Then there's the fictional creation Elinor St John (played by a memorable, eye-wateringly self-aggrandising Jean Smart), a gossip columnist in a series of large hats. She seems to be based on Adela Rogers St John, a real columnist who worked for Photoplay magazine and had connections to the Hearst newspaper empire but would have been much younger in the 1920s than how she is depicted in Babylon. St John herself was a fascinating character, nicknamed "the greatest girl reporter in the world" in the 1920s and later a chronicler of the period in several memoirs.
