Word: columned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thus reported TIME Correspondent Jon Larsen on his encounter with the woman who is responsible for reviving a dying institution-the Hollywood gossip column. Even before Louella Parsons' retirement in 1965 and Hedda Hopper's death in 1966, movieland chatter seemed to have lost its appeal. Did anyone really care any longer about those dreary Hollywood divorces and adulteries? Still, Haber's column, syndicated for little more than a year and now running in 93 newspapers, has won a sizable general readership as well as the respect and fear of cinematic celebrities. For good reason. Haber...
...column carries the usual trivia about Who Wore What to Whose Party. Although many of her trade items intrigue only insiders, they reflect professional savvy. Above all, she publishes tidbits about twosomes (or threesomes or foursomes) that even today's permissive society still finds at least mildly tantalizing...
...Mercouri, she reported, "had wall-to-wall hips, an ear-to-ear mouth, and more teeth than a pretzel has salt." Occasionally, the sarcasm cuts closer to home. Before she married Douglas Cramer, who is now head of TV production at Paramount, in 1966, Joyce described him in her column as "the kind of man who takes traveler's checks to Santa Barbara...
Some of her victims wish they had a column in which to call her something like Miss VV (Vile and Vicious) or BB (Biting and Bitchy). Sweet Julie Andrews drops her Mary Poppins mask and says of Haber: "She needs open-heart surgery-and they should go in through her feet." Director Blake Edwards charges that "Haber's writing is so blatantly vicious and her motivation so disturbed that she really adds up to a psychiatric case...
Such animosity does not keep her from all the best parties, a rich source of Hollywood dirt, and she does not let her readers forget it. "You sort of get the impression that most parties Joyce writes about are being given for her," says one student of her column. "Not that she thinks so, but so many people are coming up to her to say this or that or sitting next to her (Joyce does not sit next to people; they sit next to her) that you get the feeling she must be the most important person there...