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

by Karina Longworth

  All of the waiting was getting to Faith. After the New Year’s debacle, in the spring of 1942 she began to exhibit signs of depression—losing interest in her appearance, going on long walks alone, often on the golf course that abutted Hughes’s home. “A golf course at night is like the surface of the moon,” she later mused, “it is so devoid of people at that hour.” She had a lot of time to think, and to worry.

  Occasionally Domergue would find herself snooping around the Muirfield house, wandering through rooms that never seemed to get used, opening drawers. There were few that were unlocked—“Howard went constantly around with a bunch of keys on his person, like Bluebeard,” she recalled—but in one Faith found two tiny, carved wooden angels, and affectionate notes and cards, signed “From C.M. to C.M.” She didn’t know that these initials were code for a pair of Hughes and Katharine Hepburn’s pet names for one another—“Country Mouse” and “City Mouse”—but she knew she wasn’t supposed to have seen it.

  Hughes would work all hours of the night, stopping only when he absolutely had to sleep. Faith would eat dinner alone at his house and then wait up for him, often until dawn. He’d make trips to San Francisco to meet with Kaiser, or to conduct other war business—or, at least, that’s what he told her. And then one day in March, Louella Parsons gave Faith reason to doubt that alibi.

  “Howard Hughes was introduced to Rita Hayworth at Palm Springs over the weekend,” the gossip columnist wrote, “and he made no secret he considers her a beauty. . . .” A fairly innocuous item, but it was enough to send seventeen-year-old Faith into a tailspin. It only got worse. In late May, Hughes and Lana Turner were spotted at a nightclub together; by June 2, Parsons wrote that Howard and Lana “are hotter than last Tuesday’s temperature.”

  It wasn’t Rita Hayworth who was the problem, or Lana Turner. The real problem was that Hughes was gaslighting Faith, telling her that what she was seeing and reading with her own two eyes was in fact an apparition. Faith would ask Howard about these items, and he would tell her she had nothing to worry about, that columnists made this stuff up. In what looks like a plant meant to appease Faith,* three days later Dorothy Kilgallen led her column with the “news” that “Howard Hughes’ pursuit of Lana Turner has been getting nowhere fast—but fast enough to burn up Faith Dorn, his steady dream girl.” Perhaps buoyed by this gesture, Faith called Louella Parsons to set the record straight. “I am supposed to be engaged to him,” she told the columnist, “and he certainly wasn’t out with Lana Turner.” In that same item, in response to Faith, Parsons acknowledged that Howard and Lana “were in a party, but he certainly was her escort, and although we hate to hurt Miss Dorn—she is a very nice young woman—we must print the news, and what Lana does, romantically and otherwise, is news.” That may have been what hurt the most: after all this time spent as Howard’s captive, after giving up her contract at Warner Bros. and her life to have him control her career, nothing Faith did was news, romantically or otherwise.

  Meanwhile, the stories about Howard and Lana kept coming, and after Faith had embarrassed herself with that phone call, Parsons took pleasure in picking at her scab. In an item about how Howard was “plenty smitten” with Lana, Parsons added, “It’s true the Texas millionaire and his former heart Faith Dorn were close to the altar at one time. But that is a closed chapter now.”

  Howard tried to appease Faith, not least by letting her watch his print of Hell’s Angels, which he had kept vaulted since the film’s release. But then one day his mood turned. He discovered that Faith had been in his drawer, and had seen his notes from Hepburn. She knew she was in trouble, because in the lecture that followed, he addressed her not as “Little Baby,” but as “Faith.” Howard had never been violent with her, but the sound of her given name, which he never used, felt like the back of his hand.

  Devastated, she left his home in tears, went to her parents’ house to pack a bag, and got in her never-used convertible (a gift from Howard, natch) and drove. Before she took off, Faith told her parents not to tell Howard or anyone who worked for him where she was going.

  By the time she arrived in Palm Springs and called home, three Hughes aides had set up camp in her parents’ living room. Her mom and dad sold her out, spilling what they knew about her whereabouts. Faith agreed to come back the next day, but refused to meet with Howard at home, instead insisting they meet at his office. When she arrived, he was waiting for her with milk and cookies. This wasn’t the parental gesture that it might seem—the treats were for Howard. As he laid out his case, he munched cookies all the while. “It was a small trick,” Faith explained, “to confuse the thinking of the adversary.” But she knew this trick too well, and this time she wasn’t going to let it throw her. When she told him she couldn’t have a relationship with him anymore—not like this—he explained to her that in times of war, most women were forcibly separated from the men in their lives. She was lucky, Hughes declared, that he was able to do his part for the war effort without having to leave her. She was lucky to have any relationship at all, in other words. Still, she wouldn’t give. Faith wanted out.

  But Howard could not accept defeat, and the meeting ended with Faith agreeing to spend a few weeks in Santa Barbara, accompanied by Hughes’s driver and his maid, to clear her head before making a final decision. This was ingenious: it got rid of Faith, so that Hughes could have the freedom to do what he wanted to do without her, while keeping her totally under his control.

  Domergue spent two months in Santa Barbara and then went to meet Hughes in San Francisco. They had a happy reunion and Hughes promised that this time, things would be different. He had a surprise for her, he said, “and as soon as we are both back in Los Angeles, I will show it to you, and I think it will solve the things that are upsetting you.”

  The surprise was a new house, a rental in Bel Air that was the opposite of the gloomy Muirfield manse in every way. “You never have to go into the Muirfield house again,” Hughes told her. “I don’t want to go there myself.” Once they moved in, Hughes spent weeks throwing artifacts of his past into the fireplace—letters, mostly, from his mother, uncles, aunt Annette, and Ella. For the past decade and a half, maybe, he had been moving toward this moment, and now the time had come to fully erase anything of his past that he deemed less than useful in building his future. Or, maybe, it was just better to burn the evidence of a previous, more vulnerable incarnation of Hughes than to have them festering in drawers, waiting for lonely and paranoid Faith to find them.

  And their relationship did improve in Bel Air. Howard spent more nights at home with Faith, listening to classical music. He introduced Faith to Caruso and Tchaikovsky, whose Symphony No. 6 Hughes was planning to use as the score in The Outlaw. Hughes was now letting Faith drive herself, “even allowing me to attend a motion picture theater by myself.”

  This comparative peace wouldn’t last long.

  Chapter 15

  Divorce, Marriage, and Rape Fantasy

  “Nothing was ever an accident with Howard,” Ava Gardner said. “He had people meeting every plane, train, and bus that arrived in Los Angeles with a pretty girl on board. He had to be the first to grab the new girl in town. It was a matter of pride for him.” Once he learned that Ava Gardner existed, it must have destroyed him that Mickey Rooney had gotten to this one first.

  In September 1942, after nine months of marriage, Ava left Mickey, their relationship having fallen apart amid his infidelities and her insecurities. Filing for divorce from a superstar was a huge career risk for a contract girl whose only public profile was as Mickey Rooney’s wife, but she reached a point where she could no longer handle the humiliation. Mayer sent his attack dog, Eddie Mannix, to handle Ava, and she agreed to sue on grounds of incompatibility rather than adultery. She settled for $25,000 cash and a car (she could have asked for half of Rooney’s net worth, which she was entitled to under state law), and Mickey let her keep a mink and some jewelry that he hadn’t pawned away. In return MGM renewed her contract, uppe
d her salary, and arranged for her to be loaned out to Poverty Row studio Monogram to appear with an over-the-hill Bela Lugosi in a cheapie called Ghosts on the Loose. A year into her tenure at the studio, MGM had not yet cast her in a credited role in one of their pictures.

  Howard Hughes saw a picture of Ava for the first time when he read about her divorce filing in the newspaper. Hughes allegedly took note of the news and gleefully snorted, “The little runt couldn’t satisfy her.” Hughes became determined to catch Ava on the rebound.

  When Howard cold-called her, Gardner mistakenly thought he said his name was Howard Hawks, and she agreed to meet because she was hoping the director could cast her in a real part in a real movie. They made a date, but Hughes sent Johnny Meyer in his stead, to do reconnaissance on this new find. Ava would soon learn that “checking out girls for Howard Hughes was one of Johnny’s regular chores.” (His other main occupation was to lobby on behalf of Hughes in Washington, to aid the Boss in acquiring defense contracts.) Johnny was not tight-lipped about his work. “I don’t know where all the bodies are buried,” he told Ava. “But I do know where most of them are sleeping—and that’s even better!”

  Ava prattled on for twenty minutes about how excited she was to meet Howard Hawks. Finally, Meyer broke the news to her that she had the wrong Howard in mind. “They both made movies but Hughes also owned TWA, the airline,” Ava remembered Meyer telling her. “That seemed to mean a lot more to Johnny than it did to me at the time.” He also told her that his boss was crazy rich, and nearly deaf. He told Ava that if Howard “grinned at me like an idiot, I’d know he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. Best advice about Howard anybody ever gave me.”

  Hughes could hear perfectly well over the electronically amplified phone he had at home, and the next day he called Ava and apologized for not making it to their date the night before. This meant that Meyer’s report on Ava had been positive. Ava invited Howard over for a drink, and that started a ball rolling that she couldn’t stop.

  Ava didn’t know a thing about Howard Hughes up to that point. “I didn’t know about his reputation or his great wealth or his thing about airplanes and jetting around the world,” she would say. “I just knew that as soon as I got divorced from Mickey, Howard entered my life and I couldn’t get rid of him for the next fifteen years, no matter who I was with or who I married.”

  Hughes often took Ava to the Players Club, the nightclub and restaurant owned by Hughes’s friend the writer-director Preston Sturges, who had followed winning a Best Screenplay Oscar in 1941 for The Great McGinty by writing and directing an incredible run of smart comedic classics, including Christmas in July, Sullivan’s Travels, and The Lady Eve. Howard would regularly pay Sturges to close his club for a night so that Hughes and his date could have the whole place to themselves. Though Howard hated being close enough to strangers that they might accidentally rub shoulders, he loved to dance and would pay whatever it cost to keep the band playing so they could have the floor to themselves all night.

  After a while, Ava got bored with Hughes’s seduction act. She “hated dancing with him,” Ava said, “because he held me too tight, and he was a lousy dancer.” She’d try to shock him by drinking too much and spouting profanities. It amused her that even though he hated drinking, he was so smitten with her that he’d put up with anything. She was less amused by the fact that he was constantly trying to buy her gifts—to buy her, essentially. The only gift that truly thrilled her was a German shepherd that Howard told Ava he picked because the dog was “as beautiful and perfect as you.”

  Just like Mickey, Howard started asking Ava to marry him early into their relationship, and he kept badgering her until finally one night she said yes. She may have given in because she knew they couldn’t actually do anything about it for months, until the year had passed that made a California divorce final. Hughes told Ava that there was no reason to wait—he could take her to Vegas, where she’d get her divorce in just six weeks, but when Ava went to Louis B. Mayer to ask permission to divorce Rooney faster, the mogul refused. “Wait the year, show some respect to Mickey!” Mayer said.

  Forced into stasis with Ava, Hughes had time to ease his relationship with Faith onto an off-ramp. Instead he continued to require total devotion and obedience from the teenager, and turned his attention on bringing another long-strung-along project out of mothballs: he set a date (February 5, 1943) and a location (San Francisco) for the premiere of The Outlaw.

  After Fox backed out of its distribution deal, Hughes had put Birdwell to work planning a road show tour of the movie. Road shows were an attractive release strategy for distributors of high-budget films, because each “exclusive” engagement helped create publicity for the next city. Plus, you could charge higher ticket prices—but it was customary to give customers something extra for their money, especially if the movie itself wasn’t exactly an epic. Hughes knew he needed to present some kind of live entertainment before screenings of The Outlaw, and, according to Jane, “some idiot convinced Howard that an added scene done ‘in person’ was the answer.” So Jules Furthman wrote a new scene between Billy and Rio, and novice performers Jack Beutel and Russell rehearsed it every day at Goldwyn Studios, under the screenwriter’s direction. These run-throughs began during the summer (when Jane was noticeably unwell) and were still going on in early November, when Hughes, who was largely absent from the rehearsals, suddenly decided that the preshow needed an out-of-town test run ASAP.

  Birdwell’s aides thought the abrupt urgency to get this ball rolling was inexplicable, except for the fact that the Boss had mentioned that Jane “was getting impatient.” She had been doing press for the same movie for three years, with Hughes keeping her occupied so that she couldn’t make another movie. Her career was totally in his hands, but his plans were as dependent on her as she was on him. Hughes’s entire marketing strategy for The Outlaw depended on Jane being available to pose for photos and to show up at public events so that oglers could see the assets for themselves. If Jane got so fed up that she refused to do these things—or, should she, say, run away and get married, breaching her contract and ditching the prospect of stardom for matrimony and motherhood—Hughes would have been at a total loss. Hell’s Angels had had aviation feats to promote; Scarface had a righteous battle with the censors. The Outlaw lacked a similar hook to fire Hughes’s imagination, and without one, Howard put all of his eggs in the breast basket.

  The first weekend of December, Beutel and Russell were sent to Tucson to dress-rehearse the act in a place where the Hollywood trade press probably wouldn’t find them. It did not go well. “Production is inadequate,” reported Birdwell’s man on the scene, “and Russell, for some reason or other, does not look good on the stage. All the qualities apparent in photographs are lost in the theater.”

  Nonetheless, they pushed forward to February. Billboards were put up around San Francisco to herald the premiere, featuring enormous blowups of the Hurrell haystack image, along with captions branding Russell as “mean, moody and magnificent,” and boldly promising that, unlike other wartime commodities, “Sex has not been rationed.” Newspaper reports forwarded Birdwell’s inaccurate insinuations that The Outlaw had been denied a Production Code seal of approval because Hughes refused to shave down the Code-breaking sex within.

  The Outlaw was booked at the Geary Theater for nine weeks. The prescreening one-scene stage play proved to be a disaster (“the papers crucified us,” wrote Jane). It was dropped, but Russell and Beutel would still appear onstage with comedian Frank Mc Hugh, giving him lines to set up his punch lines. They did shows all day and night, before each screening of the movie, and usually to packed houses. After the late-night show, they’d go back to the hotel and booze deep into the night, then get up the next day and do it again.

  The early reviews of The Outlaw were the definition of mixed. Some of the columnists who had taken advantage of Hughes’s hospitality tried to find a bright side. Jimmie Fidler, who in 1951 would call The Outlaw “o
ne of the most ludicrously inept pieces of cinematic trash ever screened,” in 1943 called the movie “good entertainment” and begged his readers not to backlash against Jane Russell. “Jane had nothing to do with the long delay in releasing her one and only picture,” Fidler wrote, before forwarding Birdwell’s line that The Outlaw “was held up by censorship problems” and that Hughes had “started the publicity wheels rolling in good faith.”

  But when Domergue arrived for a visit, Howard was furious about the bad reviews, particularly a takedown in Time that took personal shots at him. In addition to calling The Outlaw “a strong candidate for the flopperoo of all time,” the story included behind-the-scenes details too pointed and accurate to come from Birdwell’s spin, such as Hughes’s habit of calling his collaborators at all hours of the night to engage in conversations that absolutely could have waited until after dawn. Jane’s character was dismissed as “a half-breed moron.” Most cruelly, the unsigned Times piece revealed that the bought-and-paid-for press corps had laughed in derision during the screening, and then explained why no one else in attendance had reported as viciously. “The critics hedged their bets a little,” the anonymous Time critic wrote, “[because] they know that many a bad picture has been profitable.”

  The reviews inspired Howard to tinker with the cut of the film. Over the course of the nine-week run, he was constantly flying back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles, sometimes hand-carrying newly edited prints. One of his visits to San Francisco coincided with the arrival of Jane’s aunt Ernestine, who was livid over the billboards featuring supine Russell. She insisted on confronting the man responsible for the imagery. “You’re selling my niece as though she were some cheap stripper,” Aunt Ernie declared to Hughes, “and I don’t think that’s right.” Hughes didn’t disagree, but instead protested, “I can’t very well sell her like Shirley Temple.”