Post-Tribune |

Hollywood Hopper hat at Symphony’s 2018 May Wine Brunch

A column I wrote a year ago about the power of legendary gossip columnist Hedda “the Hat” Hopper captured the attention of Marti Ross of St. John.

I had published this column just prior to the Women’s Association of Northwest Indiana Symphony Society’s Annual May Wine Brunch, which always features a ladies hat competition that I’ve been asked to judge in the past.

I told Ross, who happens to be one of the organizers for the event, that my brother David and his wife Pat own one of the late Hopper’s personally owned silk flower topped wide-brimmed wonders, which came from an auction, nestled in its original hat box from Saks Fifth Avenue. Ross urged me to talk my mother Peggy about bringing it for this year’s event.

Mission accomplished. Next month, I’ll return as a celebrity judge, with my mother, for the 46th Annual May Wine Brunch, and Hopper’s hat will join the fun parade of head-worthy accessories.

I’ve been doing the honors of judging this competition since 2009, and returned for these same hat award duties in 2014, 2016 and 2017. It’s a favorite tradition and for a worthy cause raising money for programming for the Northwest Indiana Symphony.

This year’s festivities are May 9 in the dining room, salons and atrium of the Center for Visual and Performing Arts, 1040 Ridge Road in Munster. Guests are encouraged to arrive when the doors open at 10 a.m. Lunch is at noon. Tickets are still $50 each and reservations are required by April 25 by calling 219-836-0525, Ext. 206.

It’s a day of wonderful music, raffle prizes, shopping at more than two dozen vendor booths, great conversation, a scrumptious lunch and many silver trays of sweet, delicious wine with tiny heart-shaped slices of strawberries in each glass. This year’s theme is “With a Song in My Heart,” with the musical entertainment at 1 p.m. featuring guest vocalists from the “Showboat and Show Tunes” NWI Symphony concert coming up May 12.

As for Hopper, she was based at her flagship newspaper the Los Angeles Times and syndicated by the Tribune Syndicate, including her Hollywood-datelined columns appearing the Chicago Tribune. She claimed a readership of more than 35 million at the height of her career in the early 1950s, in addition to her reach with the listeners of her syndicated radio show.

The late great Irv “Kup” Kupcinet, whose gossip columns appeared in Chicago newspapers for a remarkable 60 years, mostly in the rival Sun-Times, once told me an interesting bit about Hopper prior to his death in 2003. When Hopper, whose elaborate hats were her signature trademark, died at age 71 very suddenly in 1966 after a bout of pneumonia and a heart ailment, the Tribune Syndicate was left scrambling to fill her column’s void.

Kup said legendary Chicago Tribune editor Don Maxwell called to meet with him and asked if he would leave the Sun-Times to take over Hopper’s column, with an offer that even included her house in Los Angeles, her office in Hollywood plus the lucrative $75,000 annual salary! But Kup, consulting with wife Essie, declined, not wanting to leave the Windy City.

Kup enjoyed visits from myself and my parents at his apartment in downtown Chicago in his later years after he stopped going to the newsroom each day because of his advanced age. He preferred to do his writing from home. I once asked him about the odd inclusion of Hopper’s large mansion (which she once famously described as “the house that fear built”) as part of the prosed Tribune contract offer, all of which Kup even detailed in his 1988 published autobiography “Kup: A Man, an Era, a City.” After all, Hopper had a beloved son, Bill Hopper, the actor who starred opposite Raymond Burr on the TV series “Perry Mason.”

Kup explained Hopper had been financially drained after the lawsuit following 1963 publishing of her second autobiography “The Whole Truth and Nothing But.” Actor Michael Wilding, the second husband of Elizabeth Taylor, successfully sued Hopper for $3 million because of a passage in the book which asserted Wilding had an affair with fellow actor Stewart Granger. Kup said just before her passing, Hopper had taken a hefty advance for her contract with the Tribune Syndicate to cover the mortgage costs associated with her home and office. Appropriately, the title of Hopper’s first autobiography, published in 1952, was “From Under My Hat.”

Philip Potempa is a journalist, published author and the director of marketing at Theatre at the Center.

pmpotempa@comhs.org