Stuff You Missed in History ClassTracy talks about not seeing a frozen body of water that could support a person as a kid. Holly discusses how difficult it is to pare down Hedda Hopper's life into an episode.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class. A production of iHeartRadio Happy Friday.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
We talked about frost fairs on the River Thames, and boy, so we've talked about I grew up in North Carolina.
I grew up on the North Carolina Piedmont.
A place where it could get cold enough for a still body of water, probably not.
A moving one, but like a pond.
A pond could maybe freeze over, not enough to be safe to walk on. So walking on a frozen body of water was one of the things that my mother taught me I could I should never ever ever do, because I could fall through the ice and die. And this caused some culture shock for me when I moved to Massachusetts. And like, there's a lot of places in Massachusetts. I'm going to talk about one in a second. There are a lot of places in Massachusetts where bodies of water used to get frozen enough on a regular basis to skate on and walk on. We have a whole episode where we talk about Frederick Tudor cutting ice out of New England ponds and selling it to people like that was a whole thing. It's a lot warmer. Now, it's not really as possible. But the first time I was walking through Boston Common and there were people skating on the frog Pond just terrify you.
I just I had a moment of terror.
I don't think the frog Pond is very deep at all, and it is also like maintained as a skating service, but.
I had, Yeah, I just had this moment. It was like, all of you need to get off of the ice.
Also, when I originally envisioned this episode, I was thinking about talking about other temporary frozen things, frozen festivals, festivals on frozen bodies of water. And one reason was because I knew about this thing that ran in the Boston Daily Globe on January ninth of nineteen twenty five. Here is the headline, Heard fifty thousand a shore that's heard HRD like we're herding cats. Heard fifty thousand ashore fearing a disaster, Police cleared Jamaica pond of merrymakers when Mayer sees ice threatens to give way. Warning given by water abrupt end to cities annual carnival firemen helped to draw crowd skating races provide good sports.
That all that was headline, and.
Then this article starts. More than fifty thousand young people were in the midst of a perfect evening of skating on Jamaica Pond last night at the annual Ice Carnival of the City of Boston, when suddenly, about nine thirty o'clock, nearly fifty policemen appeared and ordered everyone off the ice. Mayor Curly, who had just arrived at the carnival to give out the prizes and the various contests, quickly noticed that large black patches of water had appeared about the pond. Fearing that the ice, softened by the warmth of the last few days, was about to collapse under the weight of humanity it was bearing and precipitate the merry thousands to their deaths, he ordered the police to clear the pond. This did not wind up being about other frost festivals and other places. It was just about London. And we also didn't mention how these these have appeared in various pop culture. There are some London Frost Fair scenes in Virginia Wolf's Orlando m HM, and at least two episodes of Doctor Who which I have not watched. All of the episodes of Doctor Who. There's like a chunk of them that I missed some point, Like, apparently these are interconnected the stories that are told about, yet like and there are in totally different seasons.
Of the show, as I understand it.
I also, the more TV I watched, the less I remember any of the TV they already watched, And so I could have seen all these episodes and I just don't remember them. Also, just tons of art and stories and broadside ballads and poems and all of that. Yeah, I can't. The whole freezing over of things makes me think of The Mighty Ducks.
Okay, because there's a scene in.
The first one. I don't know if you ever saw that movie. Emilio Estevez's character basically has to coach these kids hockey team because he got a drunk driving arrest and this is his community service. Oh yeah, and he is like a rich dude who doesn't want to do any of this, although he does he did play hockey when he was younger. And at one point he has a bunch of the kids in his limousine and he tells his driver to go out on the I and I think one of the parents freaks out and it's like what are you doing? And he was like, I know when ice is safe to drive on, and they're like how, And that whole thing just like made me go, wait, that's like a skill people can have, Like, yeah, I didn't realize how much basically cultivation goes into especially ice highways that are used by big trucks, right, Like, uh, you know a lot of people that live in more remote areas, like maybe the lake is going to freeze over, the harbor's going to freeze over. People are gonna use their snowmobiles to get across it, and like maybe maybe there is a road that is sort of created by people, but they're also big highways with big trucks. And I know there was a whole TV show about this called Ice Road Truckers. Don't remember on network that was on. I'm imagining it was on Discovery or one of the other Discovery networks. But it's a whole thing of like measuring the ice and planning out the path and clearing the snow off of it because the snow insulates it, so they clear the snow off so that it will freeze more, right, and then increasingly a lot more like monitoring of the ice both just for general safety and because the seasons that these roads are usable is becoming so much shorter in so many places. And it's like, I mean, some of this is driven by need of people to get things like food and medicine and other stuff delivered during the wintertime, but also like diamond mines that still operate in the wintertime, and the ice roads are like how the trucks get in and out of there, and so like, as the season gets shorter, the capitalism wants to use them as long as possible, but also not have a truckloaded with diamonds go through it. Yeah, I'm not saying anything because I feel ways about that as I think you doos I did too.
I like diamond's interesting. Yeah.
Well, and as I was writing the like the very beginning of the episode where we were talking about, like we know there's places this is not a novelty, it's a necessity and the climate is messing it up, I originally was like sort of writing in a thing that about how like this affects industries and it also affects like a lot of people whose like lives and livelihoods are incredibly vulnerable like a lot of indigenous communities are like this is a key part of.
Their way of life in the winter.
And then I was like, I couldn't find a way to write it that did not feel like I was equating a diamond mine with an indigenous community, and right, that made me angry, and I was like, I'm just taking this out. We're going to talk about it behind the scenes when I can like have more have more context there than in this one intro paragraph. I just remember when my beloved and I first met, because there were only a few weeks between when we met and when we got engaged, and telling him distinctly, if you were to give me a diamond, I would say no, yeah, which was fine because we were too poor to own any such thing anyway at the time. Right, that was almost thirty years ago. Yeah, I don't remember if I said that exact thing to Patrick, but I said something very similar about that to Patrick. I also, like, very specifically said I would like to be asked in a way that's meaningful and also private. Yeah. I didn't say any of that, but it was, you know, it was sort of it was in a public place, but it was not a busy public place. Sure quiet, sure, silly. We were at home and I did not know what was happening. Oh that's sweet. Yeah, my my mom was in the hospital unexpectedly. Uh. And it was a scary situation, right, I mean, she was, it was. It was scary for reasons, but it was it was not like my mother was dying at that moment like a scary.
There was concerns.
And he had sent me out of the apartment on an errand that was a ruse to get me out of the apartment. And I came back and there were candles lit everywhere, and I literally thought he was just being really nice because my mom was in the hospital and I was.
Worried about her.
That's so sweet.
Yeah. So anyway, anyway.
That was that has nothing to do at all with frost fairs. Somehow we got on a diamond tangent. We got out a diamond kick. Yes, yes, I am going to look at that book so I can learn how to ice skate. Yeah, I actually I have PDF on it. I can just email you, but really I want the ice cream recipe.
I want that.
Yeah.
I don't remember the details of that at all.
Yeah, I was going through it and I was like, now there's an ice cream and how to save drowning people. Like this just really feels like an assortment. You can eat ice cream, you can save people, you can ice skate, you are golden, you got your winter covered with that book. You talked about Head of Hopper this week. Yep. I feel like that could have been an eighteen hour podcast. So it was a little bit tricky to try to be like, Okay, no, what actually fits in our normal range? That doesn't That gives a sense of really what she was capable of without having to delve into everything because there were so many stories. There were so many like writers and actors and yeah, directors who got harmed by her. But Charlie Chaplin is an easy touchdown. Yeah, here's the thing that's interesting to me. She routinely gets called a bad writer h by everyone. There's even a Nora Efren article from the New York Times from the seventies where she's like, she's a bad writer, and I I don't know that I agree with that assessment. Okay, her grammar one hundred percent kookie muki u h. She even talks about how she had an assistant at one point that was like a college educated writer editor and would be like, no, you can't do that grammatically, that's a split infinitive or that's a dangly part of sible and she'd be like, I don't care. So technically, I think she probably was not a great writer. However, she had some really good turns of phrase that always made me go like that is that is a clever way to put that. There was one in her when I was reviewing her autobiography where she's talking about when she was a kid and she bought herself a side saddle because she wanted something that made her stand out as an interesting person. And while she waited, she had to order it, and while she waited for it to come, she made herself a riding habit.
And then she.
Rode this horse that was like an old horse that her family had around the town, as proud as could be. And she included this phrase that I was like, I love this. She said my head was so high that the sky and I were cheek to cheek. I love this. I love that that sentence so much, and I'm like, okay. So her grammar may have been screwy, but she also wrote some very fun phrases. She also talked about when she was a kid, there was a moment where her dad's had what sounded a little like a midlife crisis, huh, and he got caught up in something we've talked about on the show, which was the Klondike Rush. Right, I was guessing ampletely different thing from the slightly wrong time period, So go ahead. Yeah, no, So he literally went up to Alaska to try to like find fortune, and he had never been great at business, and so not only did he leave her mom with a bunch of kids to take care of, there were also a lot of people who had not paid their bills at the butcher shop, and so the family didn't have money. And even though she said she was kind of shy as a kid, she was like, I'll go get those people to pay. And she described herself by saying I was the fightingest fourteen year old bill collector ever seen in Eltuna. And that's another sentence that is just marvelous. So again, technically she may not have been a good writer, and certainly in terms of like fact checking, she was right well, and I think the content, the fact that she was writing gossip and sometimes verifiably false gossip, probably predisposed people to be more critical of her writing, right, sort of like the you know, there's a broad assumption about things like tabloids and their content and the quality of them that you know, probably leads people to then be a circular. It's a spiral, that's what I'm trying to say.
Yeah.
Yeah, When she was first living in New York and she lived in like a boarding house for young ladies that were very poor, where a lot of other actors were living, she brushed up against so many interesting people, Like we forget that there were these pockets where all of like the people that we now think of as like the classic film stars or the classic stage chars, we're all kind of hanging out together. And like, you know, she knew Theta Barrow when she was very very young, and she knew this is my favorit and someone I kind of would like to do an episode on.
But I'm almost.
Scared too because I revere her so much. Ruth Gordon, Oh yeah, I love Ruth Gordon. It just it fascinates me that there are so many I also saved a story for this behind the scenes that is sort of a fun denument of like come Uppance, which is that there was an actor named Joseph Cotton who had a reported had an affair with one of his co stars. He was already married, and the thing was, it seems like and I don't know, but just based on reading different accounts of it, she moved forward and published an article about it in her column, but like his wife, seems to have kind of known he was a cheater and had chosen to stay with him anyway, and that that column really hurt her more than it did him, and that it made him really angry. So that then when they were at a benefit not too long after that, or some event that both had a Hopper and Joseph Cotton were at, he kicked the leg out from under her chair and she fell in front of the rye at this event, which isn't necessarily you know, violence never the way. However, allegedly he got sent telegrams from like hundreds of people in Hollywood that were like, Oh, we've all been wanting to do this for so long, You're a hero, and that he put those all on his wall, which is kind of indicative of how she was perceived. Her son, William was also an actor. He was on Perry Mason for a long time. But I in that Vanity Fair article that we mentioned Roddy McDowell being interviewed for as well as many other actors. I don't remember who said it, but they mentioned one of the things that kind of broke my heart was that nobody in Hollywood trusted her son because they presumed he was like a spy for her. And I know she had a pretty significant falling out with her son and was pretty much on her own late in life. And I wonder if that isn't some of it right, Like you can't spread poison everywhere and then not expect it to hit your kids in something as a strange flip to that. So, she and Loela Parsons each had one child, they had each been divorced. They were essentially single moms. As much as they often hated each other, and there was a brief I think in nineteen forty eight they had a brief reconciliation.
They did not last.
But as much as they hated each other, they never said they never gave bad reviews to each other's kids, and in fact, if either of the other one's kid was in a movie or had a project going on, they always spoke like glowingly of it.
Huh.
And there's been a lot of theorization about it about like was it just that they both knew how hard it had to be to have them for moms, so they wanted to like keep that off limits and never harm each other's kids, Like was that just the sacred space?
Right?
But it is very like even when I think it was when Heada Hopper's daughter got married or not Headhoppers aren't. When Louella Parson's daughter got married, Heda was at their wedding. I mean, it was like there was some sort of weird social contract between the two of them where they would engage in that way and it was safe. Yeah. It's so fascinating to me and so hard for me to understand the level of like purposeful intrigue of that life. Yeah, it sounds exhausting, It sounds unpleasant. It sounds like, uh, exactly the opposite of how I would ever want to live, Like I don't. I don't want to stir the snakes. I want to stay out of the drama. I don't want to manufacture drama. I certainly don't want to be the person who is accusing people of illegal activities like it's just it's all so strange to me and so hard to wrap my brain around. Like in and she was like, you know, my age ish when she started really taking off in this way. And I'm like, particularly as a woman in my early fifties, I do not want any of that drama. No. I want to be in the most peaceful possible scenarios whenever I can. Yeah, I don't want any drama in my life. However, sometimes when there is other drama that doesn't affect me and ideally also isn't about anything consequential at all, right, that I will look at that drama. Oh listen, Like, I'm not trying to be holier than now about any of it. Like I watch Bravo shows, I enjoy schadenfreude as much as the next pert. I think the difference is that I don't perceive these things as reality in a way that is important, and I don't fight with people on the internet about it, you know what I mean. Like, I know if I met one of those people, I don't think i'd care and I wouldn't be like I know who you are because I don't. Yeah, my days of fighting with people about stuff on the Internet are very over. Yeah, it's just too too much. I don't know anyway, I don't, I don't. I don't understand wanting to cultivate a life of drama and an enemy's list. And it sounds like an awful way to make a living to me. Yeah, yeah, but for some people, they're very cut out for it. She seemed to love it. She liked being called all the names. She liked being referred to in ways we can't say on a show that is, you know, potentially going to be listened to by youngsters. I don't and I but I mean it goes on right. We still have outlets that exist solely to expose the secrets of famous people, and I none of that sounds good to me anyway. Like I said, I understand the appeal of gossipy things and the schadenfreude of watching someone who seems to have everything get taken down. I do understand it. I don't love it, right. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
