Hedda Hopper, gossip queen extraordinaire

This image from 1942 shows Hedda Hopper in a slip and pearls, long after her career as a silent film actress had ended in the 1930s. (Ted Allan)

Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper is shown here in 1961 dressed in an evening gown. (Paul A. Hesse Studios)

This 1950 photo by Ben Polin shows Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in her favorite hat, an Easter bonnet created by famed designer Lilli Dache.

Syndicated gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, at left, appeared in Pittsburgh in 1963 to promote her book, “The Whole Truth and Nothing But.” Wtih her is Ernest Stern and his wife, Regina.

An undated photo of Elda Furry, who became Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.

Her real name was Elda Furry, and she was a butcher’s daughter from Altoona who could not wait to leave rural Pennsylvania.

Born in 1885 in Hollidaysburg, Pa., she left the Carter Conservatory of Music in Pittsburgh and headed to New York to become a chorus girl on Broadway.

For $10, a numerologist determined that her new first name should be Hedda. It paired well with the last name of DeWolf Hopper, a silent screen star she married.

By 1915, Hedda Hopper was in Hollywood, where she acted in more than 120 silent films, earning her the nickname “Queen of the Quickies.”

By the 1930s, she was finished as an actress and began writing newspaper stories to pay the bills. Soon, she discovered that writing gossip about Hollywood stars paid handsomely. Affairs, divorces and abrupt departures from Hollywood filled her weekly column.

During the era of the Hollywood blacklist, the words in her syndicated column ruined careers and lives because she relied on FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to tell her which talented people in Tinseltown should be branded as Communists, or Communist sympathizers.

So, it’s nothing less than ironic that a book she published in 1963 was titled “The Whole Truth and Nothing But.”

Hedda Hopper, who died in 1966, is buried in Altoona.