Part of Quarberg’s job was to respond to requests from newsmen for “feminine art,” meaning cheesecakey publicity photos that journalists could either print in their publications, or keep for their personal use. But some fans would write directly to their favorite stars to ask for photos. On July 9, 1928, a fan from San Bernardino named Caroline Black sent a handwritten note to Ben Lyon, who had already been shooting Hell’s Angels for nearly nine months.
“You are one of my favorite actors, and I never miss one of your pictures,” Black wrote. “Would you please send me one of your photos. I would like to have one very much.”
Lyon responded by sending not an official autographed head shot, but instead a snapshot of himself, wearing a sweater and slacks, straddling a tree stump, grinning. A thick branch protruded between Lyon’s legs, curling slightly toward his face, unmistakably suggesting what would qualify as history’s largest erect penis. And, from Lyon’s huge smile to the way his left hand spanned the base of the branch, it seemed clear that he was in on the joke.
What Lyon apparently didn’t know when he sent this dirty visual prank was that his adoring fan Caroline Black was just fourteen years old. Lyon was soon made aware of this fact by a letter from Caroline’s father:
“Now, I don’t know whether this is your idea of a practical joke or whether you make a practice of sending obscene photos to young girls, but whether it was intended for a joke or not has no bearing on the fact that this picture has aroused a curiosity in the mind of my daughter who heretofore was entirely innocent of even a thought of anything sexual.
“My wife wept for hours over this thing,” Mr. Black added. “I have turned this picture over to [my attorney] and told him to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. Furthermore, we are going to take this up with the women’s clubs and request that they bar your pictures from this community.”
Black’s attorney, Bruce G. Sebille, then began a correspondence with Hughes’s attorney Neil S. McCarthy. “The act of which Mr. Lyon has been guilty is of such a salacious and obscene nature, that I dislike exceedingly to see it publicized,” Sebille wrote. “Mr. Black is of the opinion, however, that an opportunity has been offered to bring before the public the pernicious practices peculiar to the profession your client is engaged in.” In a phone conversation, McCarthy had apparently suggested that someone had been playing a joke on Lyon by sending the picture—a claim that could be bolstered by another document in Quarberg’s files, which appears to be a draft of a letter sent to Ben Lyon from an unnamed “District Attorney of San Bernardino County,” which may be a fake concocted as part of an elaborate scheme to scare the actor. However, Lyon did pose for this photograph, and Sebille, who was a real lawyer, remarked in his letter to McCarthy that Lyon’s facial expression in the snapshot “does not impress me as that of a man violently agitated by his evident knowledge that his picture was being taken. His obscene posture appeared to afford him rather fatuous amusement.”
Assuming this was a real scandal (or, at least, a legitimate attempt at blackmailing Lyon to ensure a payout from Hughes), it was the rare Hell’s Angels–related event that Quarberg covered up rather than disseminated, under the assumption that all press would do Hughes some good. The final cost to produce Hell’s Angels would, according to Hughes’s own figures, swell to roughly $4 million before it was finished, after three years in production—roughly the same amount spent to make Gone with the Wind, a much longer film produced a decade later. As production dragged on, Hughes and Quarberg decided that their best strategy was not to downplay the profligacy of Hughes’s pet project, but to play up the hugeness of ambition and resources possessed by this boy wonder who, over a period during which an increasing segment of the audience for movies would struggle financially, “sacrificed” a great portion of his personal fortune in order to make what was promised would be a giant entertainment for the masses—if he ever finished it.
WITH HELL’S ANGELS A full-time rival for her husband’s attention, Ella Hughes’s energy for maintaining a semblance of marriage began to flag. Annette Lummis got a wire from a friend of the family urging her to come to Los Angeles quick—Ella wanted to return to Houston and get a divorce.
“I think it was a heck of a life [for Ella], if you ask me,” said Annette of her niece-in-law and close friend. “[Howard] was making Hell’s Angels, and he wasn’t home at all. He would come home for two hours in the daytime and get a sandwich and then he would go out and fly.”
Meanwhile, Ella retained close ties to her family in Houston, and in Houston, Howard’s Hollywood activities were looked down upon. It was apparent to the Hughes Tool employees there that the head of their company in literal name only was, as one employee complained to Noah Dietrich “only interested in making movies. He’s a spendthrift kid who’s taking all the money out of this company and spending it on wild living in Hollywood.”
In an attempt to find some kind of equivalent of the Houston society scene in which she felt comfortable, Ella began spending time in Pasadena, hotbed of what passed for “old money” in the still relatively newly developed area of Southern California. She joined the Junior League and made attempts to include her husband in her new social whirl. But Howard had his own social whirl, and didn’t want the two to meet. “I think she didn’t like the people [in Hollywood],” mused Aunt Annette, adding that Hughes, for his part, “did not want Ella to meet any of the movie people. I don’t think he thought they were her equal.” Given that Hughes’s movie friends were mostly debauched party animals like Goulding and Neilan, it’s no wonder he didn’t want his refined wife to meet them.
“Ella was a pretty girl and well brought up, but she was lacking in the qualities that Howard favored after his marriage,” Dietrich later observed. “She was far from the extroverted, voluptuous actresses his name was later connected with.” This may have been true, but this statement, essentially implying that Ella wasn’t sexy enough for Howard, belittles the serious cultural divide that had carved a fault line in the middle of a marriage whose stitching showed from the start. Though much had changed since the first years of the film industry’s colonization of Hollywood, when street prostitution was rife and boardinghouses hung signs reading “No Movies” in their windows, the difference between a Houston society belle and the average actress, in terms of birth, breeding, and perceived class, was still vast. Ella came from one of the most storied, wealthy families in Houston, a place where ideas of social standing were, as Annette’s husband Fred put it, “all mixed up with Klan, prohibition, religion . . .” She would have been raised to believe that her destiny was to be wife to a rich man, which meant that while she might devote any free time she had to charity, her real job was to conform to a traditional ideal of a wife. Before their marriage had a chance, her husband had dragged Ella into a place and an industry that was doing much to threaten those Victorian ideas about men and women. The Hughes family had supported Howard’s marriage to Ella in the hopes that it would serve as a link back to his past, but Howard wasn’t interested in the past, only in realizing his giant dreams for the future.
The divorce agreement, dated October 28, 1929, stipulated that Ella would receive a total settlement of $1.25 million, disbursed over four years. Ella Rice Hughes’s life in Hollywood officially ended in September 1930, almost a year after the settlement, with a single-sentence gossip item in the Los Angeles Paper. “The divorced wife of Howard Hughes, young Hollywood producer-millionaire, has returned to Houston.” As far as the local media was concerned, once she ceased to be Mrs. Hughes, Ella’s name was no longer worthy of mention. For his part, Hughes was never interested in offering much insight into the breakup. “What is there to say about it?” he said in 1948. “We got married and it didn’t work, so we got a divorce.”
Dietrich claims that Hughes immediately moved a “beautiful movie actress” into the house before anyone other than Howard and Ella knew that the pair had officially separated, but Hughes would later insist that he was not a playbo
y during this period. “I didn’t go around with these girls while I was married,” he told journalist Stephen White in 1954. When asked by White directly if the separation was precipitated by his involvement with other women, Hughes responded, “Absolutely not. I neglected her—I wasn’t in love with her—so we called it off.” He added, “I have been accused of practically everything, but the one thing I have not been accused of is cheating on this girl [Ella].” Nearly thirty years after the fact, he was adamant that he had been faithful to his wife during the period of their cohabitation—yet phrased it less like “I didn’t do it” and more like “You can’t pin it on me.”
Whatever wild oats Hughes did or did not manage to sow during or after his first marriage effectively ended, within months of Ella’s return to Houston, Howard Hughes was seriously involved with the woman who many expected would become his second wife.
Part II
Billie and Jean, 1928–1936
Chapter 4
The Girl with the Silver Hair
While Will Hays had arrived in Hollywood in 1922, and first established a Production Code with the intention of regulating on-screen morality in 1930, he was not able to mount a fully functional and effectively prohibitive censorship system until 1934. The years between 1930 and 1934, called the Pre-Code Era, are sometimes remembered as an anything-goes free-for-all when screens were full of sex and degradation. In fact, the demarcation between pre-Code and post-Code cinema was less like a switch flip than a slow fade. Filmmakers who intended to push the envelope had plenty of trouble with the Hays Office in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as the censors made increasingly toothsome efforts to regulate the perception of “sin” on-screen throughout the early sound period. While there were exceptions (such as glimpses of Clara Bow’s bare breasts in 1927’s Wings), for the most part sex and nudity on-screen were hardly explicit even before the Code took hold; cinematic eroticism was mostly prologue and epilogue, inherently chaste images implying that something was about to happen or that it had happened already—it was Greta Garbo, swooning while leaning against a tree that reminded her of her lover John Gilbert in A Woman of Affairs, or Billie Dove, throwing off her fur and disappearing out of frame while the camera focused on the discarded garment, in Adoration.
Billie Dove was the name adopted by Lillian Bohny, the Washington Heights dreamer who finally arrived in Hollywood in 1922 and in a few years would become perhaps the most objectified American actress in movies—even more so than Garbo, because unlike that enigmatic Swede, Dove’s sexuality was neither exotic nor ambiguous. Nicknamed the “American Beauty” after the title of one of her films, Billie was promoted as the most gorgeous woman of her time. Late in life, sixty years after her retirement, Dove was sheepish about her reputation, without denying its accuracy: “It sounds like I’m bragging, but that’s what they said,” she admitted.
Certainly, unlike Garbo, there was nothing about Dove that seemed subversive. Her round face—the perfect canvas for the dark, defining eye and lip makeup required by film stocks of the silent era—was anchored by a long, slightly underturned nose; her body was neither overly voluptuous nor wraith-thin. She never really looked young, and she vanished from the screen before she looked old. Though Billie sometimes played tragic figures, and often had to feign peril on-screen, in photographs she almost always smiled, more often than not showing teeth. She looked like she was having fun. Maybe that’s why singer Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, sought solace from a troubled childhood in Dove’s films, eventually taking the first half of her stage name in tribute to her favorite movie star.
Holiday wasn’t alone. By the end of the silent era, Dove was regularly receiving 37,000 fan letters a month, a statistic that she was happy to cite well into her nineties, as it was as valuable a measure of popularity then as an actress’s number of Instagram followers would be now. Like today’s social media stars, much of Dove’s celebrity was based on the supposedly superficial appeal of her looks (“supposedly superficial” because then, now, and in any era, popular beauty standards have much to say about a culture’s values and ideals). It was presumed that the fans didn’t love Dove because she could act, and even if she could, the journalists of her day seemed to be too stunned by her beauty to notice. One profile after another took note of attributes like her “large, alluring eyes, the small, perfect nose and mouth, and the silver-flecked long bob.” “Her brown hair started to turn gray when she was 13,” explained Sidney Skolsky in his “Tintype” column on Dove.* “She has never dyed it and never will. It’s very becoming.” Skolsky’s tintypes were generally structured as love letters compiling press release–style data about a star with a couple of “intimate” details designed to suggest to the uninitiated that Skolsky had gotten to know his subject very well indeed. In his tintype on Dove, in addition to praising the actress’s natural hair color, Skolsky added his approval of another Dove “imperfection”: “She has a mole on the lower part of her back. Going mole hunting on Dove is a pleasure.”
Before she had had a chance to develop herself as an actress, Dove was initially relegated to roles that sought only to exploit her unusual beauty. She was slotted into the action films of her husband, director Irvin Willat, as an eye-candy damsel-in-distress, because it was easy for her to do and she was there. Only later in her career did Dove get a chance to star in films that tried to speak to her female fans.
Dove believed she had manifested her stardom (which lasted for about a decade of her nearly century-long life) by looking up at the screen and wishing that it would happen, and she believed that most of her audience was composed of young women doing the same thing. “Did you ever watch a girl fan at the theater?” Dove asked a journalist at the peak of her career. “She puts herself in the place of the heroine. She imagines what she would say under the same circumstances. I know because I was once a fan.” She was acutely aware of the powerful influence her image could exert, and even once that influence had waned, she was careful about her self-presentation.
In her post-Hollywood years, there were two subjects the ever image-conscious Billie Dove supposedly didn’t like to talk about. First was her age. (Until her death in 1997, Dove kept a scrapbook of clippings, mostly from the late-1920s peak of her fame, and she scrupulously marked those documents to strike suggestions about her birth date that she didn’t like, suggesting that rumors of her touchiness about that subject were accurate.*) The other touchy subject was her romantic relationship with Howard Hughes, which began while both were unhappily married to other people, and fell apart under mysterious circumstances about three years later. Her resistance to discussing Hughes broke down toward the end of her life. In the early 1990s, she still owned a sofa that Hughes had given her during their relationship, and once, while being interviewed a few years before she died, tears came to her eyes as she sat on that couch, reminiscing about their time together.
When Howard Hughes and Billie Dove were together, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, she was essentially the Elizabeth Taylor of her generation. Dove and Taylor were both considered their era’s most beautiful women in movies, if not in the world, but it wasn’t just her beauty that made Dove a Taylor-esque target of fascination. In divorcing her husband to take up with Hughes, Dove predated Liz’s high-profile partner-swapping drama, too. In the analogy to Taylor’s many husbands, Hughes would at first seem to have been the Mike Todd—the rich guy who swooped in and rescued Dove from a passion-free marriage—but the mythology surrounding their relationship has positioned Hughes in Dove’s life as her Richard Burton: the true love that got away for reasons that seemed inconsequential decades later, when he was dead and she was alone.
This is a glowing mythologization of a romance that ended amid a failed professional partnership between the lovers. The Willat-Dove-Hughes triangle was not Hollywood’s first or biggest divorce scandal (the carefully managed union of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks beat them to it by about a decade), but the pairing of “most beautiful girl”
and “richest boy” was an irresistible one in the eyes of the movie media—which Hughes and his men attempted to manipulate to the advantage of both star and star-maker. Their relationship spanned the period in which Hughes would finally unveil Hell’s Angels and begin to demonstrate his masterful understanding of Hollywood publicity. Its end essentially coincided with the end of Dove’s movie career.
BILLIE HAD COME TO Hollywood from Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies, where she was promoted as “The Girl in the Hoop.” This was a literal description of her job. Several illustrated advertisements for the Follies in 1919 and 1920 showed a woman in profile or seen from behind, posed against a circle. In one, the scantily clad miss brings an exotic bird in for a kiss; in another, a fully naked woman holds a champagne glass aloft from her perch on a hoop on the inside curve of the moon, while the man in the moon smirks. This latter image echoed Dove’s big moment in the show. She would sit inside a circular frame, in which she would be lifted with pulleys, so that she’d hover over the stage, like a bird in a cage, while the leading man sang a love song as if howling up at the moon. Lillian’s stage name seems to have preceded her big, avian break; later in life, she explained that she had combined “Billie” with “Dove” because “one counters the other. Dove takes the boyishness out of Billie, and Billie takes the sweetness from Dove.” The change was done with movie stardom on her mind: “It was a short name, and when you put it on the marquee, you had Billie Dove there and still had room for the title of the picture.” But sitting up in the hoop felt a long way from being up on the screen, and Billie’s opportunity to show her talents was limited. As she recalled it, “I just sat up there smiling.”
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood Page 7