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

by Karina Longworth

  Less than a week later, Rossellini would disavow the RKO version of Stromboli, declaring he “renounced all claims to American earnings” on the film. After RKO’s “mutilation” of the cut, he said, “I do not recognize it as my film.” He also called the volcano-spouting advertising “pornographic.”

  This was the same argument made by Stromboli’s greatest antagonist, Congressman Edwin Johnson from Colorado, who in March railed against Ingrid Bergman on the House floor in a rant that conflated the plot of Stromboli with real life. “Now that the stupid film about a pregnant woman and a volcano had exploited America with the usual finesse, to the mutual delight of RKO and the debased Rossellini, are we merely to yawn wearily, greatly relieved that this hideous thing is finished and then forget it?” Johnson asked. “I hope not. A way must be found to protect the people in the future against that kind of gyp.” The New York Herald-Tribune noted the “personal sadness” in the rant by Johnson, who said of Bergman, “She was by very long odds my own favorite actress of all time, and I have been enjoying motion pictures for over forty years.” Johnson described Rossellini as “a treacherous viper,” a “love pirate” and a “money-mad home wrecker.” RKO’s “disgusting publicity campaign,” Johnson added, “permitted no revolting bedroom scene to escape and stressed passion in its worst sense.”

  Johnson was so stirred up by the Bergman-Rossellini scandal that he proposed legislation to exclude “immoral” actors, directors, and producers from the industry by requiring them to purchase a license from the secretary of commerce each time they worked. Each film would require a separate license for distribution, at a rate of $10,000. Johnson took credit for assigning a “special investigator” to the Hollywood beat, to gather information on “mass Hollywood behavior,” which could be used to deny a license to any film made by anyone found to be guilty of “immoral acts.” In other words, it was an ingenious proposal that would allow the U.S. government to both censor and pull a skim from the film industry.

  The MPAA’s Eric Johnston, in opposition to the proposed bill, argued that its end goal was to turn Hollywood into a “police state” and declared, “I do not wish to be nor will I be a commissar of Hollywood’s morals; no one wants that job in a democracy.”

  In the sense that it stirred up a national conversation about sexual mores that inspired ticket sales at a lower cost than he had spent on The Outlaw, to Hughes Stromboli was a success.* As if hoping lightning would strike twice, Hughes began importing Italians. His next Roman target was much prettier than Rossellini.

  That July, after seeing a photo in a magazine of a bikini-clad twenty-three-year-old Italian beauty named Gina Lollobrigida, Hughes had her tracked down and brought from Rome to Los Angeles. His men had promised to send two plane tickets, one for Gina’s husband, Milko Skofic, a Yugoslavian doctor, but they only sent one. Lollobrigida didn’t want to travel so far away without her husband. “But my husband trusted me,” said Lollobrigida. “He said, ‘Go. I don’t want you to say one day that I didn’t let you have a career.’ So I went alone.”

  Gina was excited to see the Hollywood sights, but that wasn’t in the cards. “All I saw was Howard Hughes,” she complained. Gina was given a suite at the Town House Hotel, where guards were stationed outside her door. Unless accompanied by Howard, she wasn’t allowed to leave the room, and Hughes had arranged with the front desk to block her phone calls. A week went by, and another. RKO promised to arrange Milko’s travel to Los Angeles after Gina got settled, but after she had been in the hotel for a month and a half, they still wouldn’t let her send for her husband.

  Finally, Gina recalled, Hughes picked her up at the Town House and told her he was taking her to a “business conference.” The next thing she knew, Gina was in Hughes’s plane and he was flying them to Las Vegas. The only business Hughes wanted to discuss was when Gina was going to ditch her husband. “Hughes asked me to divorce Milko and marry him,” she recalled. “Then I would have a fast, brilliant career, millions, furs, jewels . . . everything I could desire.” Gina refused the proposal and demanded a screen test. Hughes gave her some script pages to read. The dialogue was in praise of divorce.

  After that, Gina demanded that she be allowed to return to Rome and her husband. A plane ticket was booked, but before she went, Hughes threw her a farewell party at her hotel. At 3 A.M., after much champagne, Hughes presented Gina with a contract. Tipsy and tired—and unable to read more than a few words in English—Gina asked if someone could explain to her what she was signing. Satisfied with the explanation she got, Gina signed and went to bed. Back in Rome, Gina costarred in a hit Italian comedy called Bread, Love, and Dreams, and in John Huston’s Italian-set Beat the Devil. Soon Gina was among the biggest stars in Europe. Though there was demand for her to come to America and star in Hollywood movies, she couldn’t do it—the contract she had signed with Hughes precluded her from working in Hollywood for anyone but him, and she refused to work for him.

  Gina’s costar in Bread had been Vittorio De Sica, who was also the director of the Neorealist masterpiece The Bicycle Thief. In early 1952, Hughes brought De Sica from Rome to Hollywood to negotiate a contract to direct films at RKO. Asked why he would sign with Hughes, “a man seemingly devoid of artistic ambitions,” De Sica responded through a translator, “Because he is the only American producer who had made an offer with no strings attached.” No films ended up being attached, either. “I lost a year being under contract to that madman Howard Hughes,” De Sica later lamented. “He kept me a whole month in Hollywood without showing up. My contract forced me to stay in Los Angeles, and people kept saying ‘Don’t you like Los Angeles?’ ‘Sure,’ I answered, ‘but I want to work. I’m not used to being kept, like a prostitute.’”

  Chapter 20

  “Mother” and a Male Idol

  In the years since Ida Lupino and Howard Hughes first knew each other—and since the death of Ida’s close friend Thelma Todd, ex-wife of enigmatic Hughes’s aide Pat De Cicco—Lupino had lived several lifetimes. Gone was the bleached-blond nymphet who had been brought to Hollywood to serve as an answer to Jean Harlow. The Ida of the early 1930s, as columnist Gladys Hall put it, “was curved and provocative and always exciting but she wasn’t likable. She was blonde and photogenic and the delight of cameramen and poster artists; she was movie-starrish like mad but she got nowhere in particular.”

  She was also bored. One day on the set of the 1937 film Artists and Models, future gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, then an actress, asked Ida if she thought she wanted to be a star for the long haul. Ida said she guessed she did, although she “didn’t like all of this waiting around and nothing happening.” Hedda suggested Ida go for a new look—or, rather, her natural look.

  “Why don’t you scrub your face, get all that stuff off, and become a real actress—if that’s what you want,” Hedda suggested. “Otherwise you’ll be just another little starlet who fell by the wayside.”

  Ida then let her natural light brown hair grow in, and she shed the baby fat that had passed for curves in her teenage temptress phase. “I was such a wretchedly unhappy little painted doll,” Ida admitted after the transformation. Proudly, she said, “I have, deliberately, made myself an ugly girl.”

  Though she was working steadily and collecting a weekly salary that matched the average of what many Americans earned in a year, she had become disillusioned with the kinds of roles available to her at Paramount, and when her contract ended, she refused to renew it. She was tired, as she’d put it later, “of always being a coy thing lounging in a boat, listening to someone sing romantic songs—even at $1750 a week.” Now that she looked like a serious woman (at all of age twenty), she wanted work to match.

  The film that turned Lupino’s career around was The Light That Fails, in which she played a slattern turned muse to a painter who is going blind. After that, Ida was offered a contract at Warner Bros., which hoped to groom her as a new version of their top female star and best actress, Bette Davis. The notoriously ch
oosey Davis would decline to appear in all but the most attractive projects, so Warners needed a cheaper Bette Davis “type” to whom they could throw Bette’s scraps, so that those lesser films still got made and still fed the maw of the distribution cycle. But judging by the number of fine performances Lupino gave in better-than-average movies while at Warner Bros., either Bette Davis’s sloppy seconds weren’t half bad, or Ida was able to elevate subpar material into something special. These supposedly lower specimens of art let her do more interesting work than most other stars her age would or could have.

  These releases included a series of early noirs like They Drive by Night and High Sierra, both costarring Humphrey Bogart. In They Drive by Night, she’s Lana, the bitter, bored, unfulfilled wife of a much older, boozed-up businessman. Nursing a crush on truck driver George Raft, the desperately unhappy Lana kills her husband, and then blames the murder on Raft when he won’t love her. At the end of the movie Lana is revealed to be insane—a very 1940s Hollywood way of defanging such threatening female desire and vengeance, marking it as an aberration, and not an extreme example of the dissatisfaction of “normal” women the nation over.

  In 1942, Ida was cast in The Hard Way, a film about two sisters who escape their dreary small town poverty when one pushes the other into show business. The film was based on the relationship between Ginger Rogers and her mother, Lela, close enough for recognition with specific details changed so that the Rogers women couldn’t protest. The Hard Way is luridly powerful even putting aside the Rogers connections, but Ida considered it the nadir of her acting career. On the set, Lupino collapsed in exhaustion. Doctors told her she needed six months of rest; Warner Bros. gave her two weeks.

  To add to her stress, Ida’s beloved father died while she was making the movie. Stanley Lupino had been a mentor to his daughter, who had dreamed that someday his daughter would write and direct movies, as well as act in them. At twenty-four years old, Ida Lupino became determined to honor her late dad by becoming a director.

  Nothing would happen with that dream for a few years. In the meantime, after a few box-office disappointments, Warner Bros. lost interest in her as star. Unable to agree on a new contract, in 1947 she was cut loose. Shortly thereafter, Lupino (whose first marriage, to Louis Hayward, had fallen apart when he returned from World War II stricken with post-traumatic stress disorder and told her he wanted to start a new life, away from Hollywood), began dating Collier “Collie” Young, then assistant to Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn. A frustrated yes-man to an unforgiving mogul, Collie shared Ida’s desire to make movies without having to answer to anyone. She took a tentative step toward this by partnering with her new agent, Charles Feldman, to acquire the rights to a novel that she and Collie loved. Feldman flipped the rights to Fox on the condition that Ida star in the movie. That movie was Road House, in which Ida played a tough broad in a love triangle with two men.

  In Road House, in character as an itinerant chanteuse making her debut at a roadside bar and grill, Ida sang a throaty, partially spoken version of “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” This performance makes an immediate impression on the roadhouse’s regulars. “She reminds me of the first woman who slapped my face,” a male onlooker marvels. As if to counter her potentially controversial on-screen image of strength and hard living, Fox put out a number of press releases about Ida’s body, stressing its real-life fragility. Claiming that her usual weight was 105 pounds (at a height of five foot three), her studio explained that Ida needed to gorge herself on things like “ginger ale and cream” and “undiluted condensed milk and toast” while shooting a movie in order to maintain an “eye-pleasing” weight of 115 pounds. These details were deemed by the studio to be useful to the promotion of Road House, despite the fact that the movie had nothing to do with Ida’s character’s diet or weight—except in the sense that all movies were, at least subtextually, “about” the bodies of the actresses in them.

  One of Ida’s male costars in Road House was Cornel Wilde, who would later recall that on the set, he and Lupino bonded over their shared concern over “that louse, [Senator] Joe McCarthy.” As many have, Wilde was conflating Joseph McCarthy and what would become McCarthyism with the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or HUAC. McCarthy had not yet begun hunting red witches in 1947, but the HUAC investigation into Hollywood was in full swing.

  Ida was well aware that people who had joined antifascist and even marginally left-wing or pro-Russian organizations during World War II were finding themselves with a target on their backs now that the Soviets were considered the United States’ mortal enemy. Ida, who considered herself to be a New Deal Democrat, began to suspect that she was herself under investigation in 1947, when she faced a roadblock in her application to become an American citizen. After completing most of the process, she was interviewed by an agent from the Immigration and Naturalization Service who asked her if she had ever been a member of any antifascist organizations. Aware that there were some red flags on her record that might be holding up her citizenship application, Ida contacted the FBI to explain her association with certain known Hollywood leftists and their organizations. In so doing, she proceeded to name the names of those associates and their organizations.

  In an interview with Bureau agents on May 6, 1947, Lupino explained that actor Sterling Hayden, a blond pretty boy who had made only two films in Hollywood before enlisting in the Marines and serving through the war, had held meetings on his yacht, with the intention of luring Ida and others into the Communist fold. Hayden had subscribed Ida and two actresses who lived at her house to the Communist paper People’s World, which explained why Ida had three copies of multiple issues of the rag stacked up in her closet. She further told the FBI that she had asked Hayden what he would do, should the United States go to war with Russia, and he told her he “would leave the United States and go to another country where he could continue to carry on his work for the Communist cause.”

  Ida explained that she had no interest in joining that cause, and had continued associating with Hollywood leftists and attending meetings of groups where she suspected there was Communist infiltration, including the Screen Actors Guild and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP), in order to gather information on the extent of subversive forces in Hollywood. She told the FBI that she believed Karen Morley—the actress who had introduced Ann Dvorak to Howard Hawks, thus helping Dvorak get cast in Scarface— to be a Communist, and she suspected the same of Alexander Knox (who costarred with Ida in The Sea Wolf) and Charles Coburn (who was known to be a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a group of Hollywood conservatives who aided and abetted HUAC). In a closed meeting with Bureau agents, she also named the names of directors and writers Robert Rossen, Howard Da Silva, Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, and Donald Ogden Stewart. In the future, she would tell the FBI that she believed the Committee for the First Amendment, a group spearheaded by Humphrey Bogart and John Huston to protest HUAC’s subpoenas of screenwriters, had been infiltrated by commies. Ida would also identify a number of active members of the Screen Actors Guild as potential Communists, including Hume Cronyn, Lloyd Goff, Larry Parks, and Anne Revere. She agreed she would be “willing to assist if necessary in attacking these questionable groups.”

  The FBI, while appreciative of Lupino’s willingness to inform on her Hollywood colleagues, also approached her with “extreme caution,” as one report explained, “in view of her past contacts with persons of known Communist sympathies as well as the manner with which she has suddenly become interested in cooperating with the FBI.” The deal was fraught on Ida’s end, too. In December 1947, Lupino became concerned that her continued membership in ICCASP, which she maintained in order to act as a spy on the inside for the FBI, would inspire HUAC to subpoena her. The group was ostensibly devoted to keeping liberal/progressive ideals alive in Hollywood postwar and post-Roosevelt, though it also alle
gedly served as a place for Hollywood Communists to attempt to influence non-Communist liberals. The FBI recommended she continue to pretend to be a legitimate member of the organization in order to investigate it.

  In the end, Ida Lupino was not subpoenaed by HUAC. Revere, Morley, Parks, Rossen, Da Silva, Trumbo, Maltz, Stewart, and Hayden were.

  Her willingness to reveal these names to the FBI is difficult to reconcile, and not just because of her record of apparently liberal politics (in addition to her conversations with Wilde that led him to believe that he and Lupino were on the same, anti-HUAC side, Lupino spoke frequently of her adoration for FDR, who she believed saved America with the New Deal). Though she may have been legitimately worried about the Communist infiltration of Hollywood, as some people were, in the case of Hayden specifically she was informing on a man whom she frequently saw socially. Those times on Hayden’s yacht that Lupino characterized to the FBI as grim sessions of Communist proselytizing were painted by Lupino’s biographer William Donati, who worked in cooperation with Ida, as carefree jaunts that would often end with Ida cheerfully rejecting the married Hayden’s invitation to spend the night with him.