Part 18

He begged Gene Fowler to cross the Atlantic as his guest when he opened at the Palladium in the summer of 1951, following Danny Kaye, who was cutting it up all over London town as a buddy of Princess Margaret. Gene, an old Hearst reporter and once editor of the New York _American_, went along, principally to fend off some of the bites of the sharp-fanged British press. He wrote to me:

Dear Sweetie:

This is the old man’s last long journey anywhere except perhaps to the cemetery. Every citizen should be compelled by law to take a trip abroad--all expenses paid--so as to know how to vote.

Skelton is a big hit at the Palladium notwithstanding all manner of handicaps. It is a hot June with all kinds of sports events going, _and_ Danny Kaye failed to introduce him (as is the hitherto unbroken tradition) on Sir Danny’s last night at the Palladium. Tell me, honey, is it possible for any man to be bigger than himself? And is momentary glory too precious to be shared with a fellow American and a fellow trouper? It is quite true that we cannot share personal grief, but we can and should share happiness or success.

Gene

P.S. It is not true that I have been knighted.

When they got back, Red bought Gene a car to say his thanks, but Gene would have none of it. He clung like a limpet to his ramshackle jalopy, growling: “I didn’t go to London with you for a present, but because I’m a friend.”

Gene wasn’t around to help when Red and his wife, Georgia, took their son, Richard, on his last, long journey to see the world after doctors at UCLA Medical Center told them the boy was doomed with leukemia. The British press venomously accused Red of publicity seeking in taking Richard to see the Pope. The boy read the papers and realized for the first time that his illness was fatal. Wounded to the heart by the stories, Red brought his family home to Brentwood, to wait for the inevitable. Gene was one of the pallbearers at Richard’s funeral. Mickey Cohen was among those at the ceremony.

I was working in a television studio next to Red’s soon after that day. In the corridor he said shyly: “Do you suppose you could do something for me, Hedda?”

“Anything, Red.”

“My wife is mourning, just as I am. I get home tired from working and burst into tears, and so does she. She says everybody knows how I feel but nobody thinks of her. Could you write something about her, how she’s having a bad time, too?”

Four years later Red has been unable to shake off his melancholy. He sits by the hour in his garden rather than go into the house, which holds too many memories. Though he’s earned enough to make him a millionaire, he has gone through so much money--diamonds for Georgia, gifts to friends--that he has been compelled to sell the $3,500,000 TV studio he bought in hopes of becoming a big producer like Desi Arnaz. His health isn’t good, he sleeps poorly. Yet before the cameras or on a night-club stage, he’ll work hard enough to break his heart--and put a chip or two in yours.

* * * * *

Mickey Cohen had another friend among the comics in Jerry Lewis, whom he tried to set up as producer of Red’s movie life story. Jerry was another who lent Mickey money: $5000 with no security “because he needed help.” In his Martin and Lewis incarnation, Jerry came from playing night clubs in Philadelphia, where the majority of clubs are controlled by Frank Palumbo, no stranger to the racketeers.

When Dean and Jerry first appeared at Slapsie Maxie’s in Hollywood, every studio in town tried to sign them. It was Hal Wallis who succeeded. Incidentally, in their days together, Dean and Jerry had an admirer and occasional companion in the junior senator from Massachusetts. In show business language, they found John F. Kennedy was a square John who seldom caught on when they were kidding him. Jacqueline hadn’t yet come into his life. The girl he was most gone on was Helen O’Connell, who delivers warm jazz with a genteel air.

Before Dean and Jerry could start work for Hal Wallis in movies, they had some more night-club dates to fill, including one in Philadelphia. They were joined in that City of Brotherly Love by the actress wives of two of our better-known Hollywood personalities, one of them a woman who had dragged her patient husband to Slapsie Maxie’s night after night to ogle Dean. If you can prevent catastrophe, you’re bound to give it a try. So when I found out what was going on in Philadelphia, I went to see Hal Wallis.

“Unless you nip this in the bud,” I said, “you’re going to start your first Martin and Lewis picture with a couple of divorces to contend with.”

Hal was petrified. “What can I do?” he pleaded.

“Stop it before the news gets out.”

He called his partner, Joe Hazen, in for consultation. “How would you handle the situation?” they both asked.

“Telephone the boys right now. Tell them that unless those women get out of Philadelphia immediately, you’ll cancel the contract. And tell them why.”

Hal liked the idea. I sat by his desk while he made the call, and two foot-loose actresses caught the next available plane from Philadelphia to New York.

There is a New York night club with a deserved reputation for high-class entertainment called the Copacabana, formerly conducted by Jack Entratter, who became the impresario of the Las Vegas Sands, and Monte Proser, who went on to operate Broadway’s Lanai. For some years the Copa has enjoyed the services of Jules Podell, who has a gravel voice and a sharp temper.

Not long after the Martin and Lewis breakup Jerry was visiting New York to do a television show, while Sinatra was appearing at the Copa, drawing such crowds that they waited outside in the winter cold for hours in lines that stretched halfway around the block.

Jerry had played the Copa with Dean some three years earlier and quarreled briefly with Podell in the course of the engagement. One day Frank came down with an occupational sore throat, and Jerry agreed to substitute at the Copa for him, though he had no formal act and hadn’t played a night-club date alone since his parting from Dean. He appeared that night ad-libbing like crazy, but that was the last time the Copa ever saw him.

Jerry had a press agent who knew the Copa and Podell well. In a previous job, when he’d had his own public-relations business, the agent represented the place as one of his clients. The agent was in the bar one night watching Podell, in his overcoat, ushering in the customers to the restaurant and floor show downstairs. “You’re doing fantastic business with Sinatra,” the agent said admiringly.

“I need you to tell me?” snapped Podell. “Get the hell out of here.”

The agent snapped right back. The two fell into a shouting match, which ended with the agent spitting at Podell and walking out the front door, back to the Hampshire House suite where Jerry was staying. There was no satisfying Jerry until he’d heard the full account of the set-to. By now it was after midnight, but Jerry picked up the telephone to get two vice presidents of MCA out of bed, with a summons to meet him at ten o’clock the following morning at the Brooklyn studios where he was rehearsing his television show.

The pair of them showed up on the dot. They knew Jerry had a contract for a future appearance at the Copa. “I want you,” he ordered, “to write Mr. Podell a letter saying I will never appear, never set foot there from now on. You can say I don’t give a damn what pressure they try to put on me. I told Podell years ago if he ever talked nasty to any one of my people or laid a hand on one of them, he’d see the last of me.”

Over the next few days Jerry had some interesting telephone calls from all kinds of people promising to straighten things out with Podell. Jerry had a stock answer: “Not if I live to be a thousand will I talk to Podell. Nobody should look to get lucky with me. I’m not going into that place--ever.”

He made that decision stick. One side of Jerry knocks himself out to have people like him. The other side includes a mind like a steel trap; when he says no, he means not bloody likely. He won’t run away from a fight, but he shies away from people who frighten him intellectually because they’re better educated than he is. He’s the son of show-business parents who left school in the tenth grade after swatting a teacher for saying: “All Jews are stupid.”

He makes $3,000,000 a year, and he can’t stand it. Money is something he disdains. He is probably the one entertainer in our business who has never struck out in a movie, and he’s been twenty-six times to bat. Does he have any ideas why? You bet your life he knows exactly:

“I appeal to the kids and ordinary people who spend all their lives under the thumbs of authority and dignity. And I appeal to children, who know I get paid for doing what they get slapped for. I flout dignity and authority, and there’s nobody alive who doesn’t want to do the same thing.

“No matter how high you go, there’s some schnook up over you. Any General Motors vice president, for example, thinks he can do a better job than the guy above him, except he’s down here and his boss is up there. I’m getting even for every little guy in the world. I’m the kid who throws snowballs at dignity in a top hat.”

Jerry, who’ll do anything for anybody he likes, once agreed to fill in for Sammy Davis, Jr., in Las Vegas, because Sammy wanted a few days off over Christmas in Aurora, Illinois. When I got the tip, I realized the fat was in the fire. It happened that Kim Novak was also spending the holidays at her sister’s house in Aurora.

Now Harry Cohn of Columbia, who made Kim everything she is today, had been getting trouble from her. Her favorite weapon was to date men that Cohn detested, either for personal reasons or because they clashed violently with the carefully fostered image of her as a sweet, friendly girl from Chicago. Sammy was a heavy date. I’m sure he occupied quite a few pages in the oversized diary which she keeps in code and carries around with her all the time.

Kim was a girl tied hand and foot by her Columbia contract: “I haven’t got enough money to invest,” she told me one day. “I’ve been under contract on a straight salary for six years. When I’m loaned out, I don’t get anything extra--the salary goes to the studio. On _Man with a Golden Arm_, I was promised a percentage of the picture, but I guess they forgot somehow.”

“You never got a bonus?” I asked.

“One time before _Vertigo_ my agents got me a sort of bonus. They got me a special loan at seven per cent interest for a year so I could buy my house. But I was on my old salary schedule.”

“Don’t you collect for TV?”

“I can’t do TV.”

The house she bought on Tortuosa Drive in Bel Air cost her $95,000. It contains an all-blue bedroom, an all-purple study, an all-gray living room, an all-gray sleeping porch, and a pool where she swims wearing a straw hat. She gets along without a housekeeper, cooks a big pot of chile on Sundays, and dips into it for dinner three or four times a week. “I sometimes get stomach trouble,” she admits, to nobody’s surprise.

Sammy had been a frequent visitor at her house, but not after he returned to Las Vegas from Aurora. Harry Cohn, who collapsed with a fatal heart attack some months later, was not a man who enjoyed being thwarted. His passion for keeping his fingers on everybody’s business led him once to install an intercom system at Columbia so that, by flicking a switch, he could eavesdrop on conversations all over the lot.

The rumor was that it cost him $200,000 to break things up between Kim and Sammy. Truth is that it cost him no more than a single telephone call from his office to Las Vegas, where Harry knew one of the mob with a certain reputation in the business. Cohn was a man you had to stand in line to dislike. A bitter, final jest about him alleged that two thousand people attended his funeral, wanting to make sure it was true.

Over the telephone to Vegas, he said to the man on the other end: “You take care of this for me, will you?”

“Sure,” said the voice on the telephone. “I’ll just say: ‘You’ve only got one eye; want to try for none?’”

Very soon after that Sammy announced his marriage to Lorena White, a Negro show girl in Las Vegas. A few more weeks elapsed before Sammy and Lorena started proceedings for divorce. On November 13, 1960, Sammy married May Britt, who gave him a daughter the following summer, and let me tell you they’re very happy, or were when I wrote this.

Two years after the Sammy incident, Kim told me: “I guess I never really adjusted to being in Hollywood.” She found, she said, that her telephone hadn’t been ringing for quite a while. “I’m not really anti-social. It’s just that I prefer smaller parties to big ones,” she said.

With the help of a house guest, a girl who went to high school with her, she was fixing up her patio, to make it all turquoise. She was also building a fallout shelter in her back yard for herself, her friend, and her dog.

_Thirteen_

The magic word now is “television.” It used to be “Hollywood,” and there was no end to the miracles it could work. It transformed plowboys into princes, peasant girls into goddesses. The stars were American royalty and revered as such by their subjects. The magic word would bring whole villages out on the street to watch a star go by. It opened palace doors, stopped trains, brought you the keys of a city or an audience with the Pope.

Hollywood set the social style for thirty years of our history, until TV came along. Clara Bow wore a cupid’s-bow lipstick job; fifty million women copied her. Clark Gable shucked off his undershirt; so did fifty million men. The studios stuck to a simple rule and coined fortunes with it: “Show the stars like kings and queens in a glamorous setting, and the crowds will flock to see them.” Today it’s a calculated risk to put a man on the screen in evening dress in case the popcorn-munching customers decide that he’s a square.

They follow television stars just as they used to emulate the motion-picture variety. My reader mail proves that. “Is Dorothy Provine a natural blonde?” “Whatever happened to Edd Byrnes?” “When did Richard Boone get married?” Ben Casey’s surgical gown turns out to be a Seventh Avenue fashion hit. The children switch from coonskin hats to space helmets to Soupy Sales. Some of the biggest names in our town--Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and all--go on to let Soupy toss a custard pie in their faces. The children love it and the networks want the child audience.

The impact on the audience--and I don’t mean from the custard pies--is astounding to anybody like me who’s been making pictures since World War I. One of the early ones was a thing called _Virtuous Wives_, in which I sank my entire salary of $5000 on my clothes and got $25,000 worth of the loveliest outfits you ever saw from Lady Duff-Gordon, known professionally as Lucile and one of the greatest dressmakers of them all. The biggest impact I made was on a pudgy little fellow who used to lurk around the set.

When the picture was finished, he sidled up to me. I mistook his intentions. “I don’t want to buy any fur coats,” said I.

“You don’t understand,” said he. “My name’s Louis Mayer. I’m the producer and this is my first picture.”

Making a reputation then was slow going. Producers used to say: “Get what’s-her-name who played the rich bitch in _Virtuous Wives_--she might be good for this one.” But when you go on television the impact is felt overnight. The following morning a cab driver won’t let you pay your fare, a workman on a construction job offers you his hard hat.

Outside Saks Fifth Avenue, after an Easter Sunday appearance on “What’s My Line?”, I found myself surrounded by a crowd of autograph hunters so big that a disgruntled policeman threatened to turn me in unless we all went around the corner into a side street. “You’ll have to call the paddy wagon,” I warned him, “and a picture of Hopper behind bars is all I need for my collection.”

For another “What’s My Line?” appearance I had some fun with Dorothy Kilgallen, who likes to queen it on the panel. I knew I’d have to do something exciting to knock her in the eye, so I asked Marion Davies to lend me a diamond necklace. “Which one?” asked Marion. “Or would you like them all?”

“Just one,” I said. “The small one with the pear-shaped pearl. That will be showy.”

I didn’t allow Miss Kilgallen to see me until just before we were introduced on camera. She gulped, turning slightly enviously green: “Isn’t it wonderful to see real jewels again? It’s so _beautiful_!”

I didn’t let on that I’d borrowed it. “It _is_ rather nice,” I purred. The following week she had to top me. She arrived with her hair dyed bright red.... We females do that to each other.

I’ve made a lot of friends through television and a few enemies. On the whole, I imagine that enemies are better for me. I love them, because they keep me on my toes. That’s one small debt I owe “Stoneface” Ed Sullivan, the Irish Sunday supplement to the American home.

After “Toast of the Town” was launched, Billy Wilkerson made Ed an offer to come out and work for him on the _Hollywood Reporter_. Ed gave in his resignation to Captain Joseph Patterson, who ran the New York _Daily News_ until he died. “I wonder if you know what you’re doing,” said Joe. “You’ll be in a trade paper with maybe 7500 readers instead of a two-million-plus circulation.”

“I think I’ll make a lot of money,” answered Ed. “I’ll know everybody out there and be able to get them for my TV show.”

“If that’s what you want, go ahead; but don’t ask to come back.”

Billy Wilkerson, who could run a dollar to ground as fast as any man, canvassed Hollywood, collecting advertisements for a special issue of the _Reporter_ welcoming Ed Sullivan to his new roost. When that issue appeared, it was thick with page after page of greetings, all proceeds going to Billy as publisher. Somewhere along the line, Ed must have realized who was going to find himself on the better end of his new deal. He went back to Joe and announced that he’d changed his mind.

“Don’t do that again,” Joe chided him. “Another time, if you make up your mind to go, you go.”

When his “Toast” was in its salad days, Ed pursued the practice of inviting Hollywood stars to appear for free. Jack Benny was nudged into appearing for him, Bob Hope went on for the same nonexistent fee five times, until he got his own show, which was programmed opposite Ed’s on a different network. Ed repaid Bob’s earlier courtesies by opening fire on him in his “Broadway” column.

He invited Frank Sinatra to appear for nothing except the sheer joy of it to plug _Guys and Dolls_. When Frank refused, Ed roasted him in a press statement. Sinatra promptly took a full-page in the _Reporter_ to holler:

Dear Ed: You’re sick. Sincerely, Frank. P.S. Sick, sick, sick!

As a newsprint neighbor, his “Broadway” often runs cheek by jowl with my “Hollywood” in the _News_, though the Chicago _Tribune_ won’t print him. I’d been asked several times to go on his show and be introduced from the audience. He received the standard reply: “Mr. Sullivan, when I appear on TV, I go as a guest and get paid for it.” The Screen Actors’ Guild ruled long ago that an interview doesn’t constitute a performance, since it tends to promote the career of the player involved. The union set a minimum pay scale of $210 for interviews.

That was what I paid each of a long list of stars who agreed to appear in interview format on “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” a Sunday television hour that Talent Associates arranged for me to do for NBC, 8 to 9 P.M., while Ed was on CBS at the same time. I took on the show to see how TV and I got along together, on the understanding that there’d be five more similar shows if I liked it. But Ed was told that I was going to do the half dozen for certain. That’s what got his bowels in an uproar.

The rumble gave us a singularly un-merry Christmas. The only time we could hire the big MCA studio we needed for one hour was on Friday, December 25. Use of the sound stage there for sixty minutes cost $1000, plus double pay for the crew. I had another taping session set up for three days later, with _Ben-Hur’s_ Charlton Heston, who had given his promise five weeks earlier and cabled from London that he would land in Hollywood on Sunday, December 27, ready to work with me the following day.

I didn’t know a blessed thing about it until I read it in the _News_, but Ed was scared I was going to steal his TV audience. He’d been busy trying to engage extra stars for his show, including Heston, who turned up that Sunday evening, the twenty-seventh, on Sullivan’s soiree, reading from the Bible for a $10,000 fee.

On the Monday, three other actors from _Ben-Hur_--Stephen Boyd, Francis X. Bushman, and Ramon Novarro--sat waiting with me for Heston, all of us made up and rarin’ to go. At the appointed hour of 2 P.M. a telephone call reached the studio from his agent, Johnny Dugan of MCA. “I have advised Mr. Heston,” he told me, “not to come on your show.”

“That is very kind of you. Might I ask why?”

He had assumed the program would be local, not network, said Johnny. “He’s negotiating for two more shows with Ed Sullivan, and he’s afraid this might jeopardize those two engagements.”

“What about his promise, as a man, that he would appear with me? When did he arrange with Mr. Ed Sullivan to go on last Sunday?”

“I don’t rightly remember,” said Johnny Dugan.

“Is Mr. Heston there?”

A moment’s hush fell between us. “Yes.”

“Put him on,” I said. There was some murmured conversation in the background, then the agent came back: “He’s busy.”

“Then please tell Mr. Heston to go to hell. I never would have asked if I’d known he had a conflicting job at $10,000. I’d have said ‘God bless you’ and certainly not have asked him to give it up.”

The Hearst papers went to town with front-page headlines as Ed continued shooting. TV columnists all over the country started playing up the feud between Sullivan and Hopper. He needed a gimmick to help him. “Heston played Moses in _The Ten Commandments_,” he said. “This week he was the Moses who led all these people out of the wilderness.” “All these people” were the alleged walkouts from my program. The complete list over which he raised hosannas consisted of:

Bette Davis, who was ill;

Steve McQueen, who was in Alaska;

Robert Horton, who left for an engagement at the London Palladium before we ever got started;

Joan Crawford, who was not notified in time by Talent Associates that they could not tape her segment in New York;

Tuesday Weld, with whom negotiations had not reached any conclusion;

Mickey Rooney, who could not match his schedule to ours for taping.

After the show Jack Benny asked me why I hadn’t invited him on. “I don’t know you as well as I do the others,” I replied. “I wasn’t sure you’d respond.”

“I’d have loved to,” said Jack. “You’ve no idea the pressure Ed put on me to appear with him when he started his shows.”

Just for the record, these are the people, in alphabetical order, who did make their appearances on “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood”: Lucille Ball, Anne Bauchens, Stephen Boyd, Francis X. Bushman, John Cassavetes, Gary Cooper, Ricardo Cortez, Robert Cummings, William Daniels, Marion Davies, Walt Disney, Janet Gaynor, Bob Hope, Hope Lange, Harold Lloyd, Jody McCrea, Liza Minnelli, Don Murray, Ramon Novarro, Anthony Perkins, Debbie Reynolds, Teddy Rooney, Venetia Stevenson, James Stewart, Gloria Swanson, King Vidor, and the four Westmore brothers.