Adela Rogers St. Johns

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 everythi