- Born
- Died
- Birth nameAdela Minora Rogers
- Nickname
- The World's Greatest Girl Reporter
- 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.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood - Wrote the biography of her famous father's (attorney Earl Rogers) legal and personal life titled 'Final Verdict' published in 1962 and made into the 1991 movie of the same title starring Treat Williams and Glenn Ford. The story was told through Adela's eyes. In 1920 she attempted to have her father Earl declared incompetent due to his acute alcoholism but Earl represented himself and won- IMDb Mini Biography By: Lawrence Bartley
- SpousesFrancis Patrick O'Toole(June 15, 1936 - October 26, 1943) (divorced)Dick Irving Hyland(March 28, 1928 - November 16, 1935) (divorced, 1 child)William Ivan St. Johns(December 24, 1913 - March 17, 1928) (divorced, 2 children)
- RelativesRiley Thomas Stewart(Great Grandchild)
- Full second cousin to actor Humphrey Bogart; her grandmother and his grandfather were brother and sister.
- Sister of writer Bogart Rogers.
- Great-great grandmother of actress Kaylin Stewart and actor Riley Thomas Stewart.
- Mother of producer Richard R. St. Johns.
- 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).
- Happiness is a sort of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you're lucky. Joy is a light that fills you with hope and faith and love.
- I think every woman is entitled to a middle husband she can forget.
- [on William Boyd playing 'Hopalong Cassidy' in real life] Never before in movies has a star become the character he plays on the screen to the extent that he himself no longer exists separately.
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