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

by Karina Longworth

  It began in Studio A on the Samuel Goldwyn lot. Hughes had aides, wearing white gloves, personally deliver and install two white leather chairs. In the evening, Hughes would go to the Beverly Hills Hotel to pick up Peters, and Jean would accompany Howard back to the screening room. They would sit in their side-by-side, his-and-hers leather chairs and watch a couple of movies. Her husband had a tendency to watch movies he liked multiple times. Sometimes he would watch a movie all the way through, but often he’d signal to the projectionist to stop it at some random interval and put on the next film. After a double feature, Howard would take Jean back to the hotel. Then he’d return to the screening room by himself, and stay there, alone but for the aides paid to project films and answer his whims, all night.

  When Jean would visit, occasionally she’d show up dressed to the nines, in furs and full makeup; other times she’d be wearing jeans and sneakers, like a normal mom next door. “She seemed to enjoy Hughes’ company,” Ron Kistler recalled, “yet there were occasions where she’d raise her voice exclaiming, ‘I don’t want to watch that again.’”

  The aides began to observe that Mrs. Hughes started accompanying him less frequently. Eventually she stopped coming at all. This was as Hughes preferred it: Jean’s absence gave him a chance to use the screenings to hunt for new talent. Occasionally Hughes would ask the projectionist to stop the film on a specific frame, or back up, rewind, and replay the film until he spotted again the face that had caught his eye. He’d tell the projectionist, “I am interested in the gal sitting at the third table from the left top part of the screen.” The projectionist would then call Operations to give them that information, plus the reel number and the film name, and then someone at Operations would track down the casting director of that particular film. Sometimes the casting director knew which girl Hughes was talking about just based on the available information; other times a Hughes aide would have to rent a screening room, as well as a print of the film, and show that section to the casting director so that he could identify the young woman in question.

  In addition to providing a barricade against subpoenas and other unpleasant realities of his business practices, screening rooms also became “clean rooms,” where Hughes believed he could avoid the contaminants of the outside world. Anything could be a contaminant, if it penetrated either his physical or psychic space, but he was most worried about the two things he had been most afraid of since childhood: germs, and black people. These two were tied together for Hughes, and bundled up with sex, too: if anything horrified Howard more than the idea that a beautiful white woman could be carrying a venereal disease,* it was that a beautiful white woman might be sullied by the touch of a black man. There were business matters he didn’t want to deal with, women with whom he didn’t want to have any real intimacy, but nothing animated Hughes like the twin devils of germophobia and racism. Part of the appeal of staying in the same screening room, attended to by the same people, who were paid to make sure nothing and nobody was introduced into the environment without his say-so, was that Hughes could believe he was in total control. When Hughes found out that Studio A had been used to screen rushes to the cast and crew of Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess, a musical with an all-black cast, he told Ron Kistler, who had been his key aide at Goldwyn, to pack up. The Goldwyn lot had been Hughes’s intermittent professional base since the 1920s, where he had chosen to keep an office even while he was the majority owner of RKO. He would never set foot there again.

  Following the departure, Hughes moved his enterprise to a smaller, private screening house, called Nosseck Studio. He would stay there for four months in the late summer and early fall of 1958, during which time he never left once. He’d watch as many movies as he could, back to back to back for days at a time, then sleep for a full day and start the cycle again. At one point an aide killed a small lizard who had scampered into the room (not an unheard-of occurrence in Los Angeles’s desert clime). Hughes breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ve been seeing that thing for several days,” he admitted, “and I didn’t say anything because you fellows would have thought I was nuts.”

  Hughes wasn’t hallucinating the lizard, but in other ways he began to show evidence of a mounting divorce from reality. Though he would call in to Operations to leave and pick up messages, and sometimes, in between movies, take calls related to the fiasco at TWA, he ignored most matters that could have used his attention. There were no facilities to bathe at Nosseck, and Hughes wasn’t motivated to go off-site to wash. Eventually his clothes became so dirty that he just took them off, remaining naked except for his shoes while watching movies. He watched cowboy movies, airplane movies, Oscar nominees, I Was a Teenage Werewolf.

  Knowing that Jean was growing impatient living at the hotel, and wanting to mollify her without actually doing anything to change their living situation, on September 9 Howard called Operations to leave a message for “the Major.” In this message, Hughes claimed he was waiting for his lawyer to bring him keys to a house he had procured for them, but they could not move in yet because the previous tenants hadn’t moved out. He explained that he had no way of talking to Jean on the phone because he had “developed a very severe pain in my right side. I am sure it is not anything serious. I think I caught cold there while I was asleep. I will explain how this happened. The doctor is on the way and I do not want to try to walk back to where the phone is located until after he gives me something to make my side feel better.”

  This was typical of what Faith Domergue had referred to as Hughes’s “play-acting.” In the decade-plus since he had tried it out on Faith, his tactics hadn’t gotten much better, but they had become bigger. In this instance, there were several stories stacked on top of one another: he’s waiting for the keys, he’s waiting for the doctor, he’s not near a phone (even though he’s possibly using a phone to leave this message), he can’t move; the assumption seems to be that a woman might be able to penetrate through one layer of bullshit, but not five. For good measure, as if to package the crap in sweet-smelling coating, Hughes began this missive “Darling” and ended it, “All the love in the world, Howard.”

  Five days later he was still in the screening room, still “sick,” still “without a phone,” still promising that they would move into a house soon. “I am going to make the most determined effort that I have ever made in my life to arrange for us to get into the house Tue. instead of Wed,” he said in the message left for his wife the night of September 14, 1958. “I am confident this can be done, and with all those reporters underfoot plus the dust I certainly would be a lot happier to make one move instead of two. Darling, as I say, I don’t know what time we will have the phone in. . . . I feel that I love you even more tonight. But of course this is impossible because there ain’t no more than the most. Love again, Howard.”

  At some point during this period, Kistler overheard Hughes telling his wife over the phone that he was in a hospital, where doctors were working to diagnose his mysterious symptoms. The aides soon realized that Hughes was faking an illness in order to avoid spending time with either his wife or Yvonne Schubert. “When he talked with them on the phone,” Kistler recalled, “I would hear him say, ‘The night nurse Ruth is with me now and she’s ready to give me a bath,’ or, ‘Nurse Hannah is about to give me an enema.’” If anyone who was not with him in the screening room believed he was actually quarantined in a hospital, then he didn’t have to do anything—didn’t have to make any decisions, didn’t have to disappoint any women by not being able to give them the intimacy they wanted, didn’t have to confront angry employees or shareholders. He could strip everything away—including his clothes—and lose himself in the movie screen.

  But the sickness ruse he created became a self-fulfilling prophecy. At Goldwyn, Hughes appeared to be “quite fit,” according to Kistler, who one night watched his boss running sprints back and forth across 150 feet of hallway. “He went downhill in a big hurry at Nosseck’s,” Kistler recalled. Over the four months that he r
emained in the screening room, Hughes was virtually immobile. Living on a diet of milk, chocolate bars, nuts, and bottled water, he lost weight rapidly—Kistler estimated that by the time he left, Hughes’s weight was down to 110 pounds. The emaciation was readily evident because, as Kistler tactfully put it, Hughes “had become a nudist.”

  Kistler said Hughes “had on the same outfit” at his next location. After four months at Nosseck’s, Hughes returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel. The screenings continued in his hotel bungalow, No. 4. The first day after Hughes had moved back in, he threw Kistler a projector manual. “Read it,” Hughes commanded to this employee who had been hired as a driver, “and make damned sure that you know how to operate them.”

  Jean Peters was living in Bungalow 10. She knew the rules by now. She followed orders to call into the switchboard at Operations every morning upon waking, and she understood she was banned from ordering any of the foods on Howard’s “forbidden” list from room service. For years Hughes had instructed everyone who came into contact with him to avoid consuming certain foods (he was particularly concerned about pork, because of parasites), but patrolling Jean’s room service orders served multiple additional purposes. It was a relatively simple way of showing Jean, and everyone around her, how much power he held over her, without him actually having to be present. And, if there was any truth to the reports of Jean’s problematic relationship with alcohol, this was one way Hughes could limit her intake—which may have been attractive, if for no other reason than because a drunk captive could potentially become more difficult to control.

  According to Kistler, who spent as much as sixteen hours a day with Hughes in his hotel room, Howard almost never saw his wife in person—the only visit the aide could recall lasted about ten minutes, on Thanksgiving Day—but he spoke to her on the phone several times a day. Many of their phone conversations had to do with the fact that Jean didn’t want to live at the hotel. “I disliked it,” she acknowledged later. “I wanted a house of my own, a bought house, not a rented house. I agitated vociferously.” Over the phone, Hughes would suggest to his wife places they could live together—Lake Tahoe, or Santa Barbara, maybe, or Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego. One of Hughes’s motifs was that he’d tell her that he had found a nice home for them, and he had guards watching it twenty-four hours a day until they found time to inspect it (they would, of course, never find that time). Kistler felt incredibly uncomfortable being in the room for these conversations, but he heard enough of them that he was able to form an opinion: “I felt that Mr. Hughes was just buying time in his relationship with Miss Peters, Mrs. Hughes.” The Boss didn’t want to live with his wife, but he didn’t want to tell her that, so he was, according to Kistler, “stalling her off” by pretending he was making plans for their future.

  Jean’s willingness to put up with Hughes’s charades for as long as she did perhaps gives credence to the theories that this marriage was arranged to suit one or both party’s business purposes, but Jean clearly didn’t fully know what she was getting into from the get-go. Howard likely hadn’t known, when he married Jean, how he would actually behave in the marriage, either: his increasingly highly regimented way of life was less something he chose to enter into, and more something that came over him. But there’s also the possibility that, as late as the late 1950s, even with everything else that was falling apart in his life, some glimmer remained of Hughes’s youthful power to charm and manipulate people who knew better into following him down blind alleys and submitting to his unreasonable quest for control. Or maybe Jean, who had waited more than a decade for Hughes to marry her, just so badly wished that the Hughes of 1959 was the same person as the Hughes of 1946—the Hughes she had met at that long-ago party, the weekend after July Fourth, before everything started to spiral out of control. Maybe this wish was so intense that she was able to at least sometimes delude herself into believing that everything was okay. Or that it soon would be—if only they could move into a house, and out of the damn hotel.

  Hughes continued to carry on an almost entirely phone-based relationship with “the Party,” Yvonne Schubert. But the Party ended in the spring of 1959. On May 4, Hughes left a message for Kane about Schubert, aka “Coldwater:” “[I]n view of what happened Saturday night I don’t want her to go to Santa Ana under any circumstances until I get a chance to discuss this with her. Perhaps I can call her tonight or tomorrow. I want him to schedule her tight as a tick, so she has no chance to go there at all. I have got to talk to her before she does go, but I am just too sick; the episode on Saturday practically killed me, and I am fighting my way back from death’s doorstep from what she did Saturday night. I must speak to her before she goes down there. Mark my words, I want this done at minimum expense.” Kane received this message, and left one for Hughes with Operations: “I no longer feel that I am capable of accomplishing what he wants accomplished, and I feel that my effectiveness with Coldwater has been destroyed.”

  Whatever had happened that Saturday night, there are indications that not much was happening between Schubert and Hughes at all. One of Howard’s men taped a phone conversation in which the young lady complained to Hughes, “You never come to see me. I’ll bet you can’t even get it up anymore, you impotent old slob!”

  About a month after Walter Kane had bowed out of “Party” duty, on June 9, aide Bill Gay informed Operations that Yvonne Schubert had “been terminated, and is to be treated as a total stranger.” The operators were instructed that if Schubert were to call in, “we are not to recognize her voice or her name—not be rude, either—but treat her as we do any of the strangers who call here each day.”

  Hughes may have at one point intended for the dozens of girls like Schubert whom he had signed to contracts to work as actresses in movies he produced; he may have intended to have these young women all waiting in the wings, so that when one with whom he had become intimate needed to be “terminated,” Hughes would easily be able to select a replacement. What none of the girls realized is that, by 1958, he was out of the business of making movies, and due to his increasing paranoia and the isolation it resulted in, he was essentially out of the business of wooing women. Thus most of the “aspirants” of the late 1950s and ’60s never met Hughes at all.

  Still, Hughes’s diminished activity on both the cinematic and romantic fronts did not stop him from paying his men to make sure the coffers were stocked, just in case. In the fall of 1960, one of his men approached a singer named Gail Ganley after a performance at the San Diego State Fair. At the time, Ganley was a twenty-year-old UCLA student, studying Spanish. She was told by Howard’s representative that if she signed with Hughes, he would turn her into the new Jane Russell.

  “How was I to know,” she’d later say, “that they were lying to me?”

  Ganley was offered a stipend of $450 per week, sent to acting school, and given cosmetic dental work. Every week, for the next two years, Gail would drive up to Operations and honk her horn, and an envelope of money would be dropped down to her from a second-floor window on a string. Every night, seven nights a week for twenty-two months, an acting coach from the Hughes payroll came to Ganley’s apartment to work with her. The only nighttime activity Gail was permitted was dinner at Perino’s, where she was often accompanied by the coach, always sat at the same table, and was served personally by Mr. Perino. After a year of this, Gail put her foot down, telling Operations, “I just had to have my dinner hour free.”

  “I had never met Howard Hughes during that entire time,” Ganley later recalled, “or even spoke to him on the phone. But I had been told by his representatives that I would some day. In fact they told me to keep one particular dress in readiness because Mr. Hughes had seen a photo of me in that dress and liked it. Three times during that two year period I had calls telling me, ‘Mr. Hughes is in town. Get ready to meet him.’ But he never showed up.

  “I had the feeling I was constantly being watched, and I felt awkward,” Ganley added. “But, after all, it was a small eno
ugh sacrifice to make for the stardom I felt would be mine.”

  In July 1962, Gail Ganley sued Hughes for $553,000, charging that she never received her promised salary and was unable to work for others while under contract to Hughes. She’d filed the suit after contacting Hughes’s representatives and asking them why she hadn’t been given any work. “He’s out of business,” they told her. “He’s not making any movies.” In October Hughes would authorize a settlement to Ganley for $40,500 plus court costs.

  JUST BEFORE HUGHES’S FIFTY-FIFTH birthday, he told Operations that if Peters were to call and ask where he was, they should tell her he went out of town. When she called in and got this message, she responded, “Do you really think he got away this time?”

  “Yes, I think so,” the operator said.

  “Well, I don’t,” Mrs. Hughes fired back. “When you hear from him tell him I’m up.”

  Two days later would come the last entries in “the Major’s” call log in reference to her trying to find her husband—because, for the next six years, she would know where he was.

  On the day he turned fifty-five, Howard left the Beverly Hills Hotel and moved with Jean into a house in Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic community of Spanish-style ranch mansions north of San Diego and inland from the coast. Here Mr. and Mrs. Hughes truly lived together for the first extended period of time, sharing a bedroom where each slept in a twin bed. They had a dog and a few cats. Howard seemed happy. He’d work at home, deep into the night while Jean was asleep. But for some unspecified reason, Howard wouldn’t let his wife receive mail at their home address. And then Jean discovered that he didn’t really own the house—he was just renting it. She had thought that, after nearly five years of marriage, finally Howard had committed to a permanent home with her. But it had been another of his manipulations all along.