The Politics of Hollywood Gossip: Hedda Hopper and Cold War Anti-Communism

In 1938, a struggling, underemployed supporting actress began writing a movie gossip column entitled “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood.”  Following in the footsteps of her soon-to-be archrival Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper emerged as a powerful figure in the Hollywood movie industry during its “golden age” and remained influential into the 1960s.  Syndicated in 85 metropolitan newspapers and thousands of small-town dailies and weeklies during the 1940s, Hopper’s column had an estimated daily readership of 32 million by the mid-1950s (out of a national population of 160 million). By the middle of this century, Hopper and her famous hats had become a Hollywood icon.  More importantly, she was a political figure and activist, wielding her gossip and mobilizing her readers to advance her conservative political agenda, particularly her strident anti-communism.  Hopper’s and her readers’ use of gossip—private talk made public—during the era of the Hollywood blacklist to excoriate Charlie Chaplin and exonerate Lucille Ball for their liberal politics reveals how they both violated and invoked a right to privacy in their defense of Cold War America. Attention to the content of Hopper’s columns and her readers’ letters demonstrates the power of the discourse of gossip, an important popular culture dimension to conservatism, and the complex appeal and circulation of right-wing ideologies in mid-twentieth-century America.