Adela Rogers St. Johns

Biography

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. 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. 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. 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. She remained a reporter until 1948, when she shifted her focus to writing books and teaching. In 1970,St. Johns was awarded the Presidential Medal for Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, by President Richard Nixon. 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. She died on August 10, 1988 in Arroyo Grande, California at the age of 94.