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

by Karina Longworth

  If Hughes did indeed have such influence over Zanuck, it could help to explain why another Fox contract star and Hughes girlfriend, Jean Peters, was cast so selectively, and (with the notable exceptions of Lancaster in Apache and Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata), generally opposite less-than-strapping male stars such as Joseph Cotten and Richard Widmark.

  In the 1930s, Hughes had enjoyed overlapping relationships with Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers while the actresses were rivals at RKO. Now that he owned RKO, there were among the women in his life two who were professional rivals at another studio.

  At least, it was a rivalry in Terry Moore’s mind. “If Jean Peters walked into make-up while I was there, or if we would pass each other on the lot,” Terry recalled, “we’d both look in opposite directions and would ignore each other.” Terry would find herself unable to ignore Jean Peters for much longer.

  Yet, if Jean was bothered by Terry’s presence in Hughes’s life, Peters didn’t let on. Peters was, after all, a woman of mystery—and it may have been this ability to keep to herself everything going on behind her beautiful facade that gave her the ultimate edge in the fight for the most practiced smoke screen artist in town.

  Chapter 23

  “A Movie Studio Filled with Beautiful Girls Who Draw Pay but Seldom Work”

  In the fall of 1953, Howard Hughes’s habit of starlet collecting turned tragic. A nineteen-year-old girl named Rene Rosseau slit both of her wrists with a double-edged blade in her Hughes-sponsored apartment at the Sunset Tower Hotel, three months after arriving in Hollywood by way of Boston.

  When deputies of the Hollywood sheriff’s department arrived to care for the teenager, who survived the wrist-slashing attempt, Rene reportedly told them she was “despondent” because of her “star status,” or lack thereof. While she was being questioned by the cops, she attempted to leap out the window. “I tried to restrain her and was bitten on the forefinger of my right hand,” said Deputy Sergeant Henry A. Cramer.

  Among the first on the scene was Walter Kane, one of Hughes’s “talent agents,” and Kane’s wife, actress Lynn Bari. Bari took credit for throwing the would-be suicide weapon out the window where Rosseau couldn’t get it. Kane called Dr. Norman F. Crane, who called Verne Mason. “She’s going to be all right in a few days,” Mason said of Rosseau. “She went on a bender last night and got upset.”

  There is no IMDb entry for “Rene Rosseau.” If this actress went on to work in Hollywood, she did so under another name, but she almost certainly never worked for Howard Hughes—as was the case with most of the “starlets” he signed. Her suicide attempt raised the first red flag that the local media, used to accepting quid pro quo and manipulations from Hughes and his publicists, dared to actually print. “Hughes Starlet Tries to Kill Self!” blared the Los Angeles tabloid the Mirror on its November 19 cover, linking Rene’s desperation to her contract with Hughes. The Mirror’s inside headline put the onus not on Hughes, but on the starlet: “Hughes Starlet, Impatient to Be Star, Tries Death” implied that the suicide attempt had been not exactly a cry for help, but a plea for publicity.

  HUGHES MAY HAVE COME out victorious in the fight against Paul Jarrico, but his legal troubles were just beginning. Three RKO shareholders (Eli B. Castleman, his wife, Marion V. Castleman, and Louis Feuerman) filed suit against Hughes and RKO, demanding the return of $1 million they believed was improperly spent under his management. Among other things, they levied an attack on Jane Russell, who they asserted did not deserve the $100,000 per film that Hughes was paying her. “It is the consensus of motion picture critics that the acting ability and talent of Jane Russell are of a minor nature and values that the payment by Radio Pictures [RKO] of $100,000 to Hughes Tool for her services for a feature picture constituted a waste of corporate funds,” read the complaint.

  The problem was perhaps not Russell’s “acting ability and talent” so much as the structure of the deals Hughes made to lend her to other studios. Probably without realizing it, in an interview seven months earlier, Russell had offered praise of Hughes that would damn him with RKO’s stockholders. “You should see the kinds of terms he gets when he loans me to an outside studio,” Russell said. “A fantastic sum of money.” The shareholders understood that RKO was an outside studio: since Jane’s contract was with Hughes himself, Hughes personally pocketed a loan-out fee every time she was cast in an RKO movie.

  Soon came another lawsuit, this one brought by minority shareholders Louis Schiff and Jacob Sacks, which sought to put the studio and its remaining theatrical holdings into receivership. This suit alleged that Hughes “operates both corporations as though they are solely owned by him,” and cited four more problematic actress contracts, with Gina Lollobrigida, Merle Oberon, Ann Sheridan, and a French ballerina named Jeanmaire. Schiff and Sacks claimed that Hughes signed these actresses “solely for the purposes of furthering his personal interests.”

  At a time when RKO was struggling to produce movies of any quality, and in any quantity, both groups of litigious shareholders believed Hughes should pay for what they perceived to be a wanton waste of money on useless assets. Certainly it was true that the four performers named in the Schiff-Sacks lawsuit had not actually starred in movies for RKO. But with Jane Russell, the Castlemans picked the wrong target for their frustration. By the time the lawsuits started coming to court in the fall of 1953, Russell was looking more valuable than ever.

  In July 1953, she had a smash hit with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a musical directed by Howard Hawks based very loosely on the satirical fiction that had made Red-Headed Woman scribe Anita Loos a literary star. Jane and Marilyn Monroe starred as showgirl best friends with opposite talents: Monroe’s Lorelai demanded diamonds in exchange for her total objectification by men, while Russell’s Dorothy eschewed gold-digging—instead, it was she who did the objectifying of men. Russell’s big solo number in Gentlemen, “Isn’t Anyone Here for Love?,” sung by Jane amid a bevy of male dancers playing the U.S. Olympic Team, reverses the typical dynamic of a Hollywood musical, in which a woman dressed to be ogled by men is depicted as the passive prisoner of the male gaze. Here Russell, outfitted in a full-length black jumpsuit that in all but a few shots obscures her famous cleavage, sings of her desire for men (plural, not just one man) while openly admiring their bodies, which are barely clad in skintight nude-colored exercise shorts. “I like big muscles, and red corpuscles,” Russell drawls, and if while doing so she thrusts her own assets, it seems less a gesture to display them to men in the audience, and more to advertise her desire to the totally oblivious men on-screen.

  “Isn’t Anyone Here for Love?” is an essentially comic number, but compared to what Russell had done on-screen before, particularly in The Outlaw, it’s also ideologically potent. If her character in The Outlaw embodied sex under duress, her character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes boldly presented a woman owning her sexuality, and embracing it as a source of fun and pleasure, without the horrible consequences usually dealt to sexually active women during the Code era (in other words, this was the polar opposite of Kitty Foyle). Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would become the pinnacle of Jane’s screen career, and the actress had a simple explanation why: “It was the first time I played Jane Russell.”

  Buoyed in part by costar Monroe’s ascendant career, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes opened in July and dominated the summer box office, on its way to becoming the ninth-highest-grossing movie of 1953; its $5 million take was miles beyond anything RKO had released that year. So come October 1953, when Hughes was deposed in the Castleman lawsuit, he was understandably defensive of his handpicked star. Russell’s contract, Hughes stated, was worth more than any contract held by RKO.

  But what of four actresses who were reportedly “put on the payroll for [Hughes’s] own interests”? Gina Lollobrigida was offered a contract, Hughes said, but he insisted they had not paid the actress a salary since she had left for Rome immediately after signing and had not agreed to return to work for RKO. Asked if he had “any
personal interest” in Jeanmaire, whom RKO had signed to a contract on Hughes’s recommendation but was never cast in a film, Hughes said, “It is true I met this young lady and thought she was very charming, as are many young ladies, but certainly it had no bearing on my recommendation.” The other two actresses, Merle Oberon and Ann Sheridan (both of whom were on the downslope of careers begun in the early sound era), Hughes insisted he barely knew. He did acknowledge that “a number of student actresses were employed” by RKO under his watch, and that these actresses were held back from being cast in movies until “it was considered that they had the potentiality of talent and the potentiality of success.” He likened the contracting of such “students” to his discovery of Russell and Harlow, two “unknown actresses . . . who achieved considerable promise.”

  When the line of questioning aimed to get Hughes to admit his lack of expertise in the making, marketing, and distribution of motion pictures by demonstrating that he was only sporadically involved in that business between 1932 when Scarface came out, and the day a decade and a half later when he took over RKO, Hughes spun his inactivity into business savvy. “There was a pause,” in production, he acknowledged, “because the United States was going through what was being generally referred to as the Depression. Nobody made motion pictures during that time unless he was either a fool or he had to, one or the other.”

  Hughes presented the position that he was doing RKO a favor by running it, and by lending them his famous talent for finding female talent. He had had no choice but to take an active role in management, he said, because the studio couldn’t afford to hire anyone who would be better for the job. He claimed he had told the board of directors in 1948 that he would accept the role of managing director, but he “could not and was not willing to give it my full time.” Understanding that this was no way to run a studio, Hughes said his priority since 1948 had been “to find somebody who could take over the duties of production of RKO in whom I would have confidence and who could relieve me of this burden.” Hughes said he offered the job to a number of men, including Leland Hayward and David O. Selznick, but they wanted compensation that RKO couldn’t afford.

  Hughes did not mention, during his deposition, something called “Project Baker,” which had been RKO’s internal attempt to “rank motion picture production personnel according to their qualifications for the position of RKO executive in-charge-of-production.” This report used a very unique, though chiefly qualitative, algorithm: (Projected achievement = potentiality factor x potential years); “Potentiality factor” was determined by dividing “past achievement” by “years experience in [the] industry.” Project Baker produced a list of thirty qualified candidates and declared that David O. Selznick was the top choice, even though their “special service character credit report” on him revealed that he had been “involved in considerable litigation” and “prior to 1937 he had been a frequent and excessive user of intoxicants.” Howard Hughes was one of the potential executives evaluated. At the end of all this math, he was not ranked among the top thirty.

  AFTER THE SUCCESS OF Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Hughes had rushed into production a copycat Technicolor musical starring Jane Russell as an oil heiress posing as a model in order to meet men who aren’t intimidated by the size of her (financial) assets. The French Line was made in 3-D, for, to repeat an old joke about Jane Russell, two reasons. Or, as screenwriter Mary Loos, niece of Anita Loos, put it: “It was simply a matter of her cleavage, it had nothing to do with the plot.”

  RKO released The French Line on December 29, 1953—to the surprise of the MPAA, which had refused to give the musical its seal of approval. Hughes was not the first studio chief to release a film without the censors’ seal—United Artists had defied the Code by releasing the unapproved David Niven–William Holden sex comedy The Moon Is Blue earlier that year—but given Hughes’s history of antagonizing the censors, his unwillingness to engage in any sort of compromise over The French Line was perceived as an act of war. Though Hughes’s action was considered the most hostile, he was not the only warrior: that same week, independent producing giant Samuel Goldwyn (who had released his movies through RKO since 1941) had published an open letter to Joseph Breen asking him to review the Code and consider updating it to keep with the times. “Unless the Code is brought reasonably up to date,” Goldwyn predicted, “the tendency to by-pass it, which has already begun, will increase.”

  Two months later, eight producers and distributors (Allied Artists, Columbia, Loew’s, Paramount, Republic, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros.) joined together to issue a statement in support of the Code, implicitly censuring Hughes and Goldwyn’s attempts to break it down or modernize it. The resolution was headlined “Decent Entertainment Is the Best Entertainment,” and it had the effect of the producers positioning themselves, as Los Angeles’s Daily News put it, “on the opposite side of what has looked like a fence being erected by producers Howard Hughes and Samuel Goldwyn.”

  Hughes had a defector in his own ranks. Jane Russell had decided that with The French Line, he had gone too far. During production of the movie, she had gone AWOL for five days.

  “Well, I was sick,” she told Hedda Hopper, before admitting that she was also angry at the way Hughes intended to exploit her body in a dance number set to a song called “Lookin’ for Trouble.” Russell didn’t have a problem with the number itself. She compared it to the iconically sexy, but not overtly sexual, plot-driven scene in Gilda, in which Rita Hayworth, clad in a strapless dress inspired by John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, sings “Put the Blame on Mame” and performs a quasi-striptease with her opera gloves in order to pique the anger of her ex-lover. Jane didn’t even have a problem with the resolution to the number, in which the male love interest “comes roaring up and throws her over his shoulder and storms out with her. Which is, you know, it’s cute.” The problem was that Hughes wanted her to do all that wearing a silver fringe bikini. “At that time bikinis were only worn by a few naughty girls in the south of France,” Jane later explained. “No one in America ever wore them.”

  Of course, to Hughes, appropriating the style of “naughty girls” was the whole point. A June memo from RKO’s J. E. Grainger to Hughes regarding Jane’s costumes for the film promised Hughes that the garments being created for Jane were “extremely low-cut,” adding that costume designer Howard Greer “has been advised that on all of Jane’s evening gowns and cocktail dresses he is to go the full limit on cleavage.”

  Jane, who was now in her thirties, decided that this was the film on which to put her foot down. “I was screaming,” she told Hopper. “I said, ‘Listen the dance is bad enough, but with a costume [that] isn’t there, it’s just going to look cheap as hell.’ So that’s when we had the big beef about that. I ended up sicker than the dickens. And then [Hughes] finally said, all right I could have a one-piece suit.” The new costume, bespangled and featuring three connected petal-shaped cutouts under Jane’s breasts and above her pelvis, would be revealed from underneath a long white robe dress, strip-tease style, over the course of the dance.

  In the original cut of The French Line, the “Lookin’ for Trouble” number included close and medium shots, framing Jane’s torso to showcase the incredible control Russell had over her body. She was able to make each breast, barely caged within the extremely low-cut bodice of her costume, appear to move independently—a feat that surely would have been all the more impressive in the 3-D format in which the film was intended to be seen. In a spoken-word style section of the song, Jane dispenses with double entendre for single entendre. “All I need is a maaaaan!” Jane drawls. “Any type, any style, just as long as he’s a maaaaaannn! He can be short, tall, or eloooooongated. . . .”*

  RKO submitted the lyrics to this song for Code compliance on August 17, 1953. The following day, they received the Breen office’s standard reply of approval: “We have read the lyrics for the song entitled ‘Lookin’ for Trouble’ . . . and are pleased to report
that they seem satisfactory under the provisions of the Production Code. You understand, of course, that our final judgement will be based upon the finished picture.” When they viewed the filmed and edited scene in November, the censors noted “many troublesome elements” of this number, including the “costume and dance.” As a later memo explained, “it seemed quite apparent that throughout [the film], the costumes for most female characters and especially Jane Russell, were intentionally designed to give a bosom peep-show effect beyond even extreme décolletage and far beyond anything acceptable under the Production Code.” This memo singled out what was referred to as the “‘I Want a Man’ dance.”

  With the Breen office declining to offer The French Line their seal of approval, in December Hughes took his chances and released the movie without one. All the Code office could really do was fume and, as per their bylaws, threaten Hughes with a $25,000 fine, which it did. By January 6 Breen had received no response to this threat, so he sent another letter, and also informed Eric Johnston at the MPA of the violation. In January RKO resubmitted the film for an appeal. Code officer J. A. Vizzard noticed twenty-one violations remaining, in terms of suggestive lines of dialogue and shots of Russell deemed to show too much cleavage, and the “Lookin’ for Trouble” number still included “many unacceptable breast shots.” Another re-reviewer, Harry Zehner, noted that the dance sequence was “completely unacceptable as to costume, breast exposure and dance movements.” The Code office informed RKO that they had failed this appeal. RKO remained defiant. “In our opinion,” wrote executive J. R. Grainger to Breen, the film “was produced in consonance with the general principles of The Production Code. . . . Our picture is superior entertainment and neither its theme nor the pictorial presentation thereof in any sense is objectionable or offensive.”