In two shocking developments in post-World War II Hollywood, actress-singer Judy Garland attempted suicide in 1950, and, in 1962, actress Marilyn Monroe died, apparently from suicide. Movie star suicide had occurred in earlier years - at least eight incidents preceded Garland's attempt?but these postwar incidents occurred as old studio system was in sharp decline and exerted less control over stars, publicity, and audiences. Thus, Garland's attempt and Monroe's death sparked enormous news coverage and controversy, as well as discussion and debate inside and outside about causes, meanings, and significance of these tragic events. Concerned Americans sought explanations, asking where responsibility lay. Were these events result of problems internal to two actresses or due to external pressures they felt? One prominent place for such a discussion was column of famed gossip Hopper, whose readers joined her in offering their views about unstable mental health and selfdestructive actions of these troubled stars. In columns and letters, Hopper and her readers raised a range of issues and concerns, but most strikingly majority drew on concepts originating and identified with Sigmund Freud to explain problems of Garland and Monroe. Their use of the psychological to understand emotional lives of two actresses demonstrated reach of popular psychology and its saturation of popular culture and everyday experience after World War II (Rose 264). Yet, Hopper and her readers' adoption of explanations coexisted with skepticism, deeply held religious convictions, and criticisms of psychiatrists. Moreover, a significant number of Hopper's readers rejected psychology's emphasis on interior self and life, and located source of problem not within Garland and Monroe but with external factors, including studio bosses, overwork, celebrity culture, and even Hopper herself. While one of popular sites of diffusion of therapeutic knowledge in postwar America, Hopper's gossip column also provided a forum for those who remained uneasy with the psychiatric persuasion, revealing cultural change as always messy and incomplete (Illouz 7, 23; Lunbeck). Hopper's Hopper remained a powerful, if aging, figure in movie industry in 1950s and 1960s. Born in 1885 (she always claimed 1890) to strict Quaker and Republican parents in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, married and divorced once, Hopper was a struggling, underemployed supporting actress when her fledging movie gossip column Hedda Hopper's Hollywood was picked up by Los Angeles Times in 1938. Following in footsteps of her soon-to-be archrival Louella Parsons, Hopper soon became a powerful figure in movie industry. Syndicated in eighty-five metropolitan newspapers during 1940s, Hopper's column had an estimated daily readership of thirty-two million by mid-1950s (out of a national population of 160 million) (Eells). By middle of last century, Hopper in her famous hats had become a icon, and, like other gossip columnists, movie critics, and fan magazine writers, she fulfilled an important function within motion picture industry by helping to publicize movies and stars, and forging a relationship with movie-going public. And she fulfilled this function until her death in early 1966. Yet, Hopper was more than a movie gossip. She also saw herself as a conservative political figure and activist. She was a strident Cold War antiCommunist and a highly partisan member of Republican Party. She positioned herself as voice of conservative, small-town America, and used her column to express what she saw as proper social mores and political values. Gossip is private talk? true or false talk about life? voiced, often illegitimately, in public realm. …