Joyce Haber; Noted Hollywood Columnist

Joyce Haber, among the very last of the feisty breed of Hollywood columnists who were capable of canonizing a film or destroying a star, has died.

Paula Correia, a spokeswoman for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said the journalist and author died Thursday of kidney and liver failure. She had been admitted to the hospital July 14.

Miss Haber, 62, left the Los Angeles Times in 1975 to write a highly successful roman a clef called “The Users.” It was her only novel, said her friend and publicist, Jay Allen, and it quickly rose to the top of the bestseller lists of both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

The book mixed 70 of Hollywood’s chosen with fictional characters. The account of their foibles may have been the definitive treatise of film name-dropping, and it rankled many of her friends and sources.

In its review of the book, Time magazine called her “Hollywood’s No. 1 voyeur.”

Miss Haber, who attended Bryn Mawr and Barnard colleges, was divorced from film producer Douglas Cramer. She moved comfortably through the ranks of filmdom’s elite, attending premieres on the arm of such celebrities as actor-dancer Gene Kelly. She had arrived in Los Angeles after many years as a reporter, columnist and West Coast correspondent for Time-Life publications.

At The Times, she worked as a feature writer and columnist and then was given Hedda Hopper’s old job. Miss Hopper and William Randolph Hearst’s Louella Parsons were the two most influential members of the Hollywood gossip cabal.

Jim Bellows, now West Coast bureau chief for TV Guide, hired Miss Haber in 1966 when he was associate editor of The Times. He said he chose her over several other candidates because “she wrote an extremely well-read column day after day. She was a hot ticket for many years.”

At her peak, wrote Women’s Wear Daily, she was “one of the most powerful American women in the media.”

She is survived by a son, Douglas Cramer III, and a daughter, Courtney Cramer.

Services are pending.