Although the pub-ad chieftains—and presumably company heads and other execs—are sizzling at Miss Hopper for further needling the Washington probe, probability is that there will be no concerted action to cut off her news sources or otherwise penalize her. Similar thoughts have arisen in the past concerning other columnists and have never worked out.
Industry execs feel that not only Miss Hopper, but all writers whose living depends on Hollywood should take a cooperative attitude.
The truth was that no subpoena had been issued, and none ever was. Someone had planted the story on that unsuspecting publication. Of all the items about me that were printed in its columns over the months ahead, only one hurt. That was a front-page, banner-lined interview with George Sokolsky, the Hearst political commentator and an old friend. He’d wept openly on my shoulder—I top him by an inch or two in high heels—at the 1952 Republican convention in Chicago when Ike Eisenhower walked off with the nomination instead of Bob Taft.
When George arrived in Los Angeles on a lecture tour, he was nabbed by a Variety reporter and quoted as saying that Hopper was a political babe in arms. That stung. A year went by before I got a chance to set him straight—in an elevator descending to the lobby of the Waldorf Towers in New York. I felt better when he wrote me afterward:
I was asked a question which did not include your name and which I answered without knowing it referred to you. When the question and answer appeared in print, I was chagrined to find that it was made to apply to you personally.... We differ slightly on methods, but that is not as important as that we agree in principle. I regard myself as a missionary trying to win back the lost souls.... Perhaps your sterner creed is more correct than mine, and I do not want ever to quarrel with you over this particular difference. You must do it your way, and I shall have to do it mine. Please forgive me.
The pot shots loosed off in my direction from some quarters of our town didn’t cost me any sleep. I was raised to believe in the stern tradition of “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you.” Abraham Lincoln put it a touch more graciously: “If I were to read, much less to answer, all the attacks on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.” I believe in that, too; the quote is printed on a sign that stands on my desk.
Hollywood’s top brass is used to buying things, but they couldn’t buy me or my silence. Dore Schary once offered to put the Hopper name up on a big Broadway sign, but it wasn’t hard to refuse that bit of coaxing. All the major producers threatened to pull their advertising out of the Los Angeles Times unless I sweetened up my printed opinions of their pictures. That suited Publisher Norman Chandler just fine. Advertising space was very tight, Norman told them. “I like the way Miss Hopper expresses herself, and you’ll be doing me a service if you cut back on ads.” They didn’t cancel a line. I didn’t hear about this until three years later. Everybody should have a friend like Norman Chandler.
I was flattered in a different way to learn that Confidential had its West Coast gumshoe toiling for six months to find something to pin on me, past or present. Howard Rushmore reported that they finally quit empty-handed. “We wasted our time,” he said dolefully.
“I could have told you that before you started. I’ve never knuckled down to anyone in Hollywood. I’m not beholden to anybody, and I’ve never had romances with any one of them from the day I came out here.”
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