Word: elda
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Fighting Quaker. Where did this terror of the tycoons, this gorgon of gossip, spring from? Like most great legends, Hedda's girlhood, as she recalls it, is swirled in mist, lit by occasional flashes of fire. She was born Elda Furry, in Hollidaysburg, Pa. (near Altoona), in 1890. Her father, a meat dealer descended from a long line of Quaker ministers, begot a long line of children (nine), of whom Elda...
...fighter from the start. She fought her father because he was stingy. She fought her grandfather, who owned 20 farms, because he was even stingier. After a delicious sneak into Altoona to see Ethel Barrymore in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, Elda (then 17) fought her way out of the family, once & for all, and headed for Manhattan and the stage. She brought with her from Hollidaysburg two permanent assets: her talons, and an inviolable core of Quaker staidness. "Hedda," says a friend, "is a Quaker from the mouth down...
...asked Elda Weaver to marry him. Like the Kuesters, the Weavers were of German stock. Says Elda's mother who, though eightyish, is still rugged, still speaks with a German accent: "God guided every step of our way to this blessed country...
...Elda bought the old Weaver homestead, which had passed out of the family. The early years were hard, but the Kuesters pulled through, says Gus, "by chickens, hogs and going without." They pulled through also thanks to the patient devotion of Elda Kuester. Over the years hogs paid the mortgage (today the land is worth $225 an acre), and the Kuesters received the final patent of ownership: the neighbors began to call the old Weaver place the Kuester farm. There were born Dale and a pretty daughter, Shirley, now 19, who sometimes acts as her father's official secretary...
...Chapman, who was his own legman and even typed his own copy, Hedda Hopper is real Hollywood. Not by accident has she risen in four years to challenge Lolly Parsons as chief outlet for Hollywood publicity. At 52, brown-haired, boisterous Hedda, who started life as plain Pennsylvania Quakeress Elda Furry, has been nearly 25 years in the movies (acting in over 100 pictures), was the fifth of the late Actor DeWolf Hopper's six wives, between times got "kicked around plenty" while staging fashion shows, coaching actors, selling real estate, even running for political office...