Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood

by Karina Longworth

  The predecessor to the Ambassador in more ways than one, the Alexandria was not just a place to see, but to be seen: for the thousands of young women newly arrived in town looking for their chance to break into the movies, the Alexandria lobby became a popular place to perch and wait for some producer to like the look of you. If you were lucky, you could end up as Mack Sennett’s newest Bathing Beauty—meaning you’d parade through Sennett’s comedy short films in a beach costume, as one of a line of anonymous smiling girls, few of whom merited an individual credit.

  If you weren’t so lucky, you might be roped into an even less savory “acting” engagement. Con men were known to seize upon young women who bore a resemblance to the big screen stars—Gloria Swanson, say, or Phyllis Haver—and put them to work in a scam preying on the one demographic even more naive: the tourists who came to the Alexandria hoping for a glimpse of a movie star. The con man would strike up a conversation with one of these lonely lads in the bar, eventually letting it slip that such-and-such big star was—would you believe it?—a bona fide nymphomaniac: “After she finishes a picture all she likes to do is stay upstairs in her room and get laid by strangers about ten times a day.” The tourist would happily agree to pay a twenty-dollar finder’s fee to his new friend for an introduction. Such was the power of the female celebrity persona already that a good hustler could make a hundred dollars a day introducing suckers to facsimiles of “Gloria Swanson.”

  Those were the days of innocence—in that the public was generally ignorant of such goings-on in the movie capital, and the “movies” seemed to believe that, while the media successfully crafted the illusion that performers on-screen were accessible and knowable off-screen, what they did in their personal lives could remain secret. It probably should have, or would have in another place, in another industry. As gossip columnist Louella Parsons later put it, “The trouble is that the same thing could happen in a small town, human nature being what it is, but you wouldn’t hear about it. The butcher might be flirting with the milkman’s wife; or the dry goods merchant might fall in love with the banker’s wife. But you wouldn’t hear about it.” But in Hollywood, such gossip was a business in and of itself—and that business was about to get much more problematic.

  The industry’s party scene was initially inherently surreptitious, in part because Hollywood the city had done such a good job of legislating against immorality. No one who wanted booze had any trouble getting it, although with Hollywood establishing prohibition before it was a national law most parties were private rather than out in the open, and this feeling of “going underground” just to drink champagne may have normalized the consumption of other intoxicants, and other types of vice that could flourish in the dark.* But as the city plumped with attention-seekers—and journalists—it began to be difficult even in private to party like a movie star. Despite a media landscape that had been remade by yellow journalism, in which scandal sold papers, the studios hadn’t yet built the sophisticated publicity machines that would protect their most valuable assets, and stars hadn’t learned to be wary of spies in their midst. Between the fall of 1920 and early 1922, three scandals would fundamentally change the way the film industry conducted itself on and off screen.

  The 1920 film The Flapper popularized that term for a young girl who drank, danced, smoked, wore new boyishly cut fashions, and generally defied convention. The star of the movie was twenty-five-year-old Olive Thomas, a Ziegfeld Follies import who was married to Jack Pickford, hard-partying brother of “America’s Sweetheart” Mary. One September night, upon returning to her room at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, where the couple was on a delayed honeymoon, Olive couldn’t sleep. She got up to use the toilet, and Jack yelled at her for turning on the light. A little while later, Olive reached for a sleeping pill. This time she fumbled around in the dark so as to not wake her cranky husband. What Olive ended up grabbing and ingesting was not a sleeping solution, but bichloride of mercury. In some press accounts, the bichloride of mercury was said to be a cleaning product left behind by housekeeping, but it soon became legend in Hollywood that Olive had actually swallowed tablets that Jack had allegedly been prescribed as a topical solution to treat syphilis, and which acted as poison when taken internally.

  Thomas’s death via what was likely an accidental poisoning was painted in the press as the consequence of the wild Hollywood lifestyle that gave innocent young girls a fatal taste for illicit thrills. American newspapers ran stories with headlines like, “What Olive Thomas Saw in Gay Paris Before She Killed Herself,” claiming that Olive had fallen to the floor after swallowing poison with the cry, “This is what Paris has done to me!” What “Paris had done” to her was implied in the same article’s incredibly detailed narrative of a supposedly typical night in a Montmartre club, featuring “wild cat combat” between two women, a buffet of cocaine and morphine proffered to American girls by “disreputable young noblemen,” and an “entertainment” in which “a negro fights a big rat and eats it alive.” Perhaps because her association with the flapper and Hollywood’s infectious depiction of a new species of party girl, Olive Thomas’s death became the catalyst for protests against Hollywood from religious groups, as well as calls for censorship.

  Most of the blame for this horrible event was cast on the dead actress and her sordid trip down the Parisian rabbit hole, with little reserved for her surviving husband, who continued his hard-partying ways and married another not-long-for-this-world actress, Marilyn Miller, less than two years after his first wife’s death. Yet the focus on Olive’s supposed degradation over Jack’s verifiable self-destruction wasn’t mere sexism: Jack Pickford’s sister Mary was too powerful and important to the twin industries of picture making and picture gossip to allow such sordidness to touch her. If any publication had pressed too hard on Jack, they would risk losing access to Mary, and that was too steep a price to pay for printing the truth.

  A year later, fledgling actress Virginia Rappe was pronounced dead at a sanitarium in San Francisco after suffering a ruptured bladder. Rappe had attended a party a few days earlier, hosted by the screen comedian Roscoe Arbuckle, whose bag-of-frosting physique had earned him the marketing moniker “Fatty” Arbuckle. With the absence of hard evidence as to the cause of Rappe’s fatal illness, newspapers hammered home a tale of murderous rape, suggesting that Arbuckle had crushed Rappe’s bladder with his massive girth. Arbuckle was tried for the crime three times within one year. The first two trials ended with hung juries, and in the third, Arbuckle was acquitted, but his career never recovered—and neither did Hollywood.

  In February 1922, a month before Arbuckle’s third and final trial began, director William Desmond Taylor was found dead in his bungalow apartment on South Alvarado Street, a mile and a half east of the Ambassador. The Taylor murder has never been conclusively solved, but it continues to fascinate to this day, not least because three actresses are among those who have been suspected of involvement: aging child star Mary Miles Minter; Margaret Gibson, a costar of Taylor’s when he was acting in the teens, who at the time of his death was having trouble getting back to work after arrests involving prostitution and blackmail; and Arbuckle’s frequent costar and Olive Thomas’s good friend, the comedienne Mabel Normand, who was allegedly struggling to overcome addictions to drugs and alcohol at the time. This trio of suspects could not have been better or more diversely cast to present a portrait in triptych of the fragility of the female experience in Hollywood: the virgin, the criminal/whore, and the falling star. Not a single one would manage to do anything for the rest of their lives that transcended their rumored association with Taylor’s murder—or, if they did, it didn’t merit any headlines. Gibson, who had never been interrogated, even made a last-gasp bid for immortality by confessing to Taylor’s murder on her deathbed.

  Immortality-via-headline was, increasingly, all that mattered. Careers and lives be damned, there was money to be made creating a tug-of-war between industrious moralizing, and thrilling to the immorality of
the new elite, while trapping the female members of that elite into archetypical narratives of victimhood or guilt. No Hollywood film producer would throw so much of his lot behind capitalizing on this tug-of-war as Howard Hughes, although he wouldn’t stumble onto a formula that worked for another decade.

  In the meantime, there was dissolution. In 1918, a symbol of the film colony’s growing pains stood in ruins at the corner of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards. The reigning king of Hollywood after the triumph of The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith poured some of his proceeds from that film into an even more epic follow-up. To shoot a single segment in Intolerance, Griffith built a model of Babylon, complete with statuary of giant elephants, on Hollywood Boulevard massive enough to be captured in wide angle from the hill at Barnsdall Park, a half mile away. The movie was not a hit, and the Babylon set was left standing to decay. Legend has it that newspapermen, watching tourists and neighboring kids climbing through the ruins, coined the phrase “Hollywood Babylon.” To the original settlers of Hollywood, to pair the name of their town with the ultimate signifier of decadence would have been an oxymoron. To future consumers of the movies—many of whom were enticed consciously or otherwise by scandals like the ones that shone a spotlight on the industry in the 1920s—“Hollywood” and “Babylon” would become synonymous.

  In 1919, the ruins of Griffith’s Babylon set were finally torn down. Griffith’s reputation had taken a hit when Intolerance had failed to reach the cultural and financial mark of its predecessor, and though he still had hits in his future, at the end of the 1910s he returned to the East Coast and began a long process of alienation from the center of the industry that would end with him dying in obscurity, sixteen years after his last directorial credit. With Hollywood’s biggest-name director to date falling out of favor, producer Samuel Goldwyn spotted a vacuum of quality filmmaking and an opportunity to broaden the appeal of motion pictures by lending them a pedigree. The former Samuel Goldfish had been a pioneer of feature-length moviemaking, having partnered with Jesse L. Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille in 1914 to produce Hollywood’s first three-reeler, The Squaw Man; Goldwyn would then manage an early incarnation of Paramount Pictures, and Goldwyn Pictures, his going concern in the late teens, would eventually be acquired and rolled into what became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. That 1924 merger was a long way off when Goldwyn launched a campaign called Eminent Authors, designed to bring literary stars to Hollywood to translate their talents to the writing of photoplays. Goldwyn’s big get was Rupert Hughes.

  Chapter 2

  The Many Mrs. Hugheses

  Rupert Hughes’s life was the stuff of an epic novel. Born in 1872 in Idaho to a prominent judge, by the late 1910s Hughes had circled the globe working for Encyclopaedia Britannica, had served as a captain in the Mexican border service and then a lieutenant colonel in World War I, become a literary celebrity writing bestselling novels and hit plays that made him the toast of New York, and made a tidy profit in secondary sales to Hollywood. Rupert had authored his first original film scenario in 1916, Gloria’s Romance, collaborating on the script with his wife, Adelaide. (Gloria’s Romance was promoted as “A Motion Picture Novel by Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Hughes.”)

  Adelaide, a former actress and aspiring poet with striking scarlet hair, had married Rupert in 1908; they’d met when he cast her in a play. It wasn’t the first wedding for either of them. From a previous marriage, she had two kids, Rush and Avis. Rupert’s first marriage, to Agnes Hedge, had fallen apart in 1903, sparking a sensational separation trial, at which Agnes testified that Rupert had slurred her as “a Bowery washerwoman and had told her she was living an adventurous and adulterous life.” In describing Rupert’s “degenerate tastes and habits,” she claimed he “boasted openly of his illicit relations with other women.” When asked on the stand if she had seen her husband kiss her female best friend, Agnes responded, “I have seen Mr. Hughes kiss nearly every woman who ever came into our house.” The divorce was eventually settled out of court.

  Rupert and Adelaide began their marriage in New York, but after 1919, Rupert’s new career demanded that the couple spend increasingly more time in California. In defiance of the myth of the Golden West’s restorative powers, upon arrival in Los Angeles, Adelaide Hughes almost immediately started suffering from severe colitis. Adelaide came to believe that what she needed was an escape from paradise: as her son Rush later put it, his mother wished “to take a cruise around the world on a tramp steamer, wanted to get away from it all, and this caused some conflict in the household.”

  The conflict stemmed from the fact that Rupert did not want “to get away from it all.” He had quickly fallen in love with Hollywood, so much so that he felt protective of his new home. That home would soon need protecting. Louella Parsons, one of the most powerful journalists in twentieth-century Hollywood, would later credit events like the deaths of Olive Thomas, Virginia Rappe, and William Desmond Taylor for awakening mainstream America to the intoxicating behind-the-scenes narratives coming out of the place. “Hollywood wasn’t even on the map then,” Parsons said of the early 1920s, “but when these stories hit the front pages, it gave a very bright picture to the industry.” That bright spotlight led to calls for Washington-based censorship of the movies, which moved the studios to preemptively band together to create a group called the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, through which they hired former postmaster general Will Hays to oversee the industry’s efforts at self-regulation.

  Not a full month after the death of William Desmond Taylor, who had been one of the most vocal opponents of institutionalized censorship of the movies, Will Hays arrived in Hollywood. He was much feted. A banner stretched across Hollywood Boulevard at Cahuenga, reading, “WELCOME WILL H. HAYS TO THE MOTION PICTURE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.” His first week in town, Hays was the guest of honor at a party at the Ambassador, where Rupert Hughes gave the toast. Hughes was vehemently against censorship, but then, so, in theory, was Hays—that was why the studios had pursued him to run the organization that would gesture at self-regulation while silencing calls for government censorship.

  By this time, Rupert Hughes was known nationally as a fixture of the new movie smart set. He was included prominently alongside Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Buster Keaton in a caricature by Vanity Fair cartoonist Ralph Barton, and the Los Angeles Times’ Society column would relate, with no small bit of amusement, his social antics, some of which involved his brother, Howard Robard Hughes Sr.

  Howard Sr. was the epitome of the early-twentieth-century bounder turned businessman. After briefly attending Harvard, he passed the bar exam, but never practiced law. Instead, he worked as a telegraph operator and newspaper reporter, until he was drawn to the mining boom of the late 1800s. As he put it, “I decided to search for my fortune under the surface of the earth.”

  Howard Sr. would find it, but it ended up being a circuitous route. He struck out mining for silver in Colorado and zinc in Missouri before ending up in Beaumont, Texas, where oil got into his blood. It was the beginning of a new century, and, infected with millennial optimism, Howard managed to successfully woo Allene Gano, the granddaughter of a prestigious Confederate general who pioneered livestock ranching in Texas, raising new breeds on land that had never been used before. Allene’s parents had recently sold the five-acre peach orchard outside of Dallas on which they had been living, because Allene was now nineteen, and that meant it was time to present her to society and help her snag an appropriate husband. Allene’s eligibility as a prize to be won motivated an entire household’s migration.

  After their marriage in 1904, Allene and Howard lived itinerantly, traveling from one oil town to another hoping to hit pay dirt. Their only son, Howard Jr., whom they called “Sonny,” was born on Christmas Eve, 1905, in Houston; not long after, the Hugheses ended up in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. With no other reliable source of income, Howard Sr. became the town’s postmaster. His fortunes began to turn in 1908, when, after observing the difficulty
every oil prospector had puncturing through many layers of hard rock to get to the reserves of crude down below, he began developing a conical drill bit. Refined over the next year through exhaustive testing bankrolled by his business partner Walter Sharp, the Sharp-Hughes bit could crush through layers of hard rock more efficiently and faster than anything else available, and it soon became an indispensable expedient to the oil boom.

  The drill bit would make Howard Hughes Sr. rich, although Sonny’s dad saw himself not as a businessman, but as an explorer, a conqueror. Describing his ambition “to drill the deepest well in the world,” in 1912 Big Howard mused, “The outermost ends of the earth have been found; the road towards the center is still virgin soil.”

  The drill bit business steadily grew, and after 1912, when Walter Sharp died and Howard Sr. bought out the shares that had been inherited by Sharp’s wife, Estelle, the entire company belonged to Hughes. His identity as an individualist bled into his business strategy. The design secrets of the Hughes drill bit were heavily guarded, and protected by an innovative system of distribution which Howard Sr. devised. Because the company would only lease drill bits, and never sell them, they collected more frequently from each individual customer, and in requiring the eventual return of each bit, also protected themselves from the risk that some entrepreneur would buy their invention, take it apart to figure out how it worked, and improve upon it. In other words, the first Howard Hughes’s fortune was built on secrecy, and in the sense that Hughes Tool prevented its customers from learning how its product was really made, Howard Sr.’s company had something in common with Hollywood.