Harrison Carroll

Harrison Carroll (1901-1972) was a Hollywood gossip columnist whom John Wayne credited with mentoring him as a young actor and helping him come up with a moniker to replace his birth name Marion Morrison. Carroll was born in Waco, Texas and attended the Rice University in Houston before moving on to Columbia University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1922. After graduating, he moved to Los Angeles and began working as a reporter for the "Los Angeles Times" for $25 a week. Three years later, he was became the drama editor of the "Los Angeles Evening Herald", an afternoon newspaper that was a precursor to the "Herald-Examiner" and the merged "Herald-Express" that would continue on as his employer for the next 44 years. In 1926, he became a gossip columnist, a craft he plied until 1969, when he retired. His Hollywood column was syndicated to 48 newspapers. He feuded with other gossip columnists, including Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and fellow Herald columnist Jimmy Starr: all of them appeared as themselves in the 1947 crime movie The Corpse Came C.O.D. (1947). Carroll created the Harrison Carroll Cinema Reporting Prize in 1971; John Wayne was the chairman of the foundation that awarded the prize. He was married twice, to Corrinne Carroll, by whom he had a son, and whom he divorced, and to Maria Carroll, whom he lived with for 47 years. He died in 1972.