Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood
Page 1
Frontispiece
Dedication
For Rian
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Frontispiece
Dedication
Cast of Characters
Part I: Hollywood Before Hell’s Angels, 1910–1928
Introduction: The Ambassador Hotel, 1925
Chapter 1:Hollywood Babylon
Chapter 2:The Many Mrs. Hugheses
Chapter 3:No Town for a Lady
Part II: Billie and Jean, 1928–1936
Chapter 4:The Girl with the Silver Hair
Chapter 5:A Body Like a Dustpan
Chapter 6:A Cock vs. the Code
Chapter 7:“A Bitch in Heat”
Chapter 8:The Bombshell Implodes
Part III: Hepburn and Rogers and Russell, 1932–1940
Chapter 9:The Woman Who Lived Like a Man
Chapter 10:Box-Office Poison
Chapter 11:A Love Nest in Malibu, a Prison on a Hill
Chapter 12:A New Bombshell
Part IV: Life During Wartime, 1941–1946
Chapter 13:The New Generation
Chapter 14:“The Goddamnedest, Unhappiest, Most Miserable Time”
Chapter 15:Divorce, Marriage, and Rape Fantasy
Chapter 16:Disappearing Act
Chapter 17:An American Hero
Chapter 18:A Mogul and His Crows
Part V: Terry, Jean, and RKO, 1948–1956
Chapter 19:Marriage, Howard Hughes–Style
Chapter 20:“Mother” and a Male Idol
Chapter 21:The Morals Clause
Chapter 22:Rivalry at Fox
Chapter 23:“A Movie Studio Filled with Beautiful Girls Who Draw Pay but Seldom Work”
Chapter 24:Underwater
Part VI: Hughes After RKO
Chapter 25:Playacting
Chapter 26:Prisoner
Chapter 27:From Vegas to the Grave
Epilogue: Life After Death
Notes on Sources and Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Filmography
Notes
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Cast of Characters
NAMES ABOVE THE TITLE
HOWARD HUGHES
Hughes defied his family by investing his inherited riches in Hollywood, beginning in 1925. As a director and producer, Hughes established a reputation for discovering female talent. Later, as the owner and manager of RKO Pictures, Hughes consistently challenged the Hollywood status quo, particularly the industry’s censors. His reputation as an iconoclast was challenged only by his reputation as a playboy who romanced dozens of actresses, from the town’s biggest stars to countless nameless aspirants.
BILLIE DOVE
Major silent star Billie Dove’s reputation was based primarily on her unusual beauty. She left both her husband and her studio when she fell in love with Howard Hughes, putting both her heart and her career into the young tycoon’s hands.
JEAN HARLOW
This nineteen-year-old, curvaceous blond bit player became an instant, international star after Howard Hughes cast her as the femme fatale in Hell’s Angels. When Hughes sold Harlow’s contract to MGM, she became the biggest sex symbol/comedienne of the decade.
IDA LUPINO
After appearing in several films in her native England, the bleached-blond Ida was brought to Hollywood at the age of fifteen and signed to Paramount Pictures. When blond bombshells went out of fashion, Ida transformed her career, and eventually, with Hughes’s support, became the only female feature film director in the Hollywood of the 1950s.
GINGER ROGERS
The biggest female dancing movie star of the 1930s, Rogers spent that decade, in partnership with Fred Astaire and on her own, dominating the box office with her persona as a hardworking, clean-living, all-American beauty.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
In the 1930s, Katharine Hepburn was Hollywood’s embodiment of a woman who lived by her own rules, flouting conventional ideas about femininity and sexuality in nearly all of her films, and in her personal life.
JANE RUSSELL
Nineteen-year-old Jane Russell was introduced to the world as Hughes’s new bombshell in Hughes’s second directorial effort, The Outlaw. She would become the focal point of his experiments in suggestive promotion and the cultivation of controversy.
AVA GARDNER
Hughes pursued Gardner, a young brunette under contract at MGM who had yet to make an impact on-screen, immediately after her separation from her first husband, Mickey Rooney, made headlines.
FAITH DOMERGUE
Faith Domergue was a teenage beauty whose contract Hughes had purchased from Warner Bros. For years he promised Faith that he would marry her and make her a big movie star.
JEAN PETERS
Hughes met this brunette starlet on Fourth of July weekend, 1946—a holiday that he punctuated by crashing an experimental plane into a Beverly Hills neighborhood. Like many other women before her, she believed she and Howard were in love and would marry.
TERRY MOORE
The young star of animal movies like Son of Lassie and Mighty Joe Young began dating Hughes in late 1948. Moore was a Mormon, and she would not go to bed with Hughes, until they made it official.
SECONDARY AND MINOR PLAYERS
RUPERT HUGHES
Writer, silent film director, and uncle to Howard Hughes who gave young Howard his early introduction to the Hollywood scene.
ELLA RICE HUGHES
A Texas debutante who in 1925 became Howard Hughes’s first wife, and moved with him from Houston to Los Angeles so that Hughes could pursue his interest in moviemaking.
LINCOLN QUARBERG
Hughes’s publicist from 1928 to 1932.
BEN LYON
One of the two male stars of Hell’s Angels, his antics were responsible for one of Hughes’s early PR headaches.
ANN DVORAK
Female star of Scarface who publicly accused Howard Hughes of having “sold [her] down the river” when he unloaded her contract to another studio.
PAT DE CICCO
An agent for cameramen who was reputed to have mob ties, De Cicco served as one of Hughes’s “talent scouts” and close confidants for many years.
BETTE DAVIS
Warner Bros.’ top star of the 1930s.
OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND
Davis’s frequent costar who dated Hughes briefly in 1938–39.
RUSSELL BIRDWELL
The architect of the “search for Scarlett” which helped keep Gone With the Wind in the news for two years before its release, Birdwell was hired by Howard Hughes to create a similar campaign to promote Jane Russell and The Outlaw.
GLORIA VANDERBILT
Teenage heiress who dated Howard Hughes.
JOHNNY MEYER
Former aide to Errol Flynn and Warner Bros. publicist who became another of Hughes’s “talent scouts” in the early 1940s.
YVONNE DE CARLO
The future Lily Munster accompanied Hughes on the last leg of his mid-1940s “walkabout” from Hollywood.
LANA TURNER
MGM’s top post-Harlow blonde and sometime girlfriend of Hughes.
LINDA DARNELL
Minor but incredibly beautiful brunette star who believed her affair with Hughes would lead to marriage.
GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA
Italian bombshell whom Hughes saw in a magazine and lured to Hollywood.
ROBERT MITCHUM
RKO’s top male star while Hughes owned the studio from 1947 to 1955.
WALTER KANE
A key Hughes aide in the 1940s and ’50s who coordinated many efforts to find and sign new “contract girls.”
YVONNE SCHUBERT
Probably the last “contract girl” with whom Hughes had a romantic or sexual relationship.
Part I
Hollywood Before Hell’s Angels, 1910–1928
Introduction
The Ambassador Hotel, 1925
It was like something out of a movie.
The Ambassador Hotel had opened, with much fanfare, in 1921, and had since become a nexus for power, money, and fame in a Los Angeles that was not yet the sole movie capital of the universe. Over the next few years, as the East Coast’s film industry dispersed west, the Ambassador, located eight miles due south of the Hollywood sign, would be a place where the fantasy worlds on-screen bled into real life. In the hotel’s nightclub, the Cocoanut Grove, tables were nestled and dancers nuzzled under an “actual” grove of papier-mâché palm trees, recycled from the set of a Rudolph Valentino movie—an ersatz tropics in the middle of a desert that had only recently been irrigated, and with great difficulty. With its Spanish-style main building surrounded by bungalows, and a floor plan that filled every room with sunlight and allowed for an unobstructed view straight through the building and fifteen miles out to the sea, the Ambassador had been intentionally designed as a testament to the utopian qualities of the West—both the real things that California actually offered, and the projected fantasies for which all that wide-open space provided a blank screen.
On this night in 1925, a group of powerful Hollywood producers and executives had gathered at the Ambassador for a celebratory dinner, and, for at least some of the men assembled, a handful of fantasies were about to come true. As servers brought out dessert, the sweets were accompanied by a selection of cheesecake. Frederica Sagor, a twenty-five-year-old secretary turned screenwriter whose adaptation of the 1924 college party novel The Plastic Age was about to turn a Brooklyn tomboy named Clara Bow into a major star, watched as a group of “starlets, nightclub belly dancers, and ladies of the evening” sauntered toward the dinner tables. The male dinner guests—many of them Sagor’s bosses—let out a drunken whoop, and soon each man was joined by a new friend. In groups of twos and threes, they began abandoning the dessert and disappearing together into bungalows.
Frederica was not surprised when her “date” for the evening, a sixty-something writer with whom she had been assigned by MGM to develop a feature called Flesh and the Devil for a twenty-year-old Swedish beauty named Greta Garbo, went AWOL with the rest of the men. She also wasn’t surprised when she saw her direct work supervisor, dimple-chinned Harry Rapf, among the “undressed, tousled men” who “chased naked women, shrieking with laughter.” And she wasn’t even all that surprised to see “immaculate” MGM boy wonder producer Irving Thalberg, who would soon marry the studio’s superstar Norma Shearer, “drunk, drunk, drunk.” She was surprised to see Antoinette—Frederica’s dressmaker, a French woman of about thirty who made reasonably priced copies of designer fashions—as one of the women hired for the evening’s entertainment.
Frederica would describe Antoinette as “gifted” and “hardworking”—meaning, in Sagor’s mind, the two women were alike. Neither of them was one of those girls, one of the thousands of chippies who came to town with nothing but their looks to recommend them, who had no qualms about doing whatever it took to stay afloat. Frederica had thought both she and Antoinette were earning their own livings on their own talents, neither of them having to sell her beauty or her body to do it. “Yet here she was,” Frederica marveled. “Antoinette, a call girl—half-naked, lying across a chair, her hand stretched out to receive the hundred-dollar bill being pressed into it by Eddie Mannix—gross, ugly, hairy, vulgar Eddie Mannix,* Louis B. Mayer’s bodyguard.”
The female body has always been a key building block of cinema—a raw material fed into the machine of the movies, as integral to the final product as celluloid itself. Few stories lay bare the imbalanced gender politics of this mechanized process, off-screen and off-set, as blatantly as Sagor’s tale of watching Antoinette at this party. But Frederica’s is also a story of persona, and perception. Here we have one woman who is struggling to sell something other than her body to Hollywood’s men, both eyewitnessing the debasement of a woman who she thought was like her, and also passing judgment on that woman for submitting to her own commodification. “I’d seen firsthand how Hollywood can bring you down if you allow it to do so, and I—unlike Antoinette and so many others—had enough basic self-respect not to let that happen to me,” Frederica declared. The unsaid realization in Sagor’s observation is that for Antoinette, being “gifted” and “hardworking” were not enough, that she also could only get something else that she wanted by becoming, or pretending to be, what men wanted her to be.
In this, she was like so many women integral to the rise of the movies, and to Hollywood’s ultimate domination of mid-twentieth-century popular culture: in an industry run by men and fueled by male desires, most women found they could find the most success by leaving something of their “real” selves behind. In exchange for the transformative boost of stardom, they allowed—not that it was always much of a choice—their bodies, personalities, backgrounds and/or names to be reinvented and sold. They took on personas, personas that, in some cases, so obscured who they had been that the kernel of truth behind the false front fell away.
If Howard Hughes was in attendance at this business dinner turned orgy, Sagor failed to notice him, but there was a reason why the Ambassador was the site nineteen-year-old Hughes chose around this time as the first home for him and his first bride, the former Ella Rice, upon moving to Los Angeles in 1925. The Texas millionaire—who in the years to come, between stints as a record-breaking aviator, a visionary inventor, and a harried defense contractor, would carry on an erratic career as a film producer—was naive about a lot of things when he arrived in Los Angeles, but the Ambassador wasn’t one of them. In fact, he probably knew the hotel better than any other single location in the city. His father, Howard Hughes Sr., had lived there for most of the last year of his own life, a time when he soothed the wounds of recent widowerhood with the excesses available to a man in Hollywood with money to spend. Howard’s uncle, the writer and director Rupert Hughes, had lived at the hotel with his own new (third) bride just a few months earlier.
The Ambassador had been the right place for one middle-aged Hughes man to enjoy the spoils of new bachelorhood, and for another middle-aged Hughes man to honeymoon with a woman less than half his age. The hotel, located about a mile due east from the bubbling crude of the La Brea Tar Pits, was also a logical launching pad for the youngest Hughes, whose inherited fortune was dependent on oil, and whose future would be a tapestry of movies, money, women, and blue-sky dreams. Indeed, it was the perfect set on which to begin staging a movie career during which—through the promotion of bombshells like Jean Harlow and Jane Russell and a consistent antagonism of censorship standards for on-screen titillation and movie marketing—he would aim to concentrate male desire into a commodity more blatantly than any mainstream filmmaker of his era.
Howard Hughes’s reputation as a filmmaker who was unusually obsessed with sex dovetails with his image as one of the most prolific playboys of the twentieth century. His supposed conquests between his first divorce in the late 1920s and his final marriage in 1957 included many of the most beautiful and famous women of the era, from silent star Billie Dove to the refined Katharine Hepburn to bombshells like Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Rita Hayworth to countless actresses who are today relatively obscure. For decades, gossip columns were full of items about the starlets he was supposedly on the verge of marrying.
How many of these stories were true? How many women did Howard Hughes really seduce? We will never know for sure, because, of all the fields he dabbled in, from aviation to corporations to e
ntertainment, the area Howard Hughes truly mastered was publicity. “The romance stories were a lot of bologna,” posited Bill Feeder, a Variety reporter whom Hughes lured away to serve as director of RKO Public Relations in the 1950s. From the late 1920s through his acquisition of RKO Pictures in 1948, Hughes personally employed some of the most aggressive publicists in Hollywood in order to sell an image of Hughes as a genius scout of female talent. By the end of World War II, Hughes also had all the major gossip columnists and entertainment reporters of the era, including Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and Sheilah Graham, in his pocket. These journalists were so dependent on Hughes (who knew all and saw all thanks to his blanketing of the movie colony with hired detectives and bribed eyes) for tips that they’d happily spin the stories he fed them to his liking. And, for all of his later secrecy and seclusion, during the peak of his Hollywood visibility Hughes showed an uncommon knack for getting photographed in the right place at the right time. “Hughes knew how much mileage he could get from being seen with the right woman,” remembered Feeder. “Sex and showmanship were the same thing to him.” Publicity was just another form of seduction.
One of the most written about but least-known famous men in Hollywood history, Hughes began playing a tug-of-war with the media shortly after arriving in Hollywood in 1925, using cooperative journalists to help him build a persona in which famous women would play a key role. Believed to be the heir to an oil fortune (in fact, Hughes had fully mortgaged his father’s company in order to seize sole ownership of drill bit manufacturer Hughes Tool), and perceived as a rube by the Hollywood elite, Hughes was a quick study when interested. With only a little experience he understood rapidly, and perhaps better than anyone else of his era, how to use publicity to project an image that could then become real—or, at least perceived to be real. Above all, Hughes understood how easily the gap between perception and reality could be made to disappear, and how to manipulate the blurred line to his advantage.