There were many women journalists who had their finger on the pulse of Golden Age Hollywood. One of them was the famous and powerful gossip columnist Louella Parsons. Another force to be reckoned with was Hedda Hopper. Still another was Helen Louise Walker, who may not have been as famous as Parsons or Hopper, but she more than made up for it with her prolific presence in the Hollywood entertainment publications of the day.
As far as I have ascertained, there is scant biographical information available about Walker's life other than her work as a reporter from the 1920s into the late 1950s, when she wrote for numerous movie fan magazines such as MOTION PICTURE CLASSIC, PICTURE PLAY, MOVIELAND, MOVIE MIRROR, PHOTOPLAY, SILVER SCREEN and MOTION PICTURE.
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| Painting of Helen Louise Walker by Charles Gatchell, 1920s. |
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| Charles Gatchell obit, The Herald-Palladium, Benton Harbor, Michigan, April 5, 1933 (coincidentally, the birthplace of my late father). |
During her career, she wrote countless features and profiles, interviewing stars such as Claudette Colbert, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Bing Crosby and Rudolph Valentino just ten days before his death at the age of 31. Her access to so many actors and actresses made her very influential to those looking for publicity in Hollywood celebrity circles.
Walker wrote this article on Boris Karloff for the April 1932 issue of MOTION PICTURE. In the story, she states: "I've known him myself, for five or six [years]. I'm pretty proud of it, too, because he is the first actor that I "knew when." There is no mention of his being cast for THE MUMMY, which would be released at the end of the year, but she does mention that he is up for a role in a remake of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (it was never filmed), as well as appearing in the upcoming THE INVISIBLE MAN (he didn't).
Helen Louise Walker also had a perception about the power of women in Hollywood, and she wrote about it several times in the 1930s. In his February 15, 2022 essay "Hollywood is a Woman's Town’: Masculinity and the Leading Man in American Fan Magazines of the 1930s" (Source: Wiley Online Library, author Stephen Sharot begins by writing:
In their address to a predominantly female readership, fan magazines of the 1930s asserted that Hollywood was one place in which women were not subordinated to men as female stardom was superior to that of male stardom. The magazines’ representations of male actors were both compliant with, and resistant to, the tough-guy image of hegemonic masculinity. The personas of most ‘leading men’ who led the supporting casts of female stars were represented as softer forms of masculinity than that of the majority of male stars. The on-screen hard forms of masculinity of male stars were softened by the magazines’ reports of their off-screen personas, and the personas of some actors were presented as a bipolar masculinity that combined soft and hard forms.
I believe the first time she wrote about the topic was in this article from the September 1932 issue of PHOTOPLAY.
Continued tomorrow.
