‘GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD COMPANY’: HEDDA HOPPER, HOLLYWOOD GOSSIP, AND THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST CHARLIE CHAPLIN, 1940-1952 pptx

AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 73

‘GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD COMPANY’:
HEDDA HOPPER, HOLLYWOOD GOSSIP, AND THE CAMPAIGN
AGAINST CHARLIE CHAPLIN, 1940-1952

JENNIFER FROST

ABSTRACT: Prominent in the motion picture industry and among political
conservatives in the mid-twentieth-century United States, Hollywood gossip
columnist Hedda Hopper, together with her readers, had an impact on
American popular and political culture during the Cold War, an impact
most evident in Hopper’s campaign against film actor and filmmaker
Charlie Chaplin in the 1940s and early 1950s. In collaboration with
anticommunist forces inside and outside Hollywood, Hopper and her
readers contributed to the revocation of Chaplin’s U.S. re-entry visa in
1952 which, in turn, led to Chaplin’s decision to leave the United States
permanently. Far from being ‘trivial’ or ‘idle’ talk, Hopper’s gossip column
and her readers’ responses condemned Chaplin’s personal, political, and
professional life and blurred the invisible but influential boundary between
what was considered ‘public’ and ‘private’ in Cold War America.

In 1938, a struggling, underemployed supporting actress and fledgling
writer had her syndicated movie gossip column picked up by the Los
Angeles Times. With that ‘Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood’ had the audience it
needed. 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, 3000 small town dailies,
and 2000 weeklies during the 1940s, Hopper’s column had an estimated
daily readership of 35 million by the mid-1950s (out of a national

population of 160 million).
1
Among these readers were filmgoers and fans
who wrote enough letters in response to the content of Hopper’s column to
employ two clerks working full time by the early 1940s.
2
By the middle of
the last century, Hopper in her famous hats had become a Hollywood icon,
even gracing the cover of the July 28, 1947 issue of Time magazine.

The staples of Hopper’s column, as with all Hollywood gossip and fan
magazines, were the actual—and manufactured—details about the private
lives and personal problems of Hollywood stars. Gossip played a key role in
the intertextual mix of movie roles and off-screen personalities, of public
images and private lives that created the star persona.
3
Hollywood gossip
could be favourable or malicious. Although most Hollywood gossip was
and is favourable, as its purveyors need to support the motion picture
industry upon which they depend, the popular image of Hopper was that of
74 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
a ‘vicious witch’ who engaged in ‘bare-nailed bitchery.’
4
She positioned
herself as the voice of small-town America and used her column to express
what she saw as proper mores and values and to advise, and chastise, the
residents of ‘Hollywood Babylon’ about their actual and alleged behaviour.
As a consequence, the lives of individual stars became subject to popular
criticism from Hopper’s readers and other moviegoers.
5

Yet, Hopper saw herself and acted not only as a newspaper columnist,
Hollywood insider, and moral arbiter but also as a political figure. Always a
political conservative and a proud, active, and highly partisan member of
the Republican Party, Hopper used her journalistic platform to express her
political values, endorse candidates, report on her political activities, and
mobilize her readers around a variety of contemporary political issues. The
political content of her column often prompted newspaper editors to
complain that she had been hired to write about entertainment—not
politics—but she simply ignored them, with no loss of business until near
the end of her career in the 1960s.
6
It helped that she won a major contract
for her column with the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate
in 1942 and had the support of Col. Robert McCormick, the politically
conservative owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. In her column,
Hopper expressed strong opposition to the New Deal in the 1930s, U.S.
intervention during World War II, and the civil rights movement in the
1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. At the core of her conservatism, however, was her
vehement anticommunism, which led to her enthusiasm for the Cold War at
home and abroad. Hopper achieved the height of her prominence in popular
culture in 1947, just as the Cold War began, and her career supported and
benefited from the Cold War. By rallying her readers to fight ‘the Red
Menace,’ Hopper contributed to a grassroots anticommunism that conveyed
popular support for the Cold War; in turn her staunch anticommunism
brought her visibility and power inside and outside Hollywood.

The intertwining of politics, personal life, and popular culture around
Hopper’s movie gossip column during the Cold War reveals how she and

her readers blurred the imaginary yet influential boundary between what
was considered to be ‘public’ and ‘private’ in mid-twentieth-century
America. Gossip was understood to be private talk—talk about those things
which ought to kept private—voiced, often illegitimately, in the public
realm. Not coincidentally, gossip also was seen as ‘women’s talk,’ a
gendered activity, brought into a gendered domain, the masculinist public.
Reinforcing the gendered nature of Hollywood gossip were the facts that
Hopper and most of her reader-respondents were female. Yet, as in
traditional societies, Hollywood gossip also had a public function. It shared
information and knowledge, contributed to a sense of community among
moviegoers, and, in Hopper’s case, provided a platform and an audience for
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 75
her political views. As practiced by Hopper and her readers, Hollywood
gossip became an arena for discussion and debate—‘a discursive political
forum’
7
—about significant and contested issues of public and private life
and their intersections in mid-twentieth-century America.

Of all of the instances of discussion and debate that Hopper’s long career
generated, one stands precisely at the intersection of public and private life:
Hopper’s campaign against the film actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin in
the 1940s and early 1950s. For over a decade, Hopper mounted a campaign
against Charlie Chaplin, her ‘bête noir,’ according to Hopper’s biographer
George Eells.
8
She consistently criticized his professional output of the
1940s and early 1950s—The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux
(1947), and Limelight (1952)—his political support for liberal and left
causes, and his personal life, including his status in the United States as a

resident non-citizen, and his sexual and marital relationships with women.
No other campaign in her career targeted the totality of a Hollywood
insider’s life. Although Hopper singled out specific criticisms at different
points in her anti-Chaplin campaign, she found his personality and his
politics, his private life and his motion picture productions equally
egregious. Reporting both facts and rumours on all three fronts—the
personal, the political, and the professional—Hopper aimed to ruin
Chaplin’s career in Hollywood, and she worked with allies inside and
outside the industry to achieve this aim.

Hopper’s red scare politics linked her to important forces in domestic
anticommunism within and beyond Hollywood, and she collaborated with
these forces in a far-reaching campaign against Chaplin between 1940 and
1952. Her critical commentaries on Chaplin appeared unedited in the
Chicago Tribune, which stood out among major newspapers for its
consistently damaging coverage of Chaplin during these years.
9
Hopper also
was a prominent member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the
Preservation of American Ideals, founded in 1944 to fight Communist
‘subversion’ in the motion picture industry, and she cooperated with the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the House Committee on Un-
American activities (HUAC), and reactive pressure groups such as the
American Legion and the Catholic War Veterans. These forces succeeded in
their anti-Chaplin efforts when the U.S. Department of Justice revoked
Chaplin’s re-entry visa in 1952, leading to Chaplin’s decision to leave the
United States permanently. Hopper’s contribution to the campaign against
Chaplin drew strong support from her reader-respondents who objected to
Chaplin’s liberal-leftist politics, his movies, and his alleged violation of
dominant standards of morality and traditional gender norms. Attention to

the views and actions of Hopper and her readers indicate both the power of
popular conservatism and how issues of public and private life—true and
76 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
rumoured—played out and intertwined in Hollywood gossip and national
life in Cold War America.

Private Life, Personal Behaviour

Hedda Hopper never liked Charlie Chaplin. Although she admired the
artistry of his early film career—‘I bow to his talent, which verges on
genius’—he did what a Hollywood gossip columnist could not tolerate: he
ignored her.
10
Chaplin’s worldwide fame and extensive economic resources
gave him an extraordinary measure of independence within the motion
picture industry, so he did not have to ‘truckle to gossip columnists.’
11

Unlike other filmmakers, he never complained about being left out of
Hopper’s column and never responded to her praise or criticism. ‘It was
galling,’ Eells notes.
12
‘Hedda was like a big kid,’ a Hollywood publicist
remembered. ‘Chaplin had slighted her.’
13
Later on, after dealing with
Hopper’s animosity for years, when Chaplin did have some news—the
announcement of his 1943 marriage to Oona O’Neill, for example—he gave
the story to Hopper’s rival, Louella Parsons.
14

Hopper labelled him ‘the
least co-operative star,’ reported negatively on his desire to ‘keep his name
out of the papers—which is what he’s always wished,’ and was delighted
when Chaplin, after shunning the public spotlight, found himself in need of
publicity to market his latest film. ‘Well, well. Charlie Chaplin hired a press
agent. Brother, he can use one.’ ‘Dear Charlie,’ she added acidly, ‘It’s
different when you’ve got something to sell, isn’t it?’
15


Further infuriating Hopper was the fact that Chaplin, born in England, lived
in the United States for decades, making movies and money, and yet he
never became an American citizen. She constantly referred to his lack of
U.S. citizenship, calling Chaplin ‘the man who came to dinner and stayed
40 years’ and considering him insufficiently appreciative or patriotic
towards the United States: ‘he—who’s not an American citizen—continues
taking advantage of the tolerance of a country which made him millions and
gave him a home.’
16
She accused him of a lack of patriotism during World
War I—forgetting his prominent Liberty Bond campaign—and World War
II, contending he had acted selfishly by hiring round-the-clock bodyguards
despite the ‘man power shortage.’
17
Hopper never missed a chance to
declare, erroneously, Chaplin’s longing to leave the United States, reporting
variously on his plans to ‘quit Hollywood and spend his declining years
elsewhere’ or his ‘arrangements to make his future pictures in Argentina,’
and then having to retract these statements later.
18

A number of Hopper’s
readers endorsed the idea of Chaplin’s departure. ‘Let him go to England
and stay there, not earn his money here and refuse to be a citizen,’ wrote
one New York woman.
19
These attacks on Chaplin’s status as a non-citizen
revealed the nativist beliefs of Hopper and these reader-respondents. Hopper
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believed until proven otherwise that non-Americans living within the
borders of the United States posed a threat to the nation.

To Hopper, Chaplin represented not only an alien threat but also a moral
threat. Chaplin’s reputation as a moral or sexual ‘subversive’
20
emerged
from his real and alleged sexual and marital relations with women,
particularly with young women, and Hopper reinforced this reputation for
him in her column. Married unsuccessfully three times, his fourth marriage
with O’Neill, daughter of the famous author and playwright Eugene
O’Neill, was a lasting one. Chaplin met his future fourth wife when she was
seventeen, and, although the pair waited until her eighteenth birthday to
marry, the thirty-six year gap in their ages appalled Hopper—despite or
perhaps because of a similar age gap between her and De Wolf Hopper,
whom she divorced in 1924.
21
Over the years, Hopper accused Chaplin of
using and abusing young women through casual sexual affairs and ‘casting-
couch promiscuity’: giving or promising the woman a leading role in his
latest film, having a sexual relationship, and then dropping her from the film
and his life.

22
In late 1943, Hopper reported on the ‘many screen tests of
girls whom he’s discovered, which have never seen the light of day.’ She
also emphasized the young age of the women in his life, introducing ‘little
Oona O’Neill, Chaplin’s latest lady, who just passed her 18
th
birthday’ and
recalling the story of an actress ‘who was a youngster hardly out of pigtails,
busy with her schoolbooks, when her Chaplin chance came along.’
23


But Hopper dealt her greatest blow to Chaplin’s moral reputation on June 3,
1943 when she facilitated and then broke the story of actress Joan Barry’s
paternity lawsuit against him, a scandal that led to three trials during World
War II and proved ‘a turning point in the unravelling of Chaplin’s star
image,’ according to Chaplin biographer Charles J. Maland.
24
One day, as
Hopper recalled in her memoirs, ‘a girl walked into my office. I’d never
seen her before; nor had I ever seen anyone as hysterical. From her wild
eyes, I knew she was on the borderline of something desperate.’
25
The ‘girl’
was 24-year-old actress Joan Barry. In 1941, Chaplin met Barry, cast her
briefly in a film, had a sexual affair with her, and then broke it off in late
1942. Barry, who had a history of mental illness, continued to pursue him
and, in May 1943, sought to confront Chaplin with her pregnancy, claiming
he was the father, but Chaplin refused to meet with her.
26

Hopper was
outraged and, together with fellow gossip columnist and ‘veteran sob sister’
Florabel Muir, encouraged the paternity lawsuit against Chaplin, publicized
Barry’s side of the story, and supported her throughout the first trial and a
retrial.
27
‘At stake was the life of an unborn child,’ Hopper later
dramatized.
28
‘I am not responsible for Miss Barry’s condition,’ Chaplin
declared, and blood tests proved him right. Yet, blood test results were
inadmissible in California courts, and, after the first jury deadlocked in late
78 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
1944, the jury at the second trial in mid-1945 decided he was indeed the
father and obligated him to pay child support—a decision one Los Angeles
attorney considered ‘a landmark in the miscarriage of justice.’
29


In the meantime, with help from Hopper, federal authorities used the Barry-
Chaplin scandal to indict Chaplin for violating the Mann Act, popularly
known as the White Slave Traffic Act, which ‘made it illegal to transport a
woman across state lines for immoral purposes.’
30
Chaplin had paid for a
roundtrip Los Angeles-New York City train fare for Barry in October 1942
but denied having sexual relations with Barry at that time. Hopper’s role in
the federal indictment, as with the paternity suit, again proved important.
She provided information on Chaplin’s relationship with Barry to the FBI
during its investigation, served as a popular media outlet for the FBI’s

alleged findings, testified before the grand jury that indicted Chaplin, and
publicized the charges and subsequent 1944 trial in her column. Hopper
successfully worked to foster sympathy for Barry and enmity for Chaplin
among her readers by publishing stories about a ‘very nervous’ Barry
testifying in court and an incident when Barry ‘collapsed completely.’
31
‘I
wish to congratulate you on your stand in the Chaplin matter,’ a Chicago
woman wrote. ‘Apparently you are the only columnist who isn’t afraid of
him because the others either avoid it altogether or handle it with gloves.’
‘P.S.,’ she added, ‘we don’t think C. Chaplin is a genius.’ Another female
reader saw Hopper’s defence of Barry as integral to American involvement
in World War II.

Just a few lines to let you know that one American woman
appreciates the efforts you have made in your fight for Joan
Barry’s Civil Rights. … This case in the paper brings home
to us all of the things we are fighting for and sacrificing
much. That one small girl can’t be pushed around by a lot
of people with authority and influence is just one more good
example of our American way.
32


The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles later
concurred they had ‘flimsy evidence’ against Chaplin stemming from the
Barry affair. However, when Chaplin won an acquittal, Hopper remained
silent about his victory and continued her personal attacks, undermining his
vindication.
33

Later, she attributed his acquittal to his ‘suave, insinuating,’
and expensive lawyer. ‘As usual,’ she muttered, ‘he kept out of jail.’
34

Hopper’s readers echoed her indirect accusation of Chaplin buying his
acquittal in the Mann case. ‘I hope that his dough hasn’t silenced justice
completely,’ wrote one reader, while a woman reader believed ‘he got away
with murder…with all his millions and marriages.’
35
Hopper often called
attention to Chaplin’s personal wealth, estimated at upwards of $30 million,
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 79
and with more than a hint of anti-Semitism. She assumed Chaplin was
Jewish, as did many other critics on the political right, and she often drew
on anti-Semitic stereotypes to denounce him.
36
She continually referred to
his money and accused him of miserliness. Instead of giving to her favourite
charities, ‘Mr. Charlie Chaplin has held onto all his…money.’ ‘He’s had an
opportunity to contribute to the Motion Picture Relief Fund Home,’ she
declared. ‘He didn’t.’
37
When Chaplin denied the mistaken assumption that
he was Jewish, Hopper criticized him. ‘Jews should be proud of their
heritage,’ she wrote smugly. ‘Christ was a Jew.’
38


During and after the Barry-Chaplin scandal and trials, Hopper’s coverage of
Chaplin and letters from her readers made his private life and behaviour into

a public policy concern. Hopper linked his alleged immorality with his
status as a non-citizen, and during the scandal she quoted an unnamed
source on ‘moral turpitude as good and sufficient grounds for the
deportation of an alien.’
39
Similarly, North Dakota Senator William Langer
sought Chaplin’s deportation in 1945, emphasizing ‘his unsavoury record of
lawbreaking, of rape, or the debauching of American girls 16 and 17 years
of age.’
40
An ‘indignant reader’ of Hopper’s spared no ugliness in
agreement.

Ye Gods cannot that Chaplin beast be thwarted? Moral
turpitude has landed some…in Ellis Island and worse
places and that nasty repulsive little enemy alien flies
high…. He should be ridden out of this America which he
so scorns. Get busy you grand person and show him up.
41


By seeing the private Chaplin as a public threat and unworthy of residence
in the United States, Hopper, her reader, and conservatives, like Langer,
anticipated the revocation of his re-entry visa in 1952, a move that stemmed
from Cold War attacks on Chaplin as guilty of both ‘moral perversion’ and
‘political subversion.’
42


Public Life, Political Activism

Chaplin’s liberal-left politics and support for progressive causes had long
drawn the attention and ire of Hopper and other Hollywood conservatives,
as well as state and federal authorities. Jack B. Tenney, a California state
senator and chair of the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American
Activities (California’s ‘little HUAC’), considered Chaplin ‘within the
Stalinist orbit.’
43
Hopper also deeply distrusted Chaplin. When he gave two
speeches in 1942 calling for a ‘second front’ against Germany in western
Europe to aid the Soviet Union’s fight in the east, she argued he had pre-
empted and undermined authorities, as ‘that front had already been arranged
80 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
by the British and American governments.’
44
During the Cold War,
Chaplin’s ‘second front’ speeches looked like ‘procommunist subversion’ to
Hopper, her allies, and her readers. ‘It is high time our lefties begin to learn
that we are wise to em,’ wrote one California man to Hopper.
45
Reinforcing
Chaplin’s leftist reputation were his support for organized labour and refusal
to cross picket lines during the 1945-1946 Hollywood strikes, and his
endorsement of the Progressive Party’s candidate Henry Wallace during the
1948 presidential campaign. Most damning of all, however, were his
interactions with Soviet artists and diplomats, friendships and associations
with the Hollywood Left, and defence of the civil liberties of Communists.
46

When Hopper falsely charged Chaplin with contributing $25,000 to the

Communist Party, the charge made it into Chaplin’s FBI file; an
investigation into whether Chaplin indeed ever had joined or financially
supported the Communist Party USA concluded in November 1949 that he
had not.
47


But Hopper never wavered in her belief that Chaplin, as a foreigner and
political progressive, upheld ‘an ideology offensive to most Americans and
contrary to the principles that have left this nation the last refuge of
freedom-loving people,’ an ideology he was—she claimed—‘fostering’
through his activities and his films.
48
Hopper’s assumption that ‘Red
propaganda has been put over in some films’ was shared by her allies on the
anticommunist right, including the American Legion, the FBI, and HUAC,
which subpoenaed Chaplin for its October 1947 hearings about Communist
subversion in the motion picture industry. ‘Despite protests, Charlie
Chaplin, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, John Howard Lawson and Clifford
Odets will soon be making a trip to Washington, D.C., for that Commie
investigation,’ Hopper wrote in early September that year, but Chaplin was
never called to testify.
49
Still, she regarded his films with great suspicion. As
an isolationist who opposed U.S. entry into World War II, Hopper saw
Chaplin’s pro-intervention, satirical attack on Adolf Hitler in The Great
Dictator (1940) as an affront. Chaplin’s final speech, which scholars
consider an ‘impassioned six-minute attack on the dehumanizing material
and spiritual conditions that have led to fascism,’ left Hopper ‘colder than
an icicle.’

50
For the FBI, The Great Dictator was ‘nothing more than subtle
Communist propaganda.’
51


Chaplin’s 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux, in release just as HUAC was
gearing up for its October hearings, also advanced a progressive, antifascist
view of politics and society and provided fodder for Chaplin’s enemies,
including Hopper. The comedy’s black humour and Chaplin’s role as a
French Bluebeard who married and murdered wealthy women for their
money marked a distinct ‘departure from Chaplin’s aesthetic contract.’
52

Hopper could not have been happier. ‘Poor dears,’ she called the publicists
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 81
for the film’s distributor United Artists, because ‘they’re expected to
perform miracles in reclaiming Chaplin’s lost popularity and prestige with
Mr. and Mrs. America.’ ‘I’ve witnessed a historic occasion,’ Hopper quoted
an unnamed industry executive about a screening of Monsieur Verdoux.
‘I’ve just seen Chaplin’s “last” picture.’
53
This comment was not far off the
mark. Despite an innovative marketing strategy by the ‘brash’ free-lance
publicity agent Russell Birdwell, who played up the film’s controversial
content—even Hopper received Birdwell’s promotional telegrams—
Monsieur Verdoux was a box-office failure and panned by critics in the
United States.
54
Even more significantly, the film was subject to picketing,

boycotts, and bans, and the FBI labelled it ‘Soviet propaganda.’
55
Hopper
reported positively on the protests, received material from the FBI, and
aided in the red-baiting of Chaplin by publicizing enthusiastic reviews of
Monsieur Verdoux that appeared in left-wing publications.
56
This ‘hate
campaign,’ to borrow film historian Tino Balio’s apt term, was directed at
Chaplin and his film because his financial independence made him
invulnerable to the Hollywood blacklist, the punishment meted out to other
filmmakers accused of Communist sympathies beginning in late 1947.
57


This hate campaign culminated in the cancellation of Chaplin’s re-entry
permit in 1952, a few months before U.S. national elections returned
Hopper’s Republican Party to the White House after two decades of
Democratic control. Between 1947 and 1952, the Cold War and domestic
anticommunism intensified with the Soviet atomic bomb, Communist
victory in China, the Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy cases,
and the Korean War. Hopper continued to work against Chaplin. In 1950,
when Chaplin decided to re-release his 1931 classic City Lights as a way to
reconnect with American audiences, Hopper sought to undermine him.
‘Charlie Chaplin’s fearful about reissuing his picture, “City Lights” here.
Thinks there’s too much ill feeling against him personally.’
58
She also
strategized with Richard Nixon, at the time a U.S. Senator from California
but soon to be the Republican Party’s nominee for Vice President. ‘I agree

with you that the way the Chaplin case has been handled has been a disgrace
for years,’ Nixon wrote Hopper in May 1952. ‘Unfortunately, we aren’t able
to do much about it when the top decisions are made by the likes of
Acheson and McGranery,’ referring to the Secretary of State and the
Attorney General in the Democratic administration of President Harry S.
Truman. But a Republican victory in November could change the
situation.
59


To help achieve victory for the Republicans in 1952, Hopper sought to
associate Chaplin’s image of alien, moral, and political subversion with the
Truman administration. At a time of intense competition between the two
main political parties, members of the Republican Party benefited from
82 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
accusing the Democrats of being ‘soft on communism.’
60
When Chaplin and
his family planned a trip to Europe in September to promote his new film
Limelight (1952), Hopper reported that ‘Charlie’s arrangements were made
through the Justice Department, and their permit to re-enter America was
obtained through the same source,’ implying collusion between Chaplin and
the Truman administration when, in fact, he secured his permit just like
every other resident alien, through the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS).
61
But U.S. Attorney General James McGranery erased any
appearance of Democratic favouritism toward Chaplin when, two days after
Chaplin left the country, he rescinded Chaplin’s re-entry permit and ordered
the INS to hold him for hearings about his political beliefs and moral

behaviour upon his return.
62


Although the now bipartisan campaign against Chaplin cut short Hopper’s
partisan political attack, she had gotten what she wanted, and she crowed.
Chaplin had thought he had ‘the right to go against our customs, to abhor
everything we stand for, to throw our hospitality back in our faces.’ ‘I’ve
known him for many years,’ she continued. ‘I abhor what he stands for,
while I admire his talents as an actor. I would like to say, “Good riddance to
bad company.”’
63
Hopper’s ‘vituperative’ condemnation ‘was one of the
worst press lashings Chaplin ever received,’ according to Charles J. Maland,
and received a wide audience when Time magazine included it in their
coverage of Chaplin’s immigration troubles.
64
‘When I finished reading
your column,’ one woman wrote Hopper, ‘I said out loud “Give it to him
Hedda” and I know you will.’ ‘Good riddance to his type of British,’ agreed
another.
65
Hopper’s readers confirmed Chaplin’s popular image as both
politically and morally subversive, with one woman reader including in the
same sentence criticism of the age difference between Chaplin and Oona
O’Neill and his support for Henry Wallace back in 1948. ‘Ever since I saw
pictures of Chaplin and his wife, also making out checks for Wallace I have
felt something should be done.’ A male reader held nothing back, calling
him ‘that infamous, morally depraved, and pinko Charles Chaplin.’
66

Hopper later revealed her access to inside information about Chaplin’s re-
entry permit application in her column. ‘I’ve had a very close check on that
for months,’ she claimed, very probably accurately given her relationship
with the FBI. Similarly, she later reported that Chaplin ‘never would have
allowed his dancing feet to wander away from our shores’ if he had known
the decision of government officials, who ‘were so afraid he’d get wind of
their plans they practically held their breaths for two months.’
67
The
campaign against Chaplin involved a number of American institutions,
including the two main political parties, the FBI, Congress, the Department
of Justice, the INS, and the press—Hopper most notoriously—cooperating
formally and informally.
68

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As it turned out, the INS had a ‘paucity of evidence against Chaplin’ to
detain him on either political or moral grounds. When the FBI could not
provide the INS with reliable evidence of connections between Chaplin and
the Communist Party, INS officials realized they could not build a political
case against him, and so Chaplin’s alleged immoral behaviour came to be
seen as ‘key to the case.’
69
Rumour and unverifiable accusations, as well as
memories of the Barry-Chaplin scandal and the image of Chaplin as a moral
subversive, ended up dominating the U.S. government’s case against
Chaplin. Certainly, they dominated Attorney General McGranery’s
statement:

If what has been said about him is true, he is, in my
opinion, an unsavoury character [who] has been publicly
charged with being a member of the Communist Party, with
grave moral charges and with making statements that
would indicate a leering, sneering attitude toward a
country whose hospitality has enriched him.
70


The innuendo and intertwining of public and private life that characterized
Hopper’s columns, her readers’ responses, and Hollywood gossip generally
had found an audience and endorsement from the highest law official in the
United States. To be sure, this weak case meant it was ‘highly likely’
Chaplin would have been readmitted to the United States, if he had
returned; to Hopper and her allies’ great satisfaction, he did not.
71


Although at first Chaplin had said he would return to the United States to
answer charges, he surrendered his re-entry permit in Switzerland in April
1953. A second massive hate campaign directed against his new film
Limelight had occurred after his departure from the United States,
spearheaded by Hopper’s allies in the American Legion and Catholic War
Veterans and supported by her reader-respondents. One male reader wanted
Hopper to send her ‘good riddance’ column ‘to all American Legion and
other 100% American groups.’ ‘There are so many people,’ a Connecticut
woman wrote, ‘that will not attend his pictures; they have absolutely no
respect for him at all.’
72

The hate campaign destroyed the box office
potential for Limelight, with the film playing in only about 150 of the 2000
theatres in which it was originally booked.
73
This poor reception indicated
that Chaplin had no future in the United States as a filmmaker and actor.
Chaplin spoke out against the ‘lies and vicious propaganda by powerful
reactionary groups who by their influence and by the aid of America’s
yellow press have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal minded
individuals can be singled out and persecuted,’ and broke his ties with
America.
74

84 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
By helping to create this ‘unhealthy atmosphere,’ Hopper had achieved her
aim of ruining Chaplin’s career in Hollywood, but she remained vigilant in
her watch over him until the end of her life. ‘I don’t know about the rest of
you,’ she wrote in her column in November 1965, ‘but personally I feel
better when an ocean separates Charlie and the land of the free. Let’s keep it
that way.’
75
To nearly her last, dying breath, Hopper never let up on
Chaplin. Just two days before she entered the hospital where she soon died
of pneumonia in February 1966, she spoke to Florabel Muir, her
collaborator in the Barry-Chaplin scandal. ‘I hear that son of a bitch Chaplin
is trying to get back in this country,’ she is reported as saying. ‘We’ve all
got to work together to stop him!’
76

In these ways, Hedda Hopper and her readers contributed to the successful
Cold War campaign against Charlie Chaplin. Scholars see this incident
primarily as the triumph of conservative, anticommunist forces in the
United States during the Cold War, and Hopper and her readers should be
considered part of these forces. By providing a forum for advocating
political and moral conservatism, Hopper’s gossip column constituted an
important site for the popular politics of the Right during the World War II
and Cold War eras. The prominence, popularity, and political content of
‘Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood’ confirm recent historical scholarship that
places conservatism in the mainstream of American politics and culture by
mid-century and not on the margin as earlier scholars of U.S. politics had
contended.
77
More generally, the anti-Chaplin campaign occurred at the
intersection of Hollywood gossip and national politics, revealing the
boundary between ‘public’ and ‘private’ to be more fiction than fact.
Hollywood gossip, as practiced by Hopper and her readers, politicized
aspects of life considered to be private. Just as in Hopper’s column, the
right-wing campaign against Charlie Chaplin demonstrated that ‘private
talk’ was integral to the public culture—an arena for the play of larger ideas,
interests, and politics—of mid-twentieth America.
78


ENDNOTES

1
George Eells, Hedda and Louella, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1972, p. 210. Over
time, Hopper’s column was variously titled.
2

“Hedda Makes Hay,” Time, 25 May 1942, pp. 51-52. Correspondence from readers to
Hopper is in the Hedda Hopper Collection, Department of Special Collections, Margaret
Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California
[hereafter HH-AMPAS]. Although these letters are public and not private letters, given
Hopper’s practice of publishing readers’ letters in her column, I am protecting the privacy of
these letter-writers by using no names in the text and only using initials in citations. For well-
known persons, I use their full names in citations and text.
3
Richard Dyer, Stars, British Film Institute, London, 1979, p. 28; Barbara Klinger,
Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 1994, pp. 97-98.
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 85

4
Jack Levin and Arnold Arluke, Gossip: The Inside Scoop, Plenum Press, New York, 1987;
Geri Nicholas, quoted in Donald Bogle, Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography, Amistad, New
York, 1997, p. 245; Eells, Hedda and Louella, p. 173.
5
Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909-1925, Routledge, London, 1988,
pp. 114-116.
6
Eells, Hedda and Louella, p. 264.
7
Barbara Dianne Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race,
1938-1948, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1999, p. 1.
8
Eells, Hedda and Louella, p. 227.
9
Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1989, pp. 213-214.

10
Hedda Hopper, From under my Hat, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1952, p. 153.
11
Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 208.
12
Eells, Hedda and Louella, p. 228
13
Publicist, quoted in Eells, Hedda and Louella, p. 231
14
Hopper, From under my Hat, p. 152.
15
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 10 April 1944, A9 and 5 February
1947, A3.
16
Hopper, ‘“Black Widow” Handed to Nunnally Johnson,’ Los Angeles Times, 24 September
1952, p. B8; Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 22 March 1947, p. A5.
17
Hopper, ‘Marta Toren Recalled to Europe for New Film,’ Los Angeles Times, 22
September 1952, p. B8; Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 30 June 1943,
p. 13.
18
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 15 December 1947, p. 15, 24
October 1947, p. A2, and 30 December 1947, p. A2.
19
AMD, Long Island, New York, to Hopper, 21 September 1952, Charlie Chaplin folder
[hereafter Chaplin folder], HH-AMPAS.
20
John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the
Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America,’ Pacific Historical Review, 72,
4, 2003, p. 506.

21
Eells, Hedda and Louella, p. 230; ‘De Wolf Hopper Is Divorced by Fifth Wife; She Gets
Son and 30 Per Cent. of His Salary,’ New York Times, 30 January 1924, p. 1.
22
Hopper, From under my Hat, pp. 148-150; Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 210.
23
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 6 October 1943, p. 14 and 3 June
1943, p. 17.
24
Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 197.
25
Hopper, From under my Hat, p. 149.
26
Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp,’ p. 507
27
Eells, Hedda and Louella, p. 229; Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 201, 215.
28
Hopper, From under my Hat, p. 151.
29
Chaplin and Los Angeles attorney, quoted in David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art,
revised ed., Grafton, London, 1992, p. 520; Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, pp. 206,
215.
30
Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 202; Robinson, Chaplin, p. 523.
31
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 28 March 1944, p. A10 and 17 June
1943, p. 15.
32
EK, Chicago, to Hopper, 10 February 1944 and CL, ‘A Plain Citizen,’ to Hopper, 2
February 1944, Chaplin folder, HH-AMPAS.

33
Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, pp. 205, 212.
34
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 28 March 1944, p. A10; Hopper,
From under my Hat, p. 151.
35
‘Indignant Reader of the Daily News,’ New York, to Hopper [1944] and AMD, Long
Island, New York, to Hopper, 21 September 1952, Chaplin folder, HH-AMPAS.
86 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES

36
Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp,’ pp. 496, 514, n. 67.
37
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 3 June 1943, p. 17; Hopper, ‘Marta
Toren Recalled to Europe for New Film,’ Los Angeles Times, 22 September 1952, p. B8.
38
Hopper’s 3 June 1943 column in the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Maland, Chaplin and
American Culture, p. 209; this content was cut from the version of her column that ran in the
Los Angeles Times.
39
‘An important Chicago man,’ quoted in Hopper’s 22 June 1943 column in the Pittsburgh
Press, quoted in Maland, p. 209; this content was cut from the version of her column that ran
in the Los Angeles Times.
40
Langer, quoted in Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp,’ p. 506.
41
‘Indignant Reader of the Daily News,’ New York, to Hopper [1944], Chaplin folder, HH-
AMPAS.
42
Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp,’ p. 506.

43
Greg Mitchell, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan
Douglas—Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950, Random House, New York, 1998, p. 58.
44
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 3 June 1943, p. 17.
45
D. William Davis, ‘A Tale of Two Movies: Charlie Chaplin, United Artists, and the Red
Scare,’ Cinema Journal, 27, 1, Autumn, 1987, p. 48; JM, Alhambra, Calif., to Hopper, 22
September 1952, Chaplin folder, HH-AMPAS.
46
Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, pp. 221, 255-257.
47
Hopper’s 27 December 1943 column in the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Maland, Chaplin
and American Culture, p. 210; this content was cut from the version of her column that ran in
the Los Angeles Times; Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. 393.
48
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 22 March 1947, p. A5.
49
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 3 September 1947, p. A3, and 5
September 1947, p. A2; Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood:
Politics in the Film Community, 1930-60, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2003, pp. 449-
450.
50
Dan Kamin, ‘“Who is This Man (Who Looks Like Charlie Chaplin),”’ in Frank Scheide,
Hooman Mehran, and Dan Kamin, eds., Chaplin: The Dictator and the Tramp, British Film
Institute, London, 2004, p. 9; Hopper, ‘Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 16
October 1940, p. 17.
51
FBI, quoted in Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp,’ p. 500, n. 16.

52
Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 226.
53
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 18 March 1947, p. A2 and 18 April
1947, p. A3.
54
Davis, ‘A Tale of Two Movies.’ p. 52; Russell Birdwell to Hopper, 17 September 1947
and 28 September 1947, telegrams, Chaplin folder, HH-AMPAS.
55
FBI, quoted in Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp,’ p. 504.
56
Hopper, ‘Looking at Hollywood,’ Los Angeles Times, 24 October 1947, p. A2 and 17 April
1947, p. A3; Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 268.
57
Tino Balio, quoted in Davis, ‘A Tale of Two Movies,’ p. 54; Sbardellati and Shaw,
‘Booting a Tramp,’ p. 505.
58
Hopper, ‘Anne Baxter Will Costar with Webb,’ Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1950, p. 12;
Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 275.
59
Nixon to Hopper, 29 May 1952, quoted in Friedrich, City of Nets, pp. 395-396.
60
M.J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830-1970, Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1990, p. 146.
61
Hopper, ‘New Orleans Will Get Break in Astaire Film,’ Los Angeles Times, 30 August
1952, p. 10; Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 280.
62
Robinson, Chaplin, p. 572; Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 280.
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 87

63
Hopper, ‘Marta Toren Recalled to Europe for New Film,’ Los Angeles Times, 22
September 1952, p. B8.
64
Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, pp. 301, 305.
65
JMG, Lawndale, Calif, to Hopper, 23 September 1952 and CW, New York, to Hopper, 22
September 1952, Chaplin folder, HH-AMPAS.
66
LVS, Los Angeles, to Hopper, 22 September 1952 and RA, New York City, to Hopper, 23
September 1952, Chaplin folder, HH-AMPAS.
67
Hopper, ‘Marta Toren Recalled to Europe for New Film,’ Los Angeles Times, 22
September 1952, p. B8; Hopper, ‘“Black Widow” Handed to Nunnally Johnson,’ Los
Angeles Times, 24 September 1952, p. B8.
68
Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 273.
69
Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp,’ pp. 520-521.
70
McGranery’s statement appears differently in different sources; I have quoted from both
Robinson, Chaplin, p. 575 and Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp,’ p. 509.
71
Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp,’ p. 521.
72
TS, Long Beach, Calif. to Hopper, n.d., and MM, Willimantic, Conn., to Hopper, 3
October 1952, Chaplin folder, HH-AMPAS.
73
Davis, ‘A Tale of Two Movies,’ p. 55.

74
Chaplin, quoted in Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp,’ p. 521.
75
Hopper’s column, quoted in Anthony Slide, ‘Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,’ LA Reader
(April 4, 1986), p. 8, Hedda Hopper Clipping File, AMPAS.
76
Hopper, quoted in Eells, Hedda and Louella, p. 233.
77
Alan Brinkley, ‘AHR Forum: The Problem of American Conservatism,’ American
Historical Review, 99, April, 1994, p. 410.
78
My concept of ‘public culture’ derives from Thomas Bender, ‘Wholes and Parts: The Need
for Synthesis in American History,’ Journal of American History, 73, June, 1986, pp. 120-
136.