Adela Rogers St. Johns - Life and Career

Life and Career

St. Johns was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles criminal lawyer, Earl Rogers, who was a friend of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Adela Rogers as she was known in high school, was Hollywood High School's first real celebrity graduate and in the graduating class of 1910. She obtained her first job at age 19 working as a reporter for Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. She reported on crime, politics, society, and sports news before leaving the newspaper 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 nine of her 13 screenplays 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 Bruno Richard 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 for the Washington Herald. There she became prominent among a group of female reporters working for Cissy Patterson. Her coverage of the assassination of Senator Huey Long in 1935, the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936, the Democratic National Convention of 1940, and other major stories made her one of the best-known reporters of the day. St. Johns again left newspaper work in 1948 in order to write books, and to teach at a series of universities.

In 1962 she published Final Verdict, a biography of her father Earl Rogers. The book was adapted for a TNT television film in 1991; Olivia Burnette portrayed the young Nora Rogers.

In 1976, at the age of 82, she returned to reporting for the Examiner to cover the bank robbery and conspiracy trial of Patty Hearst, granddaughter of her former employer.

St. Johns was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on April 22, 1970.

In 1980, she appeared to great effect in the television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film. Her animated and forthright commentaries on such stars of the period including Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson were a highlight of this much lauded series.

Well into her 60s, St. Johns was a frequent guest on Jack Paar's Tonight Show and one night Paar noted that St. Johns had known many of the legends of Hollywood's so-called Golden years and was once rumored to have had Clark Gable's baby. St. Johns replied, "Well who wouldn't have wanted to have Clark Gable's baby?" Paar then noted that St. Johns had enjoyed a rather incredible life and asked if there was anything she wanted to do that she had not yet done. St. Johns replied, "I just want to live long enough to see how it all turns out."

In the late 1970s, St. Johns hosted a miniseries chronicling Gable's films, which appeared on Iowa Public Television.

She died in Arroyo Grande, California.