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

by Karina Longworth

  Jean had been as compliant a wife as any man could have asked for, and amid extremely challenging circumstances, she had striven to give her husband the benefit of the doubt—or, at least, most of the time did him the kindness of not revealing that she knew he was lying to her. But now she had finally become, as she would put it later, a “doubting Thomas” regarding her husband’s promises. “He was very manipulative. And even though he was darling and charming, I’ll just say my faith in him was eroded.”

  At the end of 1961, they moved to another rented house, a seven-thousand-square-foot manse in the tony Los Angeles enclave of Bel Air. This time Mr. and Mrs. Hughes did not share a bedroom. Howard was under twenty-four-hour-attendance by his aides, and it was now required that Jean schedule an appointment with her husband’s employees should she desire to see him.

  From the day they moved in until the day Hughes moved out in 1966, he didn’t leave the residence. “He sometimes went throughout the house,” Peters recalled, “but he primarily was in a very large suite, which was a bedroom and a dressing room and another room.” He’d work whenever he felt like it, all hours of the day, then he’d stop and eat and watch a movie. If he was not working in the evening and Jean was home, they’d watch TV together, but they were never alone together; aides were always around.

  Peters saw him take what she later described as “small amounts of Empirin codeine.” She told him he should try to wean himself off it. Hughes told her that he “wanted to,” and that he would—“someday.” Instead, around this time, he began to dissolve codeine tablets in water so that he could inject the drug with a hypodermic needle. By 1963 he had added into his daily intake so much Valium that his aides would have to drop off multiple prescriptions in other people’s names at drugstores all over town, so that nobody would suspect that Howard Hughes was taking too much.

  A little less than two years after Mr. and Mrs. Hughes took up residence together in Bel Air, a tabloid called the National Insider reported that the former Jean Peters wanted out: “Hollywood insider’s [sic] have wondered for a long, long time how much longer Jean Peters would accept the life she’s led as Mrs. Howard Hughes. The eccentric millionaire, it’s been said, has kept her a virtual prisoner for years, never allowing her out of her luxurious cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel, never allowing her to see friends. Now word has leaked out that she’s had it and is asking for a divorce. I wonder if she’ll have the courage to go through with her plans, whether Hughes will allow her her freedom.” This information was out of date, in that husband and wife had moved on from the Beverly Hills Hotel, but it was not inaccurate.

  Hughes and Peters would manage to sustain the Bel Air living arrangement for another two and a half years. Then, rather than have to appear in court and discuss his (mis)management of TWA, Hughes sold his interest in the airline. He pocketed a reported $566 million. Now he would have one primary motivating factor in life, according to his wife: “To avoid the taxes.”

  “I knew he wanted to be out of the state of California when the TWA matter was settled,” Peters said. “I felt my whole life was being controlled by a bunch of tax lawyers. I argued with him. I said, ‘Pay the tax. Life is too short.’”

  One July morning, Jean lay in bed and listened as unusual sounds traveled from one side of the house to the other. The front door of the Bel Air mansion slammed shut, and then all was quiet. Howard Hughes and his entourage of aides had left for the train station. They were going to Boston. Hughes would never return to his marital home.

  Jean hadn’t been told where he was going—or that he was going. “I stayed in my room,” she recalled, “but I heard them leave. I knew he was leaving.” She only found out that Boston was her husband’s destination “the next day, when I read it in the newspaper.”

  They spoke on the phone, and Howard told Jean he was considering Boston as a place for the two of them to live. “[B]ut by that time I don’t think I paid too much attention to what he was saying,” Jean later admitted. “I just didn’t believe him. Let me put it that way.”

  Jean did go to Boston for a visit. There Hughes had commandeered the entire fifth floor of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, at a cost of $2,000 (or $15,400 in 2018 dollars) per day. He and his aides occupied three suites, overlooking the public garden; part of the daily outlay of funds was meant to ensure the remaining rooms on the floor were kept empty. Jean stayed at the Ritz for two weeks. When she left, she went back to Los Angeles, back to the house in Bel Air. Then Howard abandoned Boston for Las Vegas. Mr. and Mrs. Hughes never saw one another in the flesh again.

  Chapter 27

  From Vegas to the Grave

  It started because he didn’t want to leave his room. In December 1966, the Hughes entourage began to occupy the penthouse at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Howard would remain in that suite of rooms for another four years.

  Hughes had checked into the penthouse on a whim, and after a few days the staff needed him to vacate for a prebooked reservation. Hughes wouldn’t answer the in-room phone, so the only way for hotel management to communicate with him was to slip notes under the door. When they slipped through a note asking him to please leave to make way for a new guest, Hughes scrawled a note of his own.

  “How much would I have to pay to stay if I bought the hotel?”

  The answer came back: “$13 million”—possibly an attempt to outprice even Howard Hughes.

  Hughes wrote back, “Sold.” With half a billion dollars to play with thanks to the TWA deal, he began buying up real estate in Las Vegas.

  His life was now conducted entirely from bed. He watched TV, had aides project movies, injected and swallowed drugs (which he and his aides referred to as “goodies”), handwrote and dictated voluminous memos, and talked on the phone. He barely ate; it would regularly take him eight hours to finish a can of soup. The nourishment of food couldn’t compete with the fulfillment he got from the same source that had been providing it for him for decades: Hollywood movies, starring Hollywood women.

  “He would eat a spoonful and then get interested in watching a movie on his projector,” remembered aide Gordon Margulis. “Often a movie he had already seen twenty times. The soup would cool down and he would send it back to be reheated. It had to be heated carefully so that it would be hot enough but not too hot. He would eat another spoonful or so, get involved in the movie again and send the soup back to be reheated. There were times when I reheated the same can of soup ten or twelve times.” When he came off his marathon canned-soup diet, Hughes switched to the hotel’s vegetable soup. “Now this is only a trial period,” Hughes said, “because I want it just the way I like it and it has to be right.”

  Howard talked to Jean on the phone every day. Mainly, they discussed when she would move to Vegas to be with him.

  “I had no interest in moving to Las Vegas,” she later said. “It is not my kind of town.” Still, she would have compromised if Howard would have done the same. “I wouldn’t go unless he would move out of the hotel. I was not going to live in a Las Vegas hotel.”

  There had been a time when the couple had shared the same conception of their dream home. They had fantasized, Jean said, “to one day have a ranch that would have everything on it that would make him happy and would make me happy.” Shockingly, given the total duplicitousness that had marked his approach to marriage previously, Howard actually attempted to make good on this promise. One day he called Jean from Vegas and said, “I bought you a ranch.” It was thirty minutes southwest of the Desert Inn, outside of town. Hughes told her he was going to have an airstrip installed for him, and that there would be plenty of room for her to keep horses. He had bought the ranch from heiress Vera Krupp, the original owner of a 33-carat blue-white culet-facet, 1920s diamond that Richard Burton would buy for Elizabeth Taylor in 1968.

  “He sent me pictures of it,” Jean said of the Krupp Ranch. She was not impressed, by the land or its location. Howard had told her, Jean recalled, that “it was 25 miles out of town and the road was
very bumpy, so I had visions of myself being stuck on a ranch 25 miles out of Las Vegas.” This was the big difference between Hughes’s Krupp purchase and Burton’s Krupp purchase: a ranch, located miles away from where your husband clearly intended to spend most of his time, was not the same as a diamond ring that would sit right on a woman’s finger, reminding her of her husband’s love all the time.

  Still, Jean would have moved . . . if he had moved in first. But Howard would not leave his hotel. Unable or unwilling to see his wife in person, Hughes began calling KLAS, a local Las Vegas TV station that showed movies at night, to request that they start playing more features starring Jean Peters. This wasn’t his only complaint: why not run more westerns, more aviation pictures? And how come they went dark at 1 A.M.?

  Finally, one night in 1968, the owner of KLAS, a local hero named Hank Greenspun, answered the phone and told Howard that if he owned his own TV station he could do whatever he wanted. So Hughes bought KLAS. He had the station send him a list of potential movies every week, and at night when he was ready to watch, he’d have an aide call up and make requests. Fifteen minutes before a movie was about to end, the station would get a call telling them what the next movie needed to be. His most frequent requests, by far, were the movies Robert Mitchum had made for him at RKO—which, of course, also starred Jane Russell, Ava Gardner, Faith Domergue, and other actresses who had been the subject of Hughes’s obsession.

  Operations received frequent requests from reporters who wanted to write about Jean Peters. Hughes ordered that all of these journalists receive no cooperation from his wife or anyone around her. But the Hughes camp couldn’t stop reporters from tracking Jean down and following her around Los Angeles. In a syndicated article on Peters, Vernon Scott, the first man to profile Jean as Mrs. Hughes, reported that the tycoon’s wife went out in public constantly, unrecognized, accompanied by a bodyguard. He described her as a fan of baseball, basketball, and football who spent many days voluntarily recording books for the blind at the Braille Institute, and nights at UCLA attending classes. Scott also claimed, erroneously, that Peters often flew to Las Vegas on the weekends to spend “two or three days with her busy husband.”

  Reporter D. L. Lyons tracked Peters down at UCLA and sat in on one of her night school classes, which she attended incognito. There he witnessed her silently taking in a discussion on capitalism, with her classmates apparently unaware that she was the wife of America’s “most mysterious capitalist.” Among other things, Lyons noted, “Jean Hughes is at once married and unmarried—the latter in the sense that there is no record of her having been seen in public with her husband since their marriage more than 11 years ago. During their married life, they have never been photographed together, to the best of anyone’s knowledge.” Lyons also reported that he had heard that Peters spent weekends in Vegas with Howard, though he quoted a Desert Inn employee as saying, “I’ve been here for more than a year and I’ve never seen the lady. At least I’ve never recognized her.”

  Hughes biographers Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske would later claim that Scott and Lyons were the same person, and that “[f]or his expose [of Jean Peters], Scott used the nom de plume D. L. Lyons.” If true, Scott wrote about Peters under both his real name and his pseudonym, and used the assumed name more than once to write about Peters. And yet it does seem clear that, as opposed to the extremely sanitized Scott story, the initial Lyons story included facts that Hughes would have been less pleased to see in print, such as the absence of evidence that the married couple spent time together in Vegas. However, the Hughes camp was no doubt happy about the way the Lyons story ended: first with anonymous friends denying that Jean ever felt “isolated, lonely or hidden away,” and then by describing “secret trips” that Mr. And Mrs. Hughes were said to have taken, “off for Peru or some such place on one of his jets”—making the privacy of the relationship feel wildly romantic instead of claustrophobic. A “Hughes employee” was given the last word: “Mrs. Hughes leads as interesting a life as any woman in the country. And I can tell you this: Howard loves her more than anyone else in the world.”

  These last two sentences may have been true, but the Hughes-Peters marriage had never been fully functional, and now it was all but over.

  By the end of the 1960s, Hughes wasn’t feeling well. He told Jean he was contemplating a return to Los Angeles to get medical treatment.* She wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong with him. Mentally, she believed, he was all there, despite the fact that he clearly “was taking too much Empirin codeine.” Other than that, “I knew he didn’t eat correctly. He didn’t exercise, and his whole lifestyle had ruined what was once a magnificent physique.”

  He owned the mansion across the street from where Jean still lived in Bel Air—he kept it to house his ongoing surveillance operation on his wife—and she suggested he live there while getting medical treatment. Hughes suggested he move back into Jean’s house and send Jean to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  “I didn’t want to go to the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Jean explained later, “and I was afraid if Howard ever got in my house I would never get him out.”

  They did not resolve this conundrum. In January 1970, news broke that Jean Peters was leaving Hughes.

  “This is not a decision made in haste, and is done only with the greatest of regret,” Jean was quoted as saying in the official statement announcing their separation. “Our marriage has endured for thirteen years, which is long by present standards. Any property settlement will be resolved privately between us.”

  “She will retain an affectionate loyalty toward Howard Hughes,” predicted Vernon Scott, “a man who treated her kindly, showered her with riches and affection and gave her everything but a happy marriage.”

  It was widely presumed around Hollywood that Peters would be paid untold riches in order to keep the details of the marriage private. In March, comedian Jack Carter joked of the divorce, “I can see him handing her a check for $980,000,000 and saying, ‘Would you mind not cashing this until Wednesday?’”

  Privately, in a letter to aide Bob Maheu, the former CIA man whom Hughes had originally hired to investigate Peters’s first husband, Stuart Cramer, Hughes blamed the “complete and, I am afraid, irrevocable loss of my wife” not on his own illnesses and isolation, but on his aide Bill Gay, whom Hughes had assigned to lie to and placate Peters.

  That spring, the first new photographs of Jean Peters in thirteen years began to appear in newspapers. She made her return to public life at the Oscars, which she attended with Stanley Hough, a widowed 20th Century Fox executive and former professional baseball player, and Hough’s young daughter Christina. News of Peters’s relationship with Hough was already public by that point: on February 22, in his nationally syndicated “Personality Parade” column, gossip writer Walter Scott noted that it had been an open secret ever since Jean and Stan had appeared together at a performance of Hello, Dolly. Still, Howard was interested in controlling Jean’s return to public life, just as he had controlled her retreat. A memo was prepared for him detailing former RKO publicist Perry Lieber’s thoughts on how to best manage photographic evidence of Hughes’s soon-to-be-ex-wife on a very high-profile date with another man. Perhaps they could have photos taken of her in her dress, before the ceremony, and leak them the night of the awards, with innocuous captions, and a request the press run these instead of any photos snapped at the awards dinner of the new couple together?

  In the end, these suggested preceremony photos didn’t materialize, but neither did a photo of Jean and Stan. Instead, on April 9, two days after the awards, the Los Angeles Times ran a photo of Jean sitting at the Oscars after party with Stanley’s daughter Christina. The caption referred to Jean as “the former Jean Peters” and “Mrs. Hughes.” It did not mention Stanley Hough at all.

  Totally coincidentally, in early 1970 Terry Moore separated from Stuart Cramer, Peters’s first husband. The split changed Moore’s financial status considerably, and this was a tough transition for
Terry. “It was the first time I hadn’t had servants,” she later recalled. “I had been a movie star since I was 8 years old, I’d always had everything taken care of. I’d never even had to mail a letter myself, and suddenly I was like everybody else. I went from yachts and racehorses and airplanes to worrying about how I was going to pay the bills every month. Suddenly I was in the mainstream of life, and it was sink or swim.”

  According to Moore, right after her separation, Howard made an attempt to get back into her life. He had a driver pick her up and bring her to the Hotel Bel Air, where dinner had already been ordered for her—or maybe it was the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the bungalow was filled with flowers and champagne was on ice—Terry remembered the story differently at different times. No matter which hotel it was, Terry waited there for Howard, but he didn’t show. Eventually Hughes called the driver and ordered him to take Terry home and tell her he’d call her there, so she went home. Howard didn’t call until quite late that night. He asked her how she looked, a decade since they had last seen each other. She asked him how he looked. The two spoke for about ten minutes, about “silly things,” Terry recalled. “It was just personal.”

  If that call happened (in one of Terry’s versions of the story, it didn’t), it was the last time they spoke, but Hughes continued to be on her mind. In May 1970, Rona Barrett reported on her radio show that Terry was writing a book about her “intimacies” with Hughes, “starting at age 14.” Barrett added, “14 going on 24.”

  In 1972, Jean returned to acting for the first time since before marrying Hughes, appearing in a public television production of Winesburg, Ohio. She was asked about her retirement from the screen after her marriage to Hughes. “I wasn’t convinced that being a motion picture actress, under contract to a studio, was the way I wanted to spend however many years a film career would have lasted.”