20 Fan Magazine Writers Who Invented Hollywood’s Biggest Lies

Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, who wrote from a booth at Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard, informed his readers for decades that teenage actress Lana Turner had been discovered there. That wasn’t true: She was actually scouted by publisher Billy Wilkerson at another malt shop near Hollywood High in 1936, but Skolsky perpetuated the error in print, even directing fans to a random stool as “the” spot. The tale has since transcended its own falsehood and continues to be repeated.

MGM head Louis B. Mayer’s close ally Louella Parsons was the syndicated gossip columnist for publisher William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. She had more than 20 million readers. But when MGM’s Loretta Young got pregnant by married co-star Clark Gable in 1935, Parsons published the studio-approved lie that she’d merely been sick and had later “adopted” a baby girl named Judith. It was her own daughter. Readers accepted the adoption myth for decades.

In 1939, Kirtley Baskette, a freelance writer who contributed to Photoplay, wrote a story called “Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands and Wives,” which was about the unmarried couples Clark Gable and Carole Lombard and Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck. He never made any direct accusations, but the story’s implication was enough to worry Will Hays, head of the Hollywood censorship office. The marriages happened within months. Gable and Lombard were wed in March, and Taylor and Stanwyck were married in May.

“The public wants to believe in Santa Claus and in the movie stars,” said Gladys Hall, a fan magazine writer. She published a 1932 interview with actress Tallulah Bankhead that contained sensational quotes from reckless love affairs, and Bankhead responded by sending out a telegram to the press calling the piece “a tissue of lies.” People believed the fake quotes anyway instead of the star’s own denial.

In 1934, Katherine Albert, a writer at Modern Screen magazine, did a piece on Joan Crawford with the title “I’m a Terrible Person.” The interview came after the actress had divorced Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Crawford used the opportunity to enumerate all of her shortcomings. It was a studio move disguised as brutal honesty to make her seem more relatable after the split, and it worked because fans took it as sincere.

In July 1922, an illustrator/writer for Photoplay magazine named Dick Dorgan wrote a sneering article titled “A Song of Hate,” in which he made fun of Rudolph Valentino’s eyelashes, clothes, and hair. The article was written in jest, and perhaps in response to some men’s resentment of Valentino because of his success, but many people took it seriously, and the mockery stuck with him until he died in 1926.

In the 1920s, Herbert Howe, one of the most prominent fan writers at Photoplay magazine, wrote serial profiles that concocted heterosexual public romances for silent-screen heartthrobs Ramón Novarro and Rudolph Valentino (both of whom were under contract to pose as eligible bachelors). Howe himself was involved with Novarro as his partner and publicist, though Novarro was not publicly gay, and thus had reason to support this façade. And readers bought the whole story, reporting these fictional romances as true news items.

Adela Rogers St. Johns, a Photoplay reporter who was known as “the mother confessor of Hollywood,” produced a serialized 1928 biography of silent star Clara Bow, the “It Girl,” that dramatized her real but exaggerated poverty and harsh upbringing. Years earlier, St. Johns had written comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s invented “Love Confessions,” published just as he was arrested following the death of actress Virginia Rappe. Both pieces shaped lasting, heavily fictionalized public images.

Hedda Hopper, the former actress who began her syndicated newspaper column in 1938, treated arranged “publicity dates” between young male and female contract players as real-life love affairs. And she exaggerated professional competition between female stars into personal feuds. Her audience consumed both stories as fact, furthering her influence on public perceptions of Hollywood.

In 1920, Eugene V. Brewster, who created the fan magazine business by starting a magazine for Brooklyn movie fans in 1911, held a “Fame and Fortune Contest” and selected one of the contestants, Corliss Palmer, as the winner. Brewster’s fictionalized profiles portrayed Palmer as a cinematic genius and future starlet. Her career as a motion-picture actress didn’t take off, but Brewster invested so heavily in promoting her that he essentially went broke.

“Cal York” never existed. It was a house pseudonym used by the editors of Photoplay magazine for decades, standing for “California” and “New York.” The name made him sound like someone who knew everything about Hollywood, as if he roamed the studio lots, talking to everyone. Studio publicity departments played right along, feeding Cal York fabricated material, including fake star dates and phony reconciliations between married couples. Each month, millions of readers believed they were reading hard-nosed, independent reporting.

Photoplay’s Ruth Waterbury, who went on to run Silver Screen magazine, claimed that MGM star Joan Crawford’s 1942 marriage to the actor Phillip Terry was a tranquil, happy love affair. Working with studio publicity departments, Waterbury painted a similar portrait of Clark Gable’s marriages, turning hasty, questionable decisions into the types of romance no one questioned. In fact, Crawford admitted that she married Terry in a moment of desperation, feeling lonely.

Lincoln Carter was not an actual journalist but rather a house name for one or more writers at Eugene V. Brewster’s Brooklyn-based fan magazine, which operated between 1911 and 1914. The magazine published short stories based on popular silent movies of the day, complete with illustrations taken directly from the film. These stories described the actors as though they actually experienced the perilous stunts they performed on screen. Early audiences, unfamiliar with the art of staging for film, wrote in assuming that these men and women were real-life heroes.

Harry Carr, who wrote for a Los Angeles fan magazine in the 1910s and ’20s as the West Coast correspondent, was given these rudimentary studio press kits about “foreign” stars such as Polish-born actress Pola Negri or Italian-born actor Rudolph Valentino, and turned them into breathless, dramatized biographies. He fabricated families of nobility, narrow escapes from war-torn homelands, and tragic romances. The resulting narratives became American “facts,” bolstering Hollywood’s image as home to the exotic foreign star.

In the 1920s and ’30s, Mayme Ober Peak wrote celebrity profiles for Photoplay and other publications, with interviews so vivid that readers pictured themselves eavesdropping on an hours-long conversation with a celebrity in his or her living room. In reality, Ober Peak was typically turning studio-supplied press releases into first-person dialogue. Readers never knew they were reading recycled studio copy; such shortcuts were common practice.

Agnes Smith had written more than 200 Photoplay features before she became editor of a New York fan magazine in 1926. Smith’s profiles of some of the most popular stars of the silent era, such as “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, glossed over studio squabbles and even their personal divorces, presenting studio-approved scenarios like private whispers. Readers took these dignified portraits for gospel.

In the 1920s, New York fan magazine managing editor Adele Whitely Fletcher collaborated with another writer, Gladys Hall, on a series of interview playlets, which read like full-length plays, complete with dramatis personae, stage directions, and dialogue attributed to actual stars, such as silent film star Gloria Swanson and screen heartthrob Rudolph Valentino. The public had no reason to believe that what they read in print was anything but the actual words spoken by celebrities in private.

In the 1940s, Fredda Dudley was a feature writer for a number of fan magazines that covered stars such as Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, and Casablanca’s Paul Henreid in “at home” pieces based on studio material. Dudley cooked up tales of invented home-cooking routines, made-up child-rearing stories, and modest pastimes to assure readers in wartime and post-war years that the stars they worshipped were living wholesome, ordinary lives. The public lapped up the domestic image, never knowing how messy life was really behind it.

In the 1920s and ’30s, Delight Evans, editor and chief feature writer for a New York fan magazine, ran monthly columns purporting to reveal the exact beauty regimens and diets of prominent movie actresses. Many of those “secret” recipes were created by Evans and studio publicists in conjunction with cosmetic advertisements that appeared on the same page as her articles. Female readers followed along with the routines, convinced they were doing what the stars did.

Howard Sharpe, a freelance writer for several fan magazines during the late 1930s and ’40s, profiled headstrong stars Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford. He built dramatic stories around on-set tantrums, walkouts, and feuds with directors. Sharpe sometimes stretched minor friction or even invented it to make his articles more thrilling. Stars and studio heads complained, but readers believed every word.

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