Adela Rogers St. Johns

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 756-758. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (1999).

American journalist, novelist and screenwriter who wrote scores of screenplays for silent movies. Later in life, she appeared with other early 20th-century figures as one of the "witnesses" in Warren Beatty's epic film Reds (1981).

She got back in harness as a reporter for the "Examiner" in 1976, when the 82-year-old covered the trial of Patricia Hearst, William Randolph Hearst's granddaughter. St. Johns married Richard Irving Hyland and Ivan St. Johns.

In 1970,St. Johns was awarded the Presidential Medal for Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, by President Richard Nixon.

Daughter of a prominent Los Angeles criminal lawyer Earl Rogers, she published "Final Verdict" (1962), a biography of her father.

She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6424 Hollywood Walk of Fame in Hollywood, California on February 8, 1960.

She remained a reporter until 1948, when she shifted her focus to writing books and teaching.

A story of hers was adapted into another talkie classic, What Price Hollywood? (1932), the precursor of the 1937's A Star Is Born (1937) and its two remakes. Earl Rogers, a lawyer whose reputation for winning acquittals in seemingly hopeless cases was so great that another legend of the bar, Clarence Darrow, used his services in a jury tampering case, was a friend of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. As a nineteen-year-old, the teen-aged Adela became a reporter for "San Francisco Examiner", Hearst's self-heralded "Monarch of the Dailies". As a cub reporter working her way up the ranks, she covered everything from crime and sports to politics and high society. She quit the newspaper racket in the early part of The Roaring Twenties to became a freelance writer. During the halcyon years of The Jazz Age, she made her living interviewing celebrities for "Photoplay Magazine", the premiere movie rag of its time.

Lionel Barrymore won a Best Actor Oscar playing a mouthpiece based on her father in A Free Soul (1931), which was based on a 1927 novel written by Adela.

Among her most notorious subjects: the controversial Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney "long-count" fight in 1927; the treatment of the poor during the Great Depression; the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for kidnapping and murdering the son of Charles Lindbergh; her coverage of the assassination of Senator Huey Long in 1935; the abdication of King Edward VIII (Duke of Windsor) in 1936; and the Democratic National Convention of 1940.

She also began publishing short stories in top drawer magazines such as Hearst's "Cosmopolitan" and toiled in the belly of The Hollywood Beast of as a screenwriter before returning to the fold of the Hearst newspapers in the late 1920.

Adela Rogers St. Johns was born Nora Adela Rogers on May 20, 1894 in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of legendary criminal defense attorney Earl Rogers, a brilliant barrister who drank himself to death at an early age.