Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  Lawford told Otash that he had been to the actress’s house to try to clean out any evidence of the affairs with the Kennedys, according to the detective, but he wanted Otash to double-check. “He said, ‘I took what I could find and destroyed it—period,’ ” said Otash. “But he said, ‘I’m so out of it, I would feel better if you went there.’ ” Otash was worried he’d be recognized, he said, so he sent someone else who found and destroyed incriminating material such as letters that Lawford may have missed.

  Otash became convinced, after that night, that he was in trouble. He felt he knew too much. In 1959 he had been convicted of conspiracy in a racehorse-doping incident, and though he claimed he had been set up and though the conviction was later reduced to a misdemeanor, the California Bureau of Private Investigators and Adjusters revoked his license in 1965 citing evidence of “moral turpitude.” Edmund Brown, who had prosecuted Otash in the Confidential trial, was by then the Governor of California. He was also a close political ally of the Kennedys, having helped Jack win the California primary in 1960, and Otash was convinced that his license had been revoked on Brown’s orders and that the Governor was acting at the behest of Robert Kennedy. “That son-of-a-bitch Bobby Kennedy,” Otash claimed, “had been trying to get me for years.”

  It was the end of Otash’s career as the world’s premiere gatherer of sleaze—he went on to become the head of security for the Hazel Bishop beauty salons and during the 1970s and 1980s was manager of the Hollywood Palladium. Otash died in 1992 at the age of seventy. His infamous tape of Marilyn Monroe, however, would surface nearly three decades after it was made and would help change the direction of tabloid television.

  * Twenty-five years later, Seymour Hersch resurrected the Durie Malcolm story in his book The Dark Side of Camelot and declared it true.

  * Apologists would later dismiss the self-censorship, arguing that until the tabloidization of the press in the late 1970s and 1980s politicians’ private lives were off limits. That is simply not the case. Throughout American history, politicians’ sex lives have been the subject of newspaper articles. The very first newspaper in America, Publik Occurrences Foreign and Abroad, reported in 1790 a rumor that the King of France was sleeping with his daughter-in-law. Thomas Jefferson’s affair with his slave, Sally Hemings, was first reported in the Richmond Record in 1802. When Andrew Jackson got married before his wife’s divorce was legal, the papers tormented him with stories about bigamy, and Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate child was so widely reported that it became the stuff of nursery rhymes.

  * Oleg set up dates for patriarch Joe Kennedy; they met every Tuesday night at eight at the swank midtown Manhattan restaurant La Caravelle. “I would usually bring some lady friends—top models or society girls,” according to Oleg, “although, on several occasions, Joe did the honors and, believe me, he knew some real beauties.” Jack Kennedy had an affair with Oleg’s wife, Gene Tierney.

  * Igor Cassini actually coined the phrase “Jet Set.” His predecessor, Maury Paul, had coined the phrase “Cafe Society.”

  * If Cassini was paid for his services, he would have been required to register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which was enacted to identify spies. Cassini has always maintained that he was never paid and, indeed, a check was never found.

  * Confidential again took the opportunity to bash a gossip columnist. “The Truth About that Jet Set Suicide” claimed that Charlene Wrightsman killed herself over her husband’s infidelities.

  * Lawford denied this account to the Los Angeles Times and offered to take a lie detector test. When the Times took him up on it, he declined. He died shortly thereafter.

  6

  the divas

  In September 1964, Louella Parsons, the greatest Hollywood gossip columnist who ever lived, broke her hip. Louella had been feeble for a while both physically and mentally; but after she broke her hip, she never fully recovered. For a while she gallantly tried to continue writing her column, making the slow, painful trip from her bedroom down the hall to her office, but she never really wrote again, and the next year, at age eighty-three, the grand dame of gossip went into a Hollywood nursing home.

  The dowager ruler of Hollywood had finally left her throne. “She was Queen of Hollywood,” Life magazine proclaimed, “the very embodiment of its hopes, its dreams, its fears and its responses … her home on Beverly Hill’s Maple Drive was the closest thing to Buckingham Palace the movie industry ever boasted.”

  When word of Louella’s retirement reached her nemesis Hedda Hopper, the slightly younger, always less powerful Hopper spent the night celebrating. It was Lucille Ball Day at the New York World’s Fair, and the seventy-nine-year-old former showgirl literally kicked off her shoes and danced until dawn. Her rivalry with Louella was so all-consuming that Hedda didn’t notice that the kingdom she had inherited had all but vanished. Two years later, on January 30, 1966, Hedda caught double pneumonia and died within two days. News of Hedda’s death reached Louella at her Hollywood nursing home, where the former queen of gossip had become virtually mute, silently watching old movies on TV all day. When she was told that Hedda had died, however, a smile crossed Louella’s face and she spoke for the first time anyone there could remember. “GOOD!” she said.

  If the gossip industry had a golden age, it coincided with the “golden age” of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s. And, like Hollywood during those years, the gossip industry had its constellation of fixed stars. Chief among them was Walter Winchell, who is often credited with inventing the gossip column. Just below Winchell in the firmament were “the ladies,” as the syndicated columnists, and legendary rivals, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper were referred to jointly. Like Winchell, “the ladies” were more famous and more powerful than many of the movie stars they covered. Louella, the more influential of the two, was, by most accounts, Hollywood’s first gossip columnist (Winchell started out as a Broadway columnist). “Hollywood loved her,” noted writer Paul O’Neil. “She was Queen—the one it deserved—and she reigned for forty years.”

  Indeed, the accolades and honors bestowed upon Louella during the years when her power was at its peak routinely invoked royalty. When Louella’s boss, William Randolph Hearst, threw a party for her in 1948, eight hundred of Hollywood’s most famous movie stars and most powerful moguls jammed Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel to pay homage.

  “No queen,” Louis B. Mayer toasted her, “could wish for richer jewels than the bright crown of friendship you possess.”

  “You have a heart,” Darryl Zanuck declared, “as big as the church itself.”

  It wasn’t, of course, Louella’s heart that Hollywood loved, but the one thousand or so newspapers that carried her daily column. During the 1930s through the 1950s, she and Hedda were an unofficial but essential part of the Hollywood studio systerm. Studio executives, well aware that the public curiosity the columnists fed with their items about the stars heightened the box office appeal of those stars and thus increased studio profits, parceled out items to Hedda and Louella every day. They also forced stars to cooperate in giving exclusives to the two women. In return, Hedda and Louella were careful never to antagonize the studio moguls themselves. And in fact, they were ardent defenders of the studio system.

  Louella often referred to Hollywood as “this marvelous town” and sang the praises of “our magnificent industry.” Although she is remembered as a shrewish harridan, she was, in fact, a protector of the stars. She knew much more about them than she ever revealed. In fact, since her husband, Docky, was a urologist for Twentieth Century Fox and frequently administered tranquilizers or testosterone shots to stars, she often found out about their medical conditions before the stars themselves did—and she usually kept quiet about them. While she did, from time to time, chide or even attack stars, the scoldings usually took place when actors and actresses violated moral codes—as when Ingrid Bergman scandalized American moviegoers by becomin
g pregnant out of wedlock—or when they disobeyed the orders of studio executives. “This is the first time I have publicly spanked Judy,” Louella wrote in 1949 after Garland failed to lose fifteen pounds as directed by MGM. “But I can’t understand her attitude after all that has been done for her.”

  Hedda Hopper was more caustic than Louella, but even she saw herself as a champion of Hollywood, as a promoter of its stars and its values. She liked to think she played the role of a stern—but loving—aunt. Hedda, for example, felt that she had practically discovered Elizabeth Taylor, and would privately advise the star on her wardrobe and her love life. When Taylor confided to Hedda that she was having an affair with Eddie Fisher, Hedda broke the story as though she had a moral obligation, not only to her readers but to Hollywood at large and the actress herself, to do so. “I had no regret,” she said. “Without a sense of integrity, you can’t sleep at nights.”

  The two columnists’ truly vicious behavior usually involved their rivalry, their fights over scoops. For example, when Clark Gable and Carole Lombard got married in 1939, Louella banned them from her column for several months because they didn’t give her the story exclusively. Joan Crawford was careful not to make the same mistake; when she got married to Philip Terry in 1948, she notified Louella immediately. That, of course, infuriated Hedda. Upon reading Louella’s scoop, Hedda telephoned Crawford and declared: “I will ruin you!” When Crawford ran into Hedda at a Hollywood party, she stretched her arms toward the columnist and begged for forgiveness. Hedda abruptly walked away. So when Rock Hudson married Phyllis Gates in 1955, they played it smart. As soon as vows were exchanged, Rock got on the phone and called the story in to Louella Parsons while Phyllis was on the other line, giving it in to Hedda Hopper.

  In the 1950s, when stars like Jimmy Stewart and Bette Davis began defecting from the studios and hiring independent agents, the studio system that had produced so many classic movies began to fall apart. New stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean held the system, and Hedda and Louella, in contempt and refused to cooperate with them. The columnists, for their part, continued writing about aging studio stars like Clark Gable—Louella invariably referred to him as “the king”—and ridiculed the new generation.

  At the same time, many of the newspapers that carried their columns began to fold. In late 1962, a printers’ strike that lasted 114 days killed or seriously crippled a number of New York papers, including the New York Mirror, Winchell’s home base. Louella’s hometown outlet, the Los Angeles Examiner, folded in 1962. In 1966, the great Herald Tribune folded. In 1967, the World Journal Telegram, a conglomerate of papers hoping to join forces in an effort to stay alive, collapsed. Most towns were left with only one newspaper—usually the more established, upscale paper—and the tabloid wars that had characterized the pretelevision era disappeared. Editors in one-paper towns began to reevaluate the role of their publications. Without the need to use blaring headlines, scandal, and gossip in the old daily competition for circulation with other papers, they could afford to refine the definition of news, to distinguish it more sharply from entertainment, to make it more serious and more sober. Socially conscious editors and reporters also became openly disdainful of Hollywood and celebrities. The once feared and revered Louella, in particular, became a source of ridicule, an aging and somewhat daffy relic. In one oft-repeated, perhaps apocryphal incident, some friends dropped by Parsons’s home to take her to a movie screening and the gossip diva answered the door buck naked except for red shoes and a matching hat and handbag. She then excused herself, went into the rest room and ten minutes later came out declaring, “Well that was the worst damn picture I ever saw!” John Barrymore called her “that old udder” and Marlon Brando referred to her as “The fat One.” “[Louella’s] column limited itself almost completely to trivia—production news from the studios and items concerning the love affairs, marriages, quarrels, divorces, peccadilloes and pregnancies of featured players,” a snide Life piece noted at the time of her retirement. “But if she was narrow, semi-illiterate and often moved by blubbering sentimentality, so were many of her peers in the movie colony.”

  With Hedda and Louella gone, many assumed that the era of gossip was dead. “Who shall replace the Mmes Parsons and Hopper?” Bob Thomas, the veteran Hollywood correspondent for the Associated Press, wondered in an article in 1968. “Probably no one. Their successors are pretenders to thrones that no longer exist. Gone are the days when Hollywood was a tight little town that ruled the entertainment world and hence could be ruled by feminine columnists.”

  There was, however, a small but determined group of gossip columnists who were ferociously vying for the position. They were a peculiarly determined lot, trying against the odds to persuade reluctant editors around the country that gossip still mattered. One of them was Cindy Adams.

  The former Cindy Heller was an almond-eyed former beauty queen and stand-up comic from Queens who had a string of fifty-seven dubious beauty titles, including Miss Coaxial Cable 1949, Miss Torso of 1949, Miss Upswept Hairdo of 1948, Miss Brooklyn Dodgers of 1947, Queen of the Night Club Division of the March of Dimes, Miss Bagel, Miss Manischewitz Wine of 1948, and Miss Bazooka Bubble Gum of 1948. Cindy had tried to use her string of unlikely titles to break into show business—performing stunts like blowing Bazooka bubbles at Bergen Junior College in Teaneck, New Jersey, to demonstrate inflation. Then, in 1951, Cindy Heller met comedian Joey Adams, who was on the periphery of Sinatra’s Rat Pack and was married to Walter Winchell’s sister, Mary. She became Cindy Adams on Valentine’s Day, 1952. Although she would later claim that she was seventeen when she got married, according to an announcement at the time, she was twenty-one. A friend insists that even then, she was shaving off a few years.*

  Joey introduced Cindy to his friend Frank Sinatra and various political leaders he had entertained, and, after failing to make it as a singing and dancing sidekick in Joey’s stand-up comedy act, the young Mrs. Adams decided to cash in on these contacts by becoming a gossip columnist. By 1960, her column “Cindy Says” was syndicated in ten newspapers, including the Miami Beach Sun and the Bridgeport Herald in Connecticut. Although her success was modest, the beautiful young wife of the older Borscht Belt comedian cut quite a figure, and she played it to the hilt. She wore stunning jewels, rode in a limousine, decorated her apartment in red, dressed only in red clothes and wrote only with a red pen. “I even think in red,” she told Editor and Publisher in 1960. “I go out seven nights a week, go to all the plays on opening night. I know everybody, go to parties all the time and report it all in a brassy and breezy way.”

  In 1961, Joey and a group of performers were chosen to make a “Good Will Tour” of Southeast Asia on behalf of Kennedy’s Cultural Exchange program. Cindy Adams came along and addressed the crowds in their native tongues, just like Jacqueline Kennedy had done, Joey said. “The payoff was to be a better understanding of the democracy that is America,” he noted. “It was my thought that maybe we could bring a little joy to a troubled world.”

  Not everyone agreed. A House appropriations subcommittee questioned the wisdom of spending more than $250,000 on a vaudeville act. It also expressed outrage that the “goodwill” mission was characterized by feuding among its members, that Cindy Adams addressed the Prime Minister of Afghanistan as “honey,” and that she wrote a column calling three members of the Laotian royal family “those three cranky princes.” Rival gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen ridiculed Adams and company in her column, calling it a waste of taxpayers’ money. “Mrs. Adams is bombing around the globe,” she wrote. Kilgallen wrote:

  Joey Adams, a comedian whose talent I will not attempt to evaluate, is touring around the globe with a bunch of performers under the auspices of the State Department to the tune of $10,000 a week to prove that the United States has tap dancers and a fellow who can blow up balloons in the shapes of giraffes and elephants. I am not making this up.

  What’s more, Mr. Adams’s wife, Cindy, is along on the junket fo
r the sole purpose of introducing the various acts in the language of the country being entertained…. If our diplomats abroad need Joey and Cindy Adams to convert the shepherds of Afghanistan to democracy, then we are in real trouble.

  A gossip feud erupted, and Cindy accused Dorothy of being jealous of her, as a younger, sexier gossip columnist. Cindy called Dorothy “a vulgar old crone” and wrote a vitriolic attack in which she accused Kilgallen of being an alcoholic. Kilgallen filed a $1 million suit against Adams, and Cindy and Joey countersued.*

  Despite the publicity from the feud, Cindy was having trouble breaking into any major newspapers, and in 1965 she parlayed her newfound friendship with foreign despots into a book-writing career. Amid rumors, denied by Cindy, that she had an affair with mass murdering Indonesian dictator Sukarno, Cindy Adams wrote Sukarno: An Autobiography.† Sukarno’s “autobiography” was met with mixed reviews, to put it kindly. Dan Kurzman wrote in the Herald Tribune that “The book often reads as if it were the handiwork of a high school freshman struggling to pass an English course.”* Then, Sukarno was overthrown in 1968, a new government took power in Indonesia, and Cindy’s lifetime visa was canceled. She cozied up to her pals Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos and the Shah of Iran and continued to write for small, local newspapers. She would resurface later when the climate was kinder to gossip.

  Another gossip columnist trying to make a name for herself during this period was Doris Lilly. Doris was a holdover from Cafe Society, a vivacious, socially connected, tall blond beauty who dated, among others, John Huston, Joe DiMaggio, Evelyn Waugh, Walter Winchell, and Cary Grant. Lilly was raised near Santa Monica, and moved to New York in 1946. She got her entree into the world of celebrity through John Huston, whom she met in a drugstore. The director was eager to get the beautiful young woman in bed, according to Lilly, and he agreed to marry her when she was still in her teens. They flew to Juarez, Mexico, where they had a quick ceremony witnessed by Humphrey Bogart. Within a matter of months, Lilly caught Huston in bed with another woman and filed for divorce—and learned that her marriage was never legal in the first place. Huston, Lilly said, had got a bit actor from his movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre to pose as the priest and had convinced Bogart to go along with the ruse. Lilly was furious and consulted lawyers, but, she said, Huston talked her out of suing, persuading her he could help her career more if they remained friends and allies. And it was true. The director introduced her to Hollywood’s elite. Mike Todd soon signed her up to be in a show, and in the years to come she had steamy affairs with some of the best-known actors of her time, including Gene Kelly, who was then married. She was less impressed with lovers Ronald Reagan, who wrote rather vapid love letters to her,* and Joe DiMaggio, who, she said, was “about as exciting in bed as a bowl of cornflakes.”