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

by Karina Longworth

  This first marriage proposal to Rogers came right after Rogers and her on-screen dance partner Fred Astaire finished shooting their masterpiece, Swing Time, directed by George Stevens and released in September 1936. All of the Astaire-Rogers collaborations are notable for the ways in which they pioneered the subsumed sex scene: in a time of increasing regulation of on-screen sexuality, movies like The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat managed to communicate sophisticated stories of seduction and consummation primarily through choreographed dance. Swing Time did what their previous films had done, and more. Its climax is the stunning number set to the song “Never Gonna Dance,” in which Astaire confesses his love to the unattainable Rogers, and then the couple shares one, last, forbidden waltz. It’s the apotheosis of the Astaire-Rogers ballroom dance-as-sex scene.

  Rogers and Stevens fell in love on the set of Swing Time, and carried on a relationship for three years—three years that encompassed Hughes’s romance with Hepburn, and fell roughly into the midpoint of Stevens’s seventeen-year marriage to former silent star Yvonne Howell. And then, in 1939, after his flight around the world and the fizzling of his affair with Bette Davis, Howard came back into Ginger’s life with a vengeance. By early 1940, he had finally convinced her to allow his attorney Neil McCarthy to handle her divorce from Ayres. Once the papers were filed, Rogers recalled, “Howard completely dominated my personal life.” He sealed the deal by giving her a five-carat emerald engagement ring.

  A woman who believed in the ritual of marriage and all it symbolized, Ginger continued to live with her mother Lela after accepting Howard’s proposal. Hughes still had the mansion on Muirfield Road, and in 1940, in need of temporary lodgings during the Philadelphia Story shoot, Hepburn moved back in, but they did not rekindle their romance. Hughes was working hard to convince Rogers—who had bested Hepburn in the battle of the RKO divas—that she was the woman he wanted to live with. One day he took her up to a parcel of land he had bought on Cahuenga Peak, overlooking Lake Hollywood. Hughes had purchased 138 acres west of the Hollywood sign, and he explained to Ginger that he was going to build a house there just for her. “He knew I loved a view,” she recalled. “My own home had a very lovely view, and this was much higher than the house I had; so he thought that would be very appealing to me, and to some extent it was.”

  While Rogers was imagining life with Howard Hughes in a custom-built castle in the sky, her career was at a crossroads. She and Astaire had recently made what she believed would be their final film together, the musical biopic The Story of Irene and Vernon Castle. Rogers had been RKO’s top female star for much of the 1930s, but the studio had battled with her over contracts and struggled to figure out what to do with her in between Astaire musicals. The devoutly religious Rogers also had firm ideas about what she should be representing on-screen, and she fought back against some of the material RKO tried to cast her in.

  Then Rogers was courted by producer David Hempstead to star in an adaptation of a popular novel called Kitty Foyle, about an independent young woman who becomes pregnant and has an abortion. One night, while Howard was driving her to dinner, Ginger started flipping through a copy of the novel that Hempstead had sent her. Somehow she flipped straight to the scenes in the book that were the least likely to pass the Production Code in a film adaptation—not just the abortion, which Rogers found repugnant, but also what censor-in-chief Joseph Breen would call “the suggestion of frequent illicit sex affairs between your two leads.” Ginger threw the book down in disgust, telling Hughes she was “not flattered” that Hempstead and RKO had bought this “highly suggestive and too lurid” novel expressly with her in mind.

  Ginger’s mother advised her that there was no way the things that she objected to in Kitty Foyle could ever make it into a Hollywood movie. Kitty Foyle would have to be sanitized for the screen, and with a millionaire fiancé promising her the world—or, at least, a house with a view of the world as Hollywood knew it—Ginger could afford to wait.

  Except, increasingly, it felt like Ginger Rogers’s time was not her own. At first Howard would call Lela directly to schedule and plan his dates with Ginger. As they became more seriously involved, Hughes stopped asking either of the Rogers women for permission and started directly ordering Ginger to make sure he was the sole focus of her attention. She had begun to suspect that he was having her followed, and that her phone calls were being surveilled. Years earlier, Hughes had kept tabs on Billie Dove by physically standing outside public restrooms to make sure he didn’t lose her when she emerged. Ginger’s instinct that he had tapped her phones, if accurate, would have been the first indication that Hughes had begun to outsource the activity of monitoring his girlfriends to a network of aides and spies. That network would become visible to all soon enough.

  After his experience with Katharine Hepburn, Hughes may have feared once again being shut out of a complicated family dynamic. Rogers didn’t come from a long, storied line like the Hepburns, but that made her bond with Lela Rogers all the stronger. Ginger believed that her mother was the only person who always had her best interests at heart. Once Hughes angrily started trying to regulate the frequency with which she spoke to Lela, Ginger’s increasingly bad feeling about the relationship began to crowd out her hopes for a blue-sky future. “This was too much for me,” she thought.

  Finally, one night in 1940, Howard called Ginger at home. He had a dentist appointment the next morning and wanted Ginger to go with him. Ginger refused. She didn’t know what to tell him, or why exactly she was pushing back against his demands now, but something inside her was telling her to do it. Then something outside told her to do it, too: that same evening, Ginger recalled, she picked up the ringing phone to find screenwriter Alden Nash on the other end. Nash told Ginger that he had seen Hughes’s car parked in front of the home of another actress—not just that night, but many nights.*

  When Howard called the next morning to once again try to get Ginger to accompany him to the dentist, she again refused. She spent the day packing up all the jewelry Hughes had given her. A few hours later, she got a call from Noah Dietrich. Howard was in the hospital, Dietrich told her. Would she come see him?

  Driving to the dentist, Hughes had smashed head-on into another car. Another crash meant another head injury; this time it had taken seventy stitches to close up Howard’s eye. When Ginger got to the hospital, Hughes was in the recovery room, his head wrapped up like a mummy.

  “How are you feeling?” Ginger asked.

  “Miserable,” he responded, and proceeded to explain that this was her fault. He had been so mad that Ginger refused to accompany him to the dentist, he told her, that he had driven straight into oncoming traffic.

  By now Ginger was used to Hughes’s patterns of manipulation. Already aware that he was cheating, she wasn’t going to let him gaslight her anymore. She told him what she had found out about where he was spending his nights, and with whom. Before the sedated cad could conjure up a response, Ginger produced the box full of jewelry, which included the emerald ring. The engagement, she told him, was over.

  “There was a long silence you could cut with a knife,” Rogers recalled. “Howard looked at me from under his bandages; his soulful eyes were like those of a bloodhound puppy. Then I turned and walked toward the door. With a dramatic turn of the head I opened the door, slamming it as I left. That was the last time I ever saw Howard.”

  Dietrich soon entered the hospital room and found Hughes in tears over the breakup. “It was,” Dietrich wrote, “the only time anyone saw Howard Hughes cry.”

  IN THE WAKE OF their breakup, Ginger Rogers edged into a new echelon of stardom, thanks to Kitty Foyle, the movie based on the bestselling novel that she had been convinced was too trashy to be filmed.

  With a final script written by future Hollywood Ten radical Dalton Trumbo and directed by future Hollywood red-chaser Sam Wood, Kitty Foyle had ended up being a bizarrely moralistic film, one that took unusual satisfaction in telling women that their dreams and de
sires for either romantic dependence or modern independence were both foolish and wrong.

  Kitty Foyle (portentously and, ultimately, sinisterly, subtitled “the natural history of a woman”) begins with a prologue, filmed with inter-titles instead of dialogue, as if to play on the audience’s distant memories of a simpler, silent film era. It opens with a title card explaining that in order to understand the film to come, we need to review a brief history of the “white-collar girl.” We flash back to 1900, when a young woman’s life is depicted as consisting of wearing a fluffy white dress and being painstakingly protected and wooed. On the streetcar, a gentleman eagerly gives up his seat so the young woman can sit down. That same man comes to her house and, obeying the rules of her father, courts her. The endgame of the 1900 girl’s public life is a husband and baby. “But that was not enough,” says the next title card. A dramatization of the fight for suffrage follows.

  “And so the battle was won,” reads the next title. “Women got their equal rights.” These “equal rights” are depicted as a woman standing on a streetcar, men oblivious to her, not offering her a seat in which to rest her weary working-girl bones. Then comes a long text crawl: “Thus woman climbed down from her pedestal and worked shoulder to shoulder with men—who became so accustomed to her presence during the day that evening brought a new malady to the white-collar girl. By 1940 this had come to be known, rather gloomily, as ‘That Five-Thirty Feeling.’” In other words, men don’t want to date or marry working women, so working girls are left with no man to marry or date, and when the workday is over, they return to their sad, shared apartments and ponder, “Is that all there is?”

  When we finally enter the movie proper, we see that Ginger Rogers’s Kitty is the 1940 version of the harried working girl. Kitty’s unglamorous doctor boyfriend is forever keeping her waiting for dinner, but tonight he asks her to meet him at midnight so they can get married. There is little to no romantic chemistry between Kitty and the doctor, but this marriage is clearly the sensible thing for Kitty to do: it will allow her to quit her job selling perfume at an upscale cosmetics store and have the children she desperately wants. She goes to her apartment to pack, and who does she find waiting for her there but Wyn, her rakish ex-husband. Wyn tells her he’s leaving his current wife and son and old-money family and hightailing it to South America, and he wants Kitty to come with him. He tells her to meet him at midnight at the train station. Now Kitty has two options, and as she packs, apparently swept away by her ex’s romantic proposal, her reflection in the mirror starts shaming her for even imagining a life on the lam with her dashing ex. “Married people face things together. But you won’t be married,” Kitty’s judgy mirror self cautions.

  Kitty had been polite when the doctor proposed, but not passionate; when Wyn showed up, she turned into a different person, and now we see that Kitty has been putting on an act with her new suitor—and that Ginger Rogers’s performance in this film is at a much higher level of difficulty than anything she’s done before. In Kitty Foyle, Rogers plays at least four distinct characters: the Kitty who loves Wyn, the Kitty who “loves” the doctor, the tomboy fifteen-year old Kitty, and the conscience Kitty sees when she looks in the mirror.

  Now come the flashbacks, showing how Kitty, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, craved throughout childhood to be part of the high-society set. Her beleaguered widower father warned against such dreams, lambasting fairy tales for “putting ideas in little girls’ heads” that working-class rubes from nowhere could end up with rich princes, and encourages her to find a workaday lad and marry him. The message is that the ambition to pass through classes, to achieve or accumulate much more than what you’re born into, is dangerous. And yet it’s Kitty’s father who introduces her to Wyn, an heir to a massive Philadelphia fortune. She becomes his secretary, and he woos her via Dictaphone.

  Their romance turns serious on the night Franklin Roosevelt is elected president for the first time. They celebrate the victory in a New York speakeasy and Kitty’s virtue soon falls like Hoover’s hope of remaining in office. This is the most literal of the various different ways in which Kitty Foyle serves as a capsule history of the first four decades of the twentieth century through one woman’s experience, placing personal choice in political context. Now politically and socially empowered to make their own choices, Kitty Foyle suggests, women will make those choices based on emotion—and that this is why they shouldn’t have so much agency. The scene in which Kitty succumbs to Wyn’s seduction takes place in a cabin, opposite a roaring fire. Though we enter the room on a wave of soft and romantic background music, the first shot of the scene ominously moves in on the raging fire, and when we then see Kitty and Wyn, they’re posed and shot in an odd, unsettling angle. Moralist director Wood uses mise-en-scène to tell the audience that even though this coupling is what Kitty thinks she wants, she shouldn’t be there—and a girl like her can’t be trusted to make her own decisions about sex and men.

  Kitty and Wyn break up the first time when his business fails, and instead of proposing to her as she expects, he offers to keep her on his payroll, because he thinks he owes it to her. “Nobody owes a thing to Kitty Foyle,” the proud secretary says. “Except Kitty Foyle!” Fueled by her indignation, she goes to New York and finds the job at the perfume counter. She meets the boring doctor, who makes her starve the night of their first date rather than take her out to dinner in order to impress on her that he’s not rich and that life with him means being careful about every cent spent. Then Wyn shows up again in New York, and he and Kitty elope and return to their hometown of Philadelphia. They’re elated, but his family is livid, threatening to disinherit him unless Kitty immediately enrolls in finishing school. This disapproval seems to overwhelm Wyn, who we’re reminded is the seventh man with his family name, so Kitty, feeling unwanted, walks out and goes back to New York—only to discover that she’s pregnant. She decides that she’ll raise the kid on her own, and that he’ll be the toughest little boy in town. There’s an incredible scene in which a delirious Kitty wakes up in her hospital bed and describes the dream she’s just had, in which she’s saved her little boy from drowning. What she doesn’t know—although she probably feels—is that she couldn’t save him, that the baby died in childbirth. It’s the most tragically cruel demonization of single motherhood in any movie I’ve ever seen.

  When Kitty snaps out of the flashback, she has realized that her past life with Wyn contained incredible, romantic highs, and unbearable lows; her future life with him would promise passion, but at least as much uncertainty. Attempting to live life alone and take care of herself resulted in the horrific loss of a child. The right thing to do is to marry the doctor with whom she’ll have a respectable, middle-class life, with no passion, but probably less pain.

  As a star, Ginger Rogers is remembered as a trouper. The standard line on her, that she did everything that Fred Astaire did but backward and in heels, underlines the labor inherent in a woman’s attempt to compete with a man without giving up their femininity. The Fred and Ginger musicals existed in fantasy spaces, where she could do just that. The message of Kitty Foyle was that such fantasy spaces, and the gender dynamics that could flourish there, were incompatible with an ethical life in modern times. That Kitty Foyle was a huge hit suggests early warning of the turn toward conservatism and conventional gender roles that would really flourish in the years after World War II.

  Kitty Foyle cautioned against Cinderella fantasies, but in real life, Rogers would feel thankful that with Hughes she had gotten out before she ended up trapped in a different nightmare fairy tale: Rapunzel. “Howard wanted to get himself a wife, build her a house, and make her a prisoner in her own home while he did what he pleased,” Rogers wrote. She added, “Thank heavens I escaped that.”

  Chapter 12

  A New Bombshell

  Once the afterglow of the around-the-world flight had worn off, Howard Hughes began plotting his reentry into film production. Though financially
backing Hepburn’s purchase of the rights to The Philadelphia Story in 1939 had allowed him to dip a toe back into the world of Hollywood as a moneyman, before that movie was actually made in 1940, Hughes was already hungry for more. As ever, Hughes’s second-go-round as a Hollywood player wasn’t motivated by talent or creativity so much as a need to be known. By the end of the 1930s, he began seeing disconcerting signs that any legacy he had established in Hollywood at the beginning of the decade had faded away. “My name doesn’t mean much anymore,” he said. “It was brought home to me the other day when I made a telephone call and the man I wanted wasn’t in his office. I left my name with his secretary, and I had to repeat it three or four times before she got it right.”

  Publicist Russell Birdwell was one man Hughes called to fix this problem. Another was director Howard Hawks. But the centerpiece of Hughes’s Hollywood comeback would be a nineteen-year-old girl from the Valley who—thanks to the inspiration of Hughes, the grunt work of Birdwell, and her own inherent appeal—would become the most in-demand pinup of World War II before any soldier had ever seen her in a movie.

  LIKE HUGHES, RUSSELL BIRDWELL was a slender Texan who developed a business of selling stars, often through the evocation of, if not pure sex, then something adjacent to it, but with a classier gloss. Birdwell called it “glamour.” “Glamour is not to be confused with slutdom,” Birdwell once wrote. So what was it? Birdwell made it sound like charisma mixed with narcissism: “A compelling identity with themselves that attracts and holds.”

  Unlike Hughes, Birdwell was invested in the survival of the studio system as an incubator of stars, if for no other reason than that he understood that studios needed to pay men like him to write the off-screen narratives that would capture the audience’s imagination. In 1935 he published a series of articles in the New York Journal titled “Heartbreak Town.” The first of the series told the story of the Studio Club, a boardinghouse in Hollywood for aspiring actresses, founded by Mary Pickford. Birdwell’s initial article is a masterful example of the trick the Hollywood mythologist must pull off, of balancing ecstatic possibility with mundane probability and the off chance of tragedy. The current residents of the Studio Club, Birdwell wrote, “all remember that other unknowns have walked from that same club, from the very rooms that some of them now occupy, to the highest riches in the lofty realms of Hollywood.” But nothing was guaranteed, and stalwarts of the club “have seen several of the girls go insane from the strain of frustration, unemployment and failure; have stopped some from ending their lives and have seen many, through the wearying months, disintegrate morally and mentally, a few battered down by the men who roam the confines of the world’s greatest beauty marts in search of prey.” And what of the “downright sensible” girl who realizes she doesn’t have what it takes and heads home before it’s too late? The trip to her hometown can be “accomplished without cost by arranging for a girl to accompany a corpse to the point nearest her home.”