Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper's Hollywood: The rise of the celebrity gossip industry in twentieth-century America, 1910--1950

The social and cultural functions of gossip have a history as long as that of humankind. What was new in the twentieth century was the unprecedented scale upon which gossip could be transmitted to a national audience using both the new forms of mass communication—film, radio, and then television—as well as the previously existing print media. And in the early twentieth century, the celebrity gossip columnist emerged as a powerful new figure in American culture: among the most influential were Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. This dissertation will explore the rise to power of these two celebrity journalists from 1910 to 1950 and the evolution of the celebrity gossip industry. The process by which these gossip columnists moved from the relatively benign world of promotional gossip and the fantasy of celebrity identification in the 1910s to acting as informants for the federal government and wielding the power to destroy careers and lives by the late 1940s and early 1950s is at the heart of this narrative. Dispensing a potent blend of advertising, myth, politics, and innuendo, Parsons and Hopper helped alter the parameters of the public disclosure of private lives—a process with profound political and cultural consequences, particularly in the wake of the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) investigation of the film industry, begun in 1947, that led to the establishment of the blacklist in Hollywood and beyond.; This dissertation will begin a scholarly discussion of Parsons and Hopper, two of the most powerful, if woefully understudied, women in the mid-twentieth-century Hollywood film industry, but it is also part of a much larger narrative: the construction of and overt politicization of celebrity culture and celebrity journalism, which transformed the landscape of public life in the twentieth-century United States. This dissertation will provide new insight into the construction of a truly national popular culture and examine a critical intersection of popular and political culture that remains a vibrant part of U.S. culture and society today.