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

by Karina Longworth

  Odlum did not consult Schary on the sale of RKO. “Suddenly,” Schary later remembered, “much to my surprise, trade papers rumored that RKO was to be bought by Howard Hughes.” Schary met with Odlum and tried to convince him not to sell to Hughes, knowing that Hughes—whose filmography showed an interest in sensation and spectacle and a disdain for anything intellectual, mature, or progressive—would not support Schary’s sensibilities. “Since my contract permitted me to resign if there was a change in management, I advised Odlum that I would quit if he abandoned RKO.” Odlum told Schary, “Look, I’m not a picture man. I bought this company to make some money, and I made some money and I’m leaving.”

  On May 11, 1948, it was official: Hughes acquired control of RKO, purchasing 929,000 shares, amounting to a controlling interest of 26 percent of the company, for approximately eight and a half million dollars.* Hughes then signed his name to a letter sent to the employees of Hughes Aircraft, assuring them that his attention was not fatally divided, and apologizing for reports in the press that suggested that the aircraft company was no longer his top priority. “I assure you that nothing means more to me than the success of the [Hercules] flying boat.”

  What were Hughes’s real priorities vis-à-vis RKO? There was some speculation that he had bought the studio in order to control its 124 movie theaters. If he was looking for theaters, Hughes had bought the wrong studio. RKO owned fewer theaters than any of the majors, and this put them at an automatic disadvantage in the age of block booking, wherein studios would force the movie theaters they controlled to accept packages of multiple movies, sometimes including one “A” picture and several B-movies starring low-tier talent, some of which were flat-out stinkers. This process ensured that most of the time, even films that would have failed to attract audiences on their own were kept in theaters as part of the bill with the movies people really wanted to see. The prevailing wisdom was that this vertical integration was absolutely integral to the survival of the movie business. But, with less real estate than their competitors, RKO couldn’t make as much money from this business model as everyone else.

  When Hughes bought RKO, the studios were desperately trying to maintain some version of the status quo by fighting the government’s efforts to break up their monopoly on production, distribution, and exhibition of the movies. In 1940, the government had levied a consent decree, including several stipulations proposing to change the way the studios forced theaters to take their content. The studios did not want to comply with these stipulations, which would delete their guaranteed profit streams and force them to totally rethink how to make money. They haggled with the government over the consent decree in the courts until 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided against the studios and ordered them to sell their theater businesses if they wanted to stay in production. Most studio heads were united in the belief that this would kill their overall ability to make money, and they intended to band together to stall or appeal such divestment.

  Hughes was not most studio heads. He realized that if none of the major production companies owned any theaters, Hughes could negotiate with every theater directly, the way he had as an independent, and get RKO movies in more theaters. On November 1, 1948, Hughes single-handedly brought on the end of the era of vertical integration by turning RKO into the first movie studio to accept the federal government’s consent decree mandating a divestment of their exhibition businesses. Hughes did this in defiance of the other studios, who believed they would be able to negotiate a deal to hold on to at least some of their theaters. Given the choice to keep either a stake in the production studio or the theaters, Hughes chose the studio. His decision forced all of the other studios in town to give up their cash cow and follow suit—rendering Hughes essentially responsible for beginning the process that would end the studio system as Hollywood had known it since the late silent era, and giving the town’s power brokers yet another reason to hate Howard Hughes. (Cleverly, Hughes would push back RKO’s actual divestment until after he had relinquished control of the studio—and after The Outlaw had one more theatrical go-round, where it grossed $300,000 in its first weekend, smashing records in all twenty-one cities in which it played.)

  In later legal depositions, Hughes would claim that he thought that RKO was a good investment that wouldn’t take up too much of his time. “I certainly anticipated that I would have some connection with the company,” he said in 1953, “but, frankly, I hoped to purchase a going operation and a ready-made organization and did not expect to participate to the extent that I did.” Some of his critics didn’t buy this. As the examining attorney in that deposition correctly alleged, throughout Hughes’s life, “your experience as an executive has been in companies where you were the sole and final authority”—meaning Hughes had no experience ceding control to anyone else, and no demonstrated interest in trying it on for size. Whatever Hughes’s intentions going into RKO, there was little chance he would stand for anyone running it but him.

  Three days after the RKO sale, Hughes asked to meet with the head of his new studio. At their first meeting, Schary remembered, “Hughes simply touched my hand rather than shook it and then said, ‘I hear you want to quit.’” Hughes easily convinced Schary that nothing would change at RKO under his ownership. “He spoke quietly and sincerely and I agreed to go back to the salt mines.” It struck Schary that the Texan tycoon looked like a movie star—like Gary Cooper.

  This peace lasted about a month. Hughes called Schary one June midnight and asked if they could meet in three hours. Among other things, Hughes wanted to talk about the actress Barbara Bel Geddes, a stage star who was under contract to RKO and had been cast in a film called Bed of Roses. Hughes didn’t think she had star quality and wanted her fired. Schary said, “Well, get yourself a messenger boy to tell her you don’t want her, but I won’t. And as long as you’re on the phone, I’d like to tender my resignation.” Schary agreed to meet Hughes the following afternoon at Cary Grant’s house.

  Since the crash, Hughes hadn’t made a permanent home for himself—he’d bounce between the houses of friends and various hotels, conducting business in private residences or inconspicuous cars, and using his supposed business headquarters on Romaine Street as a mere message center. When Schary arrived at Grant’s house, it was clear that Grant had moved all of his personal items out, but Hughes hadn’t moved anything in. “There wasn’t a paper, a cigarette, a flower, a match, a picture, a magazine,” Schary marveled. “The only sign of life was Hughes, who appeared from a side room in which I caught a glimpse of a woman hooking up her bra before the door closed.”

  Hughes sat down next to Schary on a sofa and asked him if he was quitting because he didn’t want to take orders. “No, I said, that wasn’t the reason,” Schary recalled. “I added, that if I were looking for work in an airplane factory I would take all of his orders because he knew more about planes than I did. However, since I believed I knew more about films than he did, I couldn’t stay at RKO and take his instructions. Reasonably and quietly he pointed out he had to have men to run his enterprises who would take his orders. I understood that and realized that I was feeling sorry for him because I was quitting.”

  RKO’s president, Peter Rathvon, followed Schary out the door. Hughes installed Noah Dietrich on the RKO board, gave himself the invented title of “Managing Director-Production,” and began contemplating what kind of games to play with his new toy.

  Over time, Hughes would foster a culture of instability and secrecy at RKO. He made sure that nothing could be put into motion at the studio without his say-so, which he often withheld. In fact, he was usually unreachable by his RKO underlings. He famously refused to work out of the studio lot, preferring to keep the office he had long held on the nearby Goldwyn lot—which was sort of comparable to the CEO of Levi Strauss renting workspace in an artisanal boutique denim factory. Hughes made sure his own men were visible presences on the RKO lot, in order to make sure that his orders were being carried out without Howard him
self actually having to be present. Chief among these flunkies were Creighton J. “Tev” Tevlin and Bicknell Lockhart. Tevlin became the key gatekeeper, patrolling access to Hughes. Hughes wanted to know immediately if gossip queens Louella or Hedda were trying to reach him. Anyone else could wait.

  ONE THEORY ABOUT HUGHES’S motivation for acquiring RKO that became popular among RKO’s disgruntled stockholders was that he had bought the studio so that it could serve as a clearinghouse for what sometimes Hughes girlfriend Lana Turner called “six-month option girls.”

  When Turner was first signed to MGM at age sixteen, she was surprised to find that many of the young actresses she saw around the studio lot and assumed were her competition for roles were in fact never cast in anything at all. They were only there, Lana learned, “to be passed around the executive offices” and “six months later [they] would have fallen by the wayside . . . those six-month option girls would never go on to a movie career—they were there for the benefit of management.”

  As much as Hughes might have heard stories of such practices at studios like MGM and longed for the power and privilege to replicate them, by 1948 he didn’t need a studio for such purposes—prior to his involvement with RKO, he already had his own methods of luring and controlling young women under the auspices of future movie stardom. But owning RKO would allow him to turn an artisanal operation into a volume business.

  And now he cast a much wider net. The process would begin with a photo of a young lady in a newspaper or magazine. Maybe she was a professional model; maybe she was a coed or a beauty queen or for some other reason had done something to get her face in the paper. Upon spotting such a picture, Hughes would have a team of men track down the intriguing girl, and then one of his personal photographers would be sent to take new pictures of her.

  Hughes was very specific about the kinds of images he was looking for. There needed to be three of the subject sitting down, and another three standing up; she needed to be shot head-on and in profile and without heavy makeup or fancy hairstyling. Hughes would have the photos blown up for more intense and sometimes lengthy study. If he decided there was nothing wrong with what he was looking at, he’d have another aide contact the young lady and invite her out to Hollywood, where she’d be signed either to RKO or to a personal contract with Howard Hughes Productions, at a starting salary of $75 per week.

  The nervous system of Hughes’s personal and professional endeavors remained the former Multicolor plant at 7000 Romaine in Hollywood, which he and his employees had taken to calling “Operations.” The key cogs of Operations were a crew of secretaries who answered all calls from anyone, anywhere in the world, who wanted to reach Howard Hughes. They were under orders to transcribe every incoming phone call as faithfully as possible, noting vocal tics, inflections, and meaningful pauses, in order to produce a daily message log, which Hughes would call in to pick up several times a day.

  Operations became the nucleus of Hughes’s efforts to surveil and control everyone in his life whom he considered to be a subordinate—which was pretty much everyone, up to and including executives of RKO and TWA—but it was particularly effective when it came to procuring and maintaining new starlets. Aide Walter Kane would call in to leave messages for photographer Jack Christy, to give him instructions for future shoots, stipulate his travel plans, or make requests such as that he “stand by from 2:30 pm on Sun.” in case his services were required. Christy was once flown to Florida to photograph a girl who had won a fishing contest. The photo Hughes had seen of this fisherwoman in an outdoor magazine had done her every favor. When Christy took the deglamorized shots of the same girl, she was revealed to have a face full of pockmarks and freckles, and two of her teeth were missing. Hughes wrote this kind of thing off as the cost of doing business.

  Such fishing expeditions were worth mounting, because sometimes you found a real pearl. Usually they’d arrive in Los Angeles with a protective mother, but Hughes could work with a mother—most of them were at least as eager as their daughters to do whatever was asked of them to ensure the young girl’s stardom. Hughes, happy to offer guidance, would tell mothers to make sure their daughter slept in her bra, and never under any circumstances was she to turn her head more than fifteen degrees left or right. If the mother started to get impatient, Hughes would reassure her with a reference from her own generation: her daughter, Hughes would say, was the most beautiful girl he had seen since Billie Dove.

  It was easier if the girl was a total nobody with no sense of how the movie industry worked, and with no one close to her to make her the wiser. Those with connections in the industry were harder to control. In 1954, a German-born brunette named Dana Wynter would fall onto Howard’s radar. She had an agent who would not allow Hughes’s photographers to get to her. There was a mixed report from an advanced scout, Jack Shalitt, who had seen her: “Very attractive, very ‘distinct’ (distinguished) looking. Smile is pretty. Underbite is evident when she talks. Ankles heavy; fingers fat and fleshy.” Walter Kane suggested they bring her out to Los Angeles anyway. Wynter would work more than most of Hughes’s discoveries, probably because Hughes never ended up signing her. She did, however, marry his friend and lawyer, Greg Bautzer, in 1956, the same year she starred in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  Most women who were sponsored by Howard, during the RKO years and after, never landed such a plum role, or a catch of a man, through their association with Hughes. Much had changed since his discovery of Jane Russell, who had always been allowed to do pretty much whatever she wanted—she wouldn’t have put up with anything else. But the experience with Russell—and with Jean Harlow before her, who had shed Hughes as soon as she outgrew him, and later Faith Domergue, who fought Hughes’s control for years and escaped it as soon as she was able to—might have taught him a lesson about what he was and was not looking for. Thereafter, every young woman he signed to a contract would be given a furnished house or apartment in which to live, and an on-call driver who would double as a bodyguard and a spy for Hughes. Her days and nights would be scheduled within an inch of her life: dance, voice, and acting classes, followed by dinner out, usually at Perino’s (which sat on Wilshire Boulevard blocks away from the Ambassador), chaperoned by her driver. The contract girl would wait and wait and wait for the day, which they had been led to believe would come someday, when Hughes would call her to his office and announce that he had found the film in which she would become a star. This never happened for most of these girls. Many of them never even met Hughes. Most of them did not work in movies at all while under his employ.

  Besides, there simply weren’t enough movies to put them all in. Hughes had learned by now to only hire men, unlike Dore Schary, who would follow his orders, and yet he was rarely satisfied with the work of even the most compliant employee—he wasn’t satisfied with anything unless he had done it himself. So starlets sat around, waiting for the perfect script, which never materialized. Movies like Vendetta were subjected to endless reshoots; others, seemingly completed to Hughes’s satisfaction, sat on the shelf for years while he tinkered with edits or title ideas, or merely waited for marketing inspiration. This had worked for him in the past—on both Hell’s Angels and The Outlaw, he had done things his way, and the industry had been forced to begrudgingly applaud him. But studios were expected to release dozens of movies a year, whereas Hughes was practiced in producing only about one movie every dozen years.

  JEAN PETERS RETURNED FROM Mexico and resumed seeing Hughes almost every day. He expected her to be available whenever he wanted or needed her, and at first she was happy to comply, putting her career on the back burner when necessary. Still, when asked by columnists about her relationship with Hughes, she did what Hughes now expected his girlfriends to do: she downplayed their involvement and drew attention to her career.

  In October 1947, Louella Parsons came right out and asked Jean if she and Howard Hughes were going to marry. Jean insisted marriage was not on her mind. “I’m not one to kick fate in the
teeth,” Jean responded. “I have elected to be an actress, and I don’t think I could be married and do a good job on the screen. I couldn’t do both and do them well.”

  But it was difficult to sell a starlet supposedly choosing career over love when said starlet’s performances hadn’t exactly been of world-beating quality thus far, so Fox sought to stir up some chatter they could use to attract interest in Jean as a romantic subject. Because she had no public relationship that could be exploited, the studio tried to gin up the illusion of a romance. They asked her to go to a premiere as the date of an actor. She called Howard and explained why she wouldn’t be available that particular night. He asked her not to go. “Don’t be like that,” she said. “This isn’t pleasure, it’s business,” she said. “It’s like part of my job. I owe the studio that.”

  Hughes disagreed. “You don’t owe anyone anything,” he told her. “Except me.”

  She suddenly felt scared. She didn’t belong to him, she said—her life was still her own. Peters vowed that she’d go to the premiere whether he liked it or not, that he couldn’t stop her from doing her job.

  And then the studio called. They told her she wouldn’t be needed at the premiere after all.

  Clearly, this was Howard’s doing. With a single phone call, he had shown who was really in charge—of her bosses, and of her. Jean rang him back. “Who are you? Do you run the whole world?” Hughes replied, “A little bit of it.”

  Jean misinterpreted Howard’s manipulation as a declaration of intent: he wanted her all to himself, so that must mean he wanted only her. One night, at dinner, Hughes told her he would be going on a business trip. She cheerfully said she’d be happy to join him—they would just need to seal the deal before departure. Hughes was surprised she had any notion that they would marry—ever. “Jean, a man doesn’t get to be my age—to be over forty—without getting married unless—unless there’s some sort of reason,” he told her.