“Like the devil I will,” I countered crisply. Louella is certain to this day that I got a better present than she did. Another store’s mistake brought me two handsome cut-crystal decanters for another Yuletide, one engraved HH, the other LOP. “Would you return hers to me?” said their donor.
“Not for the world. It makes such a gay conversation piece when I can ask a guest: ‘Would you like some Jack Daniels out of Louella’s bottle?’”
I regard her ungrudgingly as a good reporter, though she doesn’t always get her facts straight where I’m concerned. (Nor do I sometimes.) She invariably pretends that I am published only in the Los Angeles Times, so her followers won’t know about the syndicate, which gives Hopper a considerable edge in readership.
She has sometimes been tripped by her own prose. When Warners years ago chose Alan Mowbray to play George Washington in Alexander Hamilton, she took aim and fired: “It seems strange to me that an Englishman would be cast as the father of our country.” During the days when Mussolini invaded Albania and lives were snuffed out by the thousands, she decided: “The deadly dullness of the past week was lifted today when Darryl Zanuck announced he had bought all rights to The Blue Bird for Shirley Temple.”
In a reminiscent mood she noted: “I don’t know how many of my readers remember John Barrymore and Dolores Costello in Trilby, the George Du Maunier story, but my mind goes back to John just loving the part of Svengali, wearing a black beard and hypnotizing the artist’s model who could only sing when he cast his baleful eye on her.” As Irving Hoffman recalled: “There wasn’t a thing wrong in the story except that the name of the picture was Svengali, not Trilby, the leading lady was Marian Marsh, not Dolores Costello ... du Maurier wrote it, not Du Maunier.”
Louella left me with egg on my face with her exclusive story that Ingrid Bergman was going to have a baby by Roberto Rossellini while she was still the wife of Dr. Peter Lindstrom. This, a few months after I’d interviewed Bergman at the scene of the crime and left Rome convinced by her that Italian newspapers had lied in their linotypes when they called her pregnant.
I will always believe that Joe Steele (the press agent employed both by her and her studio boss, Howard Hughes) subsequently told the truth to Louella. When her scoop appeared and the newspapers were hunting for Joe, they couldn’t find him. Seems she had persuaded him he was in bad shape, made sure he didn’t suffer thirst or hunger, then kept him safe and sound for three days away from her competitors.
After her story had been spread to the world, it seemed like a good idea to do something to help Ingrid, who wanted a quick divorce so that her baby could be spared at least a part of the stigma. I thought that perhaps she could be smuggled by plane out of Italy to some other country, where only friends would know exactly when or if the child was born.
Plans were going beautifully when the plan was broached to Ingrid. She refused to have anything to do with it. She would have her child proudly, she said, and if anyone didn’t like the idea he could lump it.
In 1951, Docky Martin died of cancer in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. It was a crushing blow for Louella. Not long ago, she found herself there, too, for an operation. The feebleness in her voice alarmed me. “I’m so tired of this place,” she said, “and I’m so sick.”