‘GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD COMPANY’: HEDDA HOPPER, HOLLYWOOD GOSSIP, AND THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST CHARLIE CHAPLIN, 1940-1952

AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 73 ‘GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD COMPANY’: HEDDA HOPPER, HOLLYWOOD GOSSIP, AND THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST CHARLIE CHAPLIN, 1940-1952 JENNIFER FROST ABSTRACT: Prominent in the motion picture industry and among political conservatives in the mid-twentieth-century United States, Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, together with her readers, had an impact on American popular and political culture during the Cold War, an impact most evident in Hopper’s campaign against film actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin in the 1940s and early 1950s. In collaboration with anticommunist forces inside and outside Hollywood, Hopper and her readers contributed to the revocation of Chaplin’s U.S. re-entry visa in 1952 which, in turn, led to Chaplin’s decision to leave the United States permanently. Far from being ‘trivial’ or ‘idle’ talk, Hopper’s gossip column and her readers’ responses condemned Chaplin’s personal, political, and professional life and blurred the invisible but influential boundary between what was considered ‘public’ and ‘private’ in Cold War America. In 1938, a struggling, underemployed supporting actress and fledgling writer had her syndicated movie gossip column picked up by the Los Angeles Times. With that ‘Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood’ had the audience it needed. Following in the footsteps of her soon-to-be archrival Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper emerged as a powerful figure in the Hollywood movie industry during its ‘golden age’ and remained influential into the 1960s. Syndicated in 85 metropolitan newspapers, 3000 small town dailies, and 2000 weeklies during the 1940s, Hopper’s column had an estimated daily readership of 35 million by the mid-1950s (out of a national population of 160 million).1 Among these readers were filmgoers and fans who wrote enough letters in response to the content of Hopper’s column to employ two clerks working full time by the early 1940s.2 By the middle of the last century, Hopper in her famous hats had become a Hollywood icon, even gracing the cover of the July 28, 1947 issue of Time magazine. The staples of Hopper’s column, as with all Hollywood gossip and fan magazines, were the actual—and manufactured—details about the private lives and personal problems of Hollywood stars. Gossip played a key role in the intertextual mix of movie roles and off-screen personalities, of public images and private lives that created the star persona.3 Hollywood gossip could be favourable or malicious. Although most Hollywood gossip was and is favourable, as its purveyors need to support the motion picture industry upon which they depend, the popular image of Hopper was that of 74 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES a ‘vicious witch’ who engaged in ‘bare-nailed bitchery.’4 She positioned herself as the voice of small-town America and used her column to express what she saw as proper mores and values and to advise, and chastise, the residents of ‘Hollywood Babylon’ about their actual and alleged behaviour. As a consequence, the lives of individual stars became subject to popular criticism from Hopper’s readers and other moviegoers.5 Yet, Hopper saw herself and acted not only as a newspaper columnist, Hollywood insider, and moral arbiter but also as a political figure. Always a political conservative and a proud, active, and highly partisan member of the Republican Party, Hopper used her journalistic platform to express her political values, endorse candidates, report on her political activities, and mobilize her readers around a variety of contemporary political issues. The political content of her column often prompted newspaper editors to complain that she had been hired to write about entertainment—not politics—but she simply ignored them, with no loss of business until near the end of her career in the 1960s.6 It helped that she won a major contract for her column with the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate in 1942 and had the support of Col. Robert McCormick, the politically conservative owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. In her column, Hopper expressed strong opposition to the New Deal in the 1930s, U.S. intervention during World War II, and the civil rights movement in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. At the core of her conservatism, however, was her vehement anticommunism, which led to her enthusiasm for the Cold War at home and abroad. Hopper achieved the height of her prominence in popular culture in 1947, just as the Cold War began, and her career supported and benefited from the Cold War. By rallying her readers to fight ‘the Red Menace,’ Hopper contributed to a grassroots anticommunism that conveyed popular support for the Cold War; in turn her staunch anticommunism brought her visibility and power inside and outside Hollywood. The intertwining of politics, personal life, and popular culture around Hopper’s movie gossip column during the Cold War reveals how she and her readers blurred the imaginary yet influential boundary between what was considered to be ‘public’ and ‘private’ in mid-twentieth-century America. Gossip was understood to be private talk—talk about those things which ought to kept private—voiced, often illegitimately, in the public realm. Not coincidentally, gossip also was seen as ‘women’s talk,’ a gendered activity, brought into a gendered domain, the masculinist public. Reinforcing the gendered nature of Hollywood gossip were the facts that Hopper and most of her reader-respondents were female. Yet, as in traditional societies, Hollywood gossip also had a public function. It shared information and knowledge, contributed to a sense of community among moviegoers, and, in Hopper’s case, provided a platform and an audience for AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 75 her political views. As practiced by Hopper and her readers, Hollywood gossip became an arena for discussion and debate—‘a discursive political forum’7—about significant and contested issues of public and private life and their intersections in mid-twentieth-century America. Of all of the instances of discussion and debate that Hopper’s long career generated, one stands precisely at the intersection of public and private life: Hopper’s campaign against the film actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin in the 1940s and early 1950s. For over a decade, Hopper mounted a campaign against Charlie Chaplin, her ‘bête noir,’ according to Hopper’s biographer George Eells.8 She consistently criticized his professional output of the 1940s and early 1950s—The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952)—his political support for liberal and left causes, and his personal life, including his status in the United States as a resident non-citizen, and his sexual and marital relationships with women. No other campaign in her career targeted the totality of a Hollywood insider’s life. Although Hopper singled out specific criticisms at different points in her anti-Chaplin campaign, she found his personality and his politics, his private life and his motion picture productions equally egregious. Reporting both facts and rumours on all three fronts—the personal, the political, and the professional—Hopper aimed to ruin Chaplin’s career in Hollywood, and she worked with allies inside and outside the industry to achieve this aim. Hopper’s red scare politics linked her to important forces in domestic anticommunism within and beyond Hollywood, and she collaborated with these forces in a far-reaching campaign against Chaplin between 1940 and 1952. Her critical commentaries on Chaplin appeared unedited in the Chicago Tribune, which stood out among major newspapers for its consistently damaging coverage of Chaplin during these years.9 Hopper also was a prominent member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, founded in 1944 to fight Communist ‘subversion’ in the motion picture industry, and she cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the House Committee on Un-American activities (HUAC), and reactive pressure groups such as the American Legion and the Catholic War Veterans. These forces succeeded in their anti-Chaplin efforts when the U.S. Department of Justice revoked Chaplin’s re-entry visa in 1952, leading to Chaplin’s decision to leave the United States permanently. Hopper’s contribution to the campaign against Chaplin drew strong support from her reader-respondents who objected to Chaplin’s liberal-leftist politics, his movies, and his alleged violation of dominant standards of morality and traditional gender norms. Attention to the views and actions of Hopper and her readers indicate both the power of popular conservatism and how issues of public and private life—true and 76 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES rumoured—played out and intertwined in Hollywood gossip and national life in Cold War America. Private Life, Personal Behaviour Hedda Hopper never liked Charlie Chaplin. Although she admired the artistry of his early film career—‘I bow to his talent, which verges on genius’—he did what a Hollywood gossip columnist could not tolerate: he ignored her.10 Chaplin’s worldwide fame and extensive economic resources gave him an extraordinary measure of independence within the motion picture industry, so he did not have to ‘truckle to gossip columnists.’11 Unlike other filmmakers, he never complained about being left out of Hopper’s column and never responded to her praise or criticism. ‘It was galling,’ Eells notes.12 ‘Hedda was like a big kid,’ a Hollywood publicist remembered. ‘Chaplin had slighted her.’13 Later on, after dealing with Hopper’s animosity for years, when Chaplin did have some news—the announcement of his 1943 marriage to Oona O’Neill, for example—he gave the story to Hopper’s rival, Louella Parsons.14 Hopper labelled him ‘the least co-operative star,’ reported negatively on his desire to ‘keep his name out of the papers—which is what he’s always wished,’ and was delighted when Chaplin, after shunning the public spotlight, found himself in need of publicity to market his latest film. ‘Well, well. Charlie Chaplin hired a press agent. Brother, he can use one.’ ‘Dear Charlie,’ she added acidly, ‘It’s different when you’ve got something to sell, isn’t it?’15 Further infuriating Hopper was the fact that Chaplin, born in England, lived in the United States for decades, making movies and money, and yet he never became an American citizen. She constantly referred to his lack of U.S. citizenship, calling Chaplin ‘the man who came to dinner and stayed 40 years’ and considering him insufficiently appreciative or patriotic towards the United States: ‘he—who’s not an American citizen—continues taking advantage of the tolerance of a country which made him millions and gave him a home.’16 She accused him of a lack of patriotism during World War I—forgetting his prominent Liberty Bond campaign—and World War II, contending he had acted selfishly by hiring round-the-clock bodyguards despite the ‘man power shortage.’17 Hopper never missed a chance to declare, erroneously, Chaplin’s longing to leave the United States, reporting variously on his plans to ‘quit Hollywood and spend his declining years elsewhere’ or his ‘arrangements to make his future pictures in Argentina,’ and then having to retract these statements later.18 A number of Hopper’s readers endorsed the idea of Chaplin’s departure. ‘Let him go to England and stay there, not earn his money here and refuse to be a citizen,’ wrote one New York woman.19 These attacks on Chaplin’s status as a non-citizen revealed the nativist beliefs of Hopper and these reader-respondents. Hopper AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 77 believed until proven otherwise that non-Americans living within the borders of the United States posed a threat to the nation. To Hopper, Chaplin represented not only an alien threat but also a moral threat. Chaplin’s reputation as a moral or sexual ‘subversive’20 emerged from his real and alleged sexual and marital relations with women, particularly with young women, and Hopper reinforced this reputation for him in her column. Married unsuccessfully three times, his fourth marriage with O’Neill, daughter of the famous author and playwright Eugene O’Neill, was a lasting one. Chaplin met his future fourth wife when she was seventeen, and, although the pair waited until her eighteenth birthday to marry, the thirty-six year gap in their ages appalled Hopper—despite or perhaps because of a similar age gap between her and De Wolf Hopper, whom she divorced in 1924.21 Over the years, Hopper accused Chaplin of using and abusing young women through casual sexual affairs and ‘casting-couch promiscuity’: giving or promising the woman a leading role in his latest film, having a sexual relationship, and then dropping her from the film and his life.22 In late 1943, Hopper reported on the ‘many screen tests of girls whom he’s discovered, which have never seen the light of day.’ She also emphasized the young age of the women in his life, introducing ‘little Oona O’Neill, Chaplin’s latest lady, who just passed her 18th birthday’ and recalling the story of an actress ‘who was a youngster hardly out of pigtails, busy with her schoolbooks, when her Chaplin chance came along.’23 But Hopper dealt her greatest blow to Chaplin’s moral reputation on June 3, 1943 when she facilitated and then broke the story of actress Joan Barry’s paternity lawsuit against him, a scandal that led to three trials during World War II and proved ‘a turning point in the unravelling of Chaplin’s star image,’ according to Chaplin biographer Charles J. Maland.24 One day, as Hopper recalled in her memoirs, ‘a girl walked into my office. I’d never seen her before; nor had I ever seen anyone as hysterical. From her wild eyes, I knew she was on the borderline of something desperate.’25 The ‘girl’ was 24-year-old actress Joan Barry. In 1941, Chaplin met Barry, cast her briefly in a film, had a sexual affair with her, and then broke it off in late 1942. Barry, who had a history of mental illness, continued to pursue him and, in May 1943, sought to confront Chaplin with her pregnancy, claiming he was the father, but Chaplin refused to meet with her.26 Hopper was outraged and, together with fellow gossip columnist and ‘veteran sob sister’ Florabel Muir, encouraged the paternity lawsuit against Chaplin, publicized Barry’s side of the story, and supported her throughout the first trial and a retrial.27 ‘At stake was the life of an unborn child,’ Hopper later dramatized.28 ‘I am not responsible for Miss Barry’s condition,’ Chaplin declared, and blood tests proved him right. Yet, blood test results were inadmissible in California courts, and, after the first jury deadlocked in late ... - tailieumienphi.vn