Adela Rogers St. Johns

Adela Rogers St. Johns
St. Johns in 1922
Born	Adela Nora Rogers (1894-05-20)May 20, 1894 Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Died	August 10, 1988(1988-08-10) (aged 94) Arroyo Grande, California, U.S.
Resting place	Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale
Nationality	American
Education	Hollywood High School
Occupation	Journalist, novelist, screenwriter
Years active	1912–1982
Spouse(s)	Ivan St. Johns (m. 1914; div. 1927) Richard Hyland (m. 1928; div. 1934) F. Patrick O'Toole (m. 1936; div. 1942)
Children	4
Parent(s)	Earl Rogers Harriet Belle Greene

Adela Nora Rogers St. Johns (May 20, 1894 – August 10, 1988) was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies but is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as "The World's Greatest Girl Reporter" during the 1920s and 1930s and her celebrity interviews for Photoplay magazine.

St. Johns was born in Los Angeles, the only daughter of prominent Los Angeles criminal lawyer Earl Rogers (who was a friend of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst) and his wife Harriet Belle Greene. She attended Hollywood High School, graduating in 1910.

She obtained her first job in 1912 working as a reporter for Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. She reported on crime, politics, society, and sports news before transferring to the Los Angeles Herald in 1913. After seeing her work for that newspaper, James R. Quirk offered her a job writing for his new fan magazine Photoplay. St. Johns accepted the job so she could spend more time with her husband and children. Her celebrity interviews helped the magazine become a success through her numerous revealing interviews with Hollywood film stars. She also wrote short stories for Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines and finished nine of her thirteen screenplays before returning to reporting for Hearst newspapers.

Writing in a distinctive, emotional style, St. Johns reported on, among other subjects, the controversial Jack Dempsey–Gene Tunney "long-count" fight in 1927, the treatment of the poor during the Great Depression, and the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for kidnapping and murdering the son of Charles Lindbergh. In the mid-1930s, she moved to Washington, D.C., to report on national politics for the Washington Herald. There she became prominent among a group of female reporters working for Cissy Patterson. Her coverage of the assassination of Senator Huey Long in 1935, the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936, the Democratic National Convention of 1940, and other major stories made her one of the best-known reporters of the day. St. Johns again left newspaper work in 1948 in order to write books, and to teach journalism at UCLA.