Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we are talking about Head of Hopper. And although she started out acting, what really made her famous was her work in newspapers. For several decades, she literally could make or break a movie career with her gossip column sending statements to print, regardless of whether there was any actual proof of what she claimed or the behavior she alleged that people are participating in or not. I find her super fascinating. I read both of her books growing up. She has been in a kajillion movie and TV projects. Most recently was the show Feud, which is a Ryan Murphy show, But it's largely a lot of her. Discussion of her is about her and Luella Parsons because they were kind of the two big power players in terms of gossip columns in Hollywood in the early part of the twentieth century. And I am forever just I marvel at the power that they both had and how much they created ways of consuming information about movies and movie stars that we are still wrapped up in today, even though they're kind of nonsensical. We could talk about this more behind the scenes, because I feel like I have Chicken or the Egg thoughts about the movie industry and how it has developed in this way. But she just is like a wild story of her own. So I thought we would talk about her today. We may do an episode on Luella Parsons in the future because she's also pretty interesting, and we'll talk about her some on this, but we're not going to go into her backstory. They are often, as I said, discussed kind of as a payer. Even one of the biographies I read is a simultaneous biography of the two of them that came out in the seventies. And yeah, so we'll talk about Luella some today, but really we're going to talk about head of Hopper and how she got to this point pretty late in her life of being a gossip columnist and having just such influence, and also how she used that influence sometimes in just really cruel ways. So she started life with a completely different name, which was Elda Furry. She was born June second, eighteen eighty five, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. She described that sort of as a suburb of Altoona, Pennsylvania. Later on, she wrote that she was born during an electrical storm, and she also fudged her age and routinely said she was born in eighteen ninety. Her father was a butcher, and she described her upbringing as hard. She had eight siblings, although not all of them lived to adulthood, and she made it sound as though she never really got much praise or encouragement. When her brother sherman got hired away from their father's butcher shop, she was made to pick up his duties, and this is something that she said made her tough enough to be unafraid of anyone in Hollywood. Later in her life, while she was still a teenager in Altoona, Elda acquired an accessory which defined her style for the rest of her life. She bought herself a hat with her own money, and she wrote of that hat quote, it was a thing of beauty, of bright green straw with red velvet geraniums. It made me feel rich as a queen. That hat was a greater attraction on Easter morning than the choir or the preacher's sermon. I said, if a hat can get the attention of this many people, I'll never go bareheaded, and she stuck to that because she was known for her hat collection and the money she spent on it throughout the rest of her life. When she was seventeen, Elda saw a touring company performed the play Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines that involves a love triangle with a bet and an opera star and a lot of complications before a happy ending. Ethel Barrymore starred in the play. It's often credited with being the show that made her famous, and Elderfurry thought that this was amazing, and after seeing the play, she knew she wanted to act, so in nineteen oh seven, she left Pennsylvania for New York, intent on a stage career. In her autobiography, she describes this exit from Pennsylvania as quote, when life became intolerable at home, I ran away to New York and went on the stage. But really, and you'll often see like she saw this play and then she left, But really she took some time before that to get some education that was going to benefit her in her acting career. She didn't actually get formal education past eighth grade because she had to work in the family business. But once she got the acting bug. She did manage to get her father to let her enroll in music school in Pittsburgh, so she did that for a while. But she did make that move from Opportunity to New York, kind of in a spur of the moment, way after an incident in which, according to her, her brother broke her favorite chair, and that was just the last straw for her. She had been secretly saving up money, and she got that money. She packed a suitcase and she left without telling anyone. And she wasn't though, without a place to go in New York, because her uncle lived there and she just kind of showed up on his doorstep. In New York, she got a job working as a chorus girl with the Aborn Opera Company. She was not naturally talented, but she was determined. As she moved in the social circles of the theater, she met one of the most successful actors of the day, de Wolf Hopper. He's most famously remembered today for his recitation of the Ernest Lawrence Thayer baseball poem Casey at the Bat. Hopper was twenty seven years older than Elda, and he clearly captivated her. She later wrote quote. To me, Hopper was something special, something new under the sun. His massive size, his voice, his storytelling gift. Wolfe was a six foot three riot. From the moment I saw him, he fascinated me. She wrote a lot of very adoring things about him, even long after the marriage had ended, describing how his voice was something you couldn't help but fall in love with, and describing it as sounding quote like some great church organ. Hopper had his own acting company and Elda joined it, and though they soon started a romance, they were really not open about it. No, he had a little bit of a history with women. He had already been married a divorce four times at this point. She was so much younger. They just kind of kept it quiet initially, And when Elda, who had gotten frustrated with chorus rolls, managed to land a lead part in a touring production of The Country Boy, which meant she no longer with de Wolf's company, he sent her letters throughout her eight month tour, and then when that tour ended, she decided she also wanted to be in musical theater. Instead of doing straight acting again, not as chorus girl. She wanted to be a main player, and so she started studying voice, and then she landed a role in The Quaker Girl, so once again she went back on tour, and again Wolfy wrote to her constantly. She continued to keep the secret of their romance, even as her colleagues asked who this man was who so dutifully wrote to her and was obviously just adoring of her, And she later said that the strain of keeping this secret of their romance was so great that she was never able to keep another. By the time the tour of The Quaker Girl ended, Elda and Wolfe were secretly engaged. She went to a jewelry store and bought her own ring by herself, and the next morning she took the earliest train from Albany to Grand Central station, where De wolf and his chauffeur were waiting. The couple headed to New Jersey and they got me read in secret. They only told the manager of the Algonquin Hotel where mister Hopper was living, so that he could arrange for Elda to have separate but adjoining rooms with her new husband. As Holly said earlier, this was De Wolfe's fifth marriage. As they started telling people, Elda told one of the couple's closest friends, Alice Miller, and the response was that she burst into tears because she was worried about what her young friend had done. Their other close friends, who were slowly let in on the secret, ended up celebrating with a private dinner, and eventually Elda telegraphed her parents and her father, who was several years younger than her new husbandd wolf was so angry that he put out a statement to the press that the marriage quote pains me greatly. Essentially, everyone kind of thought that de wolf had taken up with such a young woman to stroke his own ego, and that he was going to soon cast her aside. The family statement meant that soon that news was everywhere. There was no keeping any kind of secret, and the newly weds were suddenly having to patch up a lot of friendships with people who were shocked by this news or just kind of hurt at having been left out of the loop. De Wolfe's previous wives had been named Ella, Ida, Edna, and Nella, and she found that their similarities led to her new husband calling her by all of their names and not her own. She wrote, quote, I didn't have much personality of my own then, but I'd be darned if I was going to give up the shred I did possess. So she consulted a numerologist who came up with the name Heda de wolf Hopper did not like this, but she said he never called her the wrong name again. Yeah, she loved it and he was not pleased, but it worked out, I guess. On January twenty sixth, nineteen fifteen, Hedda and De Wolf had a son, William de wolf Hopper Junior. She had been touring Withdwolf on his current tour, but she returned to New York early because her pregnancy, which they had also kept secret, had just become too uncomfortable for life on the road. The birth of their son came several weeks early, and De Wolf was not in New York with her at the time. He actually found out that she had had the child while he was on stage in Chicago, and then once he returned home, the family traveled with a nanny to Nantucket and there they spent the summer. Later that same year, the couple decided to move to Hollywood, something a lot of stage actors were doing to try to get into the new and growing film industry. De wolf had been offered a contract with Triangle Film Corporation. Initially, do wolf had wanted Heda to give up her career when they married, and she acquiesced, but then she took a part, allegedly as a favor to their friend William Farnham. In nineteen sixteen, she made her on screen debut in the film Battle of Hearts. It was the first of many movies for her. By the end of the nineteeneen, she had been in eleven films and the work continued to come. This was good because de Wolfe's talent didn't really translate to the screen. His best feature was his voice, and the films were silent. Plus he was old enough that he just didn't look good on film, according to Heada's account. Later, when his contract was up, he went to New York and she stayed in California, where the work was steady for her. She did eventually go back to New York, and the Hoppers bought a house on Long Island so that their son could have a home outside of the city. De Wolfe had gone back to acting on the stage, and Hetta also did some stage work too, and then Sam Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn opened a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, to make movies, and they called headed to see if she'd like to make some films on the East Coast, and she did, and she also established her reputation as a woman with a sharp tongue very early on in these movies. In nineteen eighteen, she appeared in the film Virtuous Wives that was actually the first film made by Lewis B. Mayer. She tells this story in her book about how there was this weird guy kind of lurking around the set and they kept having to tell him to get out of the shot, and nobody realized it was Lewis B. Mayer and he had to tell people at the end, like, oh, I'm the producer. But Elda, who at this point was going by Heada, but she was also being billed as Missus d wolf Hopper, which is how she's credited in that film, fought constantly with her co star Anita Stewart. Hedda made a point to have custom clothing made for every scene out of her own pocket. She spent her entire salary, which is quoted as five thousand dollars for this project on new clothes and it upstaged the much more famous Stuart with her wardrobe, and this caused a huge calamity. In a moment, we'll talk about the end of Heada's marriage and her life after De Wolfe, but first we will take a quick sponsor break. According to Hedda's account, she began to fall out of love with her husband when she told him that she had gotten a raise the studio and was finally making the same amount of money as he was. His response to this was anger instead of happiness, and he said some very insulting things. They had already been living on very different schedules and not spending as much time together, and then Hadda started to find evidence that he was having an affair or multiple affairs. She eventually caught him in one of these, and she filed for divorce. In nineteen twenty two. D Wolfe Hopper got married again to his sixth wife, Lily and Glacier, right after the divorce was final. Soon after, Hetta was offered a year long contract in Hollywood and she took it. She was in a lot of projects, but was always a supporting player. Over time, she found she wasn't getting offered contracts and she needed to figure out what to do. Interestingly enough, during this time, she was friends with the woman who would later become her most bitter rival, Luella Parsons, and would sometimes slipper information for her gossip column in exchange for a little good press. For a while, Hopper jumped from job to job, just trying to make a living and support herself and her son. In nineteen thirty two, she made a move into a new arena, and that was politics. She ran for Los Angeles City Council that year. She did not win, but she did remain politically interested, and sometimes that interest became part of her columns. We're going to talk about that a lot more in a minute. After foundering for a bit, Heda got a radio agent and they worked on getting a show together. But her first effort was bad. She wasn't used to being on mike rather than on a stage, and she ended up using an affected British sounding accent. But she worked on it and in nineteen thirty six had us started a radio show, The Head of Hopper Show, which was a short form gossip program. Mostly she cataloged Hollywood divorces and weddings, using her connections in the industry for insider information. Luella Parson's show A Hollywood Hotel had debuted two years earlier, and based on the head of Hopper Show, Heda was offered a column by the Esquire syndicate. They specifically wanted a gossip column to compete with the one written by Lluella Parsons. Hedda couldn't type, but she could dictate, and soon her column, HEADA Hopper's Hollywood, was running in more than a dozen papers. She soon was writing seven columns a week and still doing her radio show. She got busy and successful enough to move her work out of her house to an office on Hollywood Boulevard. She kept that office, I think for the rest of her life. She listed her number and address so people could drop in or call if they had a hot tip or any inside information, and they did, and she shared it all without fact checking, later saying she didn't know anything about libel laws. But her radio show was with CBS, and their legal team would actually cut her scripts before she went on the air. They would review it and edit them if they thought something was unverifiable or could get them trouble. But she kind of found a way to work around that. Problem by using her delivery to suggest when she was hinting at something salacious, even if she couldn't say it. Hetta's work was, as we mentioned, not known for fact checking. The New York Times wrote of her after her death, quote, Ordinarily, there was a fake quality to miss Hopper's columns, tracing perhaps to the fact that she did not like to have her staff tamper with her dictated output, and to the fact that she did not always check out her information. The result was that she got names confused, such as Switching Shirley Temple and and Shirley and Judy Garland and Judy Canova. She sometimes misattributed pregnancies or engagements or love affairs. Uh, this gets a yikes. Yeah. I mean that's a pretty fast way for somebody to like have their phone ring and be like, I didn't know you were having an affair, to be like, what are you even talking about? That's not me, but it's in print, and people will start to believe it. That's a problem. Right. In nineteen forty, Hopper's writing had become so popular that she was able to take a more lucrative offer at the Des Moines Register. In Tribune syndicate, but they released her from it when the Chicago Tribune New York News syndicate made her a better offer. This was just after Hedda had pulled off something that seemed unthinkable. She had scooped Luella Parsons that was regarding the divorce of Jimmy Roosevelt, the President's son, And this was hot gossip because Jimmy, who worked for the Goldwyn Studio, was having an affair that precipitated that divorce. It made front page news all over the US, and it sparked a feud between Hopper and Parsons that persisted for decades. By the early nineteen forties, the column was getting so much mail from readers that Hopper needed two full time assistants to wade through it all. Hedda became an integral part of the studio star system. That system is something we've brushed up against on the show before, but we've never really talked about it in depth. Basically, being an actor in Hollywood from the nineteen twenties to the nineteen sixties usually involved going in for a screen test, and if the studio liked what it saw, that actor would be signed to a contract. The contracts were often seven years long, and during that time the actor was essentially an employee of the movie studio. They acted in the films they were assigned. They were usually held to morality clauses that were meant to curb any reckless, lascivious, or other behavior that could embarrass the studio, and in return, the studio made that actor a star. This usually meant the concoction of a false backstory and name, essentially meaning that that actor had to play a character anytime they were out in public, and part of that system was, of course, pr The studio essentially introduced these actors as stars, and gossip columns became a way to get the word out about their doings that were wholesome and image affirming. For example, Clark Gable was one of the stars who became famous in the star system. He was already famous by the time we're using this example, but it shows how this whole thing worked. In nineteen thirty eight, so that was the year Too Hot to Handle came out, and while plans were being laid for Gone with the Wind, a breezy mention of the already well known actor appeared in head of Hopper's Hollywood. It read quote Clark Gable is taking all his pals up to the rodeo in Victorville, October fourteenth, long before he knew Carol Lombard. Yuko Lomo was his old camping ground. He'd go out every night rabbit shooting with all the kids. When celebrity seekers found out about it, Clark moved on. Nice to know he's going back because the gang up there adore him. So it's basically like, isn't he the best guy ever? We all think he's amazing, which just Garner's more public favor for that actor so that when their films come out, people want to go see it. On the flip side, if a star was caught in a scandal and it was about to go to press, the studio would pay off papers or the columnists to suppress this story. There's one story about Luella Parsons where they bought a screenplay from her to suppress the story that never got made, but she basically got a big hunk of money to not talk about something she knew about an actor. This all meant that Hetta and her rival Luella Parsons were able to wield an incredible amount of power. If an actor did something that one of them didn't like, they could easily tank their careers by reporting it or even fabricating unfounded gossip in the guise of an inside tip. Actors who violated the morality clauses in their contracts were fired and left with no real recourse. In a nineteen ninety seven interview with Vanity Fair, actor Roddy McDowell noted that being mentioned positively by Hetta or Parsons was a sort of currency, and actors saved their clippings and showed them to studios, so they were a negotiating tool to prove the value of the actor. Hetta Hopper's sometimes manifested in ways that were actively harmful to the people she wrote about. Both she and Parsons could be incredibly conniving in ways that are kind of hard to stomach for anyone with scruples. Frankly, after Orson Wells had convinced Luella Parsons that his upcoming film Citizen Kane was not based on her boss William Randolph Hurst, Hetta was able to see an early screening and immediately reported to Hurst that it was obviously based on him, and that she was surprised Luella had not given him a heads up. Hurst was so angry he commanded Luella to launch a full scale attack on the film. To squash it. Parsons threatened to expose all of the secrets she knew about RKO executives, that was the studio where it was made, and that she would black out any coverage of it or Radio City Music Hall where it was set to premiere, and as a consequence that premiere was canceled. There is more to this story. There are so many ins and outs of just cruel and unkind behavior and canniming, but the short version is that citizen Kane tanked initially due to the work of Parsons at the behest of Hurst, which he started with a tip off from head of Hopper, and although HEADA Hopper did not work for her. She called the movie quote a vicious and irresponsible attack on a great man. Writing for the Australasian Journal of American Studies in two thousand and seven, Jennifer Frost described the way that Hopper used her column to blur the lines of public, private, and political. Quote gossip was understood to be private talk talk about those things which ought to be kept private, voiced often illegitimately in the public realm. 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 her political views. As practiced by and her reader's, Hollywood Gossip became an arena for discussion and debate about significant and contested issues of public and private life and their intersection in mid twentieth century America. So coming up, we will talk about the way head of Hopper used this whole function of her writing to target Charlie Chaplin in her column. But first we're going to pause for a sponsor break. The most famous victim of Heada's poison pen was Charlie Chaplin. She had many times written about other celebrities with a good bit of venom, but Chaplin was someone she targeted repeatedly in what has often been called a decades long campaign against him. Some of her write ups were honestly the sort of boring critiques of his films that may have been an irritant, like she would say he's a good actor, but his films are bad, but soon she started attacking him on a personal level. Some of this seems to have largely been initiated as a grudge for Chaplain not really caring about Hollywood gossip or playing the games that she typically required of stars if they wanted to stay in the good graces of her column. He also was mora aligned a little bit with Luella Parsons. There are things that place him socially near Luella Parsons, which of course she would not have liked. He also didn't work within the Hollywood system right He was making his films independently, so it wasn't as though his job was in danger if he didn't play nice with her, at least not directly. Chaplain was very liberal in his politics, and Hopper was very conservative, and she characterized his every move as suspicious. He also was and is notorious for his pursuit of underage girls and his extremely poor treatment of them. This is not a matter of dispute, but Hopper seemed to conveniently forget while lambasting him for that behavior, that her own husband, who was much older, had started seeing her when she was still very young, and that he was married six times. She often referred to Chaplin as quote the man who came to dinner and stayed forty years, as a way to criticize the fact that he lived and worked in the US but never became a citizen. She also made antisemitic comments about him. He wasn't Jewish, but she made the case that he seemed Jewish and was hiding it. There were a couple of major and deeply damaging moments in Hopper's print attacks on Chaplain. The first was when she broke the story of a paternity lawsuit. In June of nineteen forty three, an actor named Joan Berry had approached Hopper and told her that she had a sexual relationship with Chaplain. That was true, and that he had broken up with her, which was also true, and that she had gotten pregnant by him. That was not true, and blood tests proved it, but Hopper had gone full force against him, characterizing him as having abandoned a pregnant Joan Berry. In the early nineteen forties, blood tests were not admissible evidence in California praternity lawsuits. That is a little mind blowing, and while the first trial ended in a hung jury, a second trial found in favor of Barry, and Chaplain was ordered to pay support for a child that was not his own. Throughout this entire thing, Hopper had stoked public opinion against him as immoral and irresponsible, and that deeply hurt his reputation with audiences. That was not the end of the Joan Berry problems for Chaplain. Hopper also helped get Chaplin indicted under the Man Act that made it illegal to transport a woman across state lines with immoral intent. We've talked about this on the show before. It pretty much only applied to white women. Chaplain had paid for cross country train fare for Barry at one point and had a testified against him before a grand jury after she had already fed the FBI information about his activities with Barry. When the case went to trial, she covered every moment in her column. Chaplin was acquitted, but had a Hopper did not print that particular detail. During the Cold War, Hopper, noting Chaplain's leftist politics, accused him of being a communist and of donating huge sums of money to the Communist Party. She also stated that he was slyly including communist propaganda in his films. Chaplin was subpoena to appear before the House an American Activities Committee in fall of nineteen forty seven, although he was never actually called to testify. Simultaneously, his film Monsieur Verdeu was released, and Hopper and the FBI both called it Soviet propaganda, which led to picketing and boycotts and a massive failure for the film at the box office. The FBI's investigation ended. Chaplain ultimately turned up no connections to the Communist Party, but Hopper had already convinced a girl great many of her readers that the actor director was in fact a Communist or Communist sympathizer, so findings otherwise just kind of fed into this idea that there might be a conspiracy at work. Hopper's last major blow to Chaplain came in nineteen fifty two, when her work to paint him as a danger to the United States led to his permit to return to the US being revoked after he'd been abroad. He had gone to Europe to promote the film Limelight, and Hopper had suggested that the Truman administration, which was democratic, had given him special treatment in giving him a permit to travel abroad and then return. They had not gotten his travel papers through any special channels, but because of Hopper's insinuation, the Attorney General stepped in and canceled his return permit. He never returned to the United States, although he tried to appeal the situation for a year before giving up. Yeah, she was kind of trying to subtly make this connection that not only was he a communist, she never gave up on that, but that also he was in cahoots with the Democratic Party who was sympathetic to communists, Like she was really building this entire house of cards around his identity. The flip side of her treatment of Charlie Chaplin and other stars that she thought should go on the Blacklist as communists was the way that she sometimes used her column to support stars that were accused of the very same thing we mentioned in our episode about Lucille Ball that she had also been accused of potential communist ties, and it was actually head of Hopper who published the rebuttal to that accusation, including the quote from Ball's husband Desi Arnez that stated quote, the only thing read about her is her hair, and even that is not legitimate. Incidentally, not long after that, Hopper got to appear on I Love Lucy playing herself I had It continued to be successful by writing about Hollywood. In the nineteen fifties, she had a reported readership of thirty five million people, with her column running in eighty five metropolitan newspap and thousands of smaller publications. Her autobiography, titled From Under My Hat, was published in nineteen fifty two. Maybe true to form, she opens it by not talking about herself exactly, but a family member and how she leveraged their unique characteristic for her own gain. It begins quote, once upon a time, there was a six toed cousin mine. When I first saw him, I knew I was in show business. Kids in the neighborhood couldn't afford pennies, but I made them pay five pins every time they got a look at him. It's not exactly a book where you can trust that all the facts are accurate, but it definitely makes her look good, but it also offers some insights into how she felt about herself and the people in her life. She wrote another book that sometimes categorized as an autobiography in nineteen sixty three that was titled The Whole Truth and Nothing But it's really more of a stream of consciousness, tell all of all the various people she knew in Hollywood. Yeah, she spends a lot of time talking about all of Elizabeth Taylor's personal business because she had known her for years and years. On Friday, January twenty eighth, nineteen sixty six, Hedda came down with what seemed to be a bad cold or flu. On Sunday, she felt bad enough to go to the hospital two days later. She died on Tuesday, February first, nineteen sixty six, of quote, double pneumonia with heart complications. Just days before her death, Hopper had told a friend that she heard Charlie Chaplin was trying to return to the US and that he had to be stopped. She had maintained her grudge against him all the way to the end. When Hopper died, her obituary in The New York Times ran under the subheader confidant of leading Stars, noted for flamboyant hats and caustic comments. That same write up also called her the movie colonies mad Hatter and described her work this way quote. With frequent disdain for grammar, logic, and often accuracy, Hedda Hopper produced a Hollywood gossip column for twenty eight years that contributed to the insecurity and vanity of the movie industry and to the titillation and amusement of millions of readers across the county. Yes, there is a bit of comedy that in the very same paragraph where the obituary writer criticized her work, there is a misspelling of county when it should be country. I feel like she might have laughed at that. Uh. That's a very brief version of heada hopper. She had her hand so deep in the Hollywood pie that I feel like you can do entire series of podcasts about her. It intersects with literally everyone we have ever talked about in Hollywood history, and she has many wild adventures in her life because of her connections to that industry and to the stage industry in New York. But that is our coverage of her for today. I have a light and fun listener. Oh good, This is from our listener, Elizabeth, and it is about Advent Calendars. She writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I enjoyed your recent episode on Advent Calendars. As always, my twelve year old son has done a lego Star Wars Advent Calendar for the past few years, and they are so much fun and such a great way to take the edge off of the anticipation of Christmas Day. But my favorite thing about it is that he calls it microdosing Christmas. He's not wrong, and now we refer to it that way all the time. Thanks Elizabeth. I love this. That's a beautiful way to look at it. And I really had not This may sound foolish because I don't have kids. I had not thought about it as a way to kind of entertain kids, because I you know kids. I mean I remember I would get like fever pitch starting December fifth and just drive my parents crazy for the next twenty days. And so I had not thought about that function of Advent calendars, being like, here's a tiny gift, please go to your room. I can see this as like a blessing and a curse, because I remember the year my brother and I were getting new snowboots for Christmas and we were gonna go to a Christmas Eve service and the weather was awful and slushy and gross that day, and so my mom let us open that one present before we went to the service, and then that just became you let us open a Christmas Eve present last year. Now it's a requirement. Yeah yeah, I finangled a Christmas Eve situation as well. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. I do like the concept of microdocing Christmas. That makes me gagle. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History and if you have not subscribed yet, that's a super easy thing to do. You can do it on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. 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.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we are talking about Head of Hopper. And although she started out acting, what really made her famous was her work in newspapers. For several decades, she literally could make or break a movie career with her gossip column sending statements to print, regardless of whether there was any actual proof of what she claimed or the behavior she alleged that people are participating in or not. I find her super fascinating. I read both of her books growing up. She has been in a kajillion movie and TV projects. Most recently was the show Feud, which is a Ryan Murphy show, But it's largely a lot of her. Discussion of her is about her and Luella Parsons because they were kind of the two big power players in terms of gossip columns in Hollywood in the early part of the twentieth century. And I am forever just I marvel at the power that they both had and how much they created ways of consuming information about movies and movie stars that we are still wrapped up in today, even though they're kind of nonsensical. We could talk about this more behind the scenes, because I feel like I have Chicken or the Egg thoughts about the movie industry and how it has developed in this way. But she just is like a wild story of her own. So I thought we would talk about her today. We may do an episode on Luella Parsons in the future because she's also pretty interesting, and we'll talk about her some on this, but we're not going to go into her backstory. They are often, as I said, discussed kind of as a payer. Even one of the biographies I read is a simultaneous biography of the two of them that came out in the seventies. And yeah, so we'll talk about Luella some today, but really we're going to talk about head of Hopper and how she got to this point pretty late in her life of being a gossip columnist and having just such influence, and also how she used that influence sometimes in just really cruel ways. So she started life with a completely different name, which was Elda Furry. She was born June second, eighteen eighty five, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. She described that sort of as a suburb of Altoona, Pennsylvania. Later on, she wrote that she was born during an electrical storm, and she also fudged her age and routinely said she was born in eighteen ninety. Her father was a butcher, and she described her upbringing as hard. She had eight siblings, although not all of them lived to adulthood, and she made it sound as though she never really got much praise or encouragement. When her brother sherman got hired away from their father's butcher shop, she was made to pick up his duties, and this is something that she said made her tough enough to be unafraid of anyone in Hollywood. Later in her life, while she was still a teenager in Altoona, Elda acquired an accessory which defined her style for the rest of her life. She bought herself a hat with her own money, and she wrote of that hat quote, it was a thing of beauty, of bright green straw with red velvet geraniums. It made me feel rich as a queen. That hat was a greater attraction on Easter morning than the choir or the preacher's sermon. I said, if a hat can get the attention of this many people, I'll never go bareheaded, and she stuck to that because she was known for her hat collection and the money she spent on it throughout the rest of her life. When she was seventeen, Elda saw a touring company performed the play Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines that involves a love triangle with a bet and an opera star and a lot of complications before a happy ending. Ethel Barrymore starred in the play. It's often credited with being the show that made her famous, and Elderfurry thought that this was amazing, and after seeing the play, she knew she wanted to act, so in nineteen oh seven, she left Pennsylvania for New York, intent on a stage career. In her autobiography, she describes this exit from Pennsylvania as quote, when life became intolerable at home, I ran away to New York and went on the stage. But really, and you'll often see like she saw this play and then she left, But really she took some time before that to get some education that was going to benefit her in her acting career. She didn't actually get formal education past eighth grade because she had to work in the family business. But once she got the acting bug. She did manage to get her father to let her enroll in music school in Pittsburgh, so she did that for a while. But she did make that move from Opportunity to New York, kind of in a spur of the moment, way after an incident in which, according to her, her brother broke her favorite chair, and that was just the last straw for her. She had been secretly saving up money, and she got that money. She packed a suitcase and she left without telling anyone. And she wasn't though, without a place to go in New York, because her uncle lived there and she just kind of showed up on his doorstep. In New York, she got a job working as a chorus girl with the Aborn Opera Company. She was not naturally talented, but she was determined. As she moved in the social circles of the theater, she met one of the most successful actors of the day, de Wolf Hopper. He's most famously remembered today for his recitation of the Ernest Lawrence Thayer baseball poem Casey at the Bat. Hopper was twenty seven years older than Elda, and he clearly captivated her. She later wrote quote. To me, Hopper was something special, something new under the sun. His massive size, his voice, his storytelling gift. Wolfe was a six foot three riot. From the moment I saw him, he fascinated me. She wrote a lot of very adoring things about him, even long after the marriage had ended, describing how his voice was something you couldn't help but fall in love with, and describing it as sounding quote like some great church organ. Hopper had his own acting company and Elda joined it, and though they soon started a romance, they were really not open about it. No, he had a little bit of a history with women. He had already been married a divorce four times at this point. She was so much younger. They just kind of kept it quiet initially, And when Elda, who had gotten frustrated with chorus rolls, managed to land a lead part in a touring production of The Country Boy, which meant she no longer with de Wolf's company, he sent her letters throughout her eight month tour, and then when that tour ended, she decided she also wanted to be in musical theater. Instead of doing straight acting again, not as chorus girl. She wanted to be a main player, and so she started studying voice, and then she landed a role in The Quaker Girl, so once again she went back on tour, and again Wolfy wrote to her constantly. She continued to keep the secret of their romance, even as her colleagues asked who this man was who so dutifully wrote to her and was obviously just adoring of her, And she later said that the strain of keeping this secret of their romance was so great that she was never able to keep another. By the time the tour of The Quaker Girl ended, Elda and Wolfe were secretly engaged. She went to a jewelry store and bought her own ring by herself, and the next morning she took the earliest train from Albany to Grand Central station, where De wolf and his chauffeur were waiting. The couple headed to New Jersey and they got me read in secret. They only told the manager of the Algonquin Hotel where mister Hopper was living, so that he could arrange for Elda to have separate but adjoining rooms with her new husband. As Holly said earlier, this was De Wolfe's fifth marriage. As they started telling people, Elda told one of the couple's closest friends, Alice Miller, and the response was that she burst into tears because she was worried about what her young friend had done. Their other close friends, who were slowly let in on the secret, ended up celebrating with a private dinner, and eventually Elda telegraphed her parents and her father, who was several years younger than her new husbandd wolf was so angry that he put out a statement to the press that the marriage quote pains me greatly. Essentially, everyone kind of thought that de wolf had taken up with such a young woman to stroke his own ego, and that he was going to soon cast her aside. The family statement meant that soon that news was everywhere. There was no keeping any kind of secret, and the newly weds were suddenly having to patch up a lot of friendships with people who were shocked by this news or just kind of hurt at having been left out of the loop. De Wolfe's previous wives had been named Ella, Ida, Edna, and Nella, and she found that their similarities led to her new husband calling her by all of their names and not her own. She wrote, quote, I didn't have much personality of my own then, but I'd be darned if I was going to give up the shred I did possess. So she consulted a numerologist who came up with the name Heda de wolf Hopper did not like this, but she said he never called her the wrong name again. Yeah, she loved it and he was not pleased, but it worked out, I guess. On January twenty sixth, nineteen fifteen, Hedda and De Wolf had a son, William de wolf Hopper Junior. She had been touring Withdwolf on his current tour, but she returned to New York early because her pregnancy, which they had also kept secret, had just become too uncomfortable for life on the road. The birth of their son came several weeks early, and De Wolf was not in New York with her at the time. He actually found out that she had had the child while he was on stage in Chicago, and then once he returned home, the family traveled with a nanny to Nantucket and there they spent the summer. Later that same year, the couple decided to move to Hollywood, something a lot of stage actors were doing to try to get into the new and growing film industry. De wolf had been offered a contract with Triangle Film Corporation. Initially, do wolf had wanted Heda to give up her career when they married, and she acquiesced, but then she took a part, allegedly as a favor to their friend William Farnham. In nineteen sixteen, she made her on screen debut in the film Battle of Hearts. It was the first of many movies for her. By the end of the nineteeneen, she had been in eleven films and the work continued to come. This was good because de Wolfe's talent didn't really translate to the screen. His best feature was his voice, and the films were silent. Plus he was old enough that he just didn't look good on film, according to Heada's account. Later, when his contract was up, he went to New York and she stayed in California, where the work was steady for her. She did eventually go back to New York, and the Hoppers bought a house on Long Island so that their son could have a home outside of the city. De Wolfe had gone back to acting on the stage, and Hetta also did some stage work too, and then Sam Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn opened a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, to make movies, and they called headed to see if she'd like to make some films on the East Coast, and she did, and she also established her reputation as a woman with a sharp tongue very early on in these movies. In nineteen eighteen, she appeared in the film Virtuous Wives that was actually the first film made by Lewis B. Mayer. She tells this story in her book about how there was this weird guy kind of lurking around the set and they kept having to tell him to get out of the shot, and nobody realized it was Lewis B. Mayer and he had to tell people at the end, like, oh, I'm the producer. But Elda, who at this point was going by Heada, but she was also being billed as Missus d wolf Hopper, which is how she's credited in that film, fought constantly with her co star Anita Stewart. Hedda made a point to have custom clothing made for every scene out of her own pocket. She spent her entire salary, which is quoted as five thousand dollars for this project on new clothes and it upstaged the much more famous Stuart with her wardrobe, and this caused a huge calamity. In a moment, we'll talk about the end of Heada's marriage and her life after De Wolfe, but first we will take a quick sponsor break. According to Hedda's account, she began to fall out of love with her husband when she told him that she had gotten a raise the studio and was finally making the same amount of money as he was. His response to this was anger instead of happiness, and he said some very insulting things. They had already been living on very different schedules and not spending as much time together, and then Hadda started to find evidence that he was having an affair or multiple affairs. She eventually caught him in one of these, and she filed for divorce. In nineteen twenty two. D Wolfe Hopper got married again to his sixth wife, Lily and Glacier, right after the divorce was final. Soon after, Hetta was offered a year long contract in Hollywood and she took it. She was in a lot of projects, but was always a supporting player. Over time, she found she wasn't getting offered contracts and she needed to figure out what to do. Interestingly enough, during this time, she was friends with the woman who would later become her most bitter rival, Luella Parsons, and would sometimes slipper information for her gossip column in exchange for a little good press. For a while, Hopper jumped from job to job, just trying to make a living and support herself and her son. In nineteen thirty two, she made a move into a new arena, and that was politics. She ran for Los Angeles City Council that year. She did not win, but she did remain politically interested, and sometimes that interest became part of her columns. We're going to talk about that a lot more in a minute. After foundering for a bit, Heda got a radio agent and they worked on getting a show together. But her first effort was bad. She wasn't used to being on mike rather than on a stage, and she ended up using an affected British sounding accent. But she worked on it and in nineteen thirty six had us started a radio show, The Head of Hopper Show, which was a short form gossip program. Mostly she cataloged Hollywood divorces and weddings, using her connections in the industry for insider information. Luella Parson's show A Hollywood Hotel had debuted two years earlier, and based on the head of Hopper Show, Heda was offered a column by the Esquire syndicate. They specifically wanted a gossip column to compete with the one written by Lluella Parsons. Hedda couldn't type, but she could dictate, and soon her column, HEADA Hopper's Hollywood, was running in more than a dozen papers. She soon was writing seven columns a week and still doing her radio show. She got busy and successful enough to move her work out of her house to an office on Hollywood Boulevard. She kept that office, I think for the rest of her life. She listed her number and address so people could drop in or call if they had a hot tip or any inside information, and they did, and she shared it all without fact checking, later saying she didn't know anything about libel laws. But her radio show was with CBS, and their legal team would actually cut her scripts before she went on the air. They would review it and edit them if they thought something was unverifiable or could get them trouble. But she kind of found a way to work around that. Problem by using her delivery to suggest when she was hinting at something salacious, even if she couldn't say it. Hetta's work was, as we mentioned, not known for fact checking. The New York Times wrote of her after her death, quote, Ordinarily, there was a fake quality to miss Hopper's columns, tracing perhaps to the fact that she did not like to have her staff tamper with her dictated output, and to the fact that she did not always check out her information. The result was that she got names confused, such as Switching Shirley Temple and and Shirley and Judy Garland and Judy Canova. She sometimes misattributed pregnancies or engagements or love affairs. Uh, this gets a yikes. Yeah. I mean that's a pretty fast way for somebody to like have their phone ring and be like, I didn't know you were having an affair, to be like, what are you even talking about? That's not me, but it's in print, and people will start to believe it. That's a problem. Right. In nineteen forty, Hopper's writing had become so popular that she was able to take a more lucrative offer at the Des Moines Register. In Tribune syndicate, but they released her from it when the Chicago Tribune New York News syndicate made her a better offer. This was just after Hedda had pulled off something that seemed unthinkable. She had scooped Luella Parsons that was regarding the divorce of Jimmy Roosevelt, the President's son, And this was hot gossip because Jimmy, who worked for the Goldwyn Studio, was having an affair that precipitated that divorce. It made front page news all over the US, and it sparked a feud between Hopper and Parsons that persisted for decades. By the early nineteen forties, the column was getting so much mail from readers that Hopper needed two full time assistants to wade through it all. Hedda became an integral part of the studio star system. That system is something we've brushed up against on the show before, but we've never really talked about it in depth. Basically, being an actor in Hollywood from the nineteen twenties to the nineteen sixties usually involved going in for a screen test, and if the studio liked what it saw, that actor would be signed to a contract. The contracts were often seven years long, and during that time the actor was essentially an employee of the movie studio. They acted in the films they were assigned. They were usually held to morality clauses that were meant to curb any reckless, lascivious, or other behavior that could embarrass the studio, and in return, the studio made that actor a star. This usually meant the concoction of a false backstory and name, essentially meaning that that actor had to play a character anytime they were out in public, and part of that system was, of course, pr The studio essentially introduced these actors as stars, and gossip columns became a way to get the word out about their doings that were wholesome and image affirming. For example, Clark Gable was one of the stars who became famous in the star system. He was already famous by the time we're using this example, but it shows how this whole thing worked. In nineteen thirty eight, so that was the year Too Hot to Handle came out, and while plans were being laid for Gone with the Wind, a breezy mention of the already well known actor appeared in head of Hopper's Hollywood. It read quote Clark Gable is taking all his pals up to the rodeo in Victorville, October fourteenth, long before he knew Carol Lombard. Yuko Lomo was his old camping ground. He'd go out every night rabbit shooting with all the kids. When celebrity seekers found out about it, Clark moved on. Nice to know he's going back because the gang up there adore him. So it's basically like, isn't he the best guy ever? We all think he's amazing, which just Garner's more public favor for that actor so that when their films come out, people want to go see it. On the flip side, if a star was caught in a scandal and it was about to go to press, the studio would pay off papers or the columnists to suppress this story. There's one story about Luella Parsons where they bought a screenplay from her to suppress the story that never got made, but she basically got a big hunk of money to not talk about something she knew about an actor. This all meant that Hetta and her rival Luella Parsons were able to wield an incredible amount of power. If an actor did something that one of them didn't like, they could easily tank their careers by reporting it or even fabricating unfounded gossip in the guise of an inside tip. Actors who violated the morality clauses in their contracts were fired and left with no real recourse. In a nineteen ninety seven interview with Vanity Fair, actor Roddy McDowell noted that being mentioned positively by Hetta or Parsons was a sort of currency, and actors saved their clippings and showed them to studios, so they were a negotiating tool to prove the value of the actor. Hetta Hopper's sometimes manifested in ways that were actively harmful to the people she wrote about. Both she and Parsons could be incredibly conniving in ways that are kind of hard to stomach for anyone with scruples. Frankly, after Orson Wells had convinced Luella Parsons that his upcoming film Citizen Kane was not based on her boss William Randolph Hurst, Hetta was able to see an early screening and immediately reported to Hurst that it was obviously based on him, and that she was surprised Luella had not given him a heads up. Hurst was so angry he commanded Luella to launch a full scale attack on the film. To squash it. Parsons threatened to expose all of the secrets she knew about RKO executives, that was the studio where it was made, and that she would black out any coverage of it or Radio City Music Hall where it was set to premiere, and as a consequence that premiere was canceled. There is more to this story. There are so many ins and outs of just cruel and unkind behavior and canniming, but the short version is that citizen Kane tanked initially due to the work of Parsons at the behest of Hurst, which he started with a tip off from head of Hopper, and although HEADA Hopper did not work for her. She called the movie quote a vicious and irresponsible attack on a great man. Writing for the Australasian Journal of American Studies in two thousand and seven, Jennifer Frost described the way that Hopper used her column to blur the lines of public, private, and political. Quote gossip was understood to be private talk talk about those things which ought to be kept private, voiced often illegitimately in the public realm. 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 her political views. As practiced by and her reader's, Hollywood Gossip became an arena for discussion and debate about significant and contested issues of public and private life and their intersection in mid twentieth century America. So coming up, we will talk about the way head of Hopper used this whole function of her writing to target Charlie Chaplin in her column. But first we're going to pause for a sponsor break. The most famous victim of Heada's poison pen was Charlie Chaplin. She had many times written about other celebrities with a good bit of venom, but Chaplin was someone she targeted repeatedly in what has often been called a decades long campaign against him. Some of her write ups were honestly the sort of boring critiques of his films that may have been an irritant, like she would say he's a good actor, but his films are bad, but soon she started attacking him on a personal level. Some of this seems to have largely been initiated as a grudge for Chaplain not really caring about Hollywood gossip or playing the games that she typically required of stars if they wanted to stay in the good graces of her column. He also was mora aligned a little bit with Luella Parsons. There are things that place him socially near Luella Parsons, which of course she would not have liked. He also didn't work within the Hollywood system right He was making his films independently, so it wasn't as though his job was in danger if he didn't play nice with her, at least not directly. Chaplain was very liberal in his politics, and Hopper was very conservative, and she characterized his every move as suspicious. He also was and is notorious for his pursuit of underage girls and his extremely poor treatment of them. This is not a matter of dispute, but Hopper seemed to conveniently forget while lambasting him for that behavior, that her own husband, who was much older, had started seeing her when she was still very young, and that he was married six times. She often referred to Chaplin as quote the man who came to dinner and stayed forty years, as a way to criticize the fact that he lived and worked in the US but never became a citizen. She also made antisemitic comments about him. He wasn't Jewish, but she made the case that he seemed Jewish and was hiding it. There were a couple of major and deeply damaging moments in Hopper's print attacks on Chaplain. The first was when she broke the story of a paternity lawsuit. In June of nineteen forty three, an actor named Joan Berry had approached Hopper and told her that she had a sexual relationship with Chaplain. That was true, and that he had broken up with her, which was also true, and that she had gotten pregnant by him. That was not true, and blood tests proved it, but Hopper had gone full force against him, characterizing him as having abandoned a pregnant Joan Berry. In the early nineteen forties, blood tests were not admissible evidence in California praternity lawsuits. That is a little mind blowing, and while the first trial ended in a hung jury, a second trial found in favor of Barry, and Chaplain was ordered to pay support for a child that was not his own. Throughout this entire thing, Hopper had stoked public opinion against him as immoral and irresponsible, and that deeply hurt his reputation with audiences. That was not the end of the Joan Berry problems for Chaplain. Hopper also helped get Chaplin indicted under the Man Act that made it illegal to transport a woman across state lines with immoral intent. We've talked about this on the show before. It pretty much only applied to white women. Chaplain had paid for cross country train fare for Barry at one point and had a testified against him before a grand jury after she had already fed the FBI information about his activities with Barry. When the case went to trial, she covered every moment in her column. Chaplin was acquitted, but had a Hopper did not print that particular detail. During the Cold War, Hopper, noting Chaplain's leftist politics, accused him of being a communist and of donating huge sums of money to the Communist Party. She also stated that he was slyly including communist propaganda in his films. Chaplin was subpoena to appear before the House an American Activities Committee in fall of nineteen forty seven, although he was never actually called to testify. Simultaneously, his film Monsieur Verdeu was released, and Hopper and the FBI both called it Soviet propaganda, which led to picketing and boycotts and a massive failure for the film at the box office. The FBI's investigation ended. Chaplain ultimately turned up no connections to the Communist Party, but Hopper had already convinced a girl great many of her readers that the actor director was in fact a Communist or Communist sympathizer, so findings otherwise just kind of fed into this idea that there might be a conspiracy at work. Hopper's last major blow to Chaplain came in nineteen fifty two, when her work to paint him as a danger to the United States led to his permit to return to the US being revoked after he'd been abroad. He had gone to Europe to promote the film Limelight, and Hopper had suggested that the Truman administration, which was democratic, had given him special treatment in giving him a permit to travel abroad and then return. They had not gotten his travel papers through any special channels, but because of Hopper's insinuation, the Attorney General stepped in and canceled his return permit. He never returned to the United States, although he tried to appeal the situation for a year before giving up. Yeah, she was kind of trying to subtly make this connection that not only was he a communist, she never gave up on that, but that also he was in cahoots with the Democratic Party who was sympathetic to communists, Like she was really building this entire house of cards around his identity. The flip side of her treatment of Charlie Chaplin and other stars that she thought should go on the Blacklist as communists was the way that she sometimes used her column to support stars that were accused of the very same thing we mentioned in our episode about Lucille Ball that she had also been accused of potential communist ties, and it was actually head of Hopper who published the rebuttal to that accusation, including the quote from Ball's husband Desi Arnez that stated quote, the only thing read about her is her hair, and even that is not legitimate. Incidentally, not long after that, Hopper got to appear on I Love Lucy playing herself I had It continued to be successful by writing about Hollywood. In the nineteen fifties, she had a reported readership of thirty five million people, with her column running in eighty five metropolitan newspap and thousands of smaller publications. Her autobiography, titled From Under My Hat, was published in nineteen fifty two. Maybe true to form, she opens it by not talking about herself exactly, but a family member and how she leveraged their unique characteristic for her own gain. It begins quote, once upon a time, there was a six toed cousin mine. When I first saw him, I knew I was in show business. Kids in the neighborhood couldn't afford pennies, but I made them pay five pins every time they got a look at him. It's not exactly a book where you can trust that all the facts are accurate, but it definitely makes her look good, but it also offers some insights into how she felt about herself and the people in her life. She wrote another book that sometimes categorized as an autobiography in nineteen sixty three that was titled The Whole Truth and Nothing But it's really more of a stream of consciousness, tell all of all the various people she knew in Hollywood. Yeah, she spends a lot of time talking about all of Elizabeth Taylor's personal business because she had known her for years and years. On Friday, January twenty eighth, nineteen sixty six, Hedda came down with what seemed to be a bad cold or flu. On Sunday, she felt bad enough to go to the hospital two days later. She died on Tuesday, February first, nineteen sixty six, of quote, double pneumonia with heart complications. Just days before her death, Hopper had told a friend that she heard Charlie Chaplin was trying to return to the US and that he had to be stopped. She had maintained her grudge against him all the way to the end. When Hopper died, her obituary in The New York Times ran under the subheader confidant of leading Stars, noted for flamboyant hats and caustic comments. That same write up also called her the movie colonies mad Hatter and described her work this way quote. With frequent disdain for grammar, logic, and often accuracy, Hedda Hopper produced a Hollywood gossip column for twenty eight years that contributed to the insecurity and vanity of the movie industry and to the titillation and amusement of millions of readers across the county. Yes, there is a bit of comedy that in the very same paragraph where the obituary writer criticized her work, there is a misspelling of county when it should be country. I feel like she might have laughed at that. Uh. That's a very brief version of heada hopper. She had her hand so deep in the Hollywood pie that I feel like you can do entire series of podcasts about her. It intersects with literally everyone we have ever talked about in Hollywood history, and she has many wild adventures in her life because of her connections to that industry and to the stage industry in New York. But that is our coverage of her for today. I have a light and fun listener. Oh good, This is from our listener, Elizabeth, and it is about Advent Calendars. She writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I enjoyed your recent episode on Advent Calendars. As always, my twelve year old son has done a lego Star Wars Advent Calendar for the past few years, and they are so much fun and such a great way to take the edge off of the anticipation of Christmas Day. But my favorite thing about it is that he calls it microdosing Christmas. He's not wrong, and now we refer to it that way all the time. Thanks Elizabeth. I love this. That's a beautiful way to look at it. And I really had not This may sound foolish because I don't have kids. I had not thought about it as a way to kind of entertain kids, because I you know kids. I mean I remember I would get like fever pitch starting December fifth and just drive my parents crazy for the next twenty days. And so I had not thought about that function of Advent calendars, being like, here's a tiny gift, please go to your room. I can see this as like a blessing and a curse, because I remember the year my brother and I were getting new snowboots for Christmas and we were gonna go to a Christmas Eve service and the weather was awful and slushy and gross that day, and so my mom let us open that one present before we went to the service, and then that just became you let us open a Christmas Eve present last year. Now it's a requirement. Yeah yeah, I finangled a Christmas Eve situation as well. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. I do like the concept of microdocing Christmas. That makes me gagle. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History and if you have not subscribed yet, that's a super easy thing to do. You can do it on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. 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.