St. Johns, Adela Rogers

▪ American journalist and writer

née  Adela Nora Rogers 

born May 20, 1894, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.

died Aug. 10, 1988, Arroyo Grande, Calif.

      American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter best known as a reporter for Hearst newspapers and for her interviews of motion picture stars.

      The daughter of a noted criminal lawyer, St. Johns often went to courtrooms in her youth. She began her career in journalism, as well as her long association with Hearst Publications, in 1913 as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, and she subsequently worked for William Randolph Hearst (Hearst, William Randolph)'s Los Angeles Herald, Chicago American, New York American, and International News Service. She reported on crime, politics, society, and sports news before retiring in the early 1920s. St. Johns then became noted for interviewing movie stars for Photoplay magazine. She also wrote short stories for Cosmopolitan, the Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines and finished 9 of her 13 screeplays before returning to reporting for Hearst newspapers.

      Writing in a distinctive, emotional style, St. Johns reported on, among other subjects, the controversial Jack Dempsey–Gene Tunney “long-count” fight in 1927, the treatment of the poor during the Great Depression, and the 1935 trial of Richard Bruno Hauptmann for kidnapping and murdering the son of Charles Lindbergh. In the mid-1930s she moved to Washington, D.C., to report on national politics. Her coverage of the assassination of Senator Huey Long in 1935, the abdication of King Edward VIII of Britain in 1936, the Democratic National Convention of 1940, and other major stories made her one of the best-known reporters of the day. She said in her autobiography, The Honeycomb (1969), that what she did not learn at school she had “learned from pimps, professional prostitutes, gamblers, bank robbers, poets, newspapermen, jury bribers, millionaire dipsomaniacs, and murderers.”

      St. Johns retired again from newspaper work in 1948 in order to write books, including novels and memoirs, and to teach at a series of universities. In 1970 she was awarded the Medal of Freedom. In 1976, at the age of 82, she returned to reporting for the San Francisco Examiner to cover the bank robbery and conspiracy trial of Patricia Hearst, granddaughter of her former employer. A minister in the Church of Religious Science, she was working at the time of her death on Missing Years, a study of the years in Jesus Christ's life between his bar mitzvah and the time he turned 30.

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