Harrison Carroll (June 23, 1901 – August 2, 1972) was a Hollywood gossip columnist who worked at the Los Angeles Herald-Express, and whom John Wayne credited with being not only a mentor to him but helping him come up with a moniker to replace his birth name Marion Morrison.
After graduating from Waco High School, Carroll attended the Rice Institute before moving on to Columbia University, where he took his bachelor of arts degree in 1922.
[citation needed] In 1925, he was hired as the drama editor of the Los Angeles Evening Herald (an afternoon newspaper that was a precursor to the Herald-Examiner and the merged Herald-Express that continued to employ him until he retired).
He had feuds with the leading gossip columnists of the day, including Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and his fellow Herald columnist Jimmy Starr; all of them appeared as themselves in the 1947 crime movie The Corpse Came C.O.D.. Beginning in 1967 until he retired, Carroll's main place of business was the private, members-only Beverly Hills discotheque-cum-restaurant Daisy, a hang-out for the younger, hipper stars like Paul Newman when he was in L.A.[2] He created the Harrison Carroll Cinema Reporting Prize in 1971, the year before he died.
Army Archerd, who would establish himself as a famous entertainment industry gossip columnist, worked as a "leg man" for Carroll.