Mother Confessor of Hollywood

Adela Rogers St. Johns (née Adela Nora Rogers; 1894 – 1988) was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies and, late in life, appeared with other early twentieth-century figures as one of the 'witnesses' in Warren Beatty's Reds, but she is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as a "girl reporter" during the 1920s and 1930s.

St. Johns then became noted for interviewing movie stars for Photoplay magazine. As "Mother Confessor of Hollywood," she wrote frank celebrity interviews, profiles and articles for Photoplay, the first movie magazine devoted to satisfying the seemingly insatiable curiosity of a newly star-struck nation.

She also wrote short stories for Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines and finished nine of her 13 screenplays before returning to reporting for Hearst newspapers.

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, covered 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 which 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 at a series of universities.
In 1976, at the age of 82, she returned to reporting for the Examiner to cover the bank robbery and conspiracy trial of Patty Hearst, granddaughter of her former employer.

Mrs. St. Johns, who was also a minister in the Church of Religious Science, had been working on a final book, "The Missing Years of Jesus," at her death at age 94.