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

by Karina Longworth

  It was the opposite of a studio-arranged marriage—MGM did not want it to happen.

  “Why doesn’t he fuck her?” Louis B. Mayer asked Les Peterson, Rooney’s publicist. “He fucks all the others.”

  “He says she’s holding out like no dame he’s ever known, L.B.”

  “She ain’t the fucking Virgin Mary,” Mayer said.

  “He says it’s giving him terrible headaches,” Peterson said.

  “He should just boff her and get her out of my fucking hair.”

  In the end, MGM begrudgingly planned a depressingly small, quickie church wedding, on January 10, 1942. Ava was not allowed to invite her out-of-town family. The couple got drunk on their wedding night and Rooney passed out before consummating the marriage. They made up for lost time the next night, engaging until dawn in what Rooney described as a “sexual symphony.”

  Ava still hadn’t been in a movie, but her name was now in international headlines. She liked thinking about how people around the world were now wondering who she was, but being a nobody married to such a huge movie star was, as she’d later put it, “goddamn exhausting, too. Mick was so famous.” When they’d go out, he’d show her off to everyone—“Look at her! Isn’t she gorgeous? Isn’t she going to be a huge star?”—but sometimes he’d forget to mention her name. This didn’t do anything to diminish Ava’s opinion of him. “We were madly in love,” she would later say. “Well, we were screwing a lot.” One romantic evening, Ava asked her new husband what went through his mind the first time he saw her. He didn’t mince words. “I figured you were a new piece of pussy for one of the executives. The prettiest ones were usually spoken for before they even stepped off the train. I didn’t give a damn. I wanted to fuck you the moment I saw you.”

  Having trouble getting a foothold at MGM, Ava asked publicist Peterson if there was anything Mayer liked about her. After thinking about it for a while, the publicist responded, “Well, he once told me you obviously had cunt power.”

  “I said, ‘Am I supposed to be flattered by that, Les?’” Ava recalled. “He said, ‘Well, that’s just about the highest compliment L.B. can pay a girl, honey.’”

  MGM had Ava taking daily dance classes and acting classes, and when there was nothing else for her to do, she’d pose for photographs. “They’d say, ‘Who’s got good legs and nice tits and isn’t filming? Okay, Ava, you’ll do; report to the stills gallery,’” she remembered. “I was always available for pinups. I was nineteen. It wasn’t such a bad life, if you didn’t have ambition.” Ava didn’t, or at least not enough to cause her to complain. “I slipped into it real easy.”

  Usually when a new girl with Ava’s looks came to MGM, they cast her as the romantic interest in an Andy Hardy movie. The series, in which Rooney played the titular girl-crazy scamp, had been MGM’s most consistent profit center since 1937. But Mayer refused to do this with Ava, despite the fact that casting Rooney’s real-life girl would have made for excellent publicity. Though coupling with Mickey had instantly made her a hot topic of every Hollywood columnist, Ava was still being used only sporadically at MGM, and only as an uncredited extra. Ava believed she was being punished for going through with the wedding that Mayer had attempted to forbid.

  Like Ava, Jane Russell had been photographed like crazy, but after an initial burst of publicity, with The Outlaw still unreleased, magazines and newspapers had lost interest in running her photos. The original idea had been to sell Russell as a Cinderella, a penniless girl plucked out of the ether who was now supporting her whole family thanks to the genius and largesse of Howard Hughes. This wasn’t exactly accurate—as Russell put it, “Little did the public know that I could barely make my car payments and eat on $50 a week, let alone support anyone”—and it was also a fairy tale that magazines weren’t buying. Birdwell realized that what he needed was not more pictures, but a single picture that defined Russell as a star. So he called George Hurrell, who had established himself in the 1930s as the photographer you called when you wanted to turn an actress into an otherworldly sexual icon.

  Birdwell asked Hurrell how much he’d charge for a seven-hour photo shoot, and Hurrell said $500. Birdwell said, “I’ll pay you $3000 plus all costs. I’m going to deliver this girl and a load of hay and you just shoot.”

  Of the thousands of shots Hurrell got that day, Birdwell only needed one: a double-wide horizontal image of Russell reclining in a bed of hay, her blouse slipping off her shoulders, her head thrown back in sneering ecstasy, a pistol in her left hand, aimed at the point where her thighs touched under her skirt. Unbeknownst to most who saw this photograph in 1942, a haystack was the setting of The Outlaw’s rape scene.

  Life magazine had agreed to run Hurrell’s photo, but before they could get it into print, Jane and actress K. T. Stevens (daughter of director George Stevens) were sent with Birdwell’s assistant Dale Armstrong to pose for some photos alongside some oil derricks on the Santa Barbara coast. A nearby explosion wrecked their concentration. Armstrong found a pay phone and dialed Birdwell.

  “I hope you’ll believe me,” Armstrong told his boss. “A Japanese submarine has just surfaced off Santa Barbara and has shelled our two clients.”

  Before scurrying for safer ground, Armstrong had Russell pose in front of a hole created by a torpedo in the hull of a naval ship, holding a propaganda poster that originally read “A slip of a lip may sink a ship.” “Sink” had been crossed out, and “may have sunk this” had been scrawled in. Dressed in a smart, high-necked shirt dress, Russell was captured with one hip jutted cockily out to the side, her right index finger pressed to her lips in a “shhhh” pose.

  Birdwell was now able to call all the national photo desks and tell them that he had the first photos of the Bombardment of Ellwood, the first foreign attack on continental U.S. soil since the War of 1812. The images made front-page news nationwide and were featured in the January 26 issue of Life. It was hard to believe it wasn’t staged, but Birdwell insisted his starlets had been in the right place at the right time by total coincidence.

  And now there was a context for The Picture. Birdwell had huge enlargement prints made, sixty inches by forty. “I took a big blowup and got a sick looking G.I. to pose with it plastered on his barracks wall,” Birdwell later remembered. “He was sitting there looking at Jane and knitting. He had a sweater for her half finished. This picture went all over the world.”

  Birdwell’s accounts of working for Hughes on The Outlaw would give the impression that Hughes always intended for several years to pass between the announcement of The Outlaw and its unveiling, in order to mimic the campaign that helped make Gone with the Wind the biggest movie since The Birth of a Nation. But there were factors in the delay that were out of Hughes’s control. For one thing, Birdwell’s team went looking for theaters in which to book the film in early 1942 and found a lack of enthusiasm for the movie. “General attitude from various sources is that film only fair,” publicist Myer Beck cabled to Birdwell. Then, in late spring 1942, the film’s original contracted distributor, 20th Century Fox, publicly backed out of its deal with Hughes after what Birdwell described as a “beef” over the publicity campaign. Fox asked Hughes’s company for reimbursement of more than $35,000, which they had spent on print ads and promotional materials. Hughes was contractually obligated to pay for such materials, but according to Birdwell, Hughes refused to reimburse Fox, because after his office had approved the ads in question, “so much retouching had been done [by Fox] on Jane Russell that the ads were ruined.” As evidence, Birdwell marked up a press book in red pen to show the places where it was evident that Fox had “changed the shape of the girl’s breast, painted additions on to her shirt in various places and in general have ruined the product we are selling, namely, Jane Russell as God made her. Fox, in making these arbitrary changes, has done the same thing a manufacturer would be guilty of doing if he diluted tomato juice with water.”

  With Fox out of the picture, Hughes decided to book road show engagements h
imself, and Birdwell’s team began surreptitiously going from city to city to find the most hospitable locations—that is, those that wouldn’t have local censorship boards breathing down their necks.

  In anticipation of her movie debut, Jane Russell had finally moved out of her family’s home, and into a house in the Hollywood Hills with a girlfriend, an actress named Carol Gallagher who was also under contract to Hughes. Gallagher had romantic designs on Hughes, but she complained that on most of their dates, Hughes would just make her watch footage of The Outlaw. Like Jane, Carol was tall, but blond. The two went to a dressmaker and got identical outfits made, formfitting suits, and they’d both wear false hair down to their backs. They’d leave their sink full of dirty dishes and hit the town. “We probably looked like a pair of hookers,” Jane would later say. “But we thought we were the living end.” Though she and football player Waterfield were now engaged, Jane figured that what her fiancé didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  During this time, Russell, now twenty-one, found out she was pregnant. She had lost her virginity to Waterfield on her eighteenth birthday, believing they would eventually get married, but more recently she had not been entirely faithful. She wasn’t sure who the father was, and in any case, since Waterfield was preoccupied with his football career and wasn’t ready to wed, having the baby wasn’t an option. “I was terrified,” Russell recalled. “In those days no ‘nice girl’ got pregnant. There was no such thing as keeping a child out of wedlock in 1942.” She went to Glendale (outside of the city limits of Los Angeles, where the police had a specific squad to crack down on abortion providers), to have her pregnancy terminated.

  The operation, as she put it in her autobiography, “was hell,” and on the first go-round, it “didn’t take.” She ended up having to go through the procedure again and contracted an infection that required emergency hospitalization and weeks of outpatient treatment, her mother praying at her side all the while. (This was not an uncommon result of an illegal abortion in the 1940s; hospitals set up septic wards to treat patients who suffered infections resulting from “incomplete” abortions, a consequence faced by as many as one in three women who sought the procedure.) When she survived, Jane felt newly attached to God—and detached from Robert Waterfield, who couldn’t handle sick people, and would only visit her for a few minutes at a time. She gave him back his ring and shifted her attention to actor John Payne, who had been more supportive during Jane’s ordeal.

  When this trading of an all-American fiancée for an older, married Hollywood boyfriend made the gossip columns in early summer 1942, Hughes called Jane in for a meeting and warned her that he didn’t want her to become “one of those girls”—like, one of the girls he and his boys like Johnny Meyer, Pat De Cicco, and lawyer Greg Bautzer traded between themselves. The sheer fact that he cared about Jane’s reputation in her personal life (as opposed to the persona he was building for her to promote The Outlaw) meant she wasn’t like those girls at all. Hughes and his male friends dated multiple women at a time, lying to them in order to get away with juggling them, with no concern for how the women would be portrayed in the press. Hughes’s concern for Russell made her different. He either cared about her personally in a brotherly sort of way (which she seemed to believe), or he cared about controlling her tabloid persona.

  Given the illegality of the procedure and the stigma of the pregnancy that necessitated it, and Hughes’s demonstrated compulsion to micromanage his starlets, it stands to reason that Russell and her mother kept her abortion, and the traumatic aftermath, secret from Hughes and his men. But that summer, it became clear to Birdwell and his staff that something was wrong with Jane. In private memos, they discussed her frequent sick days, her begging out of rehearsals for “personal reasons,” and the impact whatever was happening in her personal life was having on her appearance. On June 26, Jane’s handler Dale Armstrong informed Birdwell that Russell was “under doctor’s orders not to get out of bed until at least the middle of the week.” A month later, Armstrong complained to Birdwell about a number of problems he was having with Jane, who “was apparently not getting proper rest as it showed in the pictures . . . she looks like hell and despite the fact I try to set the dates late in the day so she can get all possible sleep, it doesn’t seem to do much good.”

  Armstrong seems to have had the impression that Jane was not getting enough rest because she was out partying every night. Maybe she was (Russell was never shy about the fact that she liked to party), but she was also almost certainly still recovering, emotionally and/or physically, from an illegal abortion that had made her very sick and required weeks of treatment. Not only could Jane not tell the men she worked for what was really going on with her, but even if she could have, they wouldn’t have been exactly sympathetic. To them, her only value lay in her looks. If she wasn’t at 100 percent on the sex appeal scale, she wasn’t worth what they were paying her.

  JANE RUSSELL WAS A beautiful girl with Hollywood aspirations whom Hughes was able to find, photograph, and, eventually, turn into a star. Faith Domergue was a beautiful girl with Hollywood aspirations whom Hughes was able to find and keep within his possession without helping her ascend. Over the next twenty years, Hughes was able to play on his reputation as a star-maker, and the public knowledge of the success of girls like Russell and Jean Harlow—and to take advantage of the lack of public conversation about instances when it didn’t work out like that—to subject dozens of young women to experiences that were much more like Domergue’s.

  Hughes had a number of aides in these pursuits. Pat De Cicco had been key to Hughes’s operation, but he’d be less present as a girl wrangler after his marriage to Vanderbilt. Hughes had lured Johnny Meyer away from a job at Warner Bros., where he had been installed by Errol Flynn. (Meyer had testified at Flynn’s 1934 statutory rape trial as a character witness for the defense.) The FBI, which would later take an interest in Meyer, believed he had worked as Flynn’s “personal procurer”; his duties for Hughes would begin along similar lines but would expand significantly during World War II.

  Later in the 1940s and into the 1950s, Hughes’s key lieutenant would be Walter Kane. There was no love lost between Kane and some of the women in Howard’s life. One of those women, actress Terry Moore, said she and other Hughes girls “hated Walter Kane, because Walter was always looking for ‘talent.’ I mean some of us called it pimping.” When not finding new women for Hughes, Kane would deliver messages to those who were already waiting around for Hughes to pay attention to them. “Howard,” said Moore, “told Walter what lies to tell us.”

  Kane had a legit background in talent management; he had been business partners with Zeppo Marx in the 1930s and had been at Zeppo’s agency when they signed fifteen-year-old discovery Lana Turner. Now it would be Kane’s job to run interference for Hughes, signing girls with the right look to contracts, and controlling their access to the man himself. According to Kane, “Hughes didn’t like just one woman, he liked thirty or so and he could choose one or two out of the group.” The remaining twenty-eight or twenty-nine women would wait and wait and wait, sometimes kept busy with daily acting lessons or dancing classes or other types of instruction meant to increase their value. They all believed Hughes would make them into stars, but most of them were rarely if ever cast in anything while under contract to Hughes.

  Jane Russell put a positive spin on Howard’s protective operations concerning his contract actresses. After all, much of the struggle of being an aspiring starlet was removed from their lives. Hughes’s girls were given free places to live, she noted, and drivers, and free coaching. “I met two who practically never heard from Howard—and were in no way mistresses—even though some wished they were,” Russell wrote. Russell, even years later, was stuck in the perspective that for a woman of the 1940s–50s, it was an honor to be chosen for Hughes’s payroll, even if that meant not working, or being tapped for sexual duty. She insisted that under Howard’s watchful eyes, such aspirants were “being ke
pt from the ‘wolves.’ That wouldn’t have been a lifestyle for me—I’m much too independent. But if ever a mother wanted her little girl to be safe, this was among the safest situations in Hollywood. One could die from boredom, but not from harassment.”

  Faith Domergue certainly felt like she was dying of boredom, to the extent that by the spring of 1942, harassment would have felt to her like a relief. Just a few months after the New Year’s Eve debacle, Howard himself was more distant than ever, but she was still under constant surveillance by the servants in his home and the men he assigned to drive her around. She was essentially in Hughes’s version of protective custody.

  Hughes had some good excuses for being absent. The Outlaw still required his attention, but he was primarily busy with more ostensibly noble causes. The war had jump-started his manufacturing businesses. His companies and their factories produced 155 mm cannons, and struts for B-52s, and Hughes became the army’s largest supplier of ammunition feed chutes and boosters. His commercial plants were transformed into assembly lines cranking out nothing but airplane parts for the armed forces. He was also awarded government contracts to produce a fleet of spy craft. Then there was the big whale: the Hercules, an innovative plane Hughes had designed with the wingspan of a football field, which would circumvent rations on steel by using wood (hence its eventual derogatory nickname: the Spruce Goose). Hughes had pacted with wealthy shipbuilder Henry Kaiser to secure the war contracts to pay for it.

  Hughes was always a workaholic, long practiced in juggling multiple projects and relationships, but 1942 was the year when his overextension started to become unsustainable for anyone involved with him. Hughes himself hardly seemed to notice, and that was part of the problem. As Domergue observed, he had a very specific psychological quirk that allowed him to believe that his “chosen” projects and people “simply should go into a somnambulant state, a twilight sleep, and wake up or come to life only when he was ready to spend time with them.” He was incapable of taking into consideration the fact that people—colleagues, lovers—were not machines that he could chose to use on a whim, and he was unable to understand that no one enjoyed being kept waiting for Howard Hughes to pay attention to them.