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

by Karina Longworth

  Pat was obligated to alert his boss to the presence of attractive “talent” in the area; before De Cicco could exercise his own prerogatives, Hughes had right of first refusal. The next thing Gloria knew, Hughes had called her mother and invited himself over to her house for tea. He told her he wanted to give her a screen test. “Me—a movie star!” Vanderbilt exclaimed. “Yes, why not!” Gloria, like so many young girls, “dreamed of fame,” and Hughes’s reputation for selecting young women out of thin air and turning them into stars preceded him. Vanderbilt “wanted Howard’s magic wand to tap me on the shoulder.”

  The screen test didn’t materialize, but Howard did continue to call. He and Gloria would go for long drives down the coast, making small talk and listening to the radio. These meetings often had a touch of the clandestine: a Hughes aide would pick Vanderbilt up from her house, and drop her off at Hughes’s car, parked somewhere else in the neighborhood. Occasionally she was brought to the house on Muirfield Road, which she described as “a haphazardly furnished place with dust sheets over most of the furniture.” As she walked through the ghostly rooms, Vanderbilt swore she heard “a recording of the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ playing somewhere.”

  Once Gloria began dating Hughes, she put De Cicco out of her mind. And then one day Pat asked her to Sunday lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool.

  “I said ‘No,’” Vanderbilt recalled, “but it came out yes, and there I was, back as I was before, waiting around to have Pat pay me some attention.”

  Hughes was furious that his underling was trying to compete with him for a girl, and decided to send De Cicco out of town to handle something for TWA, the airline in which Hughes now owned a controlling stake.

  Gloria knew she should be wary of Pat. After all, “his first wife, actress Thelma Todd, had been killed in an unsolved murder, and there were rumors. . . .” And yet when Vanderbilt heard he was going to be sent away, she was surprised to find she was devastated.

  Not long after, Gloria found herself on a flight to New York, the same flight as Katharine Hepburn (of course, Howard had arranged seats on the plane for both). “Hadn’t Howard been in love with her?” Gloria asked herself. “How could I ever compete with someone like that?” Then in New York, she ran into Pat. He called her “Fatso” and “Stupido,” and said that if she thought Howard Hughes was serious about her, she was even dumber than she looked. Gloria decided he was right. Instead of waiting for her heart to be broken by Howard, she married Pat—the guy who had convinced her she was too fat and stupid to do any better.

  That summer of 1941, with the censorship situation on The Outlaw up in the air and romances with Domergue and Vanderbilt competing for Howard’s attention, Hughes either suffered a breakdown or was willing to let various business associates think he did in order to get some breathing room. “After his close approach to a complete physical breakdown,” Noah Dietrich wrote to one associate, “we finally prevailed upon Mr. Hughes to get sufficient rest and relaxation to rebuild his health.” In a letter to airplane designer Sherman Fairchild, Dietrich described the breakdown as “practically a complete collapse following the completion and editing of his last picture.”

  If Hughes was lying low in midsummer 1941, that would explain why he missed, and failed to immediately pounce on, the arrival in Hollywood of Ava Gardner. Brought out to Los Angeles that season and set up as a standard-issue MGM contract girl, Gardner soon learned that to be a contract girl was to be part of a system virtually rigged against her. Her contract said she would earn $50 per week (about $870 in 2017 dollars), but it also stipulated that she could be “laid off” without pay for up to fifteen weeks of the year. “So, instead of getting fifty dollars a week for the first year, it worked out at thirty-five,” she recalled. With that $35, an actress was expected to be well dressed and groomed at all times, at her own expense; she also had to pay her own rent and living expenses. “That’s why many of the starlets and contract players had to put out,” Gardner said. “Plenty of them thought nothing of giving a little bit away when the rental was due.”

  Ava herself was not so pressed into such moonlighting, because soon after arriving in town, she caught the eye of the biggest star at MGM. Mickey Rooney met Ava on her first day on the lot, when the guide showing her around led her onto the set of the Rooney–Judy Garland musical Babes on Broadway. Mickey, dressed in drag for a Carmen Miranda–inspired number, got Ava’s number. Over the weeks to come, he’d call, ask her for a date, and she’d decline. Everyone around her thought she was crazy. She spent every night at home with her sister Bappie, eating bargain hamburgers and playing cards, and her days weren’t much more exciting—MGM hadn’t cast her in anything yet, so she passed most of her time being made up and posing for photos. Going out with Rooney could really help her career, everyone told her, but Ava didn’t think so. She had heard already of Rooney’s reputation—he moved through contract girls so fast none of them had a chance to exploit his fame. Plus, he never looked down her dress—he didn’t have to; he was so short that her breasts were right at his eye line. But at her sister’s urging, Ava finally gave in.

  At the end of their first date, Mickey Rooney asked Ava Gardner to marry him—for the first time. She’d say no twenty-five times before she said yes.

  THREE MONTHS AFTER THE unpleasant Catalina cruise, Howard invited Faith to Palm Springs to join a group at his house there for the weekend. That trip was a success, and Faith began to realize that once Howard was comfortable, he could let down his guard and show more of himself. She began going to Palm Springs to see him every weekend, and over one-on-one dinners, excursions in his seaplane, and occasional shopping sprees, “we were becoming closer and closer those months of September and October,” Faith recalled. “All strain and shyness were gone and we were falling in love.”

  On October 19, Hughes gave Faith an engagement ring. “He turned to me and took me in his arms and in the darkness put a diamond on my engagement finger.”

  “I love you, Faith, I want to marry you,” Hughes told her. Then, according to Faith, who would have been the only witness, Hughes proceeded to add an extremely bizarre, supposedly romantic bon mot: “You are the child I should have had.”

  Assuming this is not an invention or false memory on behalf of Faith Domergue, what did it mean? Presumably he wasn’t referring to a real, lost opportunity. At thirty-five, Howard was old enough to be seventeen-year-old Faith’s father—old enough for the pairing to seem inappropriate and creepy, especially from the vantage of today’s understanding of consent and exploitation—but not so much older that it’s easy to trace this comment back to an obvious event in Hughes’s life. If he had been Faith’s father, Hughes would have been seventeen when she was conceived, and when Howard was seventeen, he was attending an all-boys boarding school in the rural area of Ojai, where all reports suggest he was isolated and lonely, and spent most of his free time with a horse.

  Rather than take Hughes’s odd, incestuous phrasing literally and assume he regretted not siring a child when he was still a child himself, it seems like a better idea to take this comment as a sign that a switch had flipped in Howard’s attitudes toward women. After more than a decade of pursuing adult, fully formed movie stars from Hollywood’s highest ranks—women who were as self-possessed, independent, and powerful as a system that routinely sought to keep them under the thumb of omnipotent male moguls could be—Hughes would now mount highly theatrical masquerades of relationships with girls so young, immature, and unformed that he would undoubtedly hold the upper hand in an enormous power imbalance. Not only would Howard’s need to control Faith define their relationship, but the language they used with one another reinforced the extremely paternalistic dynamic. His pet name for her was “Little Baby,” and she referred to him affectionately as her “father lover.” As we’ll see, Faith was not the only young woman who would use language with Hughes that suggested he encouraged her to see him as a kind of father figure with whom she was expected to have sex. Hughes didn
’t want to be these ladies’ genetic fathers so much as he wanted to be their Father God. Faith, with no experience that would have taught her any better or any differently, thought she was the chosen one.

  In some ways, with Faith, Hughes re-created the dynamic he had experienced as a child with his own supercontrolling mother, but in reverse. One of his main preoccupations was to impress on Faith his own fear of germs, dirt, and the introduction of anything foreign into his environments. He almost never bought new clothes, preferring to wear his familiar garments as long as possible and telling Faith, “Old clothes are more friendly.” (They were also less likely to be recently contaminated by having been touched by strangers.) He “almost flew into a rage” when he caught Faith biting her nails, “and he used to insist many times when we were together that I wash my hands over and over again. He could not abide the thought of germs or any physical imperfection seen or unseen.”

  The morning after the proposal, Faith showed up at the Warner Bros. schoolhouse wearing the ring, and soon whispers of the engagement had made it into Louella Parsons’s column. By the end of the month, Warner Bros. had sold Faith’s contract to Hughes (technically, as Hughes didn’t have an incorporated movie company at the time, to Hughes Tool). “Suddenly, within a matter of days,” Faith recalled, “I and my professional and emotional destiny were completely in his hands.”

  He didn’t officially move her into his house, but he did move her parents into a house around the corner from the Muirfield Drive estate, so that Faith would be in arms reach every night. Faith’s mom, Adabelle, was completely charmed by Hughes—the “poor woman was putty in his hands,” Faith wrote. Her father, Leo, hated him, “but could not seem to do anything about it.”

  Domergue’s description of the Muirfield house circa 1941 does Vanderbilt’s Beethoven-scored mausoleum one better. The vastness of the place, its dimness and its sparse decor, “frightened me to death, and I could not bear that he leave me alone in a room for a moment.” To the teenage Faith, it was truly a haunted mansion. “Many of the rooms in the house were locked,” she recalled, “and there was more than one that I never entered.” Those that were open were filled with the bare minimum of furniture, all musty antiques, much of it covered with drop cloths. In Howard’s bedroom there were two side-by-side iron beds, and a broken airplane propeller mounted on the wall. Hughes told her it was a relic from his crash on the set of Hell’s Angels, and when Faith asked why he kept it mounted on his wall, “he laughed and told me it served to remind him that he had the capacity to be a fool at times.”

  The center of the house was the den, the room where they spent the most time. There were a fireplace, comfortable sofas, and most important for Howard, a telephone hooked up to an amplifier. He’d do most of his work in the den, and in fact rarely used any of the other rooms in the thirty-room house besides his upstairs bedroom. There were wine and liquor cellars in the basement of the house, even though Howard never drank. There were five servants: a cook, a butler and his wife, a night watchman, and a maid.

  It became Hughes’s responsibility to make sure Faith got her high school diploma. He hired a tutor and set up a one-room schoolhouse in an office at his headquarters on Romaine Boulevard. Faith was tutored all morning, then after lunch was given speech and drama lessons, golf lessons, and sometimes a flying lesson. She was kept so busy that it took her a long time to recognize how much her life had changed, and what being with Howard meant. “I was suddenly alone,” she realized. “I had no friends any more. I was no longer allowed to drive myself; Carter, the night watchman, was promoted to the job of being my chauffeur.” One of Carter’s duties, according to Faith, was to “mark down every place I went during the day.”

  Though Hughes wanted to know everything about her, he didn’t seem to want anyone to know anything about them being together. When gossip columns alerted the public that Howard had taken Faith with him on a trip to San Diego, San Francisco, and Phoenix, it gave Faith an opportunity to see how badly Hughes reacted to any mention of his name in the press other than “a filtered and authorized release by him. For the first time, but sadly hardly the last, he fell into a silence that lasted for several days after this unfortunate article appeared, and I was bewildered and did not know what to do or say.” How did Howard’s whereabouts make it into the newspapers without his permission? Was Faith herself reaching out to the gossips, as a desperate ploy for the attention she craved?

  One morning they were in the car together, on the way to the airfield. Selfishly, more out of boredom with her new routine than any sort of fear or premonition, Faith was praying for a reprieve from her flying lesson: “I did not care what it was, if only something could occur to keep me out of the air.” They stopped at a gas station, and Hughes told her he had to make a phone call. He was in the phone booth for a long time, “moving his hands as he talked in a certain way that I had learned to recognize as a sign of stress or very earnest conversation.” He came back and spun the car around, away from the airfield.

  “Faith, the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor,” Hughes announced. “America will declare war before the day is over for sure, and the airfield is closed and all private craft have been grounded.” Faith felt guilty for her prayers, as if they had brought on the attack—but it did free up her afternoon.

  Faith spent the rest of the day on the couch, eating sandwiches and cookies while Hughes made endless phone calls. He had just built a new aircraft plant in Culver City, specifically devoted to experimental and groundbreaking aeronautical invention. Now war contracts would dominate his business.

  “From this time,” Faith wrote, “we became more secluded and alone than ever.” They stopped going to restaurants at night for dinner. Howard spent most every moment he was awake on the phone. All plans for Faith’s stardom were put to the wayside, as moviemaking drifted far from the center of Hughes’s attention.

  With nothing else to keep her busy, Faith put all of her energy into decorating Howard’s house for Christmas, and into planning a party that he had told her she could throw at Ciro’s nightclub on New Year’s Eve. Despite being betrothed to the richest man in Hollywood, it hadn’t been a glamorous life for Faith thus far. She never met any stars. And while she had made a better match than any of those older girls she had looked up to at the Warner Bros. school, there was a major difference: Faith had nobody to show off to. She rarely left the house. What good was having nailed down the most eligible bachelor in town, and being able to use his expense accounts to buy whatever she wanted, if no one else could see any of it? New Year’s Eve, she hoped, would change all that. “This would show Hollywood that we were together,” Faith thought. This party, Faith hoped, “would change our life.”

  December 31 came, and Faith put on a dress that Hughes had made for her just for this occasion, by the same seamstress who made Harlow’s cut-to-there gown in Hell’s Angels. Howard’s chauffeur picked her up, and she held her breath, waiting to make her entrance at Ciro’s and blow the room away.

  And then the driver passed Ciro’s and stopped at a nondescript restaurant way down Sunset Boulevard. There Faith found Howard sitting with Johnny Meyer and Pat De Cicco and their dates.

  She walked toward him in silent fury. Howard greeted her with a big smile. “Don’t you think this is better than noisy Ciro’s?” Faith did not. She excused herself and asked the chauffeur to take her home, and as soon as she got to her parents’ house, her resolve “gave way to a really heart-breaking cry.”

  “So much had in my mind and heart depended on this night,” she admitted. All she had wanted was “to show Hollywood that this man and I were together and to start a life a little resembling normalcy with other people in it.”

  Howard would make the not-unreasonable case to Faith that he had abandoned important work at his plant to have this dinner because he knew it was important to her, and that he had changed the venue because “I don’t feel that I should have my name in the paper celebrating in a Hollywood night club whe
n America is at war.” Of course, that was exactly what Faith had wanted—to have their pictures in the papers, looking rich and happy and overjoyed to be celebrating their love and good fortune. She only thought about how such press would make her feel, and not about how such publicity could impact Howard’s business and reputation. Howard thought of virtually nothing else.

  That night, Faith gave in. She told Howard that all she cared about was being with him. Later she understood that Howard had been playing a game with her, and “his was not just a victory, it was a rout. It had taken him eight months to capture and tame me but now it was accomplished.” There would be times when Hughes would let her win, but she understood quickly that these were not battles that mattered to him.

  This was the night that Faith became aware of Howard’s facility for a certain type of manipulation, which she called “play-acting.” “He assumed attitudes which were the opposite of what he actually thought,” Faith wrote, “and until a woman knew him very well it was difficult to understand which was the real emotion, and which was play-acting.” From there on out, Faith Domergue’s life with Howard Hughes would be a roller coaster of emotion, as the teenager desperately struggled to live with and to please a man who offered nothing but promises that she wanted to believe, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. She would come to feel that he got his satisfaction not out of being with her, but from successfully deceiving her.

  Chapter 14

  “The Goddamnedest, Unhappiest, Most Miserable Time”

  Mickey Rooney finally got a “yes” out of Ava Gardner two nights after Pearl Harbor. Since their first date, Mick had proposed almost every evening, when Ava would pump the brakes as he pushed to go all the way. But this time was different. This time it felt like the world was likely to end. Saying “yes” to Mickey Rooney, Ava would claim later, “was the start of the goddamnedest, unhappiest, most miserable time I’d ever had.” He gave her a massive diamond ring—and then asked for it back, so he could hock it to pay off a gambling debt.