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
New York City Opera Appel Room in Jazz at Lincoln Center was inaugurated with the premiere of David Hertzberg's "Sunday Morning". A work for soprano and small ensemble, it featured soprano Sarah Shafer and mezzo-soprano Kirstin Chávez. That was followed by the East Coast premiere of composer Stewart Wallace's and librettist Michael Korie's "Hopper's Wife" – a surreal, erotically-charged 90-minute 1997 chamber opera fantasy about an imagined marriage between the painter Edward Hopper and the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. It was directed by Andreas Mitisek at Harlem Stage from April 28 through May 1, 2016, in his New York City directorial debut. Third, the