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

by Karina Longworth

  Billie was never happy as a showgirl. When she first met Follies impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Billie remembered, “he took it for granted that I wanted to be in the show. He didn’t even ask me. He just said, ‘Well, now, you go two doors to your right. You’ll find a door there saying “Ned Wayburn.” You go in there and he will be there with a little rod in his hand. There’ll be girls walking in a circle and they will be learning how to do the Ziegfeld walk. So you’ll just join them.’”

  She was considered one of his “special girls,” which meant she wore an individualized costume, and occasionally got to deliver an actual line. And as she kept threatening to quit, Ziegfeld kept raising her salary in order to keep her. But floating above the stage on the hoop was not like having your face suspended on-screen, and that was still where she was determined to see herself. So she did some extra work—producers in New York were always in need of pretty girls for crowd scenes—and that led to silent comedian Johnny Hines asking her to star with him in a one-reel short film. More work followed in equally minor movies. But the ball was rolling now, and it kept on going concurrent with Billie’s Follies gig, until 1922, when she was offered a contract by Metro Pictures Corporation in Hollywood.

  The urban legend about the flight of Billie Dove from the Ziegfeld stage to Hollywood sound stages holds that Dove was having an affair with Florenz Ziegfeld, and that Billie Burke, Ziegfeld’s Broadway actress wife, arranged Dove’s first studio contract in order to ensure her rival would be shipped off to Los Angeles. Dove denied this vehemently, saying that not only did she not sleep with Florenz Ziegfeld, but she refused to sleep with anyone. “Growing up, I knew nothing about sex, nothing at all,” Dove explained. She was so naive, she said, that when she first began menstruating, “I thought I was dying.” Suddenly she was sharing a dressing room with sexually active chorus girls, who kissed-and-told nightly. After listening to these stories, at first wide-eyed and then wise, Billie decided to remain a virgin until she married.

  Dove would credit her hop to Hollywood to Joe Engel, a Metro executive who used to come to the Follies regularly and take her out for drinks after the show. Once she was in Hollywood, Engel admitted he was in love with Billie. The problem was, as Engel told her, “I promised my mother, while she was alive, I would only marry a Jewish girl.” Billie, who had been oblivious to Engel’s affections, couldn’t have been less disappointed.

  Billie’s second Hollywood film shot on location off the coast of San Francisco. All the Brothers Were Valiant was a seafaring adventure, with Malcolm McGregor and Lon Chaney as the brothers and Billie as the girl. Every morning at four the cast and crew would meet at the docks and board a real whaling ship, which would take them out into the middle of the ocean for the shoot day. Literally at sea, twenty-ish Billie caught the eye of her director, Irvin Willat. A former film editor, Willat had made a name for himself as a “man’s director” with movies like the 1919 Harry Houdini star vehicle The Grim Game, which featured a midair collision between two airplanes. One of these planes was flown on-screen by Willat himself, with an actor hanging from the plane by a rope. “We didn’t kill him,” Willat said. “But he was red as a flame.”

  The way Billie described it, Willat’s courtship was more like harassment. On the long boat ride to location, and stranded all day at sea, she couldn’t escape him. “All the way out there and all the way back and between scenes, all he would say was, ‘Marry me, marry me, marry me, marry me, marry me.’ That’s all I heard, and we were gone for an entire month. Finally, I said yes, just to get him to shut up.”

  Before the ceremony in October 1923, Willat suggested they both see a doctor, “to make sure that we’re okay to get married.” Billie’s doctor had been recommended to her by Joe Engel. A few days later, Billie ran into Engel, who told her he was “perplexed”: the doctor had told him that Billie really was the virgin she claimed to be. So much for doctor-patient confidentiality.

  The marriage caused an irreparable rift between Dove and Engel, which resulted in the termination of her contract at Metro. Luckily, her new husband was able to cast her in his films at Paramount. In Willat’s 1924 picture Wanderer of the Wasteland, Dove became just the third actress to star in a feature shot in Technicolor.

  Willat could be a taskmaster, but Billie admired his work, comparing him to John Ford, for whom she’d star in The Fighting Heart in 1925. However, Willat’s repertoire was limited (as Billie put it, “He did Westerns and boat pictures”), and under her husband’s thumb, Billie was limited to being a man’s film heroine. When Douglas Fairbanks called and asked her to star in his next adventure movie, she jumped at the chance because it was Fairbanks—the biggest star around—but also because The Black Pirate would be shot in Technicolor, and Dove’s beauty had already proven to be a good match for the medium. Yet once again, the part of the damsel in distress was typically unchallenging. As Billie put it, “I just stood around and looked scared.”

  Still, The Black Pirate made Billie a bona fide star. Every studio wanted to sign her, including MGM, which had absorbed Metro and had swiftly become the place where every star wanted to be. Billie looked at MGM’s roster and saw Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford—nothing but competition for the roles she wanted to play—so she signed instead with First National, where she’d only have to compete with Colleen Moore. That was okay, because she liked Colleen Moore, and they contrasted well. Unlike Moore, whose biggest hit was the flapper soap Flaming Youth, Billie wasn’t a comedienne or a girlish, flat-chested disrupter of gender norms. Curvaceous and sensuous, now Dove was being actively promoted as “the most beautiful woman in the world.” But Lois Weber made her an actress.

  In 1915, Lois Weber had been Universal’s star director. Her image as a rather dowdy middle-aged married woman served as convenient cover, taking the edge off her tendency to use her films to tackle controversial topics such as capital punishment (The People vs. John Doe), birth control (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), and poverty (The Blot). With Weber as their figurehead, Universal proudly promoted themselves as a women-friendly workplace. Off that success, Weber was able to launch her own personal production company, Lois Weber Productions.

  The Blot would be Weber’s final, self-produced film. Within a year of its 1921 release, her longtime marriage to actor-director-producer Phillips Smalley, with whom she had been co-credited on many of her directorial efforts, would break up. Weber cited her husband’s “habitual intemperance” as the cause. When pressed, Lois admitted that she and Smalley had “not lived together as man and wife for several years,” because “our philosophies of life made the marital relationship impossible.”

  It was not easy for an independently minded writer-director of any gender to thrive in an evolving Hollywood, but Lois Weber had the added challenge of being a female filmmaker newly divorced from the male partner with whom she had shared credit. Rupert Hughes had advocated for men to “get rid of” wives they had lost interest in with ease, but the sexual revolution he had promoted was not equal opportunity: Lois Weber couldn’t cavalierly dispose of her husband without facing career consequences. A woman who directed in partnership with her husband could be perceived as merely a helpful wife, not the threat to gender norms that she’d be as a divorced woman, continuing the same work on her own. As the film industry became more corporatized and vertically integrated, effectively marginalizing many female writers and directors who had worked during the teens, Weber was determined not to let it happen to her. After her production company fell apart, she returned to Universal to remake one of her early silent films, but it was an unsatisfactory experience that left her vowing to quit the business. She further worried that in Will Hays’s Hollywood there was no place for an independent artist with something to say—never mind a female filmmaker whose movies asked real questions about the world she lived in. “The producers select the stories, select the cast, tell you how much you can pay for a picture and how long you can have to make it in,” Weber protested. “All this could be bo
rne. But when they tell you that they also will cut your picture, that is too much.”

  Eighteen months passed before Weber made another film, and during that time, she reportedly suffered from crippling depression. She emerged in 1925, when she was hired back at Universal to run a new story department dedicated to creating big-budget movies. This went well, and Weber was allowed to direct two films of her own, The Marriage Clause and Sensation Seekers. Both of these would star Billie Dove.

  Weber had spent the previous few years contemplating the decreasing variety of female types depicted in American films. “The real American girl is not a flapper,” the director declared. The precocious party girls who dominated screens, Weber said, were nothing but “cute little dolls dressed up in clothes that they do not know how to wear.”* The women Weber knew were modern and sophisticated, but otherwise had little in common with the carelessly consumerist and arguably amoral characters she saw on-screen. She was frustrated that movies were putting forth the idea that liberation meant that women were free to drink and smoke and dance and shop, so as to better suit a male fantasy of woman unchained. “The modern girl,” Weber argued, “does not demand jazz parties, cocktails and late hours nearly as much as she demands freedom of thought and action.”

  Billie’s favorite film of her career, released in 1926, was Weber’s The Marriage Clause. The plot has Billie playing an actress who falls in love with her (male) director, but their happiness is wrecked by a scheming, exploitative producer, who manipulates the actress into signing a contract forbidding her to marry. The actress finds that stardom reached on the terms of a man who has essentially made her his property and prisoner, and at the expense of personal freedom and happiness, is so suffocating that it makes her physically sick. Weber’s critique of Hollywood, especially as it related to its female workers, was barely veiled: what’s the point of winning at a game designed to benefit someone else, and that requires you to sacrifice your soul in order to play it?

  Actress and director were on the same page. Up until now, Billie’s purpose in movies had been to embody a female ideal of “glamour” that girl fans ate up, and which also played to the fantasies of men. At the end of The Marriage Clause, when Billie’s character is dying of a broken heart, “I didn’t want to look glamorous,” Dove remembered. “I wanted to look ill.” Weber agreed, and shot Dove with no beauty makeup, and, in fact, dark lines penciled in under her eyes. It was the first time a director not only cared about what Dove thought about her character, but appreciated her ability to convey something on-screen other than beauty and desirability.

  The following year, Weber and Dove reteamed to make Sensation Seekers. Here Billie played Egypt, a “liberated woman” of the Jazz Age who learns to reject cheap thrills and embrace a less selfish, more spiritual life. Egypt was a socialite and not an actress, but again Dove’s character would connect back to her life in Hollywood. Weber was using Dove, one of the most glamorous products of the late-silent-era star system, to critique the shallow models of womanhood that Hollywood presented fetishistically, and to suggest that even the most beautiful girl in the world could be more than “just” a beauty. Both Marriage Clause and Sensation Seekers posit that a happy ending includes a male savior and domesticity, but Weber was not a traditionalist suggesting that women were meant to serve men. She simply believed you could be a modern girl with a desire for independence and freedom of thought without conforming to the movie image of modernity, which more often than not was of a flapper either preoccupied with frivolity or striving to submit herself to a sexual economy that primarily benefited men.

  Weber’s Billie Dove movies, which were championed effusively in the local industry trade press, transformed the way that Hollywood saw Dove, and suddenly studios wanted her for something other than submissive, token female parts in action films like the ones made by her husband. Billie began starring as a true leading lady, playing in the late silent era the kinds of woman-in-trouble-in-exotic-locations roles that Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford would dominate in the 1930s. In The Love Mart (1927), Billie played a woman mistakenly believed to be a “quadroon” and subsequently sold into slavery in nineteenth-century New Orleans. She transitioned to talking pictures relatively seamlessly, beginning with the partial-sound films Careers and Adoration, both of which featured Dove as wives wrongly suspected of infidelity.

  The respect that Billie had earned with her performances for Lois Weber, and the experience of being included in the process of making films about women who chafed against expectations to find and grab the lives that were right for them—all of this might have contributed to Dove’s increasing dissatisfaction in her marriage to Irvin Willat. But Willat contributed, too. Letting the line blur between director and husband, he was obsessed with maintaining Billie’s image as a docile object of desire. To that end, he wouldn’t let her smoke cigarettes. That meant something different in the 1920s than it would today; back then, smoking was a significant way a young woman showed that she was modern, and to be barred from doing so by your paternalistic husband was seriously stifling. In short, “He tried to run my life,” Billie would explain. When Willat would become particularly overbearing, Billie would leave for a few nights, and then her husband “would beg me to return. I did so until the last time, when we separated for good.”

  After the separation, Billie moved in with her mother. Still just in her mid-twenties, the movie star submitted to a social whirl led by her best friend, Marion Davies. At dinners at the opulent Hearst Castle, where William Randolph Hearst would attempt to regulate his mistress Marion’s intake of booze, Billie and Marion would sneak off to the powder room, “because Marion had a special butler who always stocked it with champagne.”

  Billie was too famous to get tipsy just anywhere. Her gorgeous face shone out from the covers of movie magazines; if she tried to go out shopping she was mobbed; the postmaster of Burbank certified that she received more than a thousand letters each day. Women were desperate to look like her, to the extent that she popularized a new haircut called the “shingle,” which was sort of like a bob gone extreme, invented, Billie said, when she went to a man’s barbershop and asked, “Would you mind cutting the back of my hair like you cut a man’s, only not that short?”

  She and her friends moved in packs, and only went to places where there would be no outsiders, no autograph hounds. One of those places was the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, an opulent palace full of crystal chandeliers, dark wood beams, and plush gold carpets. More grandiose than the Alexandria or even the Ambassador, the Biltmore became known for its in-house speakeasy, called the Gold Room after the color of its satin curtains and painted tin ceiling, and complete with a secret door through which VIP clientele like Billie and Marion could slip in and out surreptitiously. One night, Davies pushed through the crowd to find her girlfriend and whisper exciting news in her ear.

  “Billie, Howard Hughes asked to meet you!”*

  Hughes was then the talk of Hollywood. Everyone was curious about this movie he was working on. Everyone was predicting he’d lose millions of dollars—of his own money, no less. Billie was excited to make his acquaintance.

  Hughes did not make a stellar first impression. Billie was accustomed to lively conversation. Through Marion’s nephew, Charles Lederer, Dove had been inducted into the Algonquin Roundtable set; she was good friends with Dorothy Parker, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had been guests at her and Irvin’s house parties, crawling in on their hands and knees when they arrived late, after the group had already started watching a movie. And Billie was a movie star—people usually tried to impress her. Howard didn’t.

  “He would just glare at me,” she recalled. “He didn’t talk or anything.” To Billie, Howard seemed like “a zombie.”

  And soon he became a stalker. Virtually every time Billie left the house, wherever she went, Howard ended up there, too. “Knowing him later, I have an idea he had me cased,” Dove said. “Every time I would be at a place where there wa
s dancing, pretty soon the door would open and there would stand Howard. He’d look around, spot the table I was at, make a bee-line for me and pull up a chair and stay the whole evening.”

  Howard’s persistence worked, and eventually Billie fell into what she called “deep love.” They started spending whatever free time they could steal aboard Howard’s yacht, which they’d sail to Catalina. On the island there would be two horses waiting for them, and they’d ride off and get lost. Back in Los Angeles, in the middle of the night, Howard would call Reggie Callow, the assistant director of Hell’s Angels, and ask him to send a projectionist over to meet them at the screening room for a 3 A.M. movie.

  The intimacy they developed spending all this time alone together helped the relationship move fast. “Howard wanted to get married right away,” Billie recalled. “We were very much in love, but he was only halfway through his divorce, and I was still Mrs. Irvin Willat.” Hughes started looking for ways to nudge both disentanglements along.

  Willat knew Howard Hughes. Willat had first met him while visiting Houston, before Hughes started making his own movies. “I think I probably had something to do with interesting or at least stimulating Howard in pictures,” Willat later remembered. According to him, once the Texan had moved to Los Angeles, Hughes would come to his house in Hollywood “and talk to me by the hour” about the motion picture business. Willat was under the mistaken impression that Howard’s father had given him “something like twenty million dollars with which to play with the motion picture business.” Believing Hughes had disposable cash, Willat entertained his question-and-answer sessions, hoping Howard would bring him into some kind of production venture, or at least pay him to direct a movie. Hughes never did.

  According to Willat’s son Boyd, it was during these living room film school sessions that Hughes met Dove, long before the introduction by Davies that Dove herself described. Acknowledging that “Dad and Billie were already in trouble,” Boyd would insist that the married couple’s separation did not predate Dove’s involvement with Hughes. “Howard Hughes lured her,” he said in 1998.