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

by Karina Longworth

  Jane claimed she didn’t understand why her boss insisted on pushing the envelope of what was allowed on movie screens. “I don’t know what all the Breen Office rulings are, but I know that in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes we managed to get along with the Breen Office all right,” she told Hedda Hopper. She reasoned that The French Line went “overboard—between the costume and the lyric and the dance. Too much. So why don’t they cut it out and make it decent.”

  Calling the actress’s bluff on what seemed like faux naivete, Hopper responded, “Because he [Hughes] likes this controversy.”

  “He likes this controversy and he wants to make a lot of money on the picture and have it banned,” Jane concurred. “He’s being stubborn.”

  “He’s being stupid too.”

  “You’re damn right he’s being stupid, but then I went through this with The Outlaw and I never opened my mouth except to him.” Russell insisted that the publicity surrounding her breakout film had hurt her career rather than helped it. “It’s taken me all this time to crawl up out of the sewer,” she told Hopper. “And I’m not about to be jammed back in.”

  As a result, when it came time to promote the movie, rather than get behind the Goldwyn idea that the culture was changing so the Code should also change to allow more sexual permissiveness on-screen, Jane began recasting herself as a victim of Hughes’s exploitation. An article with her byline appeared in Parade Magazine, where she explained why she had submitted to three years’ worth of posing for cheesecake photos in order to promote The Outlaw: “I hated it. But 19-year-old kids don’t stamp their feet and say ‘no’ to people like Howard Hughes, who was producing the picture, or Russell Birdwell, the nationally famous public relations man, who dreamed up the publicity campaign. To them, I was just a can of tomatoes—and they put the sex label on me so they’d sell more ‘tomatoes’ than anybody else.”

  “It got so I couldn’t go anywhere without people expecting me to walk in with five men under my arm and no clothes on,” Jane complained to columnist James Bacon. “That’s what the stinking Outlaw publicity did for me.” Back then, Jane said, “I just didn’t know how to say no.” What apparently made her bitter was that now that she was an adult woman and an established star, she was still being sold like a can. “The roles get bigger,” she sneered to Look, “the costumes smaller.” Speaking of that costume, “You should have seen the others I refused to wear. I fought, I hollered, and I beefed. Then when I became emotionally done in, I took off for the beach and stayed there for a week while the picture waited. Finally, I accepted the costume I wore.”

  Not everyone was buying Jane’s presentation of herself as an unwilling participant in Hughes’s sexual spectacles. Bacon asked her about another reporter who had apparently suggested that Russell’s protestations were all part of Hughes’s publicity plan. “He knows better,” Jane responded, “and the next time I see him I’ll punch him right in the nose.”

  Most mainstream movie reporters would quote Jane without comment, but the growing alternative fan and scandal magazines began to call her bluff. “Who Does Jane Russell Think She’s Kidding?” asked Top Secret magazine in the headline of their three-page spread on the bombshell’s “holier-than-thou pose” as a woman of God. “Jane Russell who for thirteen years has built her scandal-studded Hollywood career on the magic appeal of her conspicuous frontage and made sex into the sole stock of her profitable trade, has suddenly gone squeamish and puritan!!” It wasn’t a pose: Jane had begun speaking in tongues after a spiritual reawakening at a church in Pasadena, and the experience inspired her to build a chapel with her family and invite anyone who was interested in casual prayer sessions and discussion of scripture to join her there on Friday nights. Top Secret raked further muck by suggesting that the Bible study sessions Jane led had been named as the catalyst in the divorce between Dutch actor Philip Van Zandt, who appeared in His Kind of Woman, and his wife, Victoria. Top Secret didn’t mention that it was Philip who opposed Victoria’s attendance of the classes, and, according to Victoria, it was Philip who socked her “right in the nose” when she came home from one of them, telling her “there was no place in Hollywood for girls of good character.”

  In February 1954, Breen was visited by a group of men representing RKO, including J. R. Grainger, Dietrich, and publicist Perry Lieber. The RKO contingent admitted that The French Line in its current state “had acquired a very great deal of very bad public reaction,” and asked what they could do to get the Breen office’s approval. A full year later, in March 1955, having reached the limit of the profit Hughes could milk from The French Line without a seal, RKO made cuts to the film and resubmitted it to Breen’s office for a review. Now, the censors were pleased to note, “the dance is played almost entirely in long shot, and very important, omits entirely the objectionable patter portion of the song delivered by Miss Russell while sitting and lying on the circular couch.” On March 24, 1955, The French Line finally got its seal of approval.

  IN 1954, THIRTY YEARS after the death of Howard Sr., Hughes Tool held firm as the top supplier of drill bits in the nation. As the oil extraction business boomed, so did Howard Jr.’s profits—and his tax bill. As a solution, Hughes filed articles of incorporation in Delaware that would divide his business into two distinct entities. There would now be a business (Hughes Aircraft) and a charity (the Howard Hughes Medical Institute). Howard had held an apparently sincere interest in funding medical research for a long while; in 1925, on the eve of marrying Ella Rice, he had created a will stipulating that after his death, most of his fortune should go to the establishment of Howard Hughes Medical Research Laboratories, which would be dedicated to finding cures and treatments for infectious diseases. But now, while still very much alive, Hughes had decided to establish the charity, with himself as the sole trustee, as a place to put the enormous Hughes Tool profits and assets and thus shield these monies from the tax collector.

  The charity was endowed with all of Hughes’s stock from the Hughes Aircraft Company—and he was the only stockholder. Hughes then “sold” the assets of Hughes Tool to the Medical Institute, which allowed Hughes to transform millions of the oil drill bit company’s profits into debt held by the charity. Furthermore, a complicated lease and sublease arrangement was worked out so that Hughes’s aircraft plants and tool factories would technically pay rent to the Medical Institute, allowing these payments to be written off. Not only that, but the rent for the aircraft business’s physical properties could be passed along to Hughes Aircraft’s only employer: the United States Air Force. The IRS originally denied Hughes’s application for tax-exempt status, but in March 1957, after he had made a “loan” to Vice President Richard Nixon’s brother Donald, the IRS reversed their decision and gave the Hughes Tool tax dodge the green light.

  Hughes installed as the nominal supervisor of his Medical Institute the ever-reliable Dr. Verne Mason, last seen on the scene of the attempted suicide of starlet Rene Rosseau. (Mason also kept Hughes supplied with prescriptions for codeine, which Howard had been taking consistently since the 1946 plane crash.) Hughes chose southern Florida as the location for the institute; Hughes had put a charm offensive on Florida governor LeRoy Collins and, after convincing the elected official that he planned to invest heavily in his state, Hughes likely believed he would be given preferential treatment when it came to regulations. But then, after promising to build a multimillion-dollar medical facility as well as an aircraft plant in Collins’s state, Hughes built nothing. Rather than invest in a permanent home for the institute, Hughes rented a floor for a small staff in a building on the campus of the University of Miami, and made sure the institute distributed just enough money in research grants to keep up appearances—but not enough to hamper the profitability of the scheme.

  THE IDEA THAT RKO was “a movie studio filled with beautiful girls who draw pay but seldom work,” as one report put it, was so pervasive by early 1954 that Hughes dipped into his pockets to try to make the publicity problem go away.
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  Hughes offered to buy out not just the litigious shareholders, but all of the shareholders of RKO, at $6 per share. For a total outlay of about $23.5 million, Hughes would acquire sole ownership of the studio and its properties and assets. This was way more than the shares were considered to be worth, more than twice what they had been trading for on the last active day before Hughes’s announcement. The shareholders had estimated that the studio had lost $38 million since Hughes had been running it. By buying them out, he could effectively cancel out the lawsuits, while also using his losses on RKO to offset the profits of any of his companies that weren’t failing.

  The same RKO stockholders who had, as one publication put it, “registered intense dissatisfaction at Hughes’ idea of collecting a stable of beauties who were put on at a salary but not put to work to bring the investment back,” decided to let Hughes be Hughes. They voted to accept his offer, and by March RKO had become the first movie studio to be solely owned by one man.

  Variety suggested that Hughes may have been motivated by his desire to “erase from his slate any evidence showing that his business behavior has meant losses for others.” In other words, if you were never one to admit failure, this was an easy way of wiping out an unarguable record of the same. Yet the real publicity coup came at the end of the month, when a Nevada judge dismissed the stockholders’ suits, pending Hughes’s purchase of their stock, “ruling” that Jane Russell’s “box-office appeal was—and is—large,” and that the actress was “not a waste of corporate assets.”

  The shareholders now had no basis for criticism, but what about everyone else?

  RKO was not the only studio in trouble in the mid-1950s, but given Hughes’s role in hastening the demise of vertical integration, the reporting about RKO’s difficulties producing enough movies to stay afloat reflected the town’s schadenfreude. In September, the Hollywood Citizen-News revealed that RKO had completed only one film nine months into the year—The Conqueror—and that the studio was “the talk of the movie industry today as reports circulated that the company will stop production entirely.” This lack of product was compounded by the fact that Walt Disney had pulled his films from RKO’s distribution pipeline when he had created his own distribution company. Though there was no official comment from RKO, it was reported that one unnamed source “said there was no change of policy ‘because the studio doesn’t have any policy.’”

  A few days later, an editorial criticizing Hughes’s management of RKO appeared on the front page of The Hollywood Reporter. The royal “we” had had faith in Hughes’s prospects at the studio, according to editor Billy Wilkerson, because “we thought that Mr. Hughes was a great picture enthusiast, that he liked the business and his pride would settle for nothing short of the best and plenty of that.” That “opinion, now, is completely reversed. Nothing is coming out of RKO, nothing has come out of RKO other than a picture here and there, mostly from independent units financed in part by Hughes.”

  The bottom line: “The RKO organization, formerly one of the best in the business, is now nothing; the ranks of its employees, most of whom had been there for 12 to 20 years, are no more. The current crew is in a state of complete demoralization because of an inactivity that means nothing more than a week-to-week salary check.” Wilkerson advised Hughes to get out before RKO’s resale value had been completely frittered away.

  That one film RKO had managed to produce in 1954 was itself plagued with problems. The Conqueror was an epic about Genghis Khan, starring John Wayne as the Mongol warrior and Susan Hayward as a Tartar princess. Wayne and Hayward were what Hughes would have called “extremely valuable stars”: in February 1952, together they had been named the most popular film actors in the world in an international poll conducted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Wayne, who like Howard was a fervent anti-Communist, had already acted in two productions for Hughes’s RKO: The Flying Leathernecks, directed by Nicholas Ray, and the long-beleaguered Jet Pilot, with which Hughes was still unsatisfied and compelled to tinker. Production of The Conqueror commenced in the Utah desert in the spring of 1954, under the direction of Dick Powell. Powell had sung in musicals of the 1930s, become a stalwart of film noir in the 1940s, and was now trying for a career behind the camera. Having befriended Hughes while under contract as an actor to RKO, Powell had cut his teeth directing an RKO thriller called Split Second. Hughes then trusted him with The Conqueror, the most epic film Howard would personally produce at RKO.

  Of course, Hughes had an interest in The Conqueror’s leading lady, whom he had first met in 1938, when mutual friend Ben Medford had set them up on a blind date. “She cooked him a chicken dinner,” Medford recalled. “He disliked her intensely. She disliked him. That was that.” Cut to fifteen years later, and Hayward was among the top female box-office draws in town. In 1953, Hughes and Darryl Zanuck, still presiding over 20th Century Fox, worked out a deal to trade the services of Jane Russell, whom Zanuck wanted to pair opposite Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, for Hayward, whom Hughes wanted for the basically thankless girl part in Nicholas Ray’s rodeo movie, The Lusty Men. Hughes was impressed by Hayward, and soon after The Lusty Men he began courting her, under the guise of securing her participation in The Conqueror. As Hayward’s marriage to Jess Barker started to crumble, she became more receptive to Howard’s attention. She believed they were involved seriously by New Year’s Eve 1953, when Hughes and Hayward had a dinner date at the Beverly Hills Hotel. An oft-repeated story about that night holds that Hughes had also made dates with two other women, Jean Peters and a teenage starlet, for the same night, and that he was attempting to juggle all three, who were seated in different parts of the hotel. Eventually Hayward figured out what was happening, and—so the legend goes—confronted Hughes at the table he was sharing with Jean Peters, and stormed out.

  Two months later, Howard’s name popped up in the divorce proceedings between Hayward and Barker. According to Barker, his twin sons told him that a man with a “long, dark chin,” whom they originally called “Mr. Magic,” had come to visit their mom. When pressed for details, Barker said his sons told him, “His name is Howard Hughes, and he said he was going to take us for an airplane ride, but mother said we shouldn’t tell you his name.” Hayward admitted on the stand that Howard had come to her house to “take me out,” and counter alleged that Barker had hit her and thrown her in their pool, charges that Barker admitted to. Hughes did not like this kind of publicity—the kind he couldn’t control—and began ghosting Hayward after that, but she remained in the cast of The Conqueror.

  The Conqueror is today often placed on lists of the worst films ever made, not least for the “yellowface” casting of Wayne. Hayward would later admit that she had trouble making it through a single take without “dissolv[ing] in laughter.” Nevertheless, Hughes made sure the movie was lavishly promoted, and people went to see it when it was finally dumped in theaters in 1956. According to Variety, it sold more tickets than all but ten films released that year.

  Today, The Conqueror is remembered for a shocking statistic: as of 1980, 91 of the 220 members of its cast and crew had been diagnosed with cancer, and many had died of the disease. Hayward, Wayne, and Powell were among the casualties. Though some of these instances of cancer, like Wayne’s, could be attributed to smoking, years later a link was drawn between the sicknesses and the fact that the Utah shooting location had been downwind of an aboveground nuclear testing site. Though Powell had chosen the location, in a gesture typical of Hughes, when the RKO chief decided that location shooting had become too expensive, the cast and crew were moved to Los Angeles—and sixty tons of dirt from the radioactive desert were brought with them, to better replicate the location closer to home.

  In the spring of 1955, in Miami, Hayward would try to reconcile with Hughes, but he wasn’t interested. When Susan returned to Los Angeles, she had a knock-out, drag-down summit with Barker over their custody situation. That evening, Susan Hayward overdosed on sleeping pills. She
survived, and she’d go on to win the Best Actress Oscar for the 1958 film I Want to Live! In 1961, Susan’s sister Florence Marrenner sold a tell-all story to Confidential magazine, which promoted it on their cover with the text, “My sister has millions—BUT I’M ON RELIEF.” Inside the magazine, Florence lamented that her sister seemed to have “forgotten the way mother took care of her when she tried to commit suicide”:

  Susan had been having a lot of marital troubles and then she went down to Florida to see Howard Hughes. It was when she came back that she took the pills. . . . When she came back from seeing Mr. Hughes she was in an awful state and my mother went and stayed over with her all that week. Finally, my mother came home and that night, or rather the next morning about 3 o’clock, the phone rang and it was Susan. She told my mother she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. . . . Susan never did explain to mother why she did it.

  Florence Marrenner’s story tells us less about Susan Hayward in 1955 than it tells us about Howard Hughes in 1961. A man who had once exercised total control over his image in Hollywood was now unable to get a major tabloid—which had never to this point broken a significant story about his sex life—to omit the insinuation that Hughes had had something to do with a major actress’s suicide attempt. No one would have realized it at the time, but the very existence of these few lines of gossip in print were an early signal that while the image of himself that Hughes had created remained in the public imagination, the man himself had completely disappeared into his own world.

  Chapter 24

  Underwater

  In the fall of 1953, Jean Peters boarded a plane for Rome, where she’d film Three Coins in the Fountain. A romantic ensemble drama featuring Jean as one of three American secretaries wishing upon the titular fountain for love in Rome, this film (which, plot-wise, recalled Roman Holiday, a major hit that had opened in theaters just before Three Coins went into preproduction) was a typical product of a studio in survival mode at the end of this Hollywood era. None of the actresses (including Dorothy McGuire, and Audrey Hepburn look-alike Maggie McNamara) were stars large enough to command a huge salary or to demand better material. Expense and care were spared for the real star: the exotic production value offered by shooting on location in beautiful widescreen CinemaScope color. The hope was to lure jaded audiences who had abandoned the movies for their TV sets back to the theaters with the gorgeously photographed vicarious experience of a trip to Rome.