Magazine Discourse as Women’s Commodified Culture in the 1920s,” Wide Angle 13 (January 1991), 6–33. 17. This key insight appears in the foundational texts of star studies, including Edgar Morin, Les Stars (Paris: Seuil, 1957); Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979); Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); and Richard de Cordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 18. Charles L. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 43. 19. Ibid., 41, 45. 20. Jean Marie Lutes, “Into the Madhouse with Nellie Bly: Girl Stunt Reporting in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 54 (June 2002), 219. 21. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure, 204. 22. For two essential studies, see Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 23. Eells, Hedda and Louella, 16...