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

by Karina Longworth

  In August, Bergman announced that she was separating from Petter Lindstrom. Over the next four months, Lindstrom repeatedly refused to grant his wife a divorce. In December, Louella Parsons published an anonymous tipster’s report that Bergman was six months’ pregnant with Rossellini’s child.

  Who was the tipster? According to Bergman’s publicist Joseph Steele, it was Hughes. Steele had gone to see Hughes at the Beverly Hills Hotel—then Hughes’s primary residence and the site where he was conducting much business and pleasure at the time—to confide in him about Bergman’s pregnancy. “What I have to say is intended solely for your information,” Steele had stipulated, before announcing that Bergman was going to have her lover’s baby, and that she and Rossellini desperately needed money—was there any way RKO could rush the picture out into theaters before news of the pregnancy broke? In the hotel room, Hughes agreed to keep the matter in confidence, and to, as Steele put it, “[g]ive Ingrid a break.” Louella Parsons’s column came out the next morning.

  Steele was wrong to trust Hughes—wrong to believe that he would be loyal to Bergman and Rossellini, wrong to think he would do this couple a favor when he could do things his way. After all, Bergman had been rejecting Hughes for years, and now she had taken up with this Italian—a man who had no money, was hardly a looker, and, most offensive to Hughes, was a foreigner. Hughes felt particularly antagonistic toward Rossellini, who had tried to make Stromboli with RKO’s money but without his involvement, going so far as to remain incommunicado with Hughes and his execs during filming, and refusing to allow the studio to see footage.

  By now, Hughes believed that a scandal that sexualized a female star could be a gold mine if done correctly. Bergman’s dilemma, contrary to Breen’s warning, could, in Hughes’s eyes, pave the way to profits. If his maneuvering caused pain for Rossellini and made Bergman feel even more heavily the consequences of her choosing a man other than Hughes at the same time, so much the better.

  TERRY MOORE WAS SITTING in the darkened bar of the ornate, old-world style Beverly Wilshire Hotel with Johnny Machio, an agent, and Terry’s then-boyfriend, Jerome Courtland, nicknamed “Cojo.” Nineteen years old, petite and devoutly Mormon, Terry didn’t drink; she was at the bar to see and be seen. The agent directed Terry’s attention to a man in the bar, sitting alone.

  “There’s Howard Hughes!” Machio cried out.

  Machio invited Hughes to come sit with them. Hughes, who also wasn’t a drinker, came over and ordered a round of 7-Ups for the table. It seemed like happenstance, that Machio had run into a lonely-looking friend and, feeling bad for him, invited him to join their table. But, as Terry would soon learn, nothing was happenstance when it came to Howard Hughes.

  Terry Moore’s real name was Helen Koford. She had made her screen debut at age eleven in 1940, and since then she had appeared in about one film per year, gradually graduating from an uncredited role as a young Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, to the human star of Son of Lassie. Her stage name had been given to her by her studio, Columbia, to help promote The Return of October, a 1948 young adult film in which she starred as a teenage girl named Terry who believes her dead uncle has been reincarnated as a horse. The studio had hoped the change would help conflate in the minds of the public the childish character with the of-age actress who played her. The stage name stuck, although not everyone would use it—Howard Hughes would always call Terry “Helen.”

  Terry would later find out that her first meeting with Hughes had been a setup. He had seen The Return of October and, according to Terry, had fallen in love with her. Almost forty years later, Terry still thought that horse-loving teen was the best role she had ever had, and she also, apparently without irony, romanticized the role the film had played in her love life. “There aren’t many girls who look naive enough to believe a racehorse could be her uncle,” she later wrote. “This was the quality Howard saw and fell in love with.”

  With her honeyed brown hair, chipmunk cheeks, and easy grin, Terry did not look like most of the women Hughes pursued. She was sunshine where they were noir. And, though significantly older than Faith Domergue had been on her first meeting with Hughes, Terry hoped her real age didn’t show. (“There is only one thing I lie about,” Moore would say under oath in a deposition in 1979, “and that is my age.”) Terry was having so much success as a child star that she hoped she’d be able to stall off visible maturation for a while longer. With the right styling, she could still pass for a young teenager.

  By that afternoon at the Beverly Wilshire, Terry had already filmed the lead in an RKO movie called Mighty Joe Young, a King Kong retread made by much of the same creative team as the 1933 original film. Terry played Jill, a young woman who grows up on a ranch in Africa raising a gorilla cub as a pet. Enter Max O’Hara (Robert Armstrong, who played a similar role in Kong) a middle-aged rich guy with a vague Texas accent and a mustache (shades of Hughes), who goes on safari to drum up publicity for his new Hollywood nightclub, where he plans to showcase the wild animals he’s captured. When O’Hara discovers Jill and her now fully grown pet Joe, the tycoon promises her fame and adventure if she’ll just sign a contract allowing him to bring her and Joe to Hollywood. Terry first appears twenty-four minutes into the movie, confronting one of O’Hara’s hired cowboys, who is pointing a gun at Joe. She wears her hair in two ponytails, tied with bows behind her round, lineless face. Her gingham dress, accented at the waist with another bow, is demure but does nothing to conceal her well-developed figure. The next time we see her, she’s wearing a full-skirted, low-cut, and yet still girlish evening gown. She has the face of a child and the body of a woman. Her character is not sophisticated, and neither is Terry’s performance, but it doesn’t have to be. All she has to do is evince unconditional love for the big, misunderstood ape.

  At their first meeting at the Beverly Wilshire, Hughes told Terry he had bought RKO, and thus Mighty Joe Young now belonged to him. “He couldn’t take his eyes off me,” she recalled. “It was terrifying. He was an old man of forty-three. He needed a shave. His collar was frayed. His mustache was scraggly. I was afraid of what the kids at Glendale High would say if they saw me out with an old man like this.” That Terry, a professional movie actress who was pushing twenty, thought high school students were more her peers than Howard Hughes testifies to the sizable generation gap between the millionaire and the new apple of his eye. Terry also noticed that, though they had never met before that she could recall,* Hughes “seemed to know a great deal about my life in Glendale,” where she lived with her parents and younger brother. Soon she would realize that Hughes was having her surveilled.

  Any qualms she had about this at the time had vanished by thirty years later, when Terry first began speaking openly about her and Hughes’s relationship. “That was the beginning of our long love affair,” Moore swooned later. “He raised me. I was a baby.” Nearly a decade after Faith Domergue, Hughes began another relationship that would compel a young woman to describe their romance using the language of paternal nurturing, apparently unperturbed by the incestual overtones.

  Hughes soon became a ubiquitous presence in young Terry’s life. The next week he took her and her boyfriend Cojo out flying. Then Howard and Terry began talking on the phone, for hours at a time. Soon Cojo was out of the picture. Still, Howard and Terry’s excursions were usually chaperoned by Terry’s mother, Louella “Blue” Koford, whom Howard also wooed, in his way. At one point, Terry remembered later, “he actually put his head in my mother’s lap and cried. He always said, ‘Helen has you. I don’t have anybody. I am an orphan.’” Terry related this anecdote as evidence of Howard’s charm and intimacy with her family, apparently oblivious to the strangeness of a boyfriend who was old enough to be her father getting so physically close to her own mother.

  By the spring of 1949, according to Terry, she and Hughes were dating full-time. “We would go to the Beverly Hills Hotel often for dinner, sometimes the Town House [Hotel], to the Cocoanut Grove, for dancing. We woul
d go bowling. We just went everywhere where normal people go. And we would go to Goldwyn Studios,” to watch movies deep into the night.

  Gerald “Jeff” Chouinard, one of the private detectives Hughes employed, recalled that some of Howard and Terry’s dates were not “where normal people go,” but instead in Howard’s parked car, a Chevrolet that had seen better days (by this point, Hughes had traded in the flashy sports cars of his youth for a fleet of unfashionable, anonymous sedans). Hughes would drive to the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank and wait for Terry across the street—a happy medium between his stomping grounds of Beverly Hills and Moore’s family home in Glendale. Blue would drive Terry to these rendezvous. Upon reaching the predetermined street corner, Terry would get out of her mother’s car, which was parked a respectful half-block distance away, and go sit in Hughes’s car for an hour, maybe ninety minutes. Then Terry would return to her mother’s car and go back to Glendale. In other words, there were no sleepovers.

  According to Moore, between the spring and fall of 1949, Hughes proposed marriage to her many times. “I mean, he was really begging me to marry him,” Moore recalled later. The first few times, Terry said no. “I didn’t want to get married at that point. I was more interested in my career at that point than I was Howard.” Marriage to Hughes, she was sure, would be bad for her as an actress. She explained, “I was afraid because of the types of roles I played, that his image would hurt mine.” She was all too aware of Hughes’s reputation as a “playboy,” who had been involved with “big stars, stars who were stars before I was born.” (Terry was born in 1929; the only star Hughes was involved with who was a star before she was born was Billie Dove.) She was also worried that he wouldn’t take his marriage vows seriously. She told him that he would need to be faithful to her if they got married, and he told her, “Of course.”

  “He always said ‘Yes,’” she recalled. “He lied a lot, but I didn’t know that then.”

  Though Hughes certainly had other women in his life, there’s no reason to doubt Moore’s claims that he repeatedly proposed to Terry; as we’ve seen, he’d frequently promise marriage to women as a way of seducing them, and secreting them away from the dating pool. It was also no surprise that he refused to take no for an answer. “Howard didn’t like rejection,” Terry noted. “The fact that I didn’t want to marry him made him ask me all the time.”

  Marriage wasn’t the only thing Terry was saying no to. The twenty-year-old was savvy enough to understand the motivation behind Hughes’s frequent proposals. “What he figured was by asking me to marry him he could get me, you know, to go to bed with him and, you know, there was no way.” Terry considered herself to be a devout Mormon. She still lived with her parents. She would not be convinced to let go of her spiritual ideas about sex and marriage so easily.

  One night, before her midnight curfew, Howard took Terry up to Mulholland Drive, to a spot where teenagers went to neck. They sat in his old beater of a car, looking out onto the expanse of the San Fernando Valley, a black velvet kingdom studded with rhinestone lights. “Only God can marry us,” the forty-four-year-old man told the twenty-year-old girl.

  “And so,” Terry recalled, “[w]e, you know, went on our knees and had a ceremony.”

  This “ceremony” did not accomplish what Hughes meant it to. According to Terry, afterward “he wanted me to go home with him and I said, ‘Uh-uh. I feel married now but, no, we don’t sleep together.’” She wanted, she said, “to feel legally married before I went to bed with him.”

  In November 1949, a few months after RKO released Mighty Joe Young, and about a year after their first meeting, Hughes called Terry and told her they were going out onto his yacht to get married. “We are going to do it your way,” he told her.

  He picked up Terry and her mother and flew the women to where his yacht, the Hilda, was docked in San Diego. The boat sailed out toward Mexico. Once in international waters, the captain of the boat, Carl Flynn, presided over a brief ceremony. The only paperwork documenting the marriage was an entry made by Flynn into his captain’s log. Now Terry had the veneer of legality that she needed. She and Hughes spent the night together in the boat’s stateroom.

  When they returned to Los Angeles, Terry considered herself Hughes’s wife, but she refused to wear his ring. She didn’t want anyone to know they were married, because she was still concerned about her career. Instead he gave her a string of pearls and a diamond brooch that he said had belonged to his mother, explaining they had been given to Allene by Howard Sr. as a wedding present.

  Terry dreamed that she and Howard would someday have a second wedding, in the Mormon temple, because in her faith “we marry for all time and eternity, not ’til death do us part,’” she explained. “If you marry in the temple, that is an eternal marriage.” This would require that Howard convert, which she hoped he would.

  ON JANUARY 24, 1950, STROMBOLI had a bad test screening in Long Beach. “There was a lot of enthusiasm when the name came on the screen,” reported the theater manager, “but the picture wasn’t accepted too well. There’s a lot of Italian in it.” At least Bergman “got a few whistles in one scene when she got out of bed in her slip.”

  The next day, Father Félix Morlión, an Italian priest whom Rossellini had credited as cowriter of the Stromboli story, wrote to Hughes to plead with him to reverse certain edits the RKO chief had ordered. Morlión was particularly opposed to the last scene, which minimized the impact of Bergman’s character’s religious conversion and communion with God, and included a dubbed line that the priest believed was a too-cute reference to Bergman and Rossellini’s off-screen drama, one that would inspire jeers rather than awe: “God, make me a good wife!”

  Hughes’s cuts to Stromboli were his attempt to make the film more commercial; the MPAA’s files suggest the censors viewed the film once, could not find issue with its actual content, and asked for no cuts before issuing a seal of approval. (In the sense that Stromboli was about a feisty, independent-minded, morally dubious woman who is transformed into subservience by an encounter with God, the film itself, as opposed to the scandal around it, fit comfortably within the Production Code’s essentially God-fearing worldview.)

  The censors did, however, object to Stromboli’s ads. Because Stromboli was nothing if not an art film, Hughes decided the best way to promote it would be to trick gossip readers into thinking it was something like a documentary of Bergman and Rossellini’s scandalous affair. Hughes had advance newspaper ads for the film produced, featuring the film’s titular volcano ejaculating lava under the tagline, “Raging Island . . . Raging Passions!” The MPAA pushed back, because they had no choice—they were receiving angry letters from everyday people, such as one from a group of school administrators in Abilene, Texas, remarking on the “advertisements in nationally circulated newspapers written in such a way as to capitalize subtly, though flagrantly, upon this immoral and illicit romance” and calling on the MPAA’s Johnston to “prohibit the showing of the film Stromboli and other pictures picturing persons whose conduct is morally shocking.” A full generation after the scandals that had brought Will Hays to Hollywood, history was repeating itself.

  The MPAA went looking for reasons to ban the Stromboli ads and punish Hughes. However, they couldn’t find a legitimate excuse. “The circumstances under which these ads have appeared have caused people both in and out of our industry to see trouble in them,” wrote Gordon S. White, who administered the Code office’s regulations on advertising, “. . . [but] the content of the ads actually presented no specific Code violation.” The censors were also wary of giving Hughes the attention he craved. White recommended that they “add no fuel to the fire which [Hughes] fans.”

  Hughes didn’t know what the MPAA was discussing internally, but the rumblings that the censors were going to censure him made Howard feel more defiant. Already frustrated to be stuck with a movie that made everyone think of adultery but didn’t include any actual sex, when the censors recoiled against his a
dvertising, he didn’t want to go down without a fight. He sought advice from an unlikely source: Dore Schary. They met at a Hughes Tool plant in Culver City, where Hughes’s employees were hard at work crafting weapons destined for use in the upcoming Korean War. After admitting that he already considered the acquisition of RKO to be a mistake, and a distraction away from the work he really wanted to be doing, Hughes asked Schary for his opinion on the Stromboli ads—was he right or wrong to stick to his guns? “Howard, I think you are wrong,” Schary said. “They are vulgar.” Hughes thanked Schary for his input. He withdrew the ads.

  The consequences of the affair, however, were just beginning. By the time Bergman gave birth to Rossellini’s son on February 2, their film had already been banned in Miami by the Dade County Juvenile Council, and had been refused by theater owners in Memphis, Indiana and Minnesota. Though the Catholic Legion of Decency declared Stromboli “acceptable,” individual theaters and local groups called for boycotts and bans, solely because Bergman’s personal life was deemed immoral. But Variety reported unusual interest in Stromboli in major cities. In New York, “evening business was at capacity in all situations,” and within its first week it had grossed more than $1.2 million, although business dropped off after the first few days. In Chicago, a crowd of three hundred ticket buyers, mostly women, started lining up in snow and sleet on icy sidewalks forty minutes before the 8:45 A.M. show. Said the theater manager, “It’s doing better than The Outlaw.”