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Introduction: “Malice in Wonderland”
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| 1 Introduction “Malice in Wonderland” In 1944, just six years into her career as a nationally syndicated Hollywood gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper quipped that her future memoirs would be titled “Malice in Wonderland.” Witty and catty, Hopper’s title perfectly captured her reputation in Hollywood. Malicious was the least of it: “unpredictable and ruthless,” “cold-blooded,” “a vicious witch,” and, due to her right-wing politics, “fascist.”1 Hopper herself did not shy away from such descriptions. When actress Merle Oberon asked why she wrote such cruel things in her column, Hopper replied, “Bitchery, dear. Sheer bitchery.”2 Hopper was fifty-two years old and an underemployed, struggling supporting actress when the Los Angeles Times picked up her fledgling movie gossip column, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” in 1938. She soon became a powerful figure in the film industry during its “golden age,” when the movies were the dominant form of mass entertainment in the United States. Syndicated in eighty-five metropolitan newspapers as well as small-town dailies and weeklies during the 1940s, Hopper 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.3 Hopper in her famous hats became a Hollywood icon, yet her nasty reputation dominated her career, persists today, 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 rival columnists were “guardian Furies,” the renowned playwright Arthur Miller noted in his memoirs, “the police matrons planted at the portals to keep out the sinful, the unpatriotic, and the rebels against propriety.”4 But this image of Hedda Hopper, while not without substance, owes much to her style and self-fashioning and has obscured her cultural 2 | “Malice in Wonderland” and political importance. Hopper’s distinctive contribution to U.S. popular and political culture between 1938 and 1966 lay with how she combined and wielded gossip about the worlds of both entertainment and politics in her column. Her aims were threefold: to distinguish and propel her career, to push her agenda of moral and political conservatism, and—furthering both—to connect with and mobilize her vast readership. Letters from readers demonstrate Hopper’s success with motivating them to join in conversations and campaigns around the typical topics of movies and stars, as well as the social and political issues of great concern to the conservative Hopper. In an industry that routinely disposed of letters from fans and readers, Hopper saved many of hers and published some of them in her column, revealing her respect for, and dependence on, her audience.5 These letters provide a unique source base for understanding “the lost audience ” of Hopper’s gossip and Hollywood’s past.6 Like all historical collections of both public and private letters, however, they also are limited as historical evidence in terms of representativeness.7 Not every filmgoer read Hopper’s column, not every reader wrote to Hopper, not every letter was collected and preserved, and not every letter was published or published intact. Moreover, the topics these letters addressed were generated by Hopper herself through the content of her daily column, frequent radio programs, and later television appearances, and often came in response to direct requests from Hopper. Recognizing these limitations, and that all primary historical sources are partial and incomplete, this reader response allows for a close examination of Hopper, her respondents, and their practice of Hollywood gossip over the middle decades of the twentieth century. Such an approach differentiates this study from the popular and scholarly biographies that exist of Hopper as well as of her powerful contemporaries in the gossip field, Walter Winchell and Louella Parsons.8 While traditional biography aims to explore and explain a person’s entire life story, historians—whether microhistorians or “biographers not”—are reimagining the biographical form “to see through the life” to larger historical contexts and processes.9 Similarly, the focus here is on the story of Hopper’s gossip career and her relationship with her audience. Indeed, extant mail from Hopper’s readers shaped the content of this book more than events from Hopper’s own life, although the two together can tell us much about American popular and political culture. As practiced by Hopper...