Gossip columnist 1930s through the 1950s, the two best-known - and competing - Hollywood gossip columnists were Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Well-timed leaks about a star's purported romantic adventures helped the studios to create and sustain the public's interest in the studios' star actors. As well, the movie studios' publicity agents acted as unnamed "well-informed inside sources" who provided misinformation and rumors to counteract whispers about celebrity secrets — such as homosexuality or an out-of-wedlock child — that could have severely damaged not only the reputation of the movie star in question, but the movie star's box office viability. Having fallen
Stewart Wallace Memorial Opera House of the San Francisco Opera in 2008. The New York City Opera announced that it would stage the East Coast premiere of Wallace's “Hopper’s Wife” — a 1997 chamber opera about an imagined marriage between the painter Edward Hopper and the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper—at Harlem Stage from April 28 through May 1, 2016. Stewart Wallace Stewart Wallace (born 1960) is an American composer and cantor. Wallace was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has spent much of his career composing experimental operas, from the dance-centered "Kabbalah" (1989) to the surrealist "Hopper's Wife" (1992). Two of his operas