Word: demas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...took it gallantly. She dabbled in real estate, but that bored her. Then one day she flounced into the hotel suite of Dema ("The Brain") Harshbarger, an ample and astute business woman, founder and manager of the NBC Artists' Bureau, who had gone to California to retire. Said Hedda: "I want to get on that air." "In half an hour," says Dema, "she told me more about Hollywood than I could learn in two years of constant study." Dema decided to become Hedda's manager...
...year she did a little better. Then, in 1938, Howard Denby of the Esquire syndicate came along-primed, the story goes, by the Metromen who wanted to set up a rival to Lolly Parsons. Hedda's first columns were terrible too. Hedda was too nice to people. "Look," Dema told her, "as long as everybody says you're fine, I like you, you're going to starve to death. Wake up. Be yourself." So Hedda honed her talons...
Last year, quite aside from her newspaper work, Hedda made $2,500 a week as a kind of traffic director on This Is Hollywood, a radio show. Last week, she could add up-or rather, Dema could add up for her-a quarter of a million dollars' worth of annual business. Says Dema, who runs Hedda's business affairs completely (which includes issuing her a $25 weekly allowance): "I don't think we've even scratched the surface...
...whom she dictates at the top of her lungs, from such characteristic jottings as: "Catalina and sleep . . . Stinkey Pinky . . . Test Pilot ... he has to have three steps to get on the love . . . Marie Antoinette . . . Mrs. Chauncey Olcott. . . ." Eighth member of Hedda's staff is a "brain" named Dema Harshbarger...