Brown Derby is said to have proposed to Carole Lombard there. Rival gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper are recorded as regular patrons. In "L.A. at Last", the first of the Hollywood episodes of "I Love Lucy", Lucy (Lucille Ball), Ethel (Vivian Vance), and Fred (William Frawley) have lunch at the Brown Derby. During the misadventure, the trio dines in a booth with Eve Arden on one side and William Holden (who orders a Cobb Salad) on the other. This leads to the famous disaster scene in which Lucy inadvertently causes a waiter to hit Holden in the face with a
Hedda Hopper Hopper's public image was her fondness for wearing extravagant hats, for which the Internal Revenue Service gave her a $5,000 annual tax credit as a work expense. During the Second World War, the Nazis used photographs of Hopper in her extravagant hats for propaganda, as a symbol of "American decadence". She made a $250,000 annual salary, which enabled her to live an extravagant lifestyle and maintain a mansion in Beverly Hills, which she described as "the house that fear built". After Hopper printed a story about an extramarital affair between Joseph Cotten and Deanna Durbin, Cotten ran into Hopper at