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

by Karina Longworth

  Two months later, after having completed three films for Hal Roach, Harlean appeared in his office accompanied by her mother and her mother’s husband, to ask for a release from her contract. She told Roach that her husband didn’t approve of her working in the movies. As Roach recalled, Harlean said, “It’s breaking up my marriage, what can I do?” Roach agreed to let Harlow go. This was the hoped-for result of a plan cooked up by Mama Jean, who strategically sent the Baby to seek an out from her Roach contract just before she turned eighteen. After that birthday, Harlean wouldn’t need her husband’s permission to sign a new contract elsewhere. Mama Jean hoped that, with neither the Roach contract nor McGrew holding them back, she could take her daughter to a bigger studio, and cash in.

  Soon enough, Harlow discovered that she was pregnant, and appealed to her mother to let her follow her own dream: she wanted to be a wife and mother. But Mama Jean prevailed. By the summer of 1929, Harlow had terminated her pregnancy and filed for divorce. As Mama Jean later told a fan magazine, “Chuck went away and Marino and I came to live with the Baby.” “The Baby” was now eighteen years old. This, according to Mama, “was the way she wanted it.”

  The ease with which Jean was able to obtain both an (illegal) abortion and a divorce was further testament to changing times. And now she’d labor for her freedom: separated from McGrew and his relative fortune, Jean Harlow had no choice but to pursue acting in order to support herself, as well as her mother and Bello. As she later put it, “I had to work or starve.” Much of this work was less than illustrious, but wherever she went, Harlow made an impression. When she walked on the set of The Saturday Night Kid, rumors swirled that the ostensible star of the film, Clara Bow, demanded that the newcomer be sent home and told not to come back. Harlow stayed in the movie and began dating one of its stars, actor James Hall. That relationship was short-lived; meanwhile, Jean continued taking what few small parts she could get. And then, in the summer of 1929, she was on the lot of Metropolitan Pictures for an extra gig when she ran into Hall, who was there doing reshoots on a picture that should have been long finished.

  Months had gone by since Joseph March had gone to work, and still Hughes had been unable to decide on a new actress for Hell’s Angels’s now-talking female lead. Hall and Ben Lyon, who had been working on the film off and on for almost two years, had been reshooting their parts with March’s new dialogue while they waited for Hughes to decide on a female point of the film’s love triangle. When Hall ran into Harlow on the studio lot, he figured the desperate Hughes could do worse, and Hughes agreed to give Harlow a screen test that day. She was given lines and a gown, and cameraman Tony Gaudio was instructed to set up two cameras, to get double the angles in half the time. The process was painful for all involved, but Hughes liked the result. He signed Harlow to a five-year contract on October 24, 1929—Black Thursday.

  The coming Depression years would mark some of the greatest and most decadent for on-screen Hollywood glamour, and here Harlow, and Hughes, were ahead of the curve. Hughes had initially been worried that Harlow’s extremely light blond hair wouldn’t photograph well. Now, he, March, Whale, and Gaudio watched a number of tests of her in different wigs. Her face and personality seemed completely mutable according to the color and style of her coif, and Hughes finally decided that it was her shock of white hair that made her special. Harlow was subsequently coined, in releases written by Quarberg and pounced on by a movie press desperate for light, escapist subject matter, as the “Platinum Blonde.” Here was another case of Hughes’s publicist spinning a potential liability into a selling point. In such branding, Quarberg and Hughes evoked a powerful symbol of sex, wealth, and military might that was incredibly alluring at a time when the collective American spirit could hardly have been lower.

  But as with everything involving Hell’s Angels, the process of getting a winning performance from the selling point was more easily glossed over in press releases than done. Surprising everyone who looked at her and assumed she was a natural temptress, Harlow had particular trouble with a Hell’s Angels scene in which she was meant to seduce Ben Lyon. She was happy to try to do whatever dialogue director James Whale wanted her to do, but Whale, annoyed at having to work with what he considered to be a tawdry-looking beginner, wasn’t very forthcoming with instruction. “The harder she tried the worse it got,” March remembered. In the end, Jean begged for Whale to tell her exactly how to do it.

  “My dear Miss Harlow,” Whale sighed, “I can’t tell you how to be a woman.”

  Hughes was not so concerned with whether or not Harlow could convincingly speak seductive dialogue to Lyon. In many ways, Hell’s Angels was Howard’s attempt to one-up the aviation film that had won the first Best Picture Oscar, Wings. And while that movie had offered audiences a flash of Clara Bow’s bare breasts, Hughes intended to go a step further, making his actress’s mammaries—and the effect Harlow had on men in real life, merely moving her body through a room—as much a centerpiece of the movie as the aviation footage that four men had died helping to create.

  This in mind, Hughes decided to create a Technicolor sequence to try to capture what was inherently spectacular about his female star. He had a gown designed and constructed for Harlow to wear in the sequence—skintight, in a light red that would appear on-screen to be in the same tone family as Harlow’s flesh. At the fitting, Hughes snatched the scissors out of the costume director’s hands and cut the fabric so that the skin between Harlow’s breasts would show all the way down to her waist. There was no back, either—the front of the dress was held up by thin rhinestone straps that resolved in a single strip running down Harlow’s spine. In the scene in which she wears it, Harlow’s Helen dances with Lyon’s Monte, the brother of the man to whom she’s supposedly attached. She expresses her obvious attraction for Monte by staring at him and breathing heavily, and in the slip of fabric that almost melts into her skin, her breasts pulse up and down for a sustained moment. This is before the pair even hit the dance floor. “Of course we all held our breath every time she shrugged or lifted an arm,” March recalled. “We were waiting for those slender straps to break and finally one of them did.” Knowing the entire cast and crew were lying in wait to leer over a wardrobe malfunction made Harlow incredibly uncomfortable.

  That Harlow took no pleasure in putting herself on display made the pleasure Hughes took in forcing her to do so all the more sadistic. Though Whale was directing the reshoots involving dialogue, Hughes took it upon himself to sit by the camera during the shooting of a scene in which Harlow was dressed in a negligee. When Harlow walked on set ready to shoot, Hughes gestured to the already flimsy piece of lingerie and said, “Open it wider in front.”

  She manipulated the garment to bring the neckline down by a couple of inches.

  Hughes sat there, staring. “Wider,” he called out to Harlow, whose face flushed with embarrassment.

  It got worse. “Before they got through,” March recalled, “the negligee was open practically to her navel, showing a generous view of her large breasts.” Only then was Hughes finally satisfied. “That’s better,” he announced, finally sitting back in his chair to watch the take.

  By this time, March had come around on Harlow, charmed by her spirit if not her talent. “The whole thing must have been a nightmare for her,” March acknowledged. “But she had guts. She set her beautiful white teeth and gave it everything she had and never let out a whimper.”

  BY THE SPRING OF 1930, Hell’s Angels was finally almost finished, but it had been such a long haul that anyone who had heard of the film assumed it was a disaster.* To counteract the negative rumors, once a date for the unveiling was set, Hughes and his team put together the biggest spectacle of a film premiere that Hollywood had ever seen. In what would become a lifelong pattern, Hughes seemed to figure that if he wasn’t sure he could be the best at something, he’d make damn sure his effort was the greatest—as in, largest in size, most extravagant, most expensive.

  On the nig
ht of May 27, 1930, miniature replica planes were strung up all along Hollywood Boulevard, illuminated by $14,000 worth of arc lights shining so bright and hot that, as one reporter put it, “ducks flying over the street would have been roasted by the heat.” An astonishing fifty thousand people mobbed the streets outside the Chinese Theatre, waiting hours for a glimpse of stars. And there were plenty of them. Marshall Neilan, with whom Hughes had remained friends after parting ways over the movie, supervised the guest list for the evening, and he was able to lure silent-era biggies like Gloria Swanson and Charlie Chaplin. Neilan noted that these stars RSVP’d “more out of curiosity” than faith in Hughes; they planned to spend the night “laugh[ing] at what they thought would be a sure flop, as it didn’t stand to reason that a long lanky rube from Texas could crash Hollywood and in two years time turn out a colossal hit.”* Instead, the audience, superstars included, was wowed by the film Hughes had made and, maybe more so, by the spectacle he had mounted to showcase it.

  As far as that spectacle went, the big lights and little planes were just set dressing. Even with all the established stars in attendance, the biggest entrance was made by Harlow, who arrived two hours after the movie had been scheduled to start, floating down the red carpet in all white, steadied by the arm of MGM executive Paul Bern, her late entrance surely part of Quarberg’s plan. The program handed out that night—bound in brown leather and tied up in silky gold rope, its cover painted with a comically macabre image of a pilot escaping a plane as it plummets onto a battlefield—made sure to position Harlow as a special attraction. Every other actor in the book is pictured in costume, and in character. The head shot of Harlow, on the other hand, shows that whatever she’s wearing, it’s so sleeveless, strapless, and low-cut that it appears to be nonexistent. Her body is turned in profile, her bare shoulder, arm, and exposed upper back guarding us from fully glimpsing what appear to be bare breasts. Her face is turned to us, and with her dark painted pout, lidded eyes, and perfect crown of platinum curls, she looks defiant, unwelcoming—and totally cool. A version of this image would appear on some of the Hell’s Angels posters that advertised the movie to the public; other posters would show more of Harlow’s body, posed bending over backward in fleshy ecstasy as airplanes crashed around her. The implication was that the death and destruction depicted in the film was brought on by this barely clothed blond woman’s sexuality.

  This kind of marketing, as much or maybe more than the actual film, implanted into the collective imagination the idea of Jean Harlow as the most authentically “bad” girl that movies had ever seen. The public loved this. While Hell’s Angels was a hit (albeit not the money minter Hughes’s team would make it out to be—it could never recoup its enormous expense), Harlow became its breakout star among audiences eager for new faces of talking cinema. Arbiters of taste were less enthused. Photoplay continued to be Hell’s Angels most committed critic. In response to a letter from a reader taking the magazine to task for not rating the finished product higher in their August issue, editor James R. Quirk wrote, “This picture is guilty of the highest of all motion picture crimes—bad taste. The character played by Miss Jean Harlow is one of which the motion picture cannot be proud. It is sex in its most disgusting phase, naked, vulgar, unnecessary. Our review of Hell’s Angels stands as printed.”

  But while national and trade reviewers lumped the character’s indecency with Harlow’s unsophisticated acting ability, the star quality she brought to the irredeemable role struck others as nearly revolutionary. “No star ever began in a part that seemed so unfavorable. The character portrayed by Miss Harlow is an out-and-out feminine rotter,” wrote the motion picture editor of the Kansas City Star, Jean’s hometown paper. “A youthful, thrill-crazy neurotic, produced by a Zeppelin tortured generation, she lives a heady and ruthless life in pursuit of sensation.” What made Harlow’s character a woman of her time—and only her time, because within a few years the Hays Code would legislate girls like her off the screen—was that she began defiantly amoral and stayed that way. “Retribution does not overtake her, because Howard Hughes has observed that the wages of sin are not always paid with theatrical promptness. She spreads her spiritual destruction and moves out of the story.

  “You hate Jean Harlow every moment she is on screen in Hell’s Angels, yet the seductive mannerisms with which she has endowed the part are fascinating,” the Star concluded. “Where other stars had sought to appeal through virtue, she dazzled the public through wickedness.”

  Those close to Harlow recognized that this “wickedness” was all a put-on—which made it hurt all the more that so much of the press around the film was about Harlow’s body and the supposed looseness with which she displayed and shared it. “I hate Hollywood,” she sighed to a Photoplay reporter after a night out at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub sent tongues wagging. “I suppose it sounds like biting the hand that feeds you. But I mean, I hate it because I just can’t be myself—they won’t let me.”

  Hughes was photographed with Harlow at the Hell’s Angels premiere, fueling the legend that he’d taken advantage of a producer’s prerogative with his handpicked star. In reality, the still-married Billie Dove was Howard’s secret date that night. “We sneaked in a side door early in order to avoid the crowds,” Dove confirmed. “We sat on the back row, so no one would recognize us, and then we slipped out before the picture was finished.”

  Sneaking out while the lights were still down, Billie and Howard reemerged moments later at the Cafe Montmartre, where Dove would host an invite-only private party for Hughes after the premiere. A few years earlier, this restaurant and nightclub had been the first place in Hollywood proper to match the kind of boozy, starry, in-crowd scene of the downtown hotel bars. There was dancing; there was an in-house bootlegger; there was Louella Parsons, sitting at a corner table, collecting gossip that she could judiciously either publish or trade with the subject for a story they would prefer to see in print. But by that night in 1930, the Montmartre, owned and managed by a local character named Eddie Brandstatter, was already on the decline. Competition had begun to spring up throughout the area, not least from Brandstatter’s own private Embassy Club, and in 1932, Brandstatter would file for bankruptcy and sell the Montmartre. Soon thereafter he would be convicted for absconding with the club’s drapes, china, and pride-of-place decoration: a giant marble statue of a nude woman.

  As went the fortunes of the Montmartre, so would eventually go the fortunes of the couple at the center of attention there the night of the Hell’s Angels premiere. At the beginning of the evening, Howard Hughes had been an up-and-comer and Billie Dove had been a superstar. After Hell’s Angels played, when they walked into the fading cafe together and through the crowd of curated, friendly faces, Hughes had transformed into a superstar, and though neither understood it in the moment, Billie’s moment was on the wane. The Montmartre was of Billie Dove’s era, and by the end of the night, Howard Hughes’s era had begun.

  A month later, Dove finally appeared in divorce court. On the stand, dressed stylishly in black, she acknowledged that she and her husband had been separated since September 15, 1929. She described several incidents over the course of their six-year marriage during which Willat “struck me and knocked me down.” Billie’s brother Charles and maid Mary Fitzpatrick testified to corroborate the beatings, and the maid recalled that Willat had once told her “he wouldn’t be responsible for what he did, that he was going to ‘clean up’ on his wife.” Dove was granted the divorce—Willat didn’t show up to contest it—and her claim of having been battered by Willat was splashed across the front page of the Los Angeles Times. (This was perhaps Dove’s way of getting revenge against Willat for having “sold” her to Hughes. Late in life, she told interviewer Michael Ankerich that Willat had never actually abused her.)

  Now Billie and Howard were legally free to pursue a life together. But instead of locking her down in matrimony, Hughes, high on all the accolades for having discovered Harlow, sought to tie Billie d
own professionally. He maneuvered to free Dove from her contract with First National and signed her to a new contract with his Caddo Company, through which he made a deal to produce five films with her as the star, and pay her $84,000 for each.

  “Billie Dove ‘At Liberty,’” read the headline in the Los Angeles Times. According to columnist Alma Whitaker, Dove was “a beautiful slave recently freed from servitude,” having left both her husband and her studio, First National. Whitaker asked her if the rumors were true, that she had sought a divorce in order to marry Howard Hughes. “Oh, I couldn’t marry for a year anyway. And in the meantime, I am free. . . .” Dove told the columnist.

  She may have even believed it.

  Chapter 6

  A Cock vs. the Code

  The story of the end of the silent era that has been disseminated through movies like Singin’ in the Rain and The Artist has it that many, if not most, silent film stars saw their careers collapse with the advent of sound—unless they could sing and/or dance. Of course, it’s true that some performers had heavy accents that did not match the images they had established in silent film, or they simply lacked the ability to clearly or convincingly speak dialogue. But for few major stars was it as simple as the microphones turning on and their livelihoods simultaneously turning off. The whole film industry underwent a major transition in the late 1920s, and there were performers who lost their grip on the popular imagination during this time for reasons having nothing to do with their speaking voice—just as stars of today ebb and flow and slip in and out of favor, sometimes very quickly and without a cause that’s obvious to outside observers.