Hedda Hopper column, entitled "Hedda Hopper's Hollywood", debuted on February 14 (St. Valentine's Day), 1938. Hopper could not type, or spell very well, so she dictated her column to a typist over the phone. Initially facing stiff competition against Louella Parsons, who had a monopoly on Hollywood gossip, Hopper used her extensive contacts forged during her acting days to gather material for her column. Her first major scoop had national implications: in 1939 Hopper printed that President Franklin Roosevelt's son James Roosevelt was divorcing his wife Betsey after being caught in an affair with a nurse at the Mayo Clinic. Part of
Michael Korie by the composer from forty-five minutes of text and music extracted from the opera's third act requiem before its premiere. The work was presented in London as part of the Maida Vale Concerts series in 2002, performed by the BBC Symphony. In February 2015, a new semi-staged concert version drawn from the entire opera was presented in Melbourne, Australia, directed by Cameron Lukie, and again in Sydney in 2016. Wallace and Korie's next opera, the three-character ninety-minute "Hopper's Wife", imagines Josephine Hopper, wife of painter Edward Hopper, transformed into the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Of its premiere at Long Beach