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

by Karina Longworth

  The film’s trite narrative, in which the obstacles preventing each of the three romances from proceeding to the altar are not so much overcome as brushed under the rug in time for an all-encompassing happy ending, was wan even by the grasping standards of the era. After the performances she had given in Pickup on South Street and Wait ’til the Sun Shines, Nellie, Jean deserved better. But Three Coins in the Fountain made money, and in the wake of its success, Jean was considered a “hot” star, nearly a decade into her career.

  If the success of Three Coins gave Peters’s stardom a shot in the arm, its shooting brought her relationship with Howard Hughes—which had been chugging along in parallel to her film career—to an inflection point. They had been dating for seven years, not exclusively; Jean surely knew that her rival on the Fox lot, Terry Moore, was also in Howard’s life, even if Jean was not aware that Terry believed she and Hughes were married. Jean left for Italy hoping that Howard’s heart would grow fonder in her absence, and if it didn’t, maybe she’d meet someone new and float off into a reverie of Roman romance and leave the troubles of her current life behind—just like in the movie.

  Hughes and Peters continued to stay in touch while she was away. Operations’ call logs show that on November 5, Jean was told that Hughes wouldn’t be able to phone her until after dinner, but when they did speak, “he has something very important to tell you concerning the picture you are working on.” The same night, Terry Moore’s mother was also told that her daughter would get a phone call after dinner. “It is very important to talk to [her because] he has some information about the Hal Wallis picture” (possibly Come Back, Little Sheba, which Wallis produced). So Hughes was acting not just as a boyfriend to these two women, but as their undercover agent in Hollywood. In addition to Jean and Terry, at this time Hughes was taking and making phone calls relevant to a woman code-named “Thunderbird Party.”

  At the Rome airport, as she was flying back from the Three Coins in the Fountain shoot in early 1954, Jean Peters met a young, totally normal-seeming Texas oilman named Stuart Cramer III. “I sat next to her on the plane and was attracted by her beauty and a helpless quality,” Cramer later confided. “It was a compelling, unhappy quality.” Cramer claimed that after their coupling, he had consulted with other men who had been involved with Peters, and they agreed with him about Jean’s strange allure. “I always felt there was some kind of mystery about the girl that men had a desire to solve. She makes you want to reach out and care for her.”

  Back in the States, the day after their first meeting, Cramer called Peters and asked if she would show him around Hollywood. Several months later, on May 29, 1954, Cramer and Jean got married in Washington, D.C. When they first decided to marry, she told Cramer she wanted to quit the movies. Maybe she was just looking to get away from a town that seemed to be owned by Hughes, but it didn’t work out that way. Right away, the Peters-Cramer marriage was troubled, and a little over a month after the wedding, Peters left him. “How much Mr. Hughes had to do with this I can only guess at,” teased Sheilah Graham. “We didn’t spend much time together,” Cramer recalled. “I don’t think she knew what the hell she wanted to do.”

  Most reports about Jean’s marriage to Cramer suggested it came out of nowhere. Hedda Hopper bragged that it was “no secret to me,” in the preamble to a Q&A in which the gossip maven interrogated the actress for being too private. “How do you manage to keep your life so mysterious and secret?” Hedda asked Peters. Jean demurred: “I don’t know that I’m mysterious. I lead a very simple life.”

  “But no one knows how you live,” Hedda persisted.

  Jean laughed. “Well, I’m not going to run an ad.”

  According to one tabloid report, after abandoning Cramer, Peters showed up at the office of the man she really loved, to prostrate herself. “I’ve come back,” she said. She told Hughes she was going to file for divorce. “I want to be with you,” she added. “On your terms. I don’t care. I can’t help it.”

  This jibes with Terry Moore’s version of the story . . . sort of. “Jean was married to Stuart Cramer,” Terry explained in 1977. “She called Howard and asked to see him again. She left Stuart. Stuart said she was alcoholic and suicidal, and Howard was worried she would kill herself, and so was Stuart, so they both met a lot to talk about her.”

  Four months after the wedding to Cramer, Peters was expected to report to 20th Century Fox for wardrobe tests on what no one yet realized would be her last feature film, A Man Called Peter. She didn’t show up. Peters hadn’t been seen in Hollywood all summer, and when Hedda Hopper called Darryl Zanuck for comment, he admitted that he had no idea what was going on with his contract star. “We’re supposed to start shooting on location next Monday and if she doesn’t make an appearance, I don’t know what we’ll do. If you find out anything about her, let me know.”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1954, just a year removed from her Oscar nomination, Terry Moore found herself being passed from one man to another on a Las Vegas stage. This was a nightclub act, at the Flamingo, arranged by Walter Kane per Hughes’s request. Kane felt like it was quite a tall order; in his mind, Moore was uniquely talentless: she couldn’t sing, she couldn’t dance, she could barely walk. So Kane hired a crew of male dancers to carry Terry back and forth across the stage. When the show closed, Hughes billed Terry $15,000 to cover the cost of her costumes, including a diaphanous beaded gown that he had “designed” just for her. Even Terry was starting to realize that this was the sort of thing that husbands just didn’t do.

  Elsewhere in Nevada, Howard was otherwise preoccupied. Ava Gardner had gone to Lake Tahoe to establish Nevada residency, so she could divorce Frank Sinatra. This relocation, according to one newspaper account, was facilitated by the “sphinx-like” Hughes, “with whom she is reportedly immersed in a serious romance.”

  Even though Ava had cut off their love affair in the mid-1940s, Hughes’s and Gardner’s paths continued to cross. After The Killers, Ava worked steadily for MGM, largely in film noir, but she had a lot of bad luck, and few hit movies, for the rest of the decade. In late 1949, Hughes saw to it that Ava be cast as a sexually manic southern belle opposite Robert Mitchum in an RKO drama called My Forbidden Past. As he was wont to do with RKO films starring his female favorites, Hughes spent two years tinkering with the edit. He failed to improve it—the film lost an enormous sum, $700,000—but at least it gave him an excuse to look at footage of Ava obsessively.

  After that, Gardner starred in the smash hit Show Boat, and then gave one of her finest performances—and earned her only Oscar nomination—playing the Jean Harlow role in a remake of Red Dust called Mogambo. It was while shooting that film that her three-year marriage to Sinatra had begun to fatally break down. After a few volatile weeks with his bride on the Nairobi set, Sinatra had left Ava behind and hightailed it back to Hollywood to audition for From Here to Eternity. While Frank was away, Ava had reportedly fooled around with more than one crew member, and had definitely gone to London to abort Frank’s baby. She didn’t tell her husband about the abortion until long after the fact, when he had returned to Africa for a reunion. Sinatra had then gone off to make Eternity, which would revive his slumping career. Before that movie would come out, Ava would walk out on Sinatra for good.

  Hughes had been a bone of contention in Gardner and Sinatra’s already contentious marriage. Hughes, who had Confidential magazine, like most of the town’s gossips, in his pocket, called Ava one day and told her they were planning to run a story claiming she was having an affair with Sinatra’s friend Sammy Davis Jr. Hughes could have stopped the story—he managed to prevent the tabloid, widely considered to be among the most accurate and insidious publications of the era, from running anything damaging about his own personal life during the magazine’s heyday. But instead, he told Ava to be worried: “They have pictures.”

  “Frank hit the roof when I told him,” Ava recalled. “‘Did you screw him?’ he screamed. Of course I didn’t, I said. Frank went thro
ugh the whole there’s-no-smoke-without-fire routine. How could he even think that? I said. Was he crazy? ‘How the fuck does your boyfriend know all about it then?’ he yelled. Howard was always ‘my boyfriend.’ Frank would never call him by his name. I said, ‘I’ll sue the fuckers, Frank. I’ll sue their asses off.’”

  But MGM wouldn’t let her sue—they didn’t want to draw attention to the article, and hoped it would just fade away. Its damage to the Gardner-Sinatra marriage was, however, permanent—which may have been Hughes’s hope all along.

  It wasn’t a coincidence that Hughes pursued Ava in the midst of two of her divorces. Hughes had a tendency to pounce on recently single women. “‘Wet decks,’ Johnny Meyer called us,” Ava recalled. “God knows why, although knowing Johnny, I’m sure it had some sexual, if not downright dirty, connotation.”

  According to Ava, she and Howard hadn’t seen one another “in three or four years,” but Hughes still had spies watching her. Ava had brought a Spanish bullfighter boyfriend out to Nevada, but after a few nights of drunken fights, she began to find the Spaniard tiresome. Out of the blue came one of Hughes’s aides, with an offer to put the bullfighter on a plane back to Spain. Ava accepted the offer with relief.

  The day after the bullfighter left, Hughes showed up, took Ava out on a boat, and told her she ought to have a ring the same crystal blue as the water. He reached into his pocket and produced a sapphire. Once again he was asking her to marry him. This time he was basically groveling. He told her about all the money he had now, more than ever before. He could hire the best writers and the best directors so that she could star in the best movies, or they could just sail around the world if she preferred. He was crying as he bragged, confessing he was incredibly unhappy. Obviously, she was, too—wasn’t that why she was on her third divorce, because none of the other men could make her happy?

  Actually, she desperately wanted to stay with Sinatra, but they couldn’t make it work. Putting off Howard’s entreaties, she did agree to go with him to Miami. Hughes put Ava and her maid, Reenie, up in a rented house. The night they arrived, Hughes told the maid that the following day, a woman might show up, “but don’t let her in and don’t tell her anything.” The next morning, a woman did come to the door, and she asked Reenie a whole bunch of questions: Who was renting this house? Who was paying her? Who had told her not to let anyone in?

  To every question, Reenie said, “I don’t know.” Finally the woman at the door told Reenie, “You’re either the smartest nigger I ever met, or the dumbest.” Jean Peters was living in Florida around this time, so she could have been this inquisitive, racist woman; it could also have been Susan Hayward, who was seeing Hughes in Miami, too. If it was either of these famous ladies, Reenie didn’t recognize her. When asked if she ever found out who the woman was, Reenie said, “She was obviously someone Howard Hughes didn’t want to know he was there.”

  Ava and Reenie wouldn’t stay there long. Within a couple of days, Reenie heard from one of Howard’s aides that he had picked up a spectacular diamond necklace that, as Ava put it, “he wanted to give me if I fucked him.” Ava told Reenie to pack their bags. “And we went to Cuba. Without Howard.”

  Shortly after this last go-round with Howard, Gardner starred in a film written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, called The Barefoot Contessa, about a Spanish peasant dancer who is plucked out of obscurity, transformed into a Hollywood glamour queen, and married to a handsome, secretive royal—with tragic consequences. “I tried to do a bitter Cinderella story,” Mankiewicz said, about “the type of woman whom I know only too well: the self-destructive, beautiful woman.” (Mankiewicz was notorious for having affairs with troubled actresses, from Judy Garland to Linda Darnell; four years after Contessa, his wife of nearly twenty years, retired actress Rose Stradner, would commit suicide, leaving what was described as “an almost undecipherable note, in which [she] indicated that she was ‘tired.’”)

  It was widely believed that Contessa’s Maria Vargas was based on Rita Hayworth—a Mexican dancer who was transformed into a Hollywood glamour queen, and who had recently extricated herself from a brief marriage to a duplicitous prince, Aly Khan. “That was crap,” Ava said. “There was too much shit in the script about my affair with Howard.” She added, “It could have been called ‘Howard and Ava,’ it was so fucking obvious.” The reason why “Joe swore till he was blue in the face that it was based on Rita’s life,” Ava believed, was that “Howard was a friend of his—most of those guys stuck together like shit—but [Hughes] was on to him like a fucking tiger once he’d read the script.”

  Ava believed she was playing herself, and to hear Mankiewicz tell it, his directorial choices were hampered by Ava being unable to be anything but Ava. The film’s best scene, in which Maria performs in a nightclub for the Howard Hughes character, a publicist (based partially on Johnny Meyer), and Humphrey Bogart’s director (who also narrates the film), was shot so that the viewer never sees Maria dancing but gets the impression from watching the club audience observe her that it was truly a sight to see. Mankiewicz admitted he had to shoot it this way, because “Ava just wasn’t that good a dancer.” It’s effective, though: it allows us to grasp how everyone in the room—from a wide-eyed teenage busboy to women with husbands who seem jealous to women who seem inspired—is viscerally impacted by her presence.

  Though Hughes was aware that Contessa was in production, he chose to show his power by waiting to protest the film until it was almost too late. Mankiewicz recalled that he was called to meet with Hughes and lawyer Greg Bautzer for a tense, two-hour breakfast of steak and orange juice. “I had to maintain the fiction that I hadn’t been thinking of [Hughes] at all,” Mankiewicz remembered. “He accepted that fiction as a friend, but pointed out that other people might not feel the same way.”

  There were certain things that were so baked into Contessa’s DNA that not much could be done. “You’re saying to yourself, ‘so that’s what he looks like,’” the director played by Bogart comments via voice-over, as the camera moves in for the first time on a character who is said to “own Texas.” What “he,” Kirk Edwards, looks like, as played by Warren Stevens, is a young Howard Hughes. Meanwhile, anyone who had read about Johnny Meyer during the congressional investigation would think of him when watching that early set-piece scene in the nightclub, in which a fixer-publicist played by Edmond O’Brien (and which Mankiewicz acknowledged to be an amalgam of Meyer and later Hughes aide Walter Kane), first tries to lure Maria to the tycoon’s table with a wad of cash, and then gives her a well-rehearsed pitch on behalf of his client. “Talent is what Mr. Kirk Edwards worships,” the publicist declares to Maria, while the mogul sits silently. “It’s his religion you might say.” And when it comes to talent, he’s interested in “only the top, the finest, the best that money can buy.” Now that Maria has met him, the publicist explains, “the miracle has happened, and a great career is yours for the asking. No strings attached! All Mr. Edwards wants is for the world to enjoy your talent, and for you to be happy. And all that he asks is your gratitude.”

  Hughes was most concerned with the depiction of the relationship between Edwards and Maria, which was one of a cold but eager benefactor and reluctant, rebellious beneficiary. Among the cuts Hughes demanded was a scene in which Maria throws heavy objects at Edwards (recalling the bronze bell incident between Ava and Hughes). Over that scene, Bogart’s narration would have told us, “The next stop in Kirk’s wooing was a literal kidnapping of Maria. I do not exaggerate. This was a routine procedure with Kirk. . . .” Mankiewicz admitted to a biographer that he had based this narration on a story he had heard about Hughes having “put Gina Lollobrigida under contract and then locked her in a house.” (It was a hotel, but close enough.)

  Mankiewicz agreed to make all of Hughes’s requested cuts, and Hughes made it easy by making TWA jets available, free of charge, to Gardner and Bogart to get where they needed to be to dub new dialogue. But there were aspects of Howard’s way of relatin
g to women that had already been dispersed onto other male characters in the film, and these he did not protest. There is the South American scion (Marius Goring) who is happier having people think he was sleeping with Maria than he would have been actually sleeping with her, who loses Maria for good after he spells out his transactional view of their relationship a little too literally: “I’ve paid for your company and you’ll come and go as I tell you!” And, in a way, the count (Rossano Brazzi) who romances Maria and marries her without telling her he’s war-wound impotent is cut from the same cloth. Maria is nothing but a trophy to these men. Worse—she’s a billboard, advertising to the world that each of them is more of a man than we know him to really be.

  IN JANUARY 1955, RKO threw a junket in Silver Springs, Florida, for the 3-D Jane Russell movie Underwater!, a hunt-for-sunken-treasure clunker whose reason to exist was the promise of a “skin diving” Russell in a swimsuit. A chartered TWA plane flew from Los Angeles carrying various RKO flunkies and friends, including columnist Lloyd Shearer and what Shearer described as “a colorful assortment of press agents, stooges, journalists and females.” Those “females” included both legitimate actresses like Debbie Reynolds, less established starlets under contract to RKO, and what Shearer euphemistically referred to as “several commercially-minded girls who were majoring in business administration—they conducted night school in their own apartments.”