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

by Karina Longworth

  Hughes and Quarberg may have given Harlow her branding nickname, but they had nothing to do with the final polish on her persona, nor did they play any kind of part in how she triumphed with it. Give that credit to Anita Loos, Irving Thalberg, and Harlow herself.

  In March 1932, Hughes finally agreed to sell Harlow’s contract to MGM. The studio only wanted Harlow because Paul Bern wanted her, but soon they found something to do with her. Thalberg had seen Harlow in Hell’s Angels and thought she had the right look for the film that Loos was rewriting; he just wasn’t sure if she could play comedy, given that the only laughs she had inspired in Hughes’s movie had been those of derision.

  At her MGM screen test, Jean showed her off-screen comedy chops in conversation with Thalberg. “How did you make out with Howard Hughes?” he asked her, hoping for gossip that could top off what he had already heard.

  “Well, one day when he was eating a cookie he offered me a bite.”

  Thalberg and Loos laughed, but then Jean offered the real punch line. “Don’t underestimate that. The guy’s so frightened of germs, it could darn near have been a proposal!”

  Then Thalberg asked, “Do you think you can make an audience laugh?”

  “Why not?” Harlow shrugged. “People have been laughing at me all my life.”

  With that, Jean gave the second most powerful man at MGM and one of the most famous female writers in America a cheeky nod, and was out the door.

  “I don’t think we need to worry about Miss Harlow’s sense of humor,” Thalberg said.

  Loos wrote the nod into the movie. “She knew exactly how people were going to react to her,” Loos marveled. “If men were stupid they’d fall for her; if they had good sense, they’d laugh her off.”

  At the first preview of Red-Headed Woman, audiences didn’t know if they were allowed to laugh at Harlow, whom Anita Loos affectionately referred to as “our sex pirate.” Thalberg ordered her to write a new prologue, to “tip the audience off that the movie’s a comedy.” This prologue gives an ironic cast to the whole film. The first line of the movie comes from a newly ginger-coiffed Harlow: “Gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?” winking at both star and screenwriter’s greatest claims to fame. A few minutes later Jean lasciviously tells her friend that she’s hoping to “take dictation,” mocking a similar joke from Grand Hotel, which was released by the same studio just two months earlier. In that movie, 1932’s epitome of a prestige picture, the “dictation” suggestion is just as weighted with double entendre, but it’s said by John Barrymore to Joan Crawford, who rebuffs it. In Red-Headed Woman, Jean Harlow made Joan Crawford’s shopgirls look like duchesses. Harlow’s Lil is a pure social climber who makes every rich man she meets look like a fool, so cannily that it feels like she’s advancing not on her feminine wiles so much as on male stupidity.

  The final shot of the movie shows that the rich men she becomes involved with are disposable, and that she has maintained a lasting relationship with a working-class immigrant (a chauffeur played by Charles Boyer). In its very weird way, Red-Headed Woman actually accomplishes the goals of the Hays Code—shaming adultery, or at least the men who are suckered by young floozies into committing it—even while depicting the wanton promiscuity that the Code had forbidden. Loos turned the Harlow character’s pursuit of her married boss into a joke, and showed the whole idea of preying on easily seduced men to be a lark.

  Not only is Harlow very good in the picture, but it’s fair to say that she was uniquely equipped to pull off Red-Headed Woman’s balancing act. Loos observed the odd disconnect between the roles Harlow played and the actress’s own feelings about her sexuality. She described Harlow as “unselfconscious . . . rather like a boy. She was completely frank. She had absolutely no feeling about the sensation she created wherever she went. And she had no vanity whatsoever.” Harlow was sexy enough to manipulate men, but she wore and wielded her desirability in an offhanded way that didn’t make other women feel threatened. Instead of alienating female viewers with her sexuality, the distance she was able to maintain from the way men saw her allowed her to draw women into complicity with a character like Lil. She gave female viewers the vicarious pleasure of being able to use their sexuality to win, rather than have it be a source of weakness or shame.

  Once her transfer over to the rarefied space of MGM was complete, Harlow started downplaying Hughes’s role in discovering and mentoring her. In an interview in March 1932, Harlow explained that James Hall had introduced her to Ben Lyon, which was how she ended up screen testing and getting her first significant part. “Those two boys practically directed the picture,” Harlow said of Hell’s Angels. “And they made me, for I knew nothing about the game and they could have had me with my back to the camera from morning until night, if they had wanted to keep me in the background. Instead, they gave me every opportunity and how kind they were to me, the picture shows.” Quarberg clipped this article and sent it to Hughes, scrawled with a note: “Here’s gratitude for you!”

  Harlow was not the only “ungrateful” starlet to cause trouble for Hughes that year. By the end of 1932, he had lost control of three significant actresses in whose stardom he had once been invested. “Howard Hughes has made a neat little role for himself buying up beautiful girls, putting them in expensive pictures, and then selling them retail to a ‘paying’ studio,” gossiped Screen Land magazine, citing Harlow, Billie Dove, and Ann Dvorak as examples.

  A few months earlier, twenty-year-old Dvorak, an atypical beauty whose parents had worked in silent film, had made headlines claiming she had been “sold down the river” by Hughes, who had unloaded his contract with Dvorak to Warner Bros. after the actress’s performance in Scarface had turned her from an unknown bit player into a budding star. Unlike Harlow, Hughes couldn’t even claim to have discovered Dvorak: she had been cast in Scarface after her friend, actress Karen Morley, had invited her to a party at director Howard Hawks’s house before shooting began. At the party, Ann had asked Scarface actor George Raft to dance and he declined. “She was a little high [drunk],” Hawks remembered, “and right in front of him starts to do this sexy undulating dance, sort of trying to lure him on to dance with her. She was a knockout. She wore a black silk gown, almost cut down to her hips. I’m sure that’s all she had on.” Eventually Raft gave in, and according to Hawks, he and Dvorak proceeded to dance “a sensational number which stopped the party.”

  Hawks ended up casting Dvorak in Scarface as Cesca, the sister with whom the titular two-bit gangster has a quasi-incestuous bond, and the director even inserted a scene in the movie replicating Dvorak’s party dance with Raft. Hughes soon decided that if Hawks was so interested, Dvorak must be a valuable commodity, and in August 1931, Hughes signed her to a long-term contract. He also tried to date her, but Dvorak was too nervous to accept his overtures; though she had stunned as a glamour girl in Scarface—and when drunkenly cavorting with Raft on the dance floor—this had been a performance from a young woman who thought of herself as a mousey wallflower, and she didn’t want her boss to find out about the real her. As a result, when Hughes would call, Dvorak would make her mother answer the phone and tell the millionaire that Ann was off doing something exciting and glamorous, when in reality, Ann would be sitting by the phone, “shivering and shaking with excitement . . . her face cold-creamed, eating a ham sandwich.”

  Hughes never got further with Dvorak. There were rumors the actress and director Hawks had an affair on the set of Scarface, and Hawks did cast her in his next film, The Crowd Roars, which required Warner Bros. to rent her services from Hughes. Warner Bros. paid Hughes $600 for Dvorak, and Dvorak, like Harlow before her, got $200 a week. Hughes kept renewing Dvorak’s contracts through the middle of 1932, but he didn’t give her much to do. He allegedly tried to get his old friend Lewis Milestone to cast Dvorak in his adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Rain, but Joan Crawford got the part instead. Hughes cast Dvorak in just one more film, the Spencer Tracy vehicle Sky Devils, and then continued to lo
an her out to Warner Bros. On the set of one of these WB films, Dvorak met the man who would become her first husband, actor Leslie Fenton.

  After Dvorak had shot five Warner Bros. films, Hughes finally decided to sell her contract to the studio, which paid Hughes an exorbitant $40,000. After filming her sixth film at Warner Bros., Three on a Match, opposite Humphrey Bogart, Dvorak decided that she wanted out. Warners had taken their time drafting a new contract, and Dvorak’s weekly salary hadn’t yet been raised from the bargain-basement rate Hughes had set—plus, after filming Match, Dvorak learned that the toddler who had played her son in the film had been paid the same salary as she. In addition, Fenton, whom Dvorak had impulsively married, was making a movie in Germany. Ann didn’t want to be separated, and per the times, if anyone was going to shirk their professional responsibilities for the good of the marriage, it was going to be the wife. So Ann walked out on her commitment to Warner Bros. and traveled to Europe with her husband.

  In breaching her contract, Dvorak didn’t seem to think she was giving up much. She was annoyed that Hughes had signed her to a seven-year deal and had essentially pimped her out before selling her like chattel. And she wasn’t happy with how Warners had used her thus far. “I made nine pictures in eight months,”* Dvorak said, summing up her career thus far. “Quantity, not quality.”

  In Dvorak and Fenton’s absence, her agent had already tried to negotiate with Warners to double Ann’s paltry salary, to no avail. So on July 19, 1932, two weeks after Dvorak had absconded from Hollywood with her husband, the actress, Fenton, and a Hungarian actor named Victor Varconi spoke to the press in New York and announced that Dvorak had been “sold down the river” by Hughes. Fenton and Varconi had what seemed like rehearsed statements ready to go. “Producers look at you for how much money they can squeeze out of you,” Fenton declared. “A contract’s a sentence to hard labor. There’s no regard for personality. Stars are being sent to sanatoriums because they can’t stand the pace. That’s not going to happen to Ann.” Varconi piped in with a virtual non sequitur: “There is little culture in Hollywood,” he sniffed. “I hope I shall be able to arrange my affairs so that I will not have to return there.”

  Within a day, Howard Hughes had responded to Dvorak’s claims with a statement that can only be described as a masterwork of rhetoric, far exceeding in tone and strategy Dvorak’s clumsy appropriation of the language of the slave trade. “Ann Dvorak was not ‘sold down the river;’ and she was misinformed if she thinks so,” the statement began. It went on to argue against each of Dvorak’s main points, even correcting some of Dvorak’s math about his own share of profits, before damning Dvorak with praise: “Of course, some producers might be highly indignant at Miss Dvorak’s statement and if they were in my position they might denounce her ingratitude, proclaiming loudly: ‘Miss Dvorak still would be working for $75 a week if we had not given her a part in Scarface,’ but I don’t feel that way. Producers are not entirely responsible for the success of a star. . . . I think some credit should be given for Miss Dvorak’s ability.”

  The Dvorak situation brought an echo of Hughes’s conflicts with Harlow, but if Harlow managed to shrug off Hughes and move on to bigger and better things in a way that made Hughes look expendable to her success, the opposite fate would befall Dvorak. His statement elegantly put her in her place and made Hughes—who could barely string together a sentence in a social situation—look like a font of wit and charm. It served as the perfect mic drop for Hughes, who would take his leave from Hollywood around this time, putting into motion the first in what would over the years become a pattern of disappearances.

  This time Hughes vanished from Hollywood to take a job as a copilot at American Airlines, under the pseudonym Charles Howard. This was supposedly done discreetly, at least at first, but it was reported by a Los Angeles newspaper in September, as an aside in a story otherwise mostly about Hughes’s struggles with Multicolor, the color film plant he had bought but couldn’t keep afloat. While Hughes was still perceived as fabulously wealthy in Hollywood, in actuality he was drawing no income from previous efforts at moviemaking and was not flush enough to mount new films. His personal finances would dissipate so much that by the summer of 1934, he would once again have difficulty making Ella’s alimony payments.

  Meanwhile, the star who had helped launch the Hughes myth was doing just fine without him, at least professionally—but her personal life was soon to turn tragic. In July 1932, Jean Harlow had married Paul Bern. Their coupling had shocked those who knew both well. Harlow had the most sexual persona of any movie star of her day, but off-screen, according to Anita Loos, she was “completely sexless.” It’s possible that Harlow was drawn to Paul Bern because he wasn’t sexually aggressive. (She was supposed to have said that Bern was different, because unlike all the other men she knew, “He doesn’t talk fuck, fuck, fuck all the time.”)

  Loos claimed that Bern had wooed Harlow by promising to help advance her career. By helping her escape Hughes and bringing her into the fold at MGM, he had done just that. This may have been enough, in Harlow’s mind, to overcome the rumors about Bern that Harlow surely would have heard.

  Bern was notorious for pursuing beautiful women, and for mysterious (and much gossiped-about) reasons, not consummating those relationships. Adela Rogers St. Johns reported that Barbara La Marr—a gorgeous silent-era actress who had costarred in Souls for Sale—had rejected Bern’s marriage proposal in the 1920s. She went on to die in 1926 of illnesses related to her chronic drug use—but not before telling St. Johns “what kind of person Paul was and why she wouldn’t marry him.” St. Johns said in 1971 that Harlow had told her that Bern was impotent, but that she didn’t care, because “he’s paid me the highest compliment I’ve ever had. No man has ever loved me before for what’s best in me.” “Bern adored Jean as abjectly as only a German psycho might,” Loos acknowledged. But St. Johns “had no sympathy” for what she called “Paul Bern’s nonsense.” She repeatedly told a story about how after La Marr’s rejection, Bern had tried to drown himself by sticking his head in a toilet.

  If history repeats itself, usually the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce, with Paul Bern it was sort of the other way around. The official story of Bern’s last days holds that Bern and Harlow spent the Saturday of Labor Day weekend apart. Harlow was expected on the set of the Clark Gable picture Red Dust early Sunday morning, so she went to sleep at her mother’s house, which was closer to the MGM lot. Meanwhile, her husband spent the night at home alone, reading a haul of books he had purchased the day before, including one on the study of glands, which was very trendy in Hollywood at the time, particularly among those who believed that homosexuality and other forms of “deviance” could be “cured.” The next day, Bern was found in his bedroom, curled up on the floor, a fatal gunshot wound in his head and a .38 revolver in his right hand. A mysterious note was found in a guest book near the body. It reads: “Dearest dear, Unfortunately this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humiliation. I love you. Paul” Then, below the signature, a sort of postscript: “You understand last night was only a comedy.”

  The book was not left open to this missive from “Paul.” It was discovered when the MGM crisis team arrived on the scene after Bern’s butler found his body, and they decided to present the guest book entry as a suicide note, evidence of a tortured man’s motive to end his life. When MGM finally allowed Harlow to be questioned by detectives a full day later, she insisted she had no idea what the note meant. Meanwhile, the studio leaked an autopsy report, which included the detail that Bern had “a physical condition which left him unfit for matrimony”: his genitals were “underdeveloped.”

  Certainly, MGM seems to have performed some kind of cover-up, or massaging of the presentation of facts, perhaps just to give Harlow an alibi so that she wouldn’t have to testify to an incredibly traumatic incident that Adela Rogers St. Johns claimed she definitely was present for.
“She was there in that house that night,” St. Johns wrote in 1978. “No reason not to tell it now. She’d heard the shot. She would hear it as long as she lived. After Jean’s call for help we went, another close friend and I; we took her to her mother’s. When the police and press got to the house of tragedy they found only that hideous note that made her—a girl men killed themselves over.”

  Anita Loos confirmed this version of the story. According to Loos, when Bern and Harlow’s sexual incompatibility had proven to be irreconcilable, the actress had cheerfully suggested that Bern “find yourself someone else.” As Loos describes the evening in question, Harlow had been asleep at home, in her separate bedroom (which was a necessity so that she could wake early for call times, never mind whatever extramarital arrangement she and Bern may have had), under the assumption that Bern was spending the night with a lover. Bern had even given Harlow a friendly kiss good night before leaving for his date. Loos says that when Harlow woke up the next morning, Bern’s “suicide note” had been slipped under her door. It was then that she went into his bedroom and found his body, and saw that “he had killed himself while looking in a full-length mirror.”

  In her column many years later, Hedda Hopper cited an anonymous “prominent and respected doctor who knew both Bern and Jean intimately” with the story that two weeks before Bern’s death, he came into Harlow’s bedroom and started hitting her with a whip. “She took it out of his hand and broke it,” Hopper wrote. “That was the basis of the ‘last night was a comedy’ reference in the note he left behind.”