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

by Karina Longworth

  A month later came the release of The Killers, the first movie that made enough use of Ava to feature her sultry image prominently on the poster. It was The Killers that finally turned Ava Gardner into a movie star.

  After a gripping opening, The Killers settles into a somewhat tedious detective plot. Then, thirty-eight minutes in, fighter Swede (Burt Lancaster) and his sweet, relatively plain girlfriend (Virginia Christine) go to a party that changes their lives. We see Ava first from behind, the asymmetrical strap of her black evening gown acting like an arrow, drawing our attention to her from afar. She’s introduced to Swede in a shot wide enough to fit five adults; she briefly turns to him (and the camera) and looks away. He can’t take his eyes off her, and when the camera moves closer to her, we see why. In a masterfully lit medium shot, she dominates the frame, giving moviegoers their first real chance to contemplate Ava Gardner’s odd, imperfect, beauty: the dimple in her chin, the puffiness in the cheeks and under the eyes. Moments later, we finally get a real close-up on Ava, and it’s intense. We quickly cut away, as if the editor of the movie has taken on the persona of Swede, who’s afraid of what might happen if he looks for too long. He should be afraid. Less than ten minutes of screen time later, to keep Ava’s Kitty happy, Swede has turned into a petty crook and gone to prison.

  The Killers would establish what would become Ava’s cinematic brand: she was the feline creature whose sexual magnetism alone could cause otherwise good, and definitely weak, men, to momentarily lose their minds. In real life, Ava hadn’t yet met any purely good men. In fact, the three with whom she’d had sustained relationships all treated her pretty badly. But eventually, the on-screen persona would seem to bleed into her real life.

  NABBING A FEW DAYS of leave, Bob Waterfield and his wife headed home to Los Angeles. After two years as a war bride, Jane was now finally ready to embrace her infamy; demeaning and exploitative though much of the publicity surrounding The Outlaw had been, at least it had put her front and center, and after her time spent hidden in plain sight, tagging along with her husband, she craved that attention. So Jane went to Hughes and asked to be put back to work. Hughes had locked The Outlaw in a vault after the San Francisco run in the spring of 1943, but with Russell back in the fold, he’d have a partner in promotion should he decide to try to give the film a real release. Hughes agreed to take Jane back, and even gave her a cash bonus, despite the fact that Russell told him she intended to follow her husband wherever he was sent until the point he was shipped overseas.

  But Waterfield wouldn’t be shipped overseas. He suffered an injury playing in a football championship on the base, hurting his knee badly enough to merit an honorable discharge. When his knee healed, Waterfield accepted an offer to play pro football for the Cleveland Rams. So Jane’s career was put on hold again, and again she was thrown into another world of migrant wives. This time, at least, there was a flask passed around from wife to wife, to pass the time in the frozen bleachers at games.

  In late 1945, Hughes made a deal with United Artists to finally give The Outlaw a national release, and he began planning what he assumed would be the final act of the film’s unprecedented marketing campaign. Yvonne De Carlo remembered lounging around Hughes’s room at the Town House Hotel in Los Angeles, which he had filled with advertising mock-ups. The pair would eat dinner, make love, and then while Yvonne slept, Howard would agonize over The Outlaw’s advertising deep into the night.

  A couple of the promotional ideas Hughes came up with had the flavor of a dirty dream. Hughes had his aircraft team produce a blimp in a rounder, more breastlike shape than the standard, almost-phallic airship, emblazoned with the message that after three years, The Outlaw was “coming at last.” Hughes also sent skywriters up above Los Angeles to draw, as Variety described it, “circles with dots in the middle of them under the title of the picture”—obviously meant to evoke Russell’s endowments. In capturing the surprisingly (and possibly unintentionally) goofy, juvenile nature of the movie, these promotions unwittingly anticipated the farcical sexual surrealism that swirled through the counterculture of the 1960s, rising to more mainstream popular culture in the 1970s. Here, again, Hughes was a pioneer, although no one, including him, understood it at the time.

  All films were required to have their advertising materials reviewed and approved by the Production Code office, which was now run by former U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Eric Johnston under the umbrella of what was now called the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA (sometimes shortened to just MPA, as though the “America” part was implied). Membership in the MPAA was technically voluntary, but in order to maintain a show of good faith in the “self-censorship” process that the association represented, all major studios and significant independent producers, including Hughes, maintained their membership. As MPAA signatories, producers were expected to accept the organization’s rulings on the content of their films and advertising.

  Johnston’s office was not accustomed to reviewing blimps, or anything as ephemeral as skywriting, but these stunts drew the office’s attention to more traditional formats of advertising that Hughes had disseminated without seeking approval. Hughes placed in newspapers at least three ads that had not been, and possibly would not have been, MPAA approved. One included an illustration of Billy pouncing on Rio in a pile of hay—in essence, a cartoon of The Outlaw’s rape scene—under the caption, “BOLD—with primitive emotion.” Another featured a caricature of Russell with the V-shaped neckline of her dress cut down almost to her waist, and the caption “Here They Are!”

  What most angered the censors—and other producers and studios who had been playing by the rules of the censors—was not the vulgarity of any individual promotion, but the insistence of Hughes to brattily refuse to seek the permission that everyone else in the industry had been trained to bow down before. “The whole campaign on this picture is a disgrace to the industry,” wrote 20th Century Fox’s Darryl Zanuck—Hughes’s friend—to Johnston’s boss, Joseph Breen. Zanuck also complained that Hughes’s publicity stunts made it a “hell of a time” trying to keep his own publicity men “in line.”

  Perhaps it was because of this concern for the rules that the ad that became the tipping point was one that claimed that despite the censorship battles over The Outlaw, the film was being released “as it was intended” to be seen, implying that Hughes had not made cuts demanded by the censors. On April 9, Hughes was notified that the Motion Picture Association was considering terminating his membership unless he withdrew a number of unapproved Outlaw ads and billboards, including the comparatively chaste ad in which the censors had been referenced. The MPAA’s objection to this one really made Hughes mad. “The Hays office has no right to tell me that I cannot inform the public of something which is true and a fact,” he fumed. “No criticism of MPA was included in the Outlaw advertising. The copy discussing censorship was merely a factual history of the fight to show The Outlaw to the public, exactly as it was made.”

  Hughes resigned from the MPAA and filed a lawsuit against the censorship board, alleging restraint of trade. A judge threw out this case, and his opinion included some sharply worded criticism of Hughes, who was accused of filing the lawsuit merely to obtain “additional publicity and advertising on promotion of the picture.”

  Ten days later, a theater manager in San Francisco was arrested during a screening of The Outlaw, on charges of “violating a city ordinance prohibiting the showing of indecent pictures.” Though the Associated Press reported on this event and its aftermath as straight news, it began to look more like a publicity stunt (or, at least, better publicity than money could buy) three weeks later when a San Francisco jury cleared the theater manager. This judge, at least, seems to have been in the Hughes tank: in his instructions to the jury, he gave remarks that could be confused for a defense attorney’s closing statement. “We have seen Jane Russell,” Judge Twain Michelsen pronounced. “She is an attractive specimen of American womanhood. God made her what
she is. There are some fanatical persons who object to Miss Russell in a low-necked blouse. The scene is in the desert—hardly the place for woolens or furs. Life is sordid and obscene to those who find it so.” According to the Associated Press write-up, “Some of the women in the courtroom hissed indignantly.” Hughes then excerpted Michelsen’s statement in a new, two-page ad, headlined “The censors may not like it . . . but the public does!”

  This victory occasioned a new image of Russell—created and disseminated by Birdwell—as a kind of postwar godsend. He issued a press release attributing to a “biological expert” named Dr. Henry Victor Nier the notion that “after every war, the nations involved return to the feminine ideal of Ceres, goddess of fertility.” Russell was the “well-endowed, fecund woman who will make the survival of the human race possible in an atomic age,” and her stardom was, according to Nier via Birdwell, “a sign of the subconscious urge to bring the birth rate back to a healthy statistical average. Now women will stop foolish dieting and other practices which make child-bearing a hazard. . . . The world must be repopulated, the birth rate must rise again.”

  Hughes wanted to double down on the notion of Jane Russell as the torchbearer for a new era—and a moneymaker for Hughes himself—but when he told Jane he wanted to send her on a personal appearance tour with the film, she put her foot down. She wasn’t going to do silly skits or set up the vulgar jokes of B-grade comedians: she wanted to sing. Hughes told her what she wanted to hear, and then gave Preston Sturges the job of putting her in her place.

  Sturges brought in a comedian friend of his who worked from a piano. His usual act was based on doing whatever he could to prevent his wife from attempting to sing. It seemed simple enough to slot Jane into the wife role, but it turned out there was a difference between some comedian’s poor wife and Jane Russell. They did the act together one time for a crowd, at the first stop of the tour. Afterward, the theater manager came to Jane’s dressing room and asked her if she could sing any songs, other than the single chorus she had been able to gasp out in the act. When she said she could, the theater manager sent the comedian home.

  Jane sang four songs at the next show. “I felt wonderful,” she recalled. “I had no nerves at all, and that was the start of my singing career.” After six years in professional limbo, Jane Russell was finally allowed to show off her talents, thanks to a single theater manager refusing to tolerate a misogynistic act that ridiculed the main attraction.

  By the end of April, The Outlaw was destroying box-office records. In a surefire sign that Hughes was getting under the skin of the collective film industry, Photoplay magazine once again devoted much magazine real estate to an exposé on his deplorable swerves outside the mainstream. This hit job on The Outlaw, like the one the same publication ran on Hell’s Angels, paradoxically also served as a kind of love letter to Hughes himself, who was described as “a lean, towering forty-four-year-old Texan.” (He was actually just forty.) Criticizing The Outlaw as “not deserving of notoriety,” Fred R. Sammis predicted that “had this picture been released in the usual manner, it would have run its course long before this and been quietly forgotten by those who saw it. That it is today the most widely discussed film of the year is the result of the ballyhoo and exploitation.” He called foul on the Hughes camp claim that “censorship troubles” had delayed The Outlaw’s release, before accusing Hughes of “doing the film industry a disservice” for not being satisfied with the “comparative freedom of action” he enjoyed within the system and mounting a campaign that had “[provoked] a feeling throughout America that perhaps, after all, Hollywood does need some sort of policing.”

  The real problem, according to Photoplay, was that The Outlaw was not a film worth standing on principle for. “Had the Outlaw dealt with a great social wrong or the abuse of some human right, the fight against censorship of it would have won Photoplay’s immediate support,” Sammis concluded. “The fact remains, after the shouting dies down, The Outlaw is just a semi-fictional story of an outlaw and a girl who put on the lowest cut blouse ever worn on a chilly desert night.”

  JANE’S STAR WAS FINALLY ascendant, but what about Faith? Finally, there was movement on that front, too. Preston Sturges had finished a rewrite on the Columba script. Hughes finally approved a budget, a cast, a new title—Vendetta—and writer-producer Sturges’s hiring of Max Ophuls to direct. The film was finally ready to move forward, with a start date of August 13. That is, barring disaster.

  Chapter 17

  An American Hero

  The Fourth of July fell on a Thursday, but the party stretched through the weekend. On July 5, 1946, guests began to arrive at the house of Bill Cagney (brother of James), on the shore at Newport Beach. Jean Peters, a brand-new Fox contract girl, showed up on Friday with most of the rest of the party, and on Saturday, Howard Hughes joined them. That night, according to Modern Screen magazine, Jean Peters “fell in love for the first time in her life.”

  Hughes and Jean Peters did meet for the first time that weekend at Cagney’s house, though whatever emotion Jean felt at first sight for Howard was likely overshadowed by the chaos that shortly followed. That Saturday night, Hughes, Peters, and a few other guests flew to Catalina for a satellite party. And then, Peters recalled, “Sunday he came back to his airport in Culver City to test the plane in which he crashed.”

  On July 7, 1946, Howard Hughes manned the controls for the inaugural test flight of the XF-11, a prototype reconnaissance plane that Hughes had designed for the U.S. government during wartime as part of a massive defense contract Hughes had been awarded in 1943. Hughes hadn’t been able to deliver a single plane before the end of the war, after which the Defense Department had scaled back their order, from 101 planes to the two that were in the process of being built. As his test flight would prove, over a year after D-Day, the XF-11 still wasn’t ready.

  After lifting off from the Culver City airstrip and smoothly cruising at 400 mph over the Pacific Ocean, Hughes turned the plane around to return to Culver City, victorious—just as he had been during the speed trial that ended in the crash landing in the beet field, just as he had felt when first flying the Sikorsky. And, here, just like those other times, before he could get the plane safely on the ground, something went wrong. Though the instrument panel showed no malfunction, the aircraft began to drag to one side, as if a massive weight were pressing down on the right wing. Hughes couldn’t figure out how to fix it in midair. He went looking for a place to make an emergency landing. A lifelong golf aficionado, he easily spotted the green rectangle of the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, just east of UCLA. Hughes steered the malfunctioning craft there, but there was not enough time.

  The plane hurtled into a residential street in Beverly Hills, tearing half the roof off the home of a dentist. The bad right wing slashed through the upstairs bedroom of the dentist’s next-door neighbor. Hughes’s plane bounced off a third home’s garage, took out a row of poplar trees, and finally crashed once and for all into the home of Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Meyer, where it burst into flames.

  Two other military men, Marine Sergeant William Lloyd Durkin and Captain James Guston, who happened to be in the area, dragged Hughes’s unconscious body out of the wreckage. At the Beverly Hills Emergency Hospital, doctors examining his injuries weren’t optimistic Hughes would live through the night.

  In the days and weeks immediately following his hospitalization, whether or not Howard Hughes lived or died became a subject of national obsession. The Los Angeles Times referred to Hughes as “the 40 year-old, slightly deaf, handsome bachelor whose fortune has been estimated at $125,000,000.”* The top half of their page one was taken up with a photo of the wreckage, the downed plane surrounded by the rubble of the neighborhood it took out. Depending on the publication, Hughes himself was deemed either to be “near death” or given a “fighting chance of survival.” He was said by some to be suffering from shock, and yet his brain was apparently working overtime. While in critical conditi
on, and against doctor’s orders, he called his secretary in and dictated tasks to her until the doctors made her leave the room.

  Three days later, on July 11, Hughes’s personal doctor, Verne R. Mason, briefed reporters. “Howard Hughes has suffered a turn for the worse in his fight for life,” Mason announced. Hughes’s left lung’s inability to function was requiring full intubation, and yet, in what was described as an “amazing revelation,” from his sickbed Hughes croaked out a message that he asked to be passed along to the army: “Find the rear half of the right propeller and find out what went wrong with it—I don’t want this to happen to somebody else.”

  Every day there were new headlines about Hughes’s condition—about how he had beaten the odds, about how he had woken from a coma with the design in his head for a new and improved hospital bed, which he then gave orders for one of his factories to produce. When grasping for dramatic details about the crash itself or Hughes’s subsequent condition, and coming up short, the papers put their reporters on the case of recounting the famous feminine faces seen in the hospital waiting room. Jane Russell was there, as was Lana Turner, to whom there were currently rumors that Hughes was engaged. Neither Russell nor Turner was admitted to see Hughes, with Lana reportedly waiting until dawn to no avail, “greatly upset and weeping.”

  Ultimately Hughes made a spectacular and miraculous recovery, but if his body bounced back better than anyone could have imagined, in some ways he was changed permanently by the crash. He was left with a scarred upper lip, the beginnings of a dependence on opiates that would eventually become paralyzing, and a seemingly skewed sense of his own mortality. A number of his actions over the remaining thirty years of his life—from the defiant congressional testimony he’d deliver a year later defending the work he had done for the Defense Department to his strip-mining of RKO Pictures under the cover of anti-Communism, to his increasingly compulsive collection of starlets, whom he’d stash away in apartments patrolled by bodyguards and spies, to his circa-1960s attempt to buy up nearly every casino in Las Vegas—would strike many observers as evidence of madness.