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

by Karina Longworth

  After receiving this tip, Hoover recommended that his agency begin keeping tabs on Johnny Meyer, noting that Meyer was “reported to be a procurer for Howard Hughes and other prominent persons,” and that he was “a friend of the present Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt.” Elliott Roosevelt was FDR’s son, and also an expert in reconnaissance who had recommended Hughes’s spy planes to the air force.

  Hughes, according to a different FBI document, had lured Meyer away from his position working for Warner Bros., where Meyer’s “principal duties,” according to the Bureau’s report, “were the obtaining of girls for [Errol] Flynn and for other movie executives and producers.” Hughes had hired Meyer as “public relations director of the Hughes Aircraft Corporation,” but the FBI suspected that the “public” with whom Meyer managed relations was limited to so-called party girls. Several Bureau reports noted that a reliable source had told them that Meyer had “always been a pimp,” while another supposedly reliable source claimed that he “deals essentially in sex and flesh is all he knows.” This source stated that Meyer had the “telephone numbers of various women [organized] according to their complexion and sexual ability.” The FBI didn’t officially open an investigation into Hughes, but through their surveillance of Meyer, the Bureau was able to compile a composite image of Hughes “as an unstable person” who had racked up a number of “immoral associations with various movie actresses.”

  Coincidentally (or not), a few actresses known to have “associations” with Hughes were said to have been suspiciously unavailable when the subpoenas were served on Cook and Goldthwaite. Linda Darnell was in Europe, Lana Turner was “resting somewhere out of town,” Faith Domergue “went to a play in La Jolla and kept on going to Mexico,” and Ava Gardner was “working, and could not be disturbed.” Johnny Meyer also “went missing.” Gossip reporter Earl Wilson ran into Hughes at Mocambo and suggested to him that the actresses and Meyer “had lammed out of town to avoid subpoenas.” Hughes responded, “Don’t build that up.”

  The two subpoenaed girls spoke to the press before they could be interviewed by Congress. Cook readily reported seeing Krug and Roosevelt at Hughes’s parties. Wilson went to her house and wrote a leering, mocking report, remarking extensively on her toes and noting in a parenthetical that her chest was “size 361/2, no falsies.” He simultaneously bashed Judy as a fame-chasing gold-digger and championed her for being a plucky girl who could take down powerful and corrupt men. He also noted that Congress was paying three hundred to five hundred dollars to transport these girls to Washington so they could testify about the windfalls they received of five to fifty dollars. “Talk about Hughes spending,” the columnist punned.

  Goldthwaite was less cooperative, denying she had been gifted anything at all. “I haven’t got any money, I haven’t got any jewelry,” she insisted. “I never got a cent and I never expected any.” She said she did go to a pool party at the Town House Hotel at Meyer’s invitation, but she barely had any interaction with Hughes. “I think it’s pretty mean of the government to make it look like those girls got paid—besides I think it’s a little personal.” Certainly, it looked like somebody got paid something, because according to news reports, Johnny Meyer had actually named the girls as entertainment expenses on his tax returns.

  Hughes held a press conference defending the parties and the paid-for female guests, saying both were an effort “to maintain my company’s competitive position” compared to other aviation outfits, and it was all “a matter of keeping the customers happy the way an automobile salesman gives you a cigar.” The parties occurred after the contracts were awarded, Hughes said, and were a sign not of his profligacy, but his patriotism. “If I remember correctly,” he mused, “during the war it was generally considered a privilege and an obligation to entertain soldiers and officers returning from abroad with fine war records.” He further said he had in fact delivered both the Hercules and the photographic plane, and that he had spent $7 million of his own money to complete these projects. “I have no hope of ever recouping this $7,000,000 or any of the large additional funds which I intend to put into this airplane [the Hercules].”

  Congress was persuaded by the analogy between free cigars and alleged call girls, and on July 29, the Daily News reported that the senators “suddenly and very quietly shelved the beautiful party girl angles of the probe today.” But the investigation into Hughes’s war work continued, and in August Howard went to Washington to testify. In an admiring account of his performance, Time described Hughes as “the Hollywood playboy and planemaker, about whom the public had heard very much but actually knew very little.” When Hughes entered the chambers, fifteen minutes late, “there was scattered applause and like a seasoned movie star he turned to nod to the spectators. They saw a lank, dark-mustached man in a rumpled, ill-fitting grey suit, his scrawny neck sticking out of a too-large collar.”

  He may have lacked professional costuming, and yet this was a Hollywood moment for Hughes, maybe more so than any he had actually had in Hollywood, at least not since the days of Hell’s Angels. Hughes put on a captivating show with his testimony, redirecting all attention onto Senator Ralph Owen Brewster, a Republican from Maine with whom he had been engaged in a war of published words in the days leading up to the hearing. “I charge specifically,” Hughes announced early in his performance, “that during a luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel in the week beginning Feb. 10, 1947, in the suite of Senator Brewster, that the Senator told me in so many words that if I would agree to merge Trans World Airline with Pan American and would go along with his community airline bill, there would be no further hearings in this matter.” Pan Am was the key competitor to Hughes’s TWA at the time, and Hughes believed that Brewster was collecting bribes from his rival. Brewster denied this accusation: “It sounds a little more like Hollywood than Washington,” he said. When Hughes was asked if he had any questions for Brewster, he responded, “Yes—200 to 500 of them.”

  Hughes was told to put said queries in writing, and the next day Hughes returned to the chamber armed with a list of dozens of things that he demanded Senator Brewster answer in open session. It was a stunt seemingly intended to win the hearts and minds of a public suspicious of their political servants as much as it was intended to clear Hughes of corporate wrongdoing. At one point, after Hughes demanded that the panel offer him equal time to defend himself and ask questions of his accusers, the audience exploded in applause, leading the embarrassed senators to request that the room be cleared—but reporters were allowed to stay.

  Later Hughes read from a statement he had written out in longhand. “Nobody kicks around in this country without acquiring a reputation, good or bad,” Hughes said. “I’m supposed to be capricious, a playboy, eccentric, but I don’t believe I have the reputation of a liar. For 23 years nobody has questioned my word. I think my reputation in that respect meets what most Texans consider important.”

  After Hughes’s testimony, the senators adjourned the inquiry until fall. Hughes told journalists that Senator Brewster was “too cowardly” to keep going without taking a time-out to lick his wounds.

  Hughes went back to Los Angeles, flew the Hercules flying boat at a modest elevation of seventy feet for one mile, and then was called back to Washington a week later and asked to answer an allegation from Major General Bennett E. Meyers that Hughes offered to pay $250,000 to help remove New York City’s ban on The Outlaw. According to Meyers, $150,000 was meant to be a “donation” to the Catholic Legion of Decency, which had been publicly protesting the film, and $100,000 would go to Meyers himself in exchange for acting as a go-between to get the money to the Catholics. Hughes responded that he had not made the bribe, and counteralleged that Meyers was responsible for The Outlaw’s troubles in New York in the first place. Meyers had been a top-level negotiator for air force procurement, and at the time that Hughes’s government plane-building contracts were up for renegotiation, Hughes claimed, the general approached the millionaire asking for various monies. After Hug
hes refused to give him a $200,000 “loan” or to invest in “some kind of a trick bicycle,” Hughes alleged, Meyers “put a hex” on The Outlaw with the New York censors. Hughes said he then convinced Meyers to use his connections to various New York officials, such as then-mayor William O’Dwyer and former license commissioner Benjamin Fielding, to lift the ban on the movie. There was no financial quid pro quo, Hughes said, but he admitted he had asked Meyers to “remove the finger that I believe he had put on it.” (Whether or not Hughes offered Meyers a cash bribe, his own records indicate that at some point he sent Meyers three bottles of 1918 bourbon, from Howard Sr.’s pre-Prohibition collection, with a personal note calling Bennett “Benny.”)

  That this investigation had now gone about as far afield from war profiteering as it could get was an unquestionable victory for Hughes. And yet it was not until May 1948 that Congress issued a statement clearing Hughes of wrongdoing. Long before that, though, his performance before Congress was declared a triumph by the media, and the portrait they painted was indelible.

  “It was spectacular. It was combative. It obviously gave Mr. Hughes, despite tiresome and irritating moments, considerable pleasure,” summed up the New York Times Magazine. Hughes was described as “a no-man in the land of yes-men, a leading contemporary example of the genus Rugged Individualist.” The Los Angeles Daily News ran a series of photos of Hughes testifying, a couple of them under the banner, “Smooth witness Hughes never at a loss for an answer.”

  In these photos, Hughes looks significantly older than his actual age of forty-one; in the ten years since his round-the-world flight, he had aged from a cocksure boy into a world-weary man. But grown-up Hughes had more fans than his Richie Rich incarnation ever had. The Daily News also ran a photo of a smiling Hughes signing autographs for a crowd that formed at the airfield to see him off before he piloted back to Culver City. The caption read: “You’d Think He Was a Movie Star.”

  AMID THIS NEAR DEIFICATION, some in Hollywood started speaking out (albeit anonymously) about the Hughes they knew—the longtime thorn in their side, the scourge to their standards and practices, the promotional pervert. Complaining about Hughes’s flagrantly sexual marketing of The Outlaw, one “prominent Hollywood figure” protested, “He isn’t part of the industry, and he never has been. We’ve worked for years to overcome the old idea that pictures are undermining morals and that everybody connected with the business is a paroled sex criminal. I think on the whole we’ve done pretty well. Then along comes Hughes—an outsider—and puts out stuff that no self-respecting person in town would touch. Sure, the picture’s making money. But the decent people will say ‘That’s Hollywood’—and we’ll get it in the neck.”

  It was one thing to complain about an “outsider” muddying the waters that Hollywood was supposedly working so hard to keep clean. But in an industry in which the only barrier to entry for an adult white male was money, there was no way to keep Howard Hughes out. Soon enough, he would have bought his way into one of Hollywood’s premier positions of power—and he’d bring his dirty mind with him.

  Chapter 18

  A Mogul and His Crows

  It figured that Howard Hughes would have to be totally incapacitated and possibly on the brink of death before Faith Domergue finally got her chance to star in a movie. The film Hughes and Preston Sturges had cooked up to showcase Faith, Vendetta, began shooting in August 1946, on location in the north San Fernando Valley (doubling for the “dirty jungles of Corsica,” as the film’s voiceover describes its setting). Hughes had signed off on the hiring of director Max Ophuls before the crash. An Austrian Jew who had fled the Nazi regime first for France and then the United States, Ophuls was a master stylist who had been inactive as a director since 1940.

  But when Hughes’s plane went down, Faith recalled, “We all thought Howard was going to die. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind.” When production began, all involved assumed Hughes would not be able to oversee it, or to intervene.

  And the movie was not at the front of Hughes’s mind until a few weeks after he left the hospital, when Sturges had some dailies delivered to his bedside to amuse him. Hughes was not amused. By this point Ophuls was quite a bit behind schedule. Obsessed with doing a good job, he’d fuss over details for so long that he was essentially shooting at one-third the usual Hollywood speed. Six weeks had gone by and there was barely anything to show for it. Hughes now told Sturges to fire Ophuls immediately and take over direction himself.

  According to Sturges, the firing of Ophuls had less to do with schedule concerns and more to do with Hughes’s xenophobia. Sturges recalled that, due to Howard’s recovery, he only introduced the two men for the first time “well after Vendetta had commenced principal photography.”

  “Three seconds after Mr. Ophuls left the room,” according to Sturges, “Howard demanded that I get rid of him. He said he didn’t like foreigners and he didn’t want any of them working for the company.”

  Sturges then stepped in as director, but he soon soured on Vendetta. For a filmmaker with as strong a point of view as any of his era, it was bad enough that he now found himself finishing a picture that another man started; it was worse that, now Hughes had been reminded that Vendetta was a thing, he wouldn’t stop calling and telling Sturges what to do. This zapped the fun out of it. A visitor to the set found a despondent Sturges, who felt trapped in an assignment with no end. “It doesn’t really matter,” Sturges sighed. “We go on week after week; the money keeps rolling in.”

  Finally, the day before Halloween, Hughes gave Sturges a reprieve: he fired him from Vendetta and forced him to resign from their production company. Sturges took Frances Ramsden sailing, leaving the cast and crew of the movie on the soundstage, totally unaware that their director was gone, never to return.

  Eventually Hughes hired a third director, Stuart Heisler. “We then started from scratch—new script, new costumes, but the same cast,” Faith recalled. Heisler brought in W. R. Burnett, a screenwriter who had worked on Scarface, to help him try to fix Vendetta. Burnett looked at what the otherwise “brilliant” Sturges managed to shoot and couldn’t understand how it had gone so wrong, speculating that maybe “he was sore at Hughes and it was an act of sabotage.” Either that or “he had gone nuts.”

  Heisler shot Burnett’s new script, and then Hughes let them both go. Two years later, Mel Ferrer was brought in to direct for another six weeks. As Faith remembered it, “This went on and on.”

  It was still nowhere near over by the end of 1947, when Faith went to Las Vegas to obtain a divorce from Teddy Stauffer so that she could marry Hugo Fregonese, an Argentine director under contract to MGM. Six years after having fallen into Hughes’s world, Faith had, as she would put it, “totally lost the enthusiasm of being a star and I never got it back. I wanted to bail out totally from the industry.”

  In the spring of 1948, the newly minted Mrs. Fregonese’s seven-year contract with Howard Hughes was due to expire. In April, Faith took her side of the negotiations to the press, telling The Hollywood Reporter that though conversations with Hughes had thus far been “most amicable,” they had not yet come to terms, and she was holding out to “do more pictures than I have during the years I have been under contract.” In seven years, she had appeared in two movies, only one of which, Young Widow, had been released.

  Pregnant with her first child, Faith would travel with her husband to Buenos Aires to give birth. When she returned to Hollywood a few months later, she did extend her professional relationship with Howard Hughes, but this time it would be under the auspices of his new movie studio.

  IN MAY 1948, DORE Schary was head of production at RKO Pictures. Seventeen months earlier, when he had stepped into the job, he had come out with guns blazing, declaring his intention to produce progressive cinema, “courageous motion pictures” whose themes were “both timely and important.” His role models were hits of the 1930s, such as The Grapes of Wrath and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.*

  Th
at summer, RKO released the shining example of Schary’s new deal, Crossfire, a noirish drama about the postwar killing of a Jewish GI by an anti-Semite, starring Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan and featuring a star-making bit turn from blond-bombshell character actress Gloria Grahame.

  Crossfire was a huge hit. There were lines around the block in the cities, and its $2.7 million box-office gross was several multiples of its $700,000 budget; it grossed more than any other film for RKO that year not featuring major stars Cary Grant and Loretta Young. And yet, by the time of its release, the gears were already in motion to bring the film’s director and producer before Congress to answer to charges that they were subversively injecting Hollywood films with Communist propaganda.

  Crossfire director Edward Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott were two members of the Hollywood Ten, the first ten men working in Hollywood to testify about their alleged Communist affiliations before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (usually abbreviated as HUAC). That fall, all ten were indicted for contempt of court for refusing to answer whether or not they had ever been members of the Communist Party. A few days later, the heads of all the major studios—including Dore Schary, the self-styled champion of courageous cinema—gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and agreed to fire or refuse to hire anyone in the film industry suspected of subversive politics. This was the day the Hollywood Blacklist went from rumor to reality.

  If the pressure to fall in line with the red-hunters wasn’t proof enough that this was not the time for progressive cinema, the numbers also bore it out: despite the success of Crossfire, RKO was losing money under Schary’s supervision. The studio’s net profit of $5,085,848 for 1947 represented a year-to-year drop of 50 percent of the previous year’s earnings. The owner of RKO, a businessman named Floyd Odlum, blanched at the studio’s falling stock price and went looking for a buyer.