Part 25

David Selznick immediately picked up Schary as a producer for David’s new Vanguard company. Then when Vanguard was put on ice, he farmed Dore out to RKO, later let him join that studio as its head of production. That job lasted until Howard Hughes, who had meantime bought RKO, criticized another movie, _Battleground_, that Schary badly wanted to do. So contract number three was torn up, and Schary was at liberty again.

This was now 1948, and the anti-Communist campaign in Hollywood was out in the wide, open newspaper spaces. The town had endured a strike sparked by Communists, which saw John Howard Lawson and his “progressives” marching in picket lines around Warner Brothers studio in Burbank. After one of these “peaceful demonstrations,” seven tons of broken bottles, rocks, chains, brickbats, and similar tokens of affection were cleaned up from streets in the area. Congressman J. Parnell Thomas steered his House of Representatives Un-American

## Activities Committee to investigate our labor troubles, check into

propaganda in our pictures, and make a name for himself in the headlines.

Forty-one people from the movie industry were called to Washington to testify before the House investigators. Nineteen of them announced in advance that they weren’t going to answer any questions as a matter of principle. So the Committee for the First Amendment blossomed overnight. That amendment to the Constitution, remember, guarantees freedom of religion, speech, of the press, and right of petition. The committee which was christened for it covered John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Evelyn Keyes, and a whole lot more.

They sashayed off to Washington the day Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, was due to testify. The producers had been shouting “witch hunt.” They took full-page ads alleging that the industry was being persecuted. Bogey and Betty Bacall and the rest thought they’d lend their lustrous presence in the hearing room to support Johnston.

But Parnell Thomas pulled a fast one on them. The first witness put on the stand wasn’t Johnston but John Howard Lawson, who screamed abuse and yelled “Smear!” until the guards had to be called. In evidence against him there was a copy of his membership card in the Communist party. There were nine more cards on view, too, to identify the full complement of the group that came to be known as the “Hollywood Ten”: Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Herbert Biberman, Adrian Scott, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, and Alvah Bessie.

On their sorrowful way home from Washington, Bogey, Betty, John Huston, and Evelyn Keyes limped into my living room. I poured a drink or two, and we got to talking. They’d been had, and they knew it. I wanted to know from Bogey how they could have let themselves be suckered in. When Bogey started to answer, John Huston interrupted him.

It hadn’t been a good day for Bogey. He turned on John to get some of the steam out of his system. “Listen,” he snarled, “the First Amendment guarantees free speech. That’s how we got dragged into this thing. Now when I try to talk, you’re trying to deprive me of my rights. Well, the hell with you. I’ll have another drink.” And he talked. In fact, they all did.

One of the witnesses before the House committee was Dore Schary. He was called to Washington along with producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk, who had worked for him on _Crossfire_. He made no bones about his admiration for their work. As for the “Hollywood Ten,” he believed--in the words of one reporter--that they “had a right to whatever they believed and did not necessarily deserve to be thrown to the dogs if it served the best interests of the producers.”

The committee’s chief investigator, Robert Stripling, asked: “Now, Mr. Schary, as an executive of RKO, what is the policy of your company in regard to the employment of ... Communists?”

Schary replied: “That policy, I imagine, will have to be determined by the president, the board, and myself. I can tell you personally what I feel. Up until the time it is proved that a Communist is a man dedicated to the overthrow of the government by force or violence, I cannot make any determination of his employment on any basis other than whether he is qualified best to do the job I want him to do.”

That made him a controversial figure in some people’s judgment. When Nick Schenck wanted to see Schary, he flew out in secret from New York to avoid getting involved in the probing of communism, which was still drawing blood in our town.

Nick, the soft-spoken boss of Loew’s who directed the world-wide empire and its 14,000 employees from his New York office, had a monumental mission to perform. He had come to take a look at Dore Schary, whom Louis B. Mayer now wanted back at Metro as vice president in charge of all productions, as Irving Thalberg’s successor, as Mayer’s crown prince. And Schary was insisting that if he took the job, Louis would have to keep his hands off Dore’s key decisions.

Nick Schenck approved of the plan. Schary received contract number four--seven years “in charge of production” at $6000 a week. He started in on July 1, 1948. In my July 19 column, I wrote: “It will be ironically amusing to watch some of the scenes behind the scenes now that Dore Schary is the Big Noise at Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow. He testified on the opposite side of the fence in Washington from Robert Taylor, James K. McGuinness, Louis B. Mayer, Sam Wood, and other men with whom he will work....”

As soon as he read that, Mayer shut the studio gate in my face. But I didn’t have to go there to get news; my friends inside telephoned me every day. Two weeks later Louis telephoned: “I’ve got to see you.”

“Impossible. How can you? You barred me from the studio.”

“I mean at your house.”

“Louis,” I said, “fun’s fun. What makes you think you can come into my home when I can’t go into your studio? Turnabout is fair play.”

But he badgered and bullied and begged until I agreed to see him at five o’clock that afternoon. He was standing on the doorstep as the clock struck. He came in, and we shouted at each other for an hour. “How could you do this to me, write such a column?” he kept bellowing.

“How could you do it to yourself and the studio? You fired him for putting messages in your pictures. Now you take him back as head man. You don’t agree with anything he stands for. But you’ve given him the power to do as he likes, and he’ll get you out.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides, who else was there?”

I’d never seen fear in his face before. I saw it then. Before he left, he invited me to breakfast the next morning at his house on Benedict Canyon. I guessed what would happen there.

We were having a second cup of coffee when the doorbell rang. Somebody came in. I didn’t turn around. “Dore just arrived,” Mayer said. “Will you speak to him?” Of course. Moving into the library where Schary was waiting, Louis muttered a brief hello, then left us.

“You were mighty hard on me, weren’t you?” asked Schary.

“I intended to be,” I said. “I think messages should be sent by Western Union. I don’t believe they have any place in motion pictures. Your politics should be a thing apart from your business.”

“If I promise to put no more messages in my pictures, will you be my friend?”

“Yes. But I doubt whether you can. You’re too full of your own ideas.”

“You have my promise. Will you shake hands on that?” We shook hands, but I gave him fair warning: “The moment you start putting messages in, I’ll be on your back again.” But, sure enough, the “message” pictures got into production again.

This was the time that Ida Koverman faced stark poverty through her prolonged illness. She had to have a job. I went to Schary and asked him to take her back on the payroll. He was only too willing to have her. He needed her.

Ida went back on salary for the last five years left to her. She had to walk with a cane for those years. The cane appeared the day she returned to Culver City in a black limousine, which carried her from set to set. Clutching the cane, she made her entrances to cheers, crowds, and an outpouring of affection from everyone who saw her. On her last Christmas on earth I dropped by on my way home from the office to give her a check. I asked: “What did Louis send you?”

“Go into the living room. You’ll find a shoe box. Take off the lid and you’ll see.” It was filled with homemade cookies.

While I was at her home, a huge silver bowl containing five dozen American Beauty roses arrived from K. T. Keller, president of Chrysler Motors Corporation. When I got back to my house, I called Louis Lurie, a friend of Louis B. Mayer, told him what had happened, and asked him to mail a check to Ida immediately, so she’d have it Christmas Day. He wrote a check on the spot for $250.

She lived to see King Louis deposed from his throne. It couldn’t have given her any joy, because she wasn’t that kind of woman. The mammoth studio, in spite of all its stars and resources, was being driven to the wall by this thing called television, which Hollywood despised. Metro lost millions when Mayer was in charge of production in the late forties. When Schary took over the job, there were some early money-makers, but not enough to offset the other kind, which he couldn’t resist making.

Time and again he crossed swords with Louis. If the dueling threatened to go against him, he was quick to appeal to Nick Schenck for support. In the end Schenck had to choose between Mayer and Schary. He chose Schary, who in turn was ousted years later and, when he left, collected a million dollars. Louis spent the rest of his life burning with hatred, trying in vain to take over MGM in legal battle he could never win. At his funeral Jeanette MacDonald appeared to sing “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.”

The fight against communism waxed and waned; so did the newspaper headlines. It took me off on a two-year lecture tour of twenty-four cities. I found myself the second vice president--the first was Charles Coburn--of an organization called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. John Wayne was president. As the Congressional probing continued, the studio bosses, true to form, shoved their heads into the sands like ostriches and, to protect the millions invested in unshown movies, hoped that trouble would simply go away. People like me, who dared to mention that trouble was still hanging around, discovered that strange things happened to them. Like the subpoena from Washington that didn’t exist.

_Variety_ weighed in to report news of trouble ahead for Hopper:

HEDDA’S RED RAP STIRS STUDIO TALK OF FILM REPRISAL

Hedda Hopper’s columnizing that she “knows” the names of many Reds in Hollywood--with a resulting subpoena by the House Un-American Activities Committee--has some publicity-advertising toppers of major companies doing a quiet canvass among themselves of what their studios’ attitude should be toward the syndicated writer.

Their thought is that Miss Hopper has a perfect right to say whatever she pleases. However, she is largely dependent on studio press aid for news, and there’s some question as to whether such cooperation should be continued....

Although the pub-ad chieftains--and presumably company heads and other execs--are sizzling at Miss Hopper for further needling the Washington probe, probability is that there will be no concerted action to cut off her news sources or otherwise penalize her. Similar thoughts have arisen in the past concerning other columnists and have never worked out.

Industry execs feel that not only Miss Hopper, but all writers whose living depends on Hollywood should take a cooperative attitude.

The truth was that no subpoena had been issued, and none ever was. Someone had planted the story on that unsuspecting publication. Of all the items about me that were printed in its columns over the months ahead, only one hurt. That was a front-page, banner-lined interview with George Sokolsky, the Hearst political commentator and an old friend. He’d wept openly on my shoulder--I top him by an inch or two in high heels--at the 1952 Republican convention in Chicago when Ike Eisenhower walked off with the nomination instead of Bob Taft.

When George arrived in Los Angeles on a lecture tour, he was nabbed by a _Variety_ reporter and quoted as saying that Hopper was a political babe in arms. That stung. A year went by before I got a chance to set him straight--in an elevator descending to the lobby of the Waldorf Towers in New York. I felt better when he wrote me afterward:

I was asked a question which did not include your name and which I answered without knowing it referred to you. When the question and answer appeared in print, I was chagrined to find that it was made to apply to you personally.... We differ slightly on methods, but that is not as important as that we agree in principle. I regard myself as a missionary trying to win back the lost souls.... Perhaps your sterner creed is more correct than mine, and I do not want ever to quarrel with you over this particular difference. You must do it your way, and I shall have to do it mine. Please forgive me.

The pot shots loosed off in my direction from some quarters of our town didn’t cost me any sleep. I was raised to believe in the stern tradition of “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you.” Abraham Lincoln put it a touch more graciously: “If I were to read, much less to answer, all the attacks on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.” I believe in that, too; the quote is printed on a sign that stands on my desk.

Hollywood’s top brass is used to buying things, but they couldn’t buy me or my silence. Dore Schary once offered to put the Hopper name up on a big Broadway sign, but it wasn’t hard to refuse that bit of coaxing. All the major producers threatened to pull their advertising out of the Los Angeles _Times_ unless I sweetened up my printed opinions of their pictures. That suited Publisher Norman Chandler just fine. Advertising space was very tight, Norman told them. “I like the way Miss Hopper expresses herself, and you’ll be doing me a service if you cut back on ads.” They didn’t cancel a line. I didn’t hear about this until three years later. Everybody should have a friend like Norman Chandler.

I was flattered in a different way to learn that _Confidential_ had its West Coast gumshoe toiling for six months to find something to pin on me, past or present. Howard Rushmore reported that they finally quit empty-handed. “We wasted our time,” he said dolefully.

“I could have told you that before you started. I’ve never knuckled down to anyone in Hollywood. I’m not beholden to anybody, and I’ve never had romances with any one of them from the day I came out here.”

* * * * *

It’s impossible to talk about movie politics without finding John Wayne on camera hammering away with both fists. He’s a rock-ribbed Republican who wears his creed like a medal. It’s affected his popularity no more than Frank Sinatra’s been hurt by his sympathies for the other side of the street.

Duke Wayne had no hand in politics until he smelled that Communists were infiltrating the movie business. Then he sat down in James McGuinness’ house one night with Sam Wood, Adolphe Menjou, writer Morris Ryskind, Ward Bond, Leo McCarey, and Roy Brewer of the A.F. of L. That’s how the Motion Picture Alliance was born.

Duke likes to tell about a producer who warned him the next morning: “You’ve got to get out of that MPA. You’re becoming a controversial figure. It will kill you at the box office. You will hit the skids.” He says: “I hit the skids all right. When I became president of the MPA in 1948, I was thirty-third in the ratings of box-office leaders. A year later I skidded right up to first place.”

He occasionally hankers after the days, thirty-four years and more than 150 movies ago, when he was the easygoing ex-prop man making his first Monogram picture on a total budget of $11,000. “We couldn’t afford more than one horse. So in the first scene I had to knock out the heavy and steal the horse.” His political faith is simple enough. For America: “I’m for the liberty of the individual.” Overseas: “We’ve permitted the world to think of us as big soft jerks who’re trying to buy our way with money.”

For all the burning of midnight oil he’s done as a hard-hitting businessman producing movies like _The Alamo_, he hasn’t managed to reap great profits. “I have a pretty tough partner in Uncle Sam. I’m not squawking, but he’s taken a little of it.” _The Alamo_, on which he gambled his entire bankroll of $1,500,000, has done well in the United States and cleaned up overseas.

Duke’s a kind of patriarch, with four children born to his first wife, Josephine Saenz, whom he married when he was toiling in the slave market of cowboy serials. Those children have now supplied him with four grandchildren, and by his third wife, Pilar Palette, he has a delightful daughter, Aissa, and a son, John Ethan. When Aissa was in her cradle, he set the beatniks around Schwab’s drugstore on their ears by striding in straight from work in full Western regalia one evening demanding: “Give me an enema nipple, small size, for a sick baby.”

His middle wife was a Mexican tamale named Esperanza Baur. As a warm-up to grabbing headlines with vitriolic accusations against him, “Chata” Wayne dispatched two detectives to spy on him in her native land, where Duke was filming _Hondo_. The two not-very-private eyes unfortunately got themselves arrested and thrown into jail. It took Duke to get them out.

“One had acute appendicitis. The doctor wanted to operate. You know the reputation of Mexican doctors. If anything had happened, I’d have been blamed. So I got a plane and got them out of there, over to the American side of the border. Then there could be no reflection on me if anything happened.”

Today, at fifty-five, he still stands six feet six in his Western boots (“Most comfortable things in the world if you have them made to order”) and behaves like a twenty-five-year-old when the script calls for action and he’s “on.” For _Hatari_, shot in Africa in 1962, he was pulling stunts like lassoing rhinos, missing disaster by inches when one of them charged his open truck.

He isn’t a man who goes out much, though he always comes to my parties early and stays late, talking a blue streak. “I don’t think the industry is going on the rocks,” he decided not long ago. “We’ve hit as low a point as we can go, and we can’t get anything but better.”

How does he explain his own popularity? “It’s very simple. I never do anything that makes any guy sitting out there in the audience feel uncomfortable. So when the little woman says, ‘Let’s go to the show,’ the guy says, ‘Let’s see the John Wayne picture,’ because he knows I won’t humiliate him. I think the guys pull the girls in.”

He wanted to get into Russia to make _The Conqueror_, the first United States picture shot there, but the deal fell through. When a certain TV celebrity received the Kremlin’s permission to film a television show behind the Iron Curtain, Duke asked: “If they let you in, why not me?”

“We’ve never said anything about the Russians.”

Duke Wayne grinned. “That’s the difference. I have.”

_Seventeen_

Maybe I look like Mother or Grandma Moses to Americans in uniform if they’ve been away from home long enough in far-flung places. That’s the only reason I could ever find for Bob Hope’s wanting to take me along on his Christmas shows overseas. The first time he invited me, I was too delirious to ask why. I haven’t asked him since, and he hasn’t told me. But whenever he calls: “Pack your things, Hedda, we’re off,” I’m always rarin’ to go.

You think you know what Bob’s like, but you don’t until you’ve seen him on one of these safaris. We once had to wait six hours while the fuel was drained out of our plane and replaced. When the pilot had stepped aboard, he’d sniffed and said: “My God, they’ve filled it with jet fuel.” Which would have blown us to hell and gone at a few thousand feet. Have you ever had black coffee and Tootsie Rolls for breakfast at 6 A.M. five days running? No complaints from Hope. When I got home, I’d drunk so much of the stuff I developed coffee poisoning and didn’t recover for a month.

I’ve watched him put on a performance in a base hospital for patients who looked better than he did after he’d been driven half blind with fatigue by army wives who wouldn’t let him rest because he helped their husbands’ chances for another promotion. Bob can’t say no to anybody.

He would rather entertain five hundred GI’s than be handed $50,000. He’s looked after the money he’s earned, too, though he pays as high as $2000 a week apiece to his team of writers. They deserve it. This unpredictable character, high over the Pacific, hours out on our way to the Far East, asked two of the team, John Rapp and Onnie Whizzen: “Have you got that script about a sergeant and a private you wrote six years back but we didn’t use?” So help me, they fished it out of one of their bags and passed it to him.

He can joke about his money, along with religion, politics, and the Kennedys. “Since it was reported that I’m worth around $30,000,000,” he told me recently, “busloads of relatives have arrived at the house. We have ’em standing in corners instead of floor lamps.”

He’s irreverent, but never a dirty word does he utter, nor does he take the Lord’s name in vain. I’ve been with him days on end, and I’ve yet to hear a cuss word out of him. Came the night that Hollywood and America honored him at a banquet as the number-one citizen of our industry, and Jack Benny stood up to make a speech. “I hadn’t seen Bob for ten months until I ran into him on the golf course,” said Jack, who’d arrived an hour late for the celebration after dining at home. “He stood there and said: ‘I’ve had the god-damndest time with this ball today....’” We sat there in silence, not believing it.

Bob can’t stay home, can’t sit still any more than Jack can. And at

## parties Jack’s the champion floor pacer, stanchly refusing to dance. “I

don’t have to,” he says. “I don’t have to prove myself. I did that in my youth.”