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

by Karina Longworth

Ida sacrificed friends and colleagues in order to save herself, as not a few people in Hollywood did during the Blacklist era. But Ida Lupino’s naming of names feels different from, say, Elia Kazan’s decision to go against friends like Arthur Miller in cooperating with HUAC. For one thing, Kazan openly publicized his cooperation, and spent decades providing rationalizations for it, whereas Lupino presented herself, as Wilde’s commentary makes clear, as an anti-Blacklist, anti-McCarthy liberal. She never publicly acknowledged the collaboration with Blacklist forces that her FBI files reveal.

  Because of her silence, we can only guess at how Lupino would have rationalized providing undercover aid to the forces that successfully oppressed her friends and colleagues. The facts make it clear that, in cooperating with the FBI, Ida was working with the establishment, corrupt though it may have been, in order to create room for herself, and the people close to her that she was able to protect, to subvert that establishment. It’s because Ida Lupino wasn’t subpoenaed and blacklisted that she was able to become the only female feature film director in Hollywood during a decade defined by repression. And her career as a director was defined by the same double act she played in fronting as a good liberal while secretly working with the FBI. In her films and in life, she frequently said one thing as misdirection for the fact that she was doing the opposite. Just as Fox had promoted her off-screen fragility instead of her character in Road House’s uncommon strength, Ida would go on to make films that depicted real social problems created by a society in which women were expected to be subservient to men, and yet she’d use the media to put forward the idea that she believed in traditional gender roles. This subterfuge was necessary in an industry that limited the type of power that women were allowed to have on-screen to the realm of the maternal or the sexual—and, in the latter case, usually demonized or punished women who wielded it.

  In this climate, Ida was not able to make the leap into writing, producing, and directing movies on her own; she needed a male partner to legitimize her. Ida would marry Collier Young in August 1948. Within six months, she was telling the press that they intended to produce movies together. Ida said she had been inspired by Roberto Rossellini, and not just by the low budgets and high creative returns of films like Open City. Lupino met the Italian filmmaker at a party in Los Angeles, while he was in town working on the script for Stromboli. Ida had seen some of Rossellini’s postwar films and was a fan of the way they captured in documentary style what it was like to be left alive in a world that had crumbled all around you. Ida knew this was not the kind of movie she acted in—she didn’t need a lecture about it—but Rossellini gave her one anyway.

  “In Hollywood movies, the star is going crazy, or drinks too much, or he wants to kill his wife,” the Italian Neorealist complained to the movie star. “When are you going to make pictures about ordinary people, in ordinary situations?”

  Lupino could have answered, “Sooner than you think.” Before Stromboli even went into production, Ida announced that she and Collie were starting a production company called the Filmakers, dedicated to making documentary-inspired films about social issues. They’d begin with Not Wanted, a drama about unwed mothers. Ida and Collie commissioned a script from writer Paul Jarrico, but according to Ida, “we only used about four of his pages. I did most of the screenplay.” The goal, she added, was to elicit empathy for a woman who made a mistake, “without being too messagey.”

  It was bold enough for an actress to produce and cowrite a feature film in Hollywood in 1948; the initial plan was that Ida’s involvement in Not Wanted would end there. And then, right before shooting began, the man she had hired to direct Not Wanted, Elmer Clifton, suffered a heart attack. As the producer, Ida said, she had no choice but to step into the director’s chair—she was the only option on such short notice. When speaking to a visiting reporter, Ida insisted she wasn’t “really” directing, just helping out the production while the “real” director recovered, and she didn’t take her entitled full credit on the movie. It was better to downplay rather than brag—to draw attention to herself as what she’d later call a “crusader” would be to risk not being able to get away with the totally uncommon thing she was doing.

  On set, she used her maternal wiles—as she described them—to coax her male crews into doing things her way, craftily muffling evidence of her agency, creativity, and use of power. Sally Forrest, a background dancer in MGM musicals whom Ida had promoted to leading lady in Not Wanted, started calling Ida “Mother” on set, and this caught on and fed into Ida’s public persona as a director who supervised casts and crews as though she were nurturing a brood of offspring. “Darlings, Mother has a problem,” Ida would say to her crew members. “I’d love to do this. Can you do it? It sounds kooky but I want to do it. Now, can you do it for me?” She insisted that she ran a set as though it were a family dinner, not a place of business that everywhere else in the industry was controlled by men.

  Much of the entertainment media seemingly didn’t know what to make of this actress stepping into what was perceived as a man’s job. Right at the beginning of her directing career, the Hollywood Citizen-News ran a candid photograph of Ida on set in conference with film editor William Ziegler, with the sexist fearmongering caption, “Hollywood has succumbed to the modern woman.” Going forward, Lupino’s publicity strategy vis-à-vis her directing career would be to reassure the public that being the only woman succeeding at a man’s job did nothing to detract from her femininity and her success in the traditionally feminine sphere of marriage and motherhood. Having a publicity strategy at all made her more like a movie star than any other then-working director. Certainly, no director of the era worked as hard to diminish the public perception of their own power.

  Ida’s directing career would not have been able to continue if she had not been able to give men in power what they wanted. Not Wanted—a movie that was as critical of men abusing their privilege and shirking responsibility as any of its year—grossed an astounding $1 million against a budget of just over $150,000. These were the kinds of numbers that Hollywood couldn’t ignore.

  As Collie and Ida began work on another screenplay, Never Fear, about an ostracized polio sufferer, their professional partnership began to wear on their marriage. Ida was obsessed with her work, and she counted on Collie to handle the business aspects so that she could deliver creatively. But Collie had a tendency to let her down. Right after she began directing Never Fear, Ida learned—from the assistant director, and not her husband and producing partner—that one of their investors had gone missing. With her hands full directing, Ida turned the matter over to her agent Charles Feldman, who arranged a loan so that the indie production could meet its payroll. Collie’s inability to figure the problem out himself was not auspicious, and in fact, because he never managed to find replacement investors, Ida herself was forced to personally sink her life savings into the movie. Then, though Collie tried, he failed to sell the finished film to exhibitors. Any hopes they had had of being able to function outside of the studio system went down in flames.

  Enter Howard Hughes, who called Ida at just the right time, when she was in desperate need of both cash and an opportunity to prove herself once again. Cash Hughes had; what he needed was content to move through the RKO distribution pipeline. If he had any inkling of the problems with Never Fear, Hughes either didn’t care or was happy to play rescuer. He had seen how large a profit Ida had been able to turn on Not Wanted, and he saw an opportunity to make movies that appealed to his interests (such as sex, particularly illicit sex) while ensuring a full commitment from a filmmaker (Ida) who was in it to fulfill her own social justice ambitions. Hughes also recalled how the political relevancy of Scarface had ultimately bought the film some leeway with the censors, which must have looked like an appealing thing to buy after nearly a decade of life with The Outlaw.

  Hughes offered Ida and Collie a three-picture deal. RKO would provide a $250,000 budget for each film, and the producers and the studio
would split the profits. Hughes reserved the right to approve or block material based on a one-sentence synopsis. When Lupino told him the next film she wanted to make was about a rape, Hughes gave the thumbs-up. Satisfied with the creative aspect of the agreement, she left it to the men to figure out the finer details of the deal.

  Sally Forrest, who starred in three of Lupino’s directorial efforts, got the impression that Hughes had gotten into business with Ida because “he liked her”—meaning that he recalled their romantic history and was hoping there was some kind of future for them. If that was the case, then Ida may have made a mistake in turning the negotiation over to Collie. In a face-to-face with another man involving a woman, Hughes would have been determined to show his own power, regardless of who ended up with the girl.

  Lupino had sought refuge from her marital struggles in a relationship with actor Howard Duff, with whom she had starred in a movie called Woman in Hiding. Perhaps Collie was imagining that he’d win a new lease on his marriage by negotiating a second chance for their production company, but when Ida received the executed contract, a month after the negotiation, she learned that Collie had failed her: he had essentially signed over total control of their films to Hughes and RKO. Of course Hughes had protected his right to approve talent—meaning he could put the kibosh on any actress he didn’t find sexy enough, which put in jeopardy Lupino’s stated plan to cast unknowns “on whom Hollywood won’t take a chance.” But even more upsetting for Lupino, who was still very much in debt thanks to Collie’s failure with the investors on Never Fear, was that her husband had signed a contract permitting Hughes and RKO to collect promotional expenses out of their share of profits; RKO would bill the cost of lavish promotions to the filmmakers, and Ida and Collie’s production company would never see any profits. By the end of that year Ida would file for divorce and publicly take up with Duff, though she and Collie would continue to work together.

  NEARLY A DECADE AFTER Hughes first took control of her career, Faith Domergue got her first serious push as a star. In January 1950, RKO sent Faith on a publicity tour to reintroduce her to the public and the press, because two movies in which she had starred—Where Danger Lives and the much-beleaguered Vendetta—were going to be released that year. The results of this press blitz included a full-color spread in Life magazine and a handy lesson for newbies to the Faith phenomenon: “The last name is pronounced ‘Dough-merg.’”

  This tour was to culminate in a junket at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, in which Domergue was a reluctant participant. “I’d just come off a ten-city tour and I was tired, angry and pregnant,” Faith explained. She told RKO she didn’t want to do the New York press dates. Then Hughes called her and tried to make her feel guilty for all the money he had already spent building her up. “When I told him I was going to have a baby he said, ‘OK, good-bye, Faith,’ and that was the last time I ever heard his voice.”

  Eleven months later, after an investment of more than four years and an astounding $4 million of Hughes’s money, Vendetta would finally hit movie theaters at Christmas 1950. It was deemed by no one to be worth the wait. The New York Times declared the film to be “a garrulous, slow and obvious period piece, weighed down by a profusion of exotic accents, undistinguished dialogue and unconvincing play acting.” “If a star can be made by what seems to be the most extravagant star-making venture in Hollywood history, Faith’s stardom should be assured,” wrote Time magazine’s critic. “But Vendetta is unlikely to be the picture that turns this trick.”

  Time also took note of the one aspect of Vendetta that was truly remarkable: Faith’s character Columba’s “more-than-sisterly affections” for her brother. As cobbled together under Hughes’s supervision from the footage generated by its many directors, the dramatically turgid Vendetta is only interesting as a not-particularly veiled incest fantasy. Early in the film, a gorgeous extreme close-up of Domergue’s giant dark eyes dissolves slowly into the sight of a ship, sailing under ominous skies. Columba’s brother is on that boat, and she confesses that she is imagining “the wind in his hair, his eyes glowing like tiny lamps . . . as only a man’s eyes glow when he is at last toward home—and, when he loves.” She spends the rest of the film mooning over him—sneaking into his bedroom while he’s sleeping, going through his things and caressing his sleeping face; turning to the camera, heartbroken, when he tells her he’s getting married and she should look for a husband—and also trying to convince him to seek murderous vengeance on behalf of their dead father. Though their personal relationship had long since dissolved by the time Vendetta was released, Hughes ensured a certain fidelity from his former “fiancée”: Columba’s love for her brother was the only romance Hughes would allow Faith to engage in on-screen. This was perhaps only fitting as a fulfillment of his original designs for a relationship with a woman he had once referred to as “the child I should have had.” When it came to the air of incest that he injected into his relationships with young women, at least Hughes was consistent.

  After her final falling-out with Hughes over the New York press dates, Faith recalled, “I sat around RKO for two years, doing nothing.” She was loaned to Universal to make The Duel at Silver Creek, and then her husband got a job directing a movie in England starring Joan Fontaine. Persuading RKO publicity man Perry Lieber to lobby on her behalf, Faith managed to break free of her contract. She walked off the RKO lot for the last time, exhilarated, finally “free as I had asked to be, and suddenly alone without the power of him”—Hughes—“behind me.”

  It’s too bad Hughes’s animosity moved him to keep Faith on the shelf, because her other movie of 1950 should have been a star-making vehicle, and unfortunately she was not able to capitalize on how good she was in it. In director John Farrow’s Where Danger Lives, one of only two films Domergue actually filmed for RKO while under contract to the studio, she played Margo, the stunning young wife of a much older rich guy (Claude Rains). The film begins with Margo landing in the ER after a suicide attempt. She seduces the doctor who treats her, Jeff, played by Robert Mitchum as a dumb hunk/easy mark. Jeff is an upstanding citizen with an overly accommodating nurse girlfriend (Maureen O’Sullivan, Farrow’s wife), but Margo’s eyes are black pools, and Jeff falls in. The next thing he knows, he’s drunk and probably concussed, and Margo’s husband is dead. Dizzy from a head injury, Jeff goes along when Margo declares they must flee. Where Danger Lives turns into a vicious skewering of what can go wrong when a trusting man is lured in by the wrong pretty girl. Faith gives an excellent performance, striking the perfect balance between irresistible and terrifying as she’s working her con. At the end of the film, Margo’s ego gets the better of her when Jeff is accused of having killed her husband. “Do you think he could kill a man?” she scoffs. “I did it. I did it alone!” Margo’s the kind of femme fatale bad girl whom you almost want to root for even as she’s destroying lives; she’s a female version of the charismatic male outlaws who populated so many films of the era, except sex isn’t her weakness—it’s her lethal weapon.

  Robert Mitchum was the hottest star at RKO at this point. This was thanks, in a roundabout way, to a never-was glamour girl named Lila Leeds. Leeds had put in time as a hat-check girl and cigarette peddler at Ciro’s nightclub; later she had passed through MGM and Warners as a bit player without making much of an impression. Then one night in 1948 she found herself at a party at Pat De Cicco’s house. There she met a real estate agent named Robin Ford. A few nights later, Robin called Lila and told her he had a friend who was dying to meet her. The friend was Robert Mitchum. Bob was separated from his wife, unhappily. “We’ve had a disagreement,” Mitch told Lila, “but I hope she comes back.” In the meantime, Lila was happy to be a temporary companion to one of the most charismatic men in town. They went to nightclubs, smoked reefer together. Lila was a cool girl, and good company.

  A few weeks later, Lila moved into a new apartment above the Sunset Strip, and she and a girlfriend named Vicky Evans decided to break the place in.
Lila called her pot connection, who had several joints delivered, and then she called Mitchum to invite him and Robin Ford over. The boys didn’t arrive until after midnight, after they had already split a fifth of scotch in Mitchum’s kitchen. Robin, Bob, and Lila lit up joints. Vicky did not. The group heard dogs making noise on the porch. Vicky said, “I’ll take care of them.” She flung open the door and two undercover cops burst inside. The party was over.

  By the time Howard Hughes got the news, it was too late to keep the story out of the papers. There were only three things to do: bail Mitchum out of jail, make sure he kept his mouth shut, and call Jerry Giesler—the high-priced Hollywood attorney who had made sure Errol Flynn and Charlie Chaplin had failed to do time for their alleged sex crimes.

  The LAPD acknowledged that Mitchum had walked into a trap they had been laying for a year, as part of a plan to hold Hollywood accountable for its debauchery. “When sources reported to me that Mitchum was using marijuana I personally started investigating him,” boasted Detective Sergeant Alva Barr. “I followed him to various nightspots. I would tail him from home and follow him around all evening. We followed him to parties at several other movie stars’ homes, then to late eating spots and then would wait until he went to bed. Last night we were investigating Lila Leeds when who should walk in but Mitchum.”

  All the dope smokers were paranoid. Mitchum figured out that his disgruntled former business manager was also Lila’s former agent, which led him to suspect Leeds for setting him up. In turn, Lila suspected that Vicky was behind the sting—after all, she was the one without a joint in her hand, who let the cops in. Mitchum’s sister Julie believed that RKO had set Mitchum up because he had been expressing a desire to quit acting, and that Hughes had engineered the sting so that the mogul could appear to save the actor, and thus leave Mitchum indebted to low-rent RKO, so that he wouldn’t walk away.