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.