With All the Frills Upon It

Have a hopping good Easter weekend, darlings!

Glamour in Unexpected Places

Hedda Hopper

Ethel Merman

Martha Raye

Three's a Crowd...

...Talu's a party!

Strange Bedfellows

MAMIE VAN DOREN, ANNA MAGNANI and GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA

VAN JOHNSON, MIA FARROW, JOAN CRAWFORD, ROMAN POLANSKI and WILLIAM CASTLE

DANNY THOMAS, ZSA ZSA GABOR and ESTHER WILLIAMS

JOHN WAYNE and JAYNE MANSFIELD

IRENE DUNNE, LOUISE BEAVERS and HEDDA HOPPER

BETTE DAVIS and GINGER ROGERS (and is that poor Bobbie on the end?)

Hedda Babbler

Our latest Mystery Guest was, indeed, the Lady with the Tutti-Frutti (and every other kind of) Hat, Miss Hedda Hopper. She began as an actress, but her looks were decidedly against her: one fellow actress snidely described Hopper as having the "face of a ferret." Leaving the soundstage for the reporter's desk, Hopper became a household name - perhaps even more of a celebrity than many of the movie stars she praised (and destroyed) in print.

Unlike her arch rival, Louella Parsons, who was deadly serious and a boring old bag for it, Hopper had a healthy sense of humor about her outsized personality, image, and exalted/feared position as one of the Grande Dames of Gossip. She spoofed her persona in The Women (1939), playing reporter "Dolly Dupuyster" while wearing a hat rigged out with insect antennae (get it?); and made a cameo as herself in Sunset Boulevard (1950). She also appeared as herself on an episode of I Love Lucy, with a running gag being her infamous millinery: a huge basket of fruit is mistaken for the roving reporter.

Our darling Toby Worthington was the first to guess correctly; he wins a lifetime membership to the William Hopper Fan Club.