Aunt Ernestine was not the only woman of faith who was concerned. On February 16, the Legion of Decency condemned The Outlaw, making it a moral crime for any Catholic to see it. This reignited the interest of the Hays Office. The censors, suddenly aware of the fact that Hughes had been reediting the movie, said that they would have to review the new cut in order to determine whether The Outlaw could keep its seal. They also suggested that this was an opportunity to placate the Legion of Decency by bringing them into the editorial process. Hughes refused to do that.
For months Joseph Breen and members of his office continued to try to convince Hughes to cut portions of the film. This was an extraordinary thing for the censors to do regarding a movie to which they had already given a pass, and it happened only because the ongoing public conversation about The Outlaw and Russell—much of it from people who had only seen advertising and not the actual movie—made the censorship board look foolish and impotent. A rhetorical question hung in the air: why had the board employed to clean up movie screens given their seal of approval to something so supposedly filthy?
It’s impossible to watch The Outlaw today without knowledge of how it was perceived in the 1940s, amid the public debate about “decency” and in the context of Hughes’s idiosyncratic persona within Hollywood, and the country as a whole. But with distance, it’s easier to see the ways in which The Outlaw was the first of its kind. “There had never been what you might call a sexy or bosomy western,” noted one of Hughes’s biographers, Albert Gerber. Russell, as seen on-screen but really as depicted in The Outlaw’s advertising, invented a certain kind of genre film femme fatale: a weapon-toting sexpot in a man’s world, setting the template for action heroines who would populate exploitation films for the next three decades, and then bubble up to the mainstream in the blockbuster era. And Hughes’s few directorial flourishes are startlingly unusual, almost avant-garde. At one point the camera assumes the point of view of Jack Beutel’s Billy the Kid as Russell moves in for a kiss—and holds as the actress essentially French-kisses the lens. Hughes also takes to absurd lengths the Code-era tools of “meaningful holds” and dissolves, to imply that sex is about to happen or happening off frame.
But the thing that remains shocking about The Outlaw is not its creativity (which is limited), nor the exploitation of Jane Russell’s body, nor anything that was articulated as criticism of the film in the 1940s. What’s truly shocking is the way it lays bare Hughes’s personality, and what he thought was sexy. Russell’s persona as put forth by the film’s marketing, summed up by the tagline “mean, moody and magnificent,” marked Rio as the opposite of the previous generation of bombshells embodied by post–Hell’s Angels Jean Harlow, or the then-rising pinups like Betty Grable. Harlow or Grable were sexual with a smile. In the Hurrell photographs, Jane’s body, clad in easy-to-remove rags and languid in repose, said “yes,” or “you can have this,” but the snarl on her face said “no.” Not just “no,” but, “You’re disgusting and I don’t want to fuck you.” At the core of The Outlaw, and the centerpiece of its marketing, was a rape fantasy. This publicity inspired men to think about having sex with a woman who didn’t want them, and then the movie dramatized it, with Billy violently forcing himself on Rio. Though the assault happens in shadow, there’s little ambiguity about what’s occurring, especially after Rio squeals, “Let me go!” and Billy responds by telling her that if she doesn’t stop struggling, “you’re not going to have much dress left.”
Chillingly, Billy shows no remorse for treating Rio this way—for the rest of the film, he, and she, behave as though he did nothing wrong. The next time we see Rio, she is roped into nursing Billy back to health after he’s shot by Pat Garrett. Before Billy pinned her down in the hayloft, she wanted to kill him. Now, when he’s delivered to her home and tucked into her bed half dead, she snaps into maternal mode, eventually removing her shoes and stockings and announcing her intention to use her body to make sure he doesn’t die of “chill.” When that works, she confides in Doc Holliday (Walter Huston) that she and Billy are now “married,” but Billy doesn’t know because he’s unconscious. This doesn’t stop Doc and Billy from jovially using Rio as a trading chip—which also doesn’t ultimately prevent her from begging for Billy to “give it” to her, or jumping with glee onto the back of his horse so that they can ride off together into the sunset.
The rape fantasy depicted in The Outlaw suggested that a man could force himself on a tough, domineering, self-sufficient woman and with that act of sexual violence, tame her and turn her into his loving slave. It’s the ultimate dramatization of a man negating a woman’s personhood by using sex as a power tool. This is opposed to Hell’s Angels, in which Harlow uses men as her playthings and comes out unscathed; she was the villain of the picture, but a villain whom audiences loved better than the movie’s actual heroes. Hughes’s shifting of the sexual power dynamic back to favoring his gender not only reflected his own sexual modus operandi, but also anticipated a coming evolution in sexual politics in the larger culture. After World War II, many of the women who had become self-sufficient in the absence of men would be returning to their prewar status of subordination—willingly or otherwise. (Because The Outlaw, as we’ll see, did not reach wide release until after the war was over, it managed to mirror postwar sexual politics just as Harlow’s character in Hell’s Angels, though a creature of World War I, was received as a symbol of postwar hedonism.)
In the years since she had started this job, Russell’s agent’s business had been acquired by MCA, the most powerful agency of its era, and even before they saw the film, MCA was worried that her ties to Hughes and his dirty movie would bring down her market value. None of the postpremiere press changed their minds, so in the middle of the nine-week San Francisco run, MCA superagent Lew Wasserman came calling. Russell was still getting paid just fifty dollars a week per her original contract with Hughes (a quarter of what he paid Jean Harlow almost fifteen years earlier), and now Howard was trying to get Jane to commit to a nationwide tour. Wasserman told her that she didn’t need to obey Hughes’s every order.
Wasserman had in his mind a legal wrangle that would put the man he saw as an uppity upstart in his place, but the agent framed his machinations as concern for Jane. “Hughes is exploiting you,” Wasserman said. He advised her to leave San Francisco and go and get married to Bob Waterfield, with whom she had reconciled. The mega-agent even loaned the couple his car to drive to Vegas in.
Wasserman’s plan was to withhold Jane’s services until Hughes capitulated to his demands, and to sue if necessary. But Jane didn’t get the memo about the ulterior motive. She told one of Hughes’s aides she was leaving and that she wasn’t coming back. They warned her that if she left, her contract would be suspended, and they successfully pressured her to sign a document barring her from working for anyone but Howard. Russell didn’t understand what she was doing at the time, but with that single signature, she had both essentially guaranteed that Howard Hughes would control the rest of her career, and deprived Lew Wasserman of the chance to undercut Hughes on behalf of every mogul in town who couldn’t stand him. However, Wasserman had succeeded in stymying Hughes’s efforts to release the film: with his marketing hook unavailable, after the end of the San Francisco run, instead of opening The Outlaw in other cities, as would have been customary with a road show, Hughes put the movie on the shelf, delaying its release until he was struck with new inspiration.
Marriage had always been, for Jane, the goal of dating Robert; the imagined benefits of matrimony were the prize she kept her eyes on when the relationship was not exactly living up to her romantic dreams. From the moment they first became intimate, according to Jane, “I was his obsession, and I was to obey his rules.” She chafed under his control, but in San Francisco, working so many shows a day, she had been “dying of unhappiness,” and though Waterfield was still somewhat reluctant to pull the trigger, with two months to go before her twenty-second birthday, she got him to the altar.
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Very shortly after the marriage, Waterfield was shipped off to Georgia for military training. Husband and wife spent their honeymoon on a bus and moved into a room in a house with three other couples. Because Hughes had ceased paying her salary when she left to get married, Jane got a job at a beauty parlor in Columbus, Georgia, where she did makeup for thirty dollars a week. She also worked in the local bond office but got fired for being terrible at bookkeeping. Nobody in the community around the base knew that Jane was an actress, and if anyone in the military village had recognized the young Mrs. Waterfield in a locker-room pinup, nobody mentioned it. Jane herself wasn’t talking. “I didn’t feel like admitting I was the girl whose bosom was splashed on every billboard.”
Such was married life during wartime. Russell was lucky that she got to be near her husband, even if it meant putting her career on hold. Not that anything would have necessarily been happening in her career if she had stayed home.
Hughes’s other brunette under contract, Faith Domergue, was not working, and not happy. The magic spell of the move to Bel Air had slowly dissipated. Faith was starting to suspect that Howard was back to his old ways in early spring, when she walked in on him talking on the phone just as he was saying good-bye to another “little baby.”
Faith and Howard locked eyes. She was speechless, absolutely stunned that Howard would use “the same words, the same nickname he used with me. He looked so startled, so helplessly guilty, that I almost felt sorry for him.”
But not quite. She yelled, she ran down the stairs, she was going to leave, for good—and then before she knew what was happening, Howard had her car keys in his hand. They would talk about this later, he said, “but you’re not about to get into your little red car and go running off.”
He left her standing in his bedroom, in shock. “And then,” Faith recalled, “the real consequences of leaving him started to dawn on me as my temper cooled off.”
Hughes had still not done anything to cast Faith in a movie, but she was technically under contract to him, so she wouldn’t be able to work for anyone else without his permission. And she was not the only Domergue whose financial security was dependent on Hughes—her father and grandfather were now working at Hughes factories. “The more I considered the situation, the more I felt trapped,” Faith wrote. Hughes promised her, “There is no one else but you.” She didn’t believe him, and she did not leave.
The two settled back into a routine. One night, when Hughes told her he had business meetings, Faith went out to see a movie. Howard promised to call her at midnight. Around eleven thirty, Faith was driving home when she noticed Howard’s car. Howard was driving. In the passenger seat was Ava Gardner.
By this point, Howard had been seeing Ava for months. Ava believed the reason she and Howard hadn’t married was that she wasn’t yet officially divorced (although over time she would realize that she didn’t love Howard, and didn’t want to marry him). Faith didn’t know why she and Howard hadn’t married—she had heard a number of excuses, and she didn’t know what to believe. These parallel romances couldn’t have both gone on forever, but fate had conspired to put both of Howard’s brunette paramours on Third Street, heading west at the same time, on the same night.
Howard saw Faith and sped up, trying to lose her. It didn’t work. He drove into the Farmers Market parking lot on Third and Fairfax, and Faith followed. Howard stopped. Faith did not. She rammed her little red car into the passenger side of Howard’s big black Buick.
“Poor little Ava seemed to bounce up and down in her seat like a yoyo,” Faith observed, but she insisted she wasn’t mad at or trying to hurt the other woman. “My quarrel was with him.”
Faith and Howard met in front of the smashed cars. She slapped him with her right hand, and he grabbed her little wrist and held it. She raised her left hand to hit him on the other side, but he grabbed that arm, too.
Howard let an aide (who had been following him and Ava in his own vehicle) take care of the smashed cars, and Ava. Howard went home with Faith. That night, Faith told Howard she was through. She wanted out of her contract. She wanted her family to be set free of all obligations to Hughes. He protested. She insisted. “There is nothing left,” she said. It wasn’t just this girl, tonight. Faith now knew that she and Howard were “never going to get married.” Finally, she accepted that they were “never going to build a life together, and there are no more hopes that the situation will get better later.” She told him, “I can’t live your life. If I go on now, I will die.”
Howard let her go that night, but the next morning, the phone calls to her mother began. Mrs. Domergue was quickly and easily manipulated into service. She convinced Faith to give Howard another chance. Howard had promised to move Faith and her parents into a brand-new house, staffed with his servants. Surely by now Faith’s mother realized that Hughes’s servants functioned as spies for the Boss, but she apparently didn’t think this was a problem—or perhaps she was so attracted to the financial benefits that Hughes was dangling that she didn’t care. Taking Hughes’s side, she told her daughter, “This man really loves you.”
So Faith went back to Howard, again. This time, as she later wrote, “I trusted him not at all.” Hughes was as secretive as ever, but by now Faith knew all of his tells for when he was playing her. She found messages from other women in wastebaskets, and lipstick-stained cigarette butts in Howard’s car. It was like he was playing a diabolical psychological game, telling Faith she was imagining his infidelities while purposely leaving evidence everywhere for her to see.
“There were few moments of pleasure between us,” she recalled, “and many arguments and accusations on my part, always ending with my saying, ‘I don’t want to be with you.’”
Just as Russell’s impatience may have pushed Hughes to finally premiere The Outlaw, perhaps Faith’s insolence moved him to finally do something about her career. Hughes was on the verge of signing a production partnership with Preston Sturges, and he began sending Faith to Sturges’s office every day to practice scenes that she’d eventually perform in a screen test. Something odd happened there one day. Jules Furthman came in to say hello. Sturges stepped out for a moment, and Furthman leaned in to Faith and said, “You know Howard hates women, don’t you?” By now, she certainly suspected as much.
Faith stayed home the weekend in May that Howard flew to Nevada to test fly his Sikorsky S-43 seaplane. The Sikorsky was Hughes’s baby, his favorite aircraft and one that allowed him to take pride in his own ingenuity. “It was the very first amphibian with flush riveting, an idea that Howard had been responsible for applying to aircraft, and it had a lot of other special features built to Howard’s specifications,” explained Joe Petrali, who would be one of Howard’s closest aides in the coming months. Hughes had personally overseen the construction of the Sikorsky, and when it came time to test-fly it, he was eager to show it off.
Hughes had placated Ava Gardner after the car crash by sending her and her sister Bappie to Mexico with his aide Charlie Guest. By the time they returned to Los Angeles, Bappie and Guest were having an affair, which worked out well for Hughes—he now had a sleepover spy in Ava’s house.
Hughes dropped Ava and Bappie off in Las Vegas, where they would wait while he completed the test flight at Lake Mead. Back in California, Faith spent the morning swimming and took a call from Hughes’s mechanic, who told her that Howard would be in touch with her later—he was busy with a Civil Aeronautics Agency inspector who was going to go up in the plane with him.
The call came through at twilight, and it came from a pay phone in Boulder City.
“Faith, I’m all right,” he told her, choking on tears. “I’m all right. Do not get worried when you hear the news. I’m not hurt.” Then he hung up.
He offered a few more details in his call to Ava. “I want you to know I just killed a couple of my guys,” he told her. “But don’t worry, kid, I’m going to be okay.”
Hughes had gone up in the S-43 with William Cli
ne, an inspector from the aeronautics administration; another CAA inspector, Charles Von Rosenberg, who acted as copilot; mechanic Richard Felt; and Gene Blandford, a Hughes engineer. The plane took off and circled Hoover Dam three times without incident. For most of the flight, Hughes had been sitting in the rear of the aircraft, talking to Von Rosenberg, but he switched to take the controls for landing. Hughes guided the plane into a water landing on Vegas Wash. The craft hit the water and the propeller broke off, slicing through the airplane and clear through Felt’s head, before knocking Cline into the water. Felt died from his head injuries. Cline’s body disappeared in the confusion of the crash and was never found. The other passengers, Howard included, sustained minor injuries but were able to walk away relatively unharmed.
When Howard came home, he was so pale, Faith described him as “transparent.” He believed the propeller had been meant for him.
A few days after the crash, Hughes walked into his Culver City aircraft plant with a bandage on his head. He insisted his most recent head injury wasn’t serious and everyone believed him. “Now, I wonder,” said Petrali in 1975. “I wonder how many of the strange things that happened in the next year or so, might have been caused, or triggered, by Howard’s injury in that crash. Mental injuries as well as physical.”
A week later, Ava’s divorce decree from Rooney finally came through. The same day, her mother died. Hughes had paid for Mrs. Gardner’s cancer treatment, but even the best care money could buy couldn’t outrun what she had. In the end, Howard did the only thing he could do: he made sure Ava and her sister got on the next TWA flight to North Carolina for the funeral. Then it was back to Los Angeles, and more waiting for her career to begin.
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood Page 26