Part 19

Ed blasted me twice before I tried to fire back. He was still banging away like thirty-nine weeks of “Wagon Train.” He tried another tactic. He complained to two show-business unions, the Screen Actors’ Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, that he found me guilty of “the most grievous form of payola.” “Here,” he said, “is a columnist using plugs in a column to get performers free.”

For this, I called him a liar. I have never pressured anybody to do anything for me in my life. On the air on January 10, the Hopper show did fine. Our rating matched Ed’s exactly--and we were brand-new. He didn’t appear that evening on his own show. His ulcer wouldn’t let him.

There was an epilogue. The United Services Organization gave a benefit luncheon at $25 a plate for Mary Martin at the Hotel Pierre in New York. I sat on the dais, due to make a speech, near Ed Sullivan, who was billed to introduce me. At least two hundred people at the other tables knew what had gone on between us, including Mary Patterson of the _News_, Joe’s widow.

Ed mumbled his few opening words without looking at me. I know the whole room was hoping I’d let fly. I said: “Thank you very much, Mr. Sullivan. That is the most beautiful introduction you have ever given me.” Then I went on with my speech.

“I expected fireworks,” Mary Patterson told me afterward.

“I wouldn’t do that to Mary Martin,” said I.

If this was television, they could keep it. Never in my life had anything like the brawl with “Stoneface” happened to me. Maybe a TV camera brings out the worst in people, though some of them do all right without much prompting.

I’ve known Elsa Maxwell for years. I met her long before she came out to Hollywood under contract to Darryl Zanuck to stage a party for him in a picture he was producing with Linda Darnell as its star. Elsa’s inspiration was to dress every male as Abraham Lincoln and have two poodles dancing on a piano. Then she booked herself a lecture at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium on her perennial theme: “How to Give a Party.” For a solid hour, while the audience fidgeted, she eulogized Zanuck. After the performance she found she’d run into a roadblock. The backers of her lecture refused to pay her fee. “Go ahead and sue,” they said cheerfully. “You never got around to your subject. Let Zanuck pay you.”

I dutifully reported this in the column and added: “If she thinks she’s going to collect any money from Zanuck, she’s out of her ever-loving mind.” By way of reply, she sent me a large, fragrant bunch of catnip. Another feud was on.

While she was visiting Hollywood as Evelyn Walsh McLean’s guest, Elsa organized a victory party to celebrate the liberation of Paris toward the end of World War II. It was set up in the garden of the Countess di Frasso, complete with special outdoor stage, footlights, spotlights, and special effects all supplied by Mr. F. B. Nightingale, a minor celebrity of Beverly Hills, sometimes known as “the wizard of light,” who was recommended to Elsa by Lady Mendl.

“Why not make it complete by inviting some GI’s? You’ll have a lot of vacant seats at the back,” I suggested to Elsa.

“I wouldn’t think of it,” she said. “It isn’t a party for them, it’s for my friends.”

Nevertheless, it was a beauty, with top stars singing and dancing in Mr. Nightingale’s extravaganza. He was so proud of his job that he donated his and his assistants’ labor to the cause, and charged only $200 for materials. He sent a succession of bills to Elsa. They went unanswered.

Finally, Lady Mendl called me. “This is dreadful. Mr. Nightingale needs that money.”

“Oh, come on, Elsie,” said I. “Let’s each send him a check for $100 and forget it.” She was willing, but not Mr. Nightingale. He sent Elsa a receipted bill to which he added a postscript: “Your friends Lady Mendl and Hedda Hopper took care of it.”

Within forty-eight hours I had a telephone call from Elsa, and I got a $100 check from her one day after that. Elsie Mendl had to wait two weeks. But she didn’t have a daily column.

Elsa has boasted: “I’m full of beans. You can’t embarrass an old woman like me.” Four of her friends once sat together at luncheon in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Each came from a different city, and each was well up in society. One woman steered the conversation to the subject of their common friend: “I felt desperately sorry for her when Elsa’s mother died in Los Angeles. She sent me a cable from Paris, saying she hadn’t a bean and would I cable $3000 so she could bury her mother. Of course, I was happy to.”

The woman across the table broke in. “But I had the same kind of cable, and I sent the money. It was I who buried Elsa’s mother.”

The third woman could scarcely believe her ears. “But I mailed Elsa a check for the same purpose.”

The fourth of them, who lived in San Francisco, said quietly: “You are all mistaken. My husband knew Elsa and her mother well. He had several cables from Elsa like that over the years. Finally, she convinced him she was telling the truth one day, but he went down to Los Angeles to make certain. Sure enough, her mother had died. My husband took care of her funeral.”

Elsa and I met again in San Francisco, during the birth there of the United Nations in 1945. Ina Claire was giving a party for Averell Harriman, who was then our ambassador to Moscow. As a joke, she confided to six other guests, including Elsa and myself, that each of us was the guest of honor. Harriman told us off-the-record tales of the horrors committed by Stalin and his gang. “How can you talk like that to us,” I demanded, “when you say just the opposite to the newspapers?”

“It couldn’t be printed,” was his only reply.

Elsa sailed away with that party, if you could believe what she wrote about it. She was Ina Claire’s real guest of honor--so Elsa said. Her special brand of self-promotion demands that she has a celebrated name to play on. She built her own reputation by using other people’s names, such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as the drawing card. She took up Maria Callas, and with the burning-eyed prima donna beside her, Elsa could attract virtually anybody into the Maxwell circle.

I was introduced to Callas and her then husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, by Henry Sell, who runs _Town and Country_ magazine. He gave a luncheon for the three of us at Pavillon. I did my bit, in turn, by introducing Maria to some people sitting directly across from us who were members of the board of the San Francisco Opera. “Why don’t you get her to open your season?” I prompted. Later, it was arranged that she would do just that, in _Lucia di Lammermoor_, the coming September and, in October, also launch the Los Angeles season.

But before either event could take place, Callas went to Europe and met Elsa, who fell hook, line, and sinker for her. The verbal bouquets blossomed in every Maxwell column. Overnight, Maria became “my favorite friend ... La Prima Donna del Mondo ... a goddess ... a joy forever.” She was out until all hours, caught up in a hectic round of parties. Preparations for _Lucia_ got lost by the wayside. Only a matter of days before she was due to arrive in San Francisco, she canceled out.

Elsa couldn’t forgive what I promptly wrote about her loved one, Maria: “The day of the temperamental opera star is over; has been for some time. Her rich husband, a businessman, should know you can’t do business that way.” San Francisco opera lovers couldn’t forgive Maria.

She wrote me from Milan: “If I wouldn’t always be in this nervous tension caused by these constant attacks by the papers and dishonest people and dishonest, jealous colleagues and so many other stupid things of artistic life, I would have nothing wrong with me. My nerves can stand just so much and not more. I’m sorry that I’m troubling you with these ridiculous things, but I feel you must know exactly how things are.... If you drop me a line, I’d be grateful, and please consider me your sincere friend.” She proved that in 1961 in Mallorca, when we had a jolly old time together.

Elsa couldn’t let it go at that. Thanks to Jack Paar, she landed herself a new job on his “Tonight” show on NBC and announced: “I have invaded TV. The great American public loves me.” Not every member of it, let it be said. Walter Winchell threatened to sue all twelve of Paar’s sponsors for $2,000,000 apiece after Jack and his companion had raised questions about Walter’s role as a good citizen.

Miss Maxwell decided to take it out on me, though I didn’t see her crowning performance. John Royal, NBC vice president, telephoned me the following morning about it. “She went on and tried to distort you,” he said. “I suggest you call your lawyer and get a transcript of what she said. More than that, make them show you a tape of the show. We tried to get her off the air once before when she talked about somebody on Broadway and made a gesture indicating the woman was crazy.”

“Why don’t you get her off now?”

“We can’t. Paar loves her. But if she slanders you, you can get her off. Put your lawyer on to it.” My New York lawyers are also the _News’_ lawyers. They insisted on a transcription from NBC. Their considered opinion was that Elsa stopped just short of libel. “What she wants,” they said, “is the publicity you and your circulation could give her. Our advice is ‘Don’t let her have it.’”

Not long ago Dave Chasen came across to the table at which I was sitting in his restaurant. In tow he had a dapper young man in a blue blazer with brass buttons. “Hedda,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Jack Paar.”

After we’d exchanged our how-do-you-do’s, I asked: “Mr. Paar, why do you hate newspaper people? They’ve been very good to you. You wouldn’t be where you are today but for them.” I thought he was going into his tears-in-the-eye routine, but I pressed on. “I certainly should hate you for what Elsa Maxwell did to me.”

“What did she say?” he asked, all innocence.

“I have a transcription in my office, though I don’t carry it around in my purse. But tell me, why do you hate newspaper people?” He excused himself and went off. I thought he was going to burst out crying.

By this time Jack Paar and Elsa Maxwell, who belong to the same cradle but a generation apart, had gone their separate ways. The Paar staff told me several times: “He’s very anxious to have you on his show.” But I refused. The inscrutable workings of television may have made Jack a bigger name than Bob Hope or Jack Benny, but insults leave a bad taste in the mouth.

My fellow target on the Paar show, Walter Winchell, did not always see eye to eye with me. We used to suffer from a chronic case of mutual astigmatism as far as the other was concerned. The symptoms developed rapidly during the war, when he was shunted off by the United States Navy on a mission to South America. Walter raised no objections except: who was going to look after his Sunday night radio show for the Andrew Jergens Company?

The chosen candidate to replace him was Hopper. But W.W. screamed in pain at the thought. What happened next is best told in its distinctive press style by _Daily Variety_ dated December 7, 1942, one year precisely after Pearl Harbor:

Hedda Hopper got caught among numerous complications last week that ended up in John Gunther, Robert St. John and Baukage taking over the Walter Winchell Jergens spot on the NBC chain last night instead of she.

Last Monday morning, Lennen-Mitchell agency handling the account made a deal with Dema Harshbarger, manager for Miss Hopper, to have the latter replace Winchell on the fifteen-minute period during his absence abroad. On Tuesday, confirmation came through from New York on the Hopper deal, and Jack Andrews, of the agency, was en route to Hollywood to start the ball rolling.

Miss Hopper in the meantime was preparing to take over the task when Thursday night she received a wire from New York informing her that due to complications the deal for her to fill the spot was off....

In radio circles it is understood that the Jergens outfit had changed its mind about having Miss Hopper replace Winchell after Andrews had been authorized to engage her for the December 6 broadcast. Also that the client had reversed its plan to engage her for the spot following Winchell, now occupied by the Parker family, starting January 3.

And that’s how Louella Parsons got the job following Winchell and stayed on the air four years.

It was clearly the moment for me to do a little yelling of my own, with some assistance from my attorneys, Gang, Kopp and Tyre. Our disagreement with Jergens and that company’s advertising agency was settled out of court. I received a check for $16,670. Walter took sly digs at me in his column as part of his own personal war effort clear through V-J day.

Then when the United Nations Charter was being framed in San Francisco, Hubbell Robinson of CBS asked me to fly up there to do two fifteen-minute broadcasts a week. I was to give the woman’s angle on the birth pangs of the world’s new peace baby. “I’d like to try,” I said, “even if it’s a long way from doing a Hollywood column. If I fall on my face, at least I shall have learned something.” I already had a once-a-week show for Armour and Company.

I flew my crew and myself up, expecting that a big network like CBS would have laid on all the necessary arrangements for us, since I was working for nothing and paying all my own expenses there. Not a bit of it. For my first show, interviewing some women delegates and wives of delegates from the founding nations, I learned two minutes before we went on the air that no announcer had been provided.

I scurried into the corridor outside the studio and grabbed the first man in sight. “Can you read?” He nodded, startled. “Then come on in. Here’s the script. I’ll give you a nod when it’s time, and you start reading where it says ‘Announcer.’”

We got on and we got off without casualties. Years later, when I was interviewing that calm, cool, and collected young man, Jack Webb, he said to me: “You know, you put me on radio, where I got started in show business. I was the guy you kidnaped one day in a CBS corridor in San Francisco. I was just out of uniform and needed a job.”

The first hesitant and somehow inspired sessions of the General Assembly were held in the San Francisco Opera House. Only the year before, I’d sat in a box there admiring the ladies and the glitter of a fashionable crowd listening to Puccini. Strictly as an observer of how the world was waging the peace, so I thought, I sat squeezed into one of the boxes of the Diamond Horseshoe with H. V. Kaltenborn on one side, Bill Henry on the other, and Walter Winchell to the rear with his knees digging into my back.

Walter was delivering some staccato comments into a microphone when a sound engineer tapped me on the shoulder: “You’re on next,” said he, “and you’ll have five minutes.” This was Friday.

“But I don’t start until Monday,” I whispered. Too late. I was on. I closed my eyes and prayed. I had no more idea than the man in the moon what I was going to say.

With my eyes closed, I thought how different it was now from the last time I’d been there. I said into the microphone: “The entire Diamond Horseshoe is now taken over by the press, cameras, radio equipment. Not one of the people who sat here a year ago is with us. They’re up in the gallery, and happy to be there because we’re all here for one reason, to help bring peace to a troubled world.”

I went on like that for five minutes. When I’d finished, Winchell thrust out his hand and said: “I’d like to congratulate you. I couldn’t have done that for the life of me.” And so we made up, and we’ve been good friends ever since.

_Fourteen_

Every time I go out on the town twisting, I murmur a silent apology to Elvis Presley. I realize that I’m indulging in the same gyrations that pushed Sir Swivel Hips along the road to fame. I told him in a note not long ago: “You’ll be surprised to know that I’m now doing the twist. Not as well as you, but I’m doing it. I have taken one inch off my waist and two off my _derrière_. Now I know how you keep so thin.”

When I originally saw the act, I was horrified. I said so, loud and clear. He was rolling around on the stage floor of the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Hollywood with his arms and legs wrapped around the microphone as though they were bride and groom. Nine thousand teens shrieked with excitement as he wiggled, jiggled, and bumped, and six husky policemen looked the other way. At the crucial point, from my front-row seat for opening night, I saw him give his bandsmen a broad wink that spoke volumes.

The policemen’s job was to keep the hands of the audience off the boy. He’s been manhandled so often by his frantic fans that he’s scared he’ll be torn to shreds someday, suffering the same fate as his shirts and suits. “If anyone comes down the aisle,” the loud-speakers announced, “Elvis will go off stage and not come back.” In his gold jacket with white lapels, he twisted and writhed for an hour, belting out the whole skull-cracking repertoire, from “Heartbreak Hotel” to “Jailhouse Rock.”

It was like a neighbor of ours in Altoona, who had fits, fell down, and squirmed on the sidewalk. Mother told me it was an illness and not to be upset. I hadn’t heard then about epilepsy.

The next day the Los Angeles police told Elvis to clean it up and tone it down. That night the six cops had their backs to the audience to make sure he did. I’d said my piece in the column: “Every muscle jerks as though he were a marionette. I’ve seen performers dragged off to jail for less. But Elvis’ audience got the emotional impact of the lines and screamed their undying love for the greatest phenomenon I’ve seen in this century.”

Time passed, but it doesn’t necessarily heal all wounds. When Norman Taurog, who directed Elvis in _G.I. Blues_, came up with the idea that his star and I should get together for luncheon, I fancied Presley might be tempted to swat me. “He isn’t what you expect,” Norman promised, so I went along, ready to keep my guard up.

I’ve seldom been more mistaken about anybody. I hadn’t been with Elvis five minutes when we were cozy as old pals who’ve been dragged apart and have a lot of talking to make up. His manners would have put Lord Chesterfield to shame. His face was firm, lean and unlined as a four-year-old’s. “What did you do with sideburns and the pompadour?” I asked.

“The army barber got the sideburns, and I gave the pompadour to the Sealy company to stuff mattresses with.”

“I’m one of those who felt you were a menace to young people who imitate you without realizing what they--or you--are doing.”

I must have sounded defensive. He smiled. “I gathered that. You can’t make everyone like you, but I try.” He toyed with a container of yoghurt, a bottle of Pepsi, and a cup of black coffee--nothing more. I remember how he used to lunch on a huge mound of mashed potatoes and a bowl of gravy, meat, tomatoes, a quart of milk, with half a dozen slices of thickly buttered bread to top it off.

Two years in the Army had brought many changes. I found that out when I talked with his commanding officer in Berlin. “I’d be happy if I had ten thousand more like him,” said the C.O. Sergeant Elvis, the highest-paid entertainer that ever lived, realized only $12 a month of his $145 pay because it was subject to ninety-one per cent surtax. But the trade in Presley souvenirs--a fantastic assortment of shirts, slacks, ties, statues, masks, dog tags, records, and sheet music--brought in $3,000,000 while he was out of civilian circulation.

He’s one of the few new faces in our industry who has been promoted into a living legend, and we need dream stuff like Elvis to survive. He owes his reputation to the labors of “Colonel” Tom Parker, the old-time carny and circus hand who isn’t above peddling photographs and programs at his protégé’s personal appearances to boost the take. He and his wife are childless; he’s quick to say he loves Elvis like a son. The “colonel,” with eyes like ball bearings and a mind like a bear trap, acts the part of the hick from the sticks in business dealings. “I only went to fifth grade” is his line, “so I have to go slow.” Elvis’ role is to create the impression of the country boy whose head is still awhirling from the bedazzling luck that’s befallen him.

“Sometimes a silly tale starts a lot of repercussions,” he told me. “One time I was out at the beach with some fellows throwing baseballs at milk bottles lined up in a booth. I kept on winning Teddy bears, and I gave them to the kids that gathered round. Then somebody printed a story that I owned a collection of Teddy bears. Ever since then they’ve been coming in from all over the world. I’ve got an attic full of them at my home in Graceland, Memphis. All kinds of bears, some in tuxedos, some dressed like me with guitars strapped to them. It’s fantastic.”

Elvis is an identical twin whose brother died at birth. His mother, who could bear no more children after that, is dead, too. That combination of circumstances may go toward explaining his built-in fear of being left alone, which keeps a hand-picked group of wiry young men, roughly his own age, constantly with him as companions, bodyguards, chauffeurs, and partners in judo and karate, two pastimes he picked up in the Army. The group includes his cousin, Gene Smith, an army buddy from Chicago, and boyhood pals from Memphis. If they’re temporarily unwanted in his company, they melt away in the flick of an eye.

The “colonel,” drawing on his circus experience, has seen to it that nobody has ever been hurt in any of the public melees that have a habit of building up around Elvis. But it makes for a secluded private life. When he’s in the mood to roller-skate, another hobby, he escapes the crowds by hiring an entire rink for the evening. He drops in at night clubs with his little gang and their dates only after the lights have dimmed for the floor show, and he leaves in a hurry if he’s recognized.

The same routine applies to his movie going--he sits in the last row and high-tails out if anybody stops by to stare. Every time he leaves his rented Bel Air home for the studio, he and his companions travel in two Cadillacs, one driven hard on the tail of the other. The same compulsion for protection from who knows what sometimes results in his being delivered to an auditorium or arena where he’s singing in a moving van, lying on a couch.

He works conscientiously at a long list of charities in semi-secrecy. In twelve months he will raise as much as $118,000 for benefits; prides himself that every cent of it goes to the chosen cause with nothing subtracted off the top for expenses. “We buy our own tickets, and no free tickets are handed out to anybody. We pay every entertainer on the program. When the benefit’s over, we give local newspapers a story in which every item of money is accounted for.”

Sooner or later, he says, he aims at becoming a good actor. It looks as though he’ll have to pick up his training in front of the cameras as Gary Cooper and many others did. He isn’t depending on the gyrations any longer. “They call it the twist, but it’s the same thing I’ve done for six years. The old wiggle is on the way out now.”

Apart from sensations like Elvis, the only place a young entertainer can get training is in television. The studio schools, where promising beginners were compelled to go to classes in speech, drama, dancing, or what have you, were disbanded years ago. The studios claimed they couldn’t afford them any longer. There’s very little point in a raw recruit trying to crash Hollywood today. My advice, if anybody asks for it, is: “Start in New York; get on TV; do bits on Broadway; then take a stab at movies. Otherwise, you’re going to find California can be a great spot to starve in.”