Part 7

The day after the item appeared _The Enchanted Cottage_ was returned to her--it was a big success when she produced it--and she got _I Remember Mama_ back, too. Louella had been restored in health and spirit in time to attend the preview, though in a seat removed from mine. “I expect Harriet’s picture will be very good,” she confided to a friend, “but I know one person here who won’t give it a good review.”

Harriet was in New York, where she read my notice in the News. She telephoned her mother. “Have you read Hedda’s column?”

“No, I never read that column,” Louella sniffed.

“She’s done what nobody else would do for me. I want you to call her and thank her for me.” Louella did, and we arranged a peace parley over a luncheon table at Romanoff’s for one o’clock the following day. When she walked in, a bit late as usual, every chin in the place dropped. Hasty telephone calls brought in a mob of patrons who stood six deep at the bar to witness our version of the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty. Nobody moved until we left arm in arm two hours later.

Harriet, whom I’ll always like, wired: YOU AND MA WOULD MANAGE TO TOP ME STOP YOUR HISTORIC LUNCH HAS NOW CROWDED I REMEMBER MAMA OFF THE FRONT PAGE STOP YOU GALS MIGHT HAVE WAITED FOR BABY. After that, she won a ten-year contract at RKO. But peace between Louella and me wasn’t wonderful enough to last very long.

The flames of our relationship blazed merrily one Christmas when a studio head unwittingly poured fuel oil on. Louella and I are on the same list for good-will offerings from studios, which fill my living room from floor to ceiling every season.

One Christmas just before Ernie Pyle went off on his last visit to the South Pacific, he came to call on me with some friends. After a few drinks in the den, I said: “Ernie, do you want to see what fear can bring a female in this town?”

We went into my living room. He looked in wonder at the loot and said softly: “I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.”

Not every female star gets carried away with generosity. Doris Day once sent me boxes of gift-wrapped chocolate-covered pretzels, and Rosalind Russell a fist-sized hunk of coral such as you’d find in a fish bowl. Louella’s loot exceeds mine. Once, I’m told, she collected an automobile.

One unlucky studio chief had bought expensive handbags for each of us, but they got switched in delivery. When I telephoned to thank him and included a glowing description of the bag, I could hear his face fall. “But that’s Louella’s,” he moaned. “Will you be a doll and send it on to her and explain?”

“Like the devil I will,” I countered crisply. Louella is certain to this day that I got a better present than she did. Another store’s mistake brought me two handsome cut-crystal decanters for another Yuletide, one engraved HH, the other LOP. “Would you return hers to me?” said their donor.

“Not for the world. It makes such a gay conversation piece when I can ask a guest: ‘Would you like some Jack Daniels out of Louella’s bottle?’”

I regard her ungrudgingly as a good reporter, though she doesn’t always get her facts straight where I’m concerned. (Nor do I sometimes.) She invariably pretends that I am published only in the Los Angeles _Times_, so her followers won’t know about the syndicate, which gives Hopper a considerable edge in readership.

She has sometimes been tripped by her own prose. When Warners years ago chose Alan Mowbray to play George Washington in _Alexander Hamilton_, she took aim and fired: “It seems strange to me that an Englishman would be cast as the father of our country.” During the days when Mussolini invaded Albania and lives were snuffed out by the thousands, she decided: “The deadly dullness of the past week was lifted today when Darryl Zanuck announced he had bought all rights to _The Blue Bird_ for Shirley Temple.”

In a reminiscent mood she noted: “I don’t know how many of my readers remember John Barrymore and Dolores Costello in _Trilby_, the George Du Maunier story, but my mind goes back to John just loving the part of Svengali, wearing a black beard and hypnotizing the artist’s model who could only sing when he cast his baleful eye on her.” As Irving Hoffman recalled: “There wasn’t a thing wrong in the story except that the name of the picture was _Svengali_, not _Trilby_, the leading lady was Marian Marsh, not Dolores Costello ... du Maurier wrote it, not Du Maunier.”

Louella left me with egg on my face with her exclusive story that Ingrid Bergman was going to have a baby by Roberto Rossellini while she was still the wife of Dr. Peter Lindstrom. This, a few months after I’d interviewed Bergman at the scene of the crime and left Rome convinced by her that Italian newspapers had lied in their linotypes when they called her pregnant.

I will always believe that Joe Steele (the press agent employed both by her and her studio boss, Howard Hughes) subsequently told the truth to Louella. When her scoop appeared and the newspapers were hunting for Joe, they couldn’t find him. Seems she had persuaded him he was in bad shape, made sure he didn’t suffer thirst or hunger, then kept him safe and sound for three days away from her competitors.

After her story had been spread to the world, it seemed like a good idea to do something to help Ingrid, who wanted a quick divorce so that her baby could be spared at least a part of the stigma. I thought that perhaps she could be smuggled by plane out of Italy to some other country, where only friends would know exactly when or if the child was born.

Plans were going beautifully when the plan was broached to Ingrid. She refused to have anything to do with it. She would have her child proudly, she said, and if anyone didn’t like the idea he could lump it.

In 1951, Docky Martin died of cancer in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. It was a crushing blow for Louella. Not long ago, she found herself there, too, for an operation. The feebleness in her voice alarmed me. “I’m so tired of this place,” she said, “and I’m so sick.”

I had a word with Harry Brand, publicity director of Twentieth Century-Fox and a good friend to Louella and Docky: “If you want her to live, you’d better get her out of that hospital. Either she’s in the same room that Docky had or one exactly like it. She’ll never recover until she’s moved.”

Nobody apparently had thought of that. She was out of there and into the Beverly Hills Hotel the next day. Her column power is still potent, but the times and temper of Hollywood have changed. Though she doesn’t change, you can’t help but feel sorry for her. She still belabors her enemies and coos over her intimates: Mervyn LeRoy, Jimmy McHugh, Cobina Wright, all the Catholic “A” group that includes Loretta Young, Irene Dunne, Dolores Hope. She still pretends not to read Hopper, but when I broke the news of Kay Gable’s pregnancy, on the strength of a tip from a crew member on _The Misfits_, Louella must have read the item and put in a call instantly to Kay, begging to be the child’s godmother. At the baptism her hands were so shaky we were scared stiff she’d let young John Clark Gable fall on the floor by the font.

Louella claims that the people she writes about are all her dear, dear friends, a total she once estimated at 312. My taste runs closer to that of Dema Harshbarger, my manager, whom I have known since she first put me on radio. “I have three friends in the world,” says Dema, “and I don’t want any more. The average Hollywood friendship today wouldn’t buy you a ham sandwich.”

_Five_

One of the legends that haunts the typewriters of most of Hollywood’s five hundred resident reporters and columnists insists that our town is just like Podunk, a typical American community with a heart as big as Cinerama. (Are you there, Louella?) This is true, of course--give or take a few billion dollars a year. Provided Podunk can muster three dozen and more Rolls-Royces outside a movie house for a new picture opening. And pay a good cook $500 a week to steal her away from the best friend. And produce half a dozen houses with built-in pipe organs and one with wood-burning fireplaces in both the master and children’s bathrooms--it used to belong to Maggie Sullavan and Leland Hayward but Fred MacMurray owns it now.

If the majority of people in Podunk worship money like a god, then there isn’t much to choose between us. Take a man like Dean Martin. If Podunkians judge their fellows by how many dollars they earn, then Dean would be right at home. There was the day he got to arguing with his press agent about Albert Einstein.

“I made $20,000 last week,” Dean said. “What do you think he made?”

“You’re right,” said the press agent, a thoughtful soul. “That Einstein’s a dummy. I bet he never earned more than $12,000 a year in his whole life. He’s got to be an idiot.” Dean had the grace to grin. In Hollywood, where the love of money can change people’s nature every bit as fast as in Podunk, he has a reputation for cool blood behind his beaming Italian charm.

He isn’t alone in his class. It’s an obvious weakness among singers. Perry Como, for instance, sets few records for making appearances for charity. Bing Crosby, who enjoys almost nothing about his profession except the income it brings him, can’t be dragged to a benefit. It took his fiery little Irish mother, Kate, to push him out of his house to one Academy Awards show when he was at the top of his career. “You’ll go,” she threatened, “or you’ll never hear the last of it from me.” Kate was a woman to be reckoned with and still is. That was the night Bing got his Oscar for _Going My Way_.

Jerry Lewis on one occasion begged one big star to join him in New York on an all-night telethon to raise funds in a muscular-dystrophy drive. “You know what you can do with those crippled kids,” was the response he received from this father of a big family, who has a reputation for charming birds off trees.

Some of our inhabitants cherish the quaint idea that the number of charity performances he gives is an accurate yardstick for measuring an entertainer’s heart. More accurate, anyway, than the size of his bank account. It’s easy to sing a song or two, harder to stand up and be funny for half an hour. Yet the comics measure up well; Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis, George Burns--all knock themselves out in the sweet cause of charity.

Our number-one citizen on that score is Bob Hope, and we’re proud as peacocks of him. There isn’t a place in the world he wouldn’t fly to for charity and work without drawing a nickel. He’s ham enough to love the publicity it brings him, but he does a monumental amount of good. Bob has literally made the millions that everybody believes Bing has stashed away in the vaults.

Money is talked about in our town more than elsewhere, perhaps, because there’s more of it around. Bob, who could safely be called thrifty, has splurged on a private three-hole golf course valued at more than $100,000. Elvis Presley owns fifteen automobiles, including an all-pink Cadillac with a television and hi-fi set. Beverly Hills High School has an oil well on its campus which brings in $18,000 a year.

Beverly Hills is an oasis of thirty thousand inhabitants and thirty thousand trees set in the steppes of Los Angeles. Many of its people earn their living in the entertainment industry or as doctors, lawyers, agents, soothsayers and headshrinkers, living on the backs of the others. Most of the trees that line the sidewalks are palms, though magnolias, eucalyptus, and acacias thrive in the gardens, and the evening scent of pittosporum drifts over the streets as sweet as the song of nightingales.

It’s a separate community with its own schools, police, firemen, and local government. As a contented resident, I’m happy to say that it enjoys the lowest tax rate for miles around. I am not so happy to report that in our town, where there’s at least one Olympic-size pool to the block, and sometimes five, Esther Williams found nobody she asked would give her the regular use of one for classes in teaching blind children to swim. She finally found a pool in Santa Monica, thirty minutes’ drive away, two days a week.

## Acting as a kind of buffer between Beverly Hills and Los Angeles proper

is Hollywood, with a population of some quarter of a million, which is the workplace of most of the stars who live in Beverly Hills. The rest of our population seems to be Texans, who are flocking in and who can usually leave the movie colony standing with dust on their faces when it comes to worshiping the golden calf.

Up until the early days of this century, Beverly Hills saw more coyotes than dollar bills. It was a Spanish-owned wilderness of remote canyons and tumbleweed. Then in 1906 it was bought for $670,000 by its American founders, who sold off lots at $1000 apiece on the installment plan, $800 if you paid cash; those lots sell now for $50,000. The big spending didn’t start until soon after World War I ended, but long before that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had bought a whole hilltop on Summit Drive together with the hunting lodge that stood there. They spent hundreds of thousands on the place that we called “The White House”--Pickfair.

Doug itched to put a wall all the way around Beverly Hills, but he compromised by simply encircling their estate. He and Mary literally made their home a palace. They were America’s royalty and were treated as such in their own country and overseas. Kings and queens entertained them; they rode in Mussolini’s private train. At Pickfair they entertained visiting bluebloods.

The Duke and Duchess of Alba stayed there, but they left a week early because the duke discovered, to his chagrin, that the armfuls of cuddly Hollywood blondes he’d been expecting were not permitted through Pickfair’s portals.

Pickfair had some rich neighbors. Carl Laemmle, the half-pint immigrant from Bavaria who founded Universal-International, built an estate. So did Will Rogers, Gloria Swanson, Charles Chaplin. Chaplin is notoriously tight-fisted. After he’d furnished most of his home on Summit Drive, including his own bedroom, four or five other bedrooms remained empty. He had the head decorator of our biggest furniture store come to see the rooms and suggest their decor. Charlie had all the recommended furniture delivered and kept it for six months, ignoring the bills. Finally, the store repossessed everything it had “lent” him. He applied the same treatment to another store, with the same final result.

During this period, a titled Englishman with wife and entourage wired the Douglas Fairbankses that they’d be arriving at Pickfair with ten in party; could they be accommodated? Pickfair hadn’t room for everybody, so Mary telephoned Charlie, who said he’d take in six of the visitors.

But he’d forgotten that the furniture in his guest bedrooms had been carted off, leaving only an old chest of drawers and mattresses and bedsprings on the floor of each otherwise empty room. When the guests saw the accommodations he’d provided for them, they were astounded; imagined he must be some kind of crazy health faddist, and departed after one night for a hotel.

Harold Lloyd bought his acreage direct from Mr. Benedict himself--that’s the old-timer who put his name on Benedict Canyon. Then Harold bought more adjoining land from Thomas Ince until he had twenty acres of lawns and woodlands. After he married Mildred Davis, his leading woman in _Grandma’s Boy_, in 1923, he built a forty-room, Spanish-style mansion on the place, with ten bedrooms, two elevators, a theater seating one hundred guests, and a four-room dolls’ house complete with electric light, plumbing, and grand piano. Around the house he had kennels for his great Danes, a swimming pool with fountain, two reflecting pools, and a Greek temple.

Mildred loved it all, then took a second look at the front door and burst into tears. What was the matter? “No keyhole!” she sobbed.

The Lloyds still live there. When he opened the grounds for a local charity a few years ago, today’s generation of stars gasped at this glimpse of how thick the luxury could grow before income taxes gobbled up your pay checks. “How can he possibly afford to keep up this place?” Frank Sinatra asked me.

“Because he’s worth millions,” I said, “and he holds on to them.” That afternoon, though, $69,000 was raised for the Nursery for Visually Handicapped Children. At the suggestion of Walter Annenberg’s mother, when things got dull, I sold endowments for thirteen scholarships to the school at $1000 apiece.

Harold, who is in his late sixties, believes that you can take it with you. There is one servant, a helper and nurse for their grandchild, on the place which used to employ twenty gardeners. Mildred Lloyd does most of the cooking.

Stores and services soon crowded into and around Beverly Hills, to tap the golden stream that poured into the motion-picture industry. You could buy any kind of merchandise or service at a price. Saks Fifth Avenue, J. W. Robinson’s, W. & J. Sloane eventually opened up on Wilshire Boulevard. One lady got in ahead of them with a different kind of establishment on Sunset Strip, just beyond the town line; her girls, dressed to the teeth, were once taken on a conducted tour of the MGM lot. A Metro executive was appalled when, in a moment of confidence, she showed him a wad of rubber checks she’d been given by various male customers. They would have been a prize package for any autograph hound. He offered to collect the debts and split the proceeds with her.

“Oh no, I couldn’t allow that,” she said, shocked to the marrow. “It wouldn’t be ethical.”

She had a competitor in the same line of business who one evening telephoned a visiting English knight in the middle of a dinner party to say she’d seen his name in the papers and could she provide him with a steady companion for his lonely hours.

In Beverly Hills you can call on furriers who’ll be glad to sell a mink coat at $20,000, a chinchilla wrap for $15,000, or an ermine-covered toilet seat. You can have your hair dressed by George Masters, who’ll bill you up to you-name-it for a home appointment, or a make-up by Gene Hibbs, who invented an ingenious, invisible bit of nylon mesh with a rubber band suspended from tiny hooks pulled up through your hair which, for special occasions, takes more years off your looks than plastic surgery.

If you’re a celebrity anywhere, your cost of living takes a leap, but in our town it jumps sky high. Any star looking to buy a house tries to keep his identity secret until closing day or else the price will be doubled. A star of the opposite sex will be charged $5000 by her obstetrician for delivering a baby.

When Norma Shearer was first pregnant, she was aghast to hear what the bill would be. “Very well,” the doctor compromised, “I’ll gamble with you. I’ll charge $5000 for a boy, $1000 for a girl. Okay?” Norma lost the bet when Irving Thalberg, Jr., was born.

Some of our citizens fall into the habits of European royalty and carry no money whatever in their pockets. Shirley MacLaine was working on _The Children’s Hour_ when Sam Goldwyn invited her to dine tête-à-tête with him and see a private showing of his old-time movie, _Stella Dallas_. It provided an evening out as unsophisticated as a flour sack.

She told me: “While we were looking at the picture, I started to scratch. I was wearing a wool dress I hadn’t had on for months and apparently it had gotten moths or something. I was afraid he’d think I wasn’t enjoying _Stella_. When we got out, he said, ‘How about a soda?’”

In his Thunderbird they drove to Will Wright’s on Sunset Boulevard. At the next table some youngsters were having a ball burning holes in soda straws to make improvised flutes, then blowing tunes on them. Sam asked for a lesson and soon sat in to play his own straw flute.

“The girl came with our orders,” Shirley reported, “and we ate them. Then he went through all his pockets before he finally said, ‘You got any money on you?’ But I’d left my bag at the studio.”

He called over the waitress, who wore her name on a lapel pin: “Nancy, have you ever been out with a male friend and been so embarrassed because he didn’t have any money with him?” Nancy smiled sympathetically. “How about if I sign an I.O.U. and have my wife, Frances, come down tomorrow to pay you?”

That was agreed. Sam leaned over confidentially toward Shirley. “Since we’re getting ’em free, let’s have a couple more.” They had three each before they went outside and flagged down his chauffeur, who’d followed them in another car.

“You go up and tell Mrs. Goldwyn what happened here tonight,” Sam instructed. “Say Nancy had to trust us for six sodas at thirty-five cents apiece. You come back with the money and see if you can’t scrounge seventy-five cents for a tip--but don’t tell Frances about the tip.”

* * * * *

Evenings were known to be gaudier in the old days. The Basil Rathbones gave a Louis XIV masquerade, and I was set to go as a shepherdess complete with live lamb, who had his hoofs gilded and fleece shampooed. I didn’t get there, but that’s a later story. Mrs. George Temple, Shirley’s mother, went to her first and only big Hollywood party and left a new ermine coat on a bed on top of a pile of others. When the time came to leave, she discovered that one distinguished guest had been taken violently ill in the bedroom with disastrous results to the furs, her ermine suffering most of all.

For one revel at his Mulholland Drive home, Errol Flynn imported a transvestite fairy dressed so skillfully as a girl that nobody guessed the secret. Errol had his swimming pool lit from below and brought on a team of high divers to brighten the evening. When his guests went on chattering, taking not a blind bit of notice of the performance, he dived headlong into the water in protest and refused to speak to anybody except the divers for the duration of the party.

“You’re so generous in many ways and so stingy in others,” I told him, years later. “You spent thousands on those parties, yet you wouldn’t buy a girl a box of candy or send her flowers when you could have saved yourself at least five lawsuits with a single rose each time.”