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

by Karina Longworth

  Billie Dove’s career peaked in 1926–27—just before the silent era ended—and was over by the end of 1932, but she was not a casualty of the talkie revolution. Dove initially made a smooth transition to sound. Her first talking picture, Adoration, is remembered as one of her best films and biggest hits. In 1928 and 1929, while Billie and Howard were building their relationship, she continued to star in (and speak in) well-received, prestige projects. Though it can be difficult to measure accurately the box office impact of all but the biggest hits of the 1920s, it seems that the last of Billie’s high-quality starring vehicles was Her Private Life, an Alexander Korda–directed melodrama that was widely seen and well liked on its release in September 1929.

  For some reason, after Her Private Life, Billie’s studio, First National, began casting Dove in less distinguished fare—mostly B-movies with shorter running times, many of which were never given high-wattage premieres in cosmopolitan capitals like New York and Los Angeles, and primarily played in the provinces. This began with The Painted Angel, a western musical with Billie as a saloon chanteuse. This was “a bad piece of casting,” Variety lamented when they reviewed The Painted Angel in January 1930, because “Miss Dove has no singing voice.” Another of the five Billie Dove pictures released by First National in 1930, A Notorious Affair, earned $29,000 in its first week at the Strand in New York—making it May’s lowest-grossing opening at the major picture houses in that city per Variety. Reviews of Affair suggested that critics had started to notice a pattern: Billie’s studio was doing her a disservice by casting her in bad films, with shoddy writing and in roles for which she was unsuited. “It won’t be long, Billie Dove, if these unfortunate pictures keep turning up,” warned the Daily Mirror that spring. Of Sweethearts and Wives, released that summer, Variety acknowledged, “Billie Dove carried the story and gave it what small measure of entertainment it had,” but her heavy lifting was not enough: “[I]t is no role for this engaging actress, whose progress has been sadly hampered with poor scenarios and hurried product.” The film’s “moderate” box-office numbers in Pittsburgh “attested to Billie Dove’s waning popularity.” After a weak showing in Louisville, Variety warned, “Dove still needs better scripts.”

  She was not going to get them from First National; that same summer, Howard purchased Billie’s contract, and from then on, generating quality scripts would be his responsibility. But before the first Hughes-Dove collaboration could be made, First National released the dregs of the Billie Dove library that they still had on the shelf. When One Night at Susie’s, a cut-rate gangster flick running less than an hour in which Dove had a secondary role, opened in October 1930, Variety called it a “below average programmer” even while admitting it was doing well in tertiary markets like Pittsburgh, “probably due to cast names”—suggesting that Dove’s name still had some box-office value. In May 1931, the trade paper called The Lady Who Dared, Billie’s last remaining First National release, Dove’s “return” to the screen, eight months after Susie’s. But The Lady performed “very bad” in San Francisco, and Variety’s review wrote it off as “weak in every department. Instead of reviving Billie Dove, poor lighting shows her in most semi-close-ups to disadvantage.”

  It was almost as if, since around the middle of 1929, First National had gone out of its way to hobble Billie Dove’s stardom. Why would they have done this, a full year before actually selling her contract? Could Dove’s progressing affair with Hughes have had something to do with it? By Billie’s own (admittedly not entirely reliable) memory, she left Irvin Willat, who was also under contract to First National, in September 1929. Excluding Hughes and his tendency to antagonize Hollywood’s establishment from the equation, First National may have shown that they had taken Willat’s side in his dispute with Billie by refusing to give her access to their best scripts and directors. That said, Willat himself never again worked at First National at all—he took two years off after Billie left him, and the remaining four pictures he is credited with directing were made at independent studios.

  This period of Billie’s decline from top-echelon star to unfortunate passenger in marginal B-vehicles ran in parallel with her relationship with Hughes, and put all the more pressure on her collaborations with her new boyfriend-benefactor to reverse her career fortunes. The two films Hughes produced for Dove, The Age for Love and Cock of the Air, did not do well, and shortly after they were released, the couple’s romantic and professional partnerships both fell apart.

  Billie Dove never spoke candidly in public about why her relationship with Howard Hughes came to an end, although she took pains to correct assumptions that his philandering had something to do with it. Whenever given the opportunity, she would vehemently deny that Howard had cheated on her with other women, or that he had lost interest in her. “I was in love with him,” she insisted, “and I was the one who told him to go.”

  “At the time I knew him, Howard was not the womanizer he later became,” Dove said many years after their breakup. “He was the jealous type and possessive of me.” It’s the latter part of this statement that might provide a clue as to why, two years after he purchased her contract, Hughes and Dove parted ways romantically, and also never worked together again. Dove’s split from her allegedly abusive, “man’s man” director husband was positioned in the press as the liberation of a modern woman. But her new romantic partner was even more controlling than her husband had been, and as the manager of her career, he squandered her as a resource, taking an asset that had recently been misused and running it fully into the ground. He doesn’t deserve all the credit, but within a few months after Billie Dove’s split from Howard Hughes, her movie career would be over. And, for a while, it looked like his was, too.

  HUGHES COULDN’T BEAR TO let Dove out of his sight, treating her like a precious treasure under twenty-four-hour guard. Howard would follow Billie to the bathroom at parties, waiting outside the door like a bodyguard until she was finished. At first, Billie fully embraced Howard’s oddities. She was compassionate about Howard’s issues, like his encroaching, hereditary deafness (which had been exacerbated by all the time he had spent so close to very loud airplane engines), going so far as to accompany him to Czechoslovakia to see a hearing specialist, and she learned “how to regulate my voice for him” so that she could communicate with him in a way no one else could. She even accommodated his germ phobia, which was apparent by 1930. (On their trip to Europe, Dove later remembered, Hughes’s favorite place to stay had been a brand-new hotel in Paris, because “it hadn’t been used.”)

  Around 1930, Dove, and possibly Noah Dietrich, were the only people who were able to see Hughes’s weaknesses—outside of his most inner circle, he seemed invincible. In the year after Hell’s Angels’s premiere, he became the talk of the town, his next move eagerly speculated in industry gossip columns. As one fan magazine put it, Hughes was “one of Hollywood’s—if not the world’s—most eligible young men. Shrewd, canny, with a boyish charm, he has whipped a business that called him a green young fool and a wealthy playboy.” He was rumored to be on the verge of acquiring Universal Studios and a branch of United Artists. While all of that gossip was unfounded, he did acquire a doomed color film production company called Multicolor, and struck a deal with Joseph Schenck at United Artists to guarantee the distribution of Hughes’s next batch of films.

  The first of those films to see release, in spring 1931, was The Front Page, a Lewis Milestone–directed adaptation of the hit Broadway play set in a newsroom. In the run-up, Quarberg promoted Hughes as a maverick with an unblemished record of success. The publicist distributed sample articles to newspapers to set the tone of their coverage of the film and, more important, its producer. A typical document recapped Hughes’s recent past: “Hell’s Angels made motion picture history, but above all it made Howard Hughes—revealed him as a man who had the courage of his convictions, and who had the money to carry them out even in the face of adverse predictions—and there were no end of them concerni
ng Hell’s Angels.”

  Quarberg’s thesis was that his boss beat the moguls at their own game by challenging the game: “[Hughes] defies traditions—and makes money at it.” To support this thesis, Quarberg repeatedly claimed Hughes had never lost money on a film investment—a lie that, apparently, no one fact checked at the time, as Swell Hogan remained hidden, and the accounting on Hell’s Angels was a black box. If Hughes and company said it was a phenomenal moneymaker, the press and the public believed it to be so. Hughes’s lack of regard for “the rules” of Hollywood had promotional value, but behind the scenes, his ignorance was at times almost embarrassing. Caddo sent United Artists a sketch for a movie poster that the distributor rejected because, as UA sales manager Al Lichtman put it in a telegram, “it could not be read from any distance nor could it be seen at night.”

  The Front Page was a kind of beta prototype of the screwball comedy—“beta” because it came before that subgenre had codified with films like It Happened One Night (1934), and because, with its all-male cast, Front Page was devoid of the strong female characters who would make screwballs sing. The film was released in April 1931 and was another hit for Hughes. And yet, by September of that year, Hughes was already telling his employees that he was going to scale back on film production until after the worst of the Depression passed—a stance that was reaffirmed two months later, after The Age for Love opened.

  The Age for Love would be his first production for Billie Dove, and no expense was spared in its promotion. The campaign had begun eight months before the film was released, when Photoplay ran a profile of Hughes in their February 1931 issue titled “Hollywood’s Hundred Million Dollar Kid.” The ostensible purpose of the profile was to promote The Front Page, a film that ended with an artful sound edit to leave the conclusion of the phrase “son of a bitch” not quite audible, and was thus being teased as a quasi-profane event. (Posters branded it “The !@$:*=x%-est Picture Ever Produced.”) Perhaps because profanity didn’t make a movie about newspaper men sexy to Photoplay’s largely female reader base, Billie was featured as a co-subject of the Hughes profile. Or, maybe it was the other way around: maybe Hughes was using the publicity draw of his edgy new movie to help reframe the conversation around his girlfriend and new contract starlet.

  The article, which Dove kept in her scrapbook until her death, featured a stunning glamour shot of Billie dressed in a pair of flowing silk pajamas with ornate brocade trim and kitten heel slippers, posing with chin on hand and elbow on knee, her shoulder-length curls brushed out as though she were headed to a very luxurious bed. “In a story about Howard Hughes, Billie Dove must appear,” read the photo caption. The story continued to describe how Billie and Howard’s relationship defied local convention. “It burns Hollywood to a crisp that Hughes and Billie Dove, in the face of the utmost that Hollywood tongues can do, go serenely and happily about everywhere together without bothering to make the slightest reply to questions. They simply won’t tell what their plans are. It’s nobody’s business. Ask Billie Dove, and she answers nothing. Ask young Hughes, and if he answers at all, it’s to tell you [where] to go. . . . In the meantime, they’re seen everywhere together.”

  Another profile of Billie and Howard quoted Billie on her desire for “happiness”: “I make no plans for my career, if you call it that. I don’t want to continue it when it ceases being a source of happiness to me. What I want of life is happiness. That is, I imagine, what every woman wants. Happiness to me is love. If I found all my happiness in love, I would desert the screen . . . my career. I would, of course, want babies. . . .” Reporter Dorothy Spensley noted that in the room of Dove’s home where she was interviewed, a bridal fashion magazine sat on the coffee table.

  Howard and Billie were far from setting a wedding date, but there may have been other reasons why Dove would hint in this interview that she would soon retire for marriage and motherhood. Times were changing fast, and though unlike other silent stars the quality of Billie’s voice was no impediment to her transitioning to sound film, even as a relatively young woman she was unquestionably a holdover from an era that had ended when talkies had taken over and swept in a new wave of celebrities. One of those new stars was Howard Hughes, and in 1931 his name was considered to be more valuable than that of any performer whose contract he controlled. In 1931, evaluating how to promote another Caddo film on the docket, Scarface, United Artists concluded that Hughes’s was the only name with promotional value. As publicist Hal Horne wired Quarberg, “CONSENSUS OPINION HERE HUGHES NAME STRONGEST EXPLOITATION ANGLE . . . BELIEVE OTHER NAMES UNIMPORTANT SHOULD BE OMITTED ON POSTER.”

  United Artists and Caddo came into conflict on the matter of how, or even if, to promote Billie Dove. Despite Photoplay’s eager complicity in keeping up Billie’s glamour girl image, and Quarberg’s claims in press releases that Dove was “a first-ranking star of United Artists,” United Artists itself viewed Dove as old news. The Hughes camp and the UA executives went back and forth over whether to even include Dove in the posters or the on-screen credits for The Age for Love.

  After this exchange, Quarberg went into overdrive to promote Dove as a star resurrected, through a number of biographical press releases attempting to recast this “also ran” as a woman of her moment. Quarberg’s press claimed that The Age for Love, scheduled to premiere in November 1931, would be Dove’s “return” after an eighteen-month absence from the screen, which wasn’t true—The Lady Who Dared had opened in limited release in May. The publicist would pretend that none of the movies released since Billie left First National existed—and he got away with it, because most audiences probably hadn’t seen these minor films or even registered their releases. Quarberg’s promotion sold a Billie Dove brand based on uniqueness and independence—that no one owned her. Quarberg sent magazines an article on beauty with Dove’s byline, in which “Billie” advocated exercise and “right eating” and stopped just short of shaming other women for wearing too much makeup. Billie Dove, we were meant to think, was the genuine article, a real beauty and a unique woman—not some manufactured glamour girl. She would thus be the perfect match for the independently wealthy, independently minded Howard Hughes. And the perfect star for a film that claimed to deal with the conundrum, already not fresh by 1931, of the “new woman.”

  The Age for Love has, like many silent films, been lost, and there’s very little writing available that would give a sense of what it was like to watch, but it was promoted as “a motion picture based on the day’s most common problem—should the young wife work?” This was copy that made it into the full-page ads placed in magazines like Modern Screen. Quarberg’s files show draft copy that was somewhat less pious and socially conscious: “SHE DIDN’T WANT TO BE SHACKLED!” a proposed poster might have blared in block letters. “She was chained to convention—a wife who wanted a career. She was handcuffed to a home and a husband—a prisoner in the bondage of boredom. . . . And her soul cried out for freedom!”

  The irony, of course, was that in real life Dove was a divorcee whose “freedom” Hughes had paid cash for, as easily as he had purchased her contract from First National. Here was a woman who felt that she had been bought from one man and sold to another—and whose career resurgence relied on the support and good sense of her new “owner”—starring in a film being promoted as a saga of female liberation from “the chains of convention.” Meanwhile, the press couldn’t wait for her to go back to being a missus, even as her would-be second husband’s company was promoting her new movie as her triumphant return to the realm of career woman.

  Billie feared that no marketing could compensate for the fact that The Age for Love was “no good,” even “namby-pamby.” After a preview of the film held for critics, she betrayed her nerves as reporters began pelting her with questions about her relationship with Hughes.

  “Someone give me a cigarette,” Dove said.

  The questions kept coming. “Are you ever going to marry Howard Hughes?”

  “Give me a
break. I’ve only been a free woman for a month.”

  “We are burning to know.”

  “He’s a marvelous air pilot and plays a first class game of golf. But what I am burning to know is whether this picture, which I enjoyed making more than any I have ever done, is a success.”

  According to the Screenland reporter who accosted Dove at the screening, The Age for Love was bound to be divisive: “It’s a feminine picture out and out. The average male won’t like it a bit.”

  Nor did anyone else. The Age for Love became Hughes’s first released film to flop so badly that even Quarberg couldn’t spin it any other way. It opened to tumbleweeds at the Rivoli in New York, setting a record for the lowest opening day of any film at that theater, and business only dropped off from there. In a dubious achievement that not many films matched at that time, it was pulled from release after just one week.

  Thanks to this poor performance, it was decided not to publicize the next Billie Dove picture, which was already in production, as a “Billie Dove picture.” “Of course I cannot stop the publicity which has already been planted in the movie magazines in which Miss Dove is featured,” warned a frustrated Lincoln Quarberg in a letter to United Artists. “Naturally we are very disappointed in the apparent inability of Billie Dove’s name to attract any customers at the box-office—even with a good picture and with a good performance on her part.” Hal Horne at United Artists concurred on the sad state of affairs, writing to Quarberg that if the studio “had our way we would publicize her to the stars in every city in the country. The fact remains however that the exhibitors do not want her. . . .”