Word: hedda
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Fifty-Fifty. Hedda's ascent has created a serious problem for the studios. Once the question was: How do we make sure that Louella is the first to know? Now it has become: How do we manage to let Louella know first without getting Hedda hopping? Some publicity chiefs tried giving both girls the story at once. The result, neither would print it. Finally they tried doling out "scoops" on a nominal 50-50 basis (actually, Louella is given about 60%, and that is probably the clearest measure of her edge on Hedda...
...same meticulous protocol applies at banquets and in billing. Hedda and Louella must sit equidistant from the principal speaker. In advertising displays, the problem is impossible to solve by simple geometry. Top billing is better than bottom, and left is better than right; so it has become customary to reproduce only one woman's blurb at a time...
...Hedda's Whoppers. It has been suggested that, for all Hedda's slash & dash, her wild but indisputable charm and her whizzing success at her job, the head beneath the hats is something of an air pocket. In her very first column, she perpetrated a lulu to the effect that Greta Garbo, who was soon, she said, to marry Leopold Stokowski, had undergone inspection by Stokowski's patrician Philadelphia relatives. Stokowski has no patrician Philadelphia relatives. A rudimentary instinct for checking sources would have spared Hedda that blooper...
...publicity man, who has dealt with both Hedda and Louella, says: "You have to watch yourself with Hedda. When Louella has a story, she knows when it is dangerous and will check it. But Hedda will plunge in and print it, and go away in complete innocence that she has done anything wrong in being wrong." Hedda claims that she has never been sued...
...Hedda's Weapons. With all these handicaps-and after all, Beethoven was deaf-Hedda has some wicked weapons, and knows how to use them. She can print what she does about Hollywood people because she knows still fancier stuff that the mails would not carry, and because her own private life is blackmail-proof. And she knows how to turn her most outrageous mistakes into a joke. To one "planter's" hurt question why she had reduced his exclusive scoop to one line, low in her column (it was one of her mistakes), she crowed: "Bitchery, baby, pure...