Yeah, okay, gossip columnist is not a profession for the nice. If you were nice, you wouldn’t take the job. You have to have something of a petty streak. You have to enjoy gathering information and spreading it as far as you can. However, even within those confines, there was something deeply toxic about Hedda Hopper. There are probably literally dozens of stories of people in Hollywood reacting with anger to her, and they’re all deeply satisfying. As is the fact that her birth surname was Furry, thereby tying her with a disliked subculture.

While her rival Louella Parsons had dabbled in acting before becoming a gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper had a serious career. She acted on the stage and was in many, many movies not as herself. She was rejected by Flo Ziegfeld and then ended up in the troupe of DeWolf Hopper. Then, she married him; together, they had a son. Eventually, she was offered a gossip column. In time, the gossip became her primary career, leading to her being probably the most feared and hated woman in Hollywood.

ZaSu Pitts called her a ferret, which is an insult to ferrets. Joan Bennett sent her a skunk for Valentine’s Day once, with a note that no one liked either of them. (James Mason and his wife ended up taking it in.) Joseph Cotten once pulled out a chair for her and kept pulling until she fell on the floor; he received bouquets and congratulatory telegrams. During World War II, she implied to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., that he was a slacker; he was already in the Navy at the time. She championed Joan Crawford, but I really can’t find anyone else who liked her.

And, of course, she was also a right-wing bigot. When interviewing Sidney Poitier, she asked if he could sing because “your people” apparently all sing. She was a passionate defender of the blacklist, eventually causing Elizabeth Taylor to tell her to shut up at the premiere of The Sandpiper. She was upset at being called a Nazi, but I can’t blame people who did. She’s the sort of person who likely used the phrase “premature anti-fascist” in all sincerity to refer to people who were opposed to Nazism in November 1941.

So why talk about her? My Gods, but she shaped Hollywood. She was capable of boosting careers; she’s generally believed to be part of the reason Joan Crawford won Best Actress for Mildred Pierce. But she could also destroy them. Genuinely, about the only reason she didn’t ruin Raymond Burr’s career, despite almost certainly knowing he was gay, was out of concern for her son. William Hopper. Probably best known as Paul Drake on Perry Mason.

No one’s giving me a $5000 a year tax write-off on hats; consider instead supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!