Moses & the Money Changers

Keeping a stiff upper face, CBS's Ed Sullivan read the advance publicity for Hedda Hopper's Hollywood, the NBC show he will have to buck next Sunday. Columnist Hedda's guest list claimed more than 20 star names, including Gary Cooper, Harold Lloyd, Mickey Rooney, Joan

Crawford, Bette Davis and Charlton Heston. Having just paid Ben-Hur's Heston $10,000 for an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Sullivan made some discreet phone calls to see what kind of a price Hedda was paying. Answer: $210, the minimum union pay scale for an "interview" appearance.

Blood trickled from The Stone. "This is the most grievous form of payola," he complained to two show-business unions: "Here is a columnist using plugs in a column to get performers free."

The resulting feud was something like watching a cigar-store Indian chasing a tufted titmouse with a crab net. "He's a liar," cried Hedda. "He's scared to death I'm going to knock him off the air." Computing quickly, Sullivan had figured that $90,000 in talent had probably been placed in the Hopper for the yearly income (about $4,000) of one well-tipped bootblack. "This woman just used to hang around the fringes of show business," said Sullivan in New York. "She's no actress. She's certainly no newspaperwoman. She's downright illiterate. She can't even spell. She serves no higher function than playing housemother on Conrad Hilton junkets. And yet she's established a reign of terror out there in Hollywood."

Trying to dismiss the whole thing as "professional jealousy," Hedda asserted that her Hollywood column often runs side by side with Sullivan's Broadway gossip in the New York Daily News, has a much wider national syndication and "he can't stand it, that's all." Hearst papers, which syndicate Hedda's archenemy Louella Parsons, gleefully printed the story on Page One, with eight-column banner headlines, two days running.

All this had put Charlton Ben-Heston in a curious position. Making a sort of malice-toward-none, chariot-for-all decision, he walked out on Hopper's program (evidently under pressure from his big, fee-conscious agency), explained lamely that he had assumed the show would be local rather than network. Paving his own way out, Mickey Rooney said he was sorry he did not know the Hopper program would be taped on a weekend, because he always spends Saturday and Sunday in church.

"This is a terrific victory," said Sullivan, after hearing an NBC announcement that Hedda had also been deserted by Bette Davis, Steve McQueen, Robert Horton, Joan Crawford, and Tuesday Weld (but Hopperites insisted that the whole list had withdrawn for other reasons before the rumble began). "Heston read the Bible on Sullivan's show," concluded Hedda. "The money changers haven't left the temple." Deacon Sullivan had a different vision. "Heston played Moses in The Ten Commandments," he remembered. "This week he was the Moses who led all these people out of the wilderness."

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