H is for H’burg…and Hollywood

I recently read that Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania.

Yes, that Gertrude Stein. Poet of Paris salon fame, hostess to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, author of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook beloved by beatniks decades later for its famous hash-infused fudge recipe. Did she really grow up in a small town in Pennsylvania? And why did I care?

I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania: Hollidaysburg, population (then and now) about 5,000. I thought I had found a famous female writer who shared my background. This news was worth a visit to Google!

Well, it is true that Stein was born in Allegheny (in 1874), but she didn’t exactly grow up there. When she was three years old her parents whisked her off to Vienna and then Paris. A year later they returned to the States to settle in Oakland, California. Stein grew up a California girl. (No Allegheny newspaper headlines blaring, “Local girl makes good in Paris writing incomprehensible poems!”)

Plus, Allegheny was more cosmopolitan than one might have expected for a town that doesn’t  exist anymore. I learned that in the 19^th century Allegheny was large and quite prosperous, even having a street known as “Mansion Row.” But on December 9, 1887, against its population’s wishes, Allegheny was annexed by Pittsburgh. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, “145,000 people who had gone to sleep the night before in Allegheny woke up in Pittsburgh.” Allegheny was henceforth referred to as Pittsburgh North Side. Not exactly Russia and Crimea, but still.

Discovering all of this was disappointing. I had wanted Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to be like Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t. And Gertrude Stein was not to be the famous female writer who shared my background.

I then researched (for another 15 minutes) “famous writers who came from Hollidaysburg.” What I came up with was Hedda Hopper. This seemed an even more improbable pairing of writer with birthplace. Known for her outrageous headdress and the outrage she provoked during the heyday of her Hollywood columnist years, Hopper was born in Hollidaysburg in 1885 and christened Elda Furry. (As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.) Like the Steins with Gertrude, Elda’s parents also whisked her away at age three to another location, but that was the end of any similarity: the Furrys had moved their nine children only 7 miles north of Hollidaysburg to Altoona. By her high school years, Elda was studying singing in Pittsburgh and had stars in her eyes for Broadway fame and fortune. She bolted at 18 when her parents refused to let her pursue her dream.

Elda did make it onto Broadway and in 1913 became the fifth wife of a handsome young actor named DeWolf Hopper. Hopper’s four previous wives were inconveniently named Edna, Ella, Nella and Ida. Stories have it that, annoyed by her husband’s unhappy habit of calling her by any one of the former wives’ names, Elda Hopper went in search of a new name. She consulted a numerologist, who came up with the nicely alliterative Hedda Hopper.

With the rise of the motion picture industry just after World War I, Hedda Hopper moved with her husband to Hollywood where she appeared in almost 100 films. In the mid 1930’s, however, Hopper reinvented herself. By then divorced and facing a fading acting career, she switched to gossip journalism, first on the radio and then in the newspapers.

While her column became wildly popular, appearing in thousands of newspapers large and small and read by millions, her personal nastiness and rumor-mongering made her just as wildly unpopular among many in the celebrity world. Even 50 years after her death, Hollywood still chafes at her name. In a September 2015 issue of Variety, editor Peter Bart wrote, “The best news about Hedda Hopper is that few remember her. Hedda was a journalist (of sorts), who famously wore exotic hats and devoted herself to destroying the careers of anyone she identified as being communist, gay or otherwise reprehensible.”

So, that’s it for my model female writer. Hedda Hopper from Hollidaysburg, a scribbler of screed widely read but generally despised, if remembered at all. At least, Hollidaysburg does have one beloved superstar to call its own, though gender undetermined: the Slinky. But that doesn’t give me much to model myself on. I’m really not limber enough to write while flopping down stairs head over heels…

To read more of my work go here or to my website at kathryntaylorwrites.com (where you can see what I really look like).