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

by Karina Longworth

  Where had Terry Moore been while her “husband” was retreating from the world? After 1957’s Peyton Place, she had mostly made B-movies (such as the lurid noir Why Must I Die?, released by drive-in suppliers American International Pictures), and then transitioned to TV. For two seasons she played the love interest on a western nighttime soap called Empire, which was notable as the first regular gig for Ryan O’Neal. She had semiretired, she said, after being diagnosed with a rare condition called scleroderma and given a grim prognosis of just two years to live. At the time of Terry’s revelation of her marriage to Hughes, she hadn’t appeared in movies or TV since 1972, when she played the girl in a grind-house car chase flick called The Daredevil. That same year, Terry had officially divorced Stuart Cramer, Jean Peters’s first husband.

  “I have lost the greatest friend I ever had,” she was quoted as saying by UPI. “Howard raised me. He was the greatest lover I ever had. He was the best.”

  A subsequent wire service piece on Moore’s claims openly mocked the inconsistencies in her story. “It would have been almost impossible for Terry and Hughes to have squeezed in an eight-year marriage unless he snatched her from the playpen at an unreasonably tender age.” The article allowed for “the possibility of mistaken chronology in Terry’s marital calendar. She might have married Hughes in 1942 when she was 12 years old. The alleged 8 year marriage would have ended in sufficient time to allow her the required interlocutory year between a divorce from Hughes and the marriage to Davis.”

  When asked by People magazine if she was confessing bigamy, Terry admitted that she was. “All my life, I was scared something would come out about it,” she said. She insisted she had only married Glenn Davis because “my family and the studio” made her do it. Once reunited with Hughes, she would have stayed with him, if not for his “need for other women,” and her own desire for children.

  On May 12, 1976, in Las Vegas, Terry filed a motion asking Clark County District Court to notify her of all documents filed in connection with Hughes’s estate. Her filing was done by her attorney, Arthur Leeds, who claimed that Moore and Hughes “lived together as man and wife for at least six years.” Variety noted this was inconsistent with Moore’s claim “the marriage lasted eight years” and pointed out that she had two “marriages of record” during that period to men who were not Hughes. Terry and her team’s inability to be precise about dates would become an easy target for critics of her credibility.

  Some of those who had closely observed Hughes during the period of the alleged marriage cast further doubt on Moore’s claims. Though his loyalty to Hughes was a thing long in the past, in a deposition at the end of 1977 in connection with the battle over the estate, Noah Dietrich said of Terry Moore, “She contends she was married on his yacht and that I was present and it’s a goddamned lie.” Walter Kane had nothing nice to add. Interviewed by Raymond Fowler, Kane said that Terry was crazy, that she was as liable to try to milk you as she was to try to lay you. When Raymond Fowler asked what Walter Kane thought should be done about Terry’s marriage claims, Kane said, “Shoot her. You would never be convicted.”

  There was some evidence to support Terry’s claim. About one year after Hughes’s death, a former Paramount publicist, screenwriter, and writer of star biographies named Robert F. Slatzer* signed an affidavit claiming that Terry had confided in him about the marriage to Hughes while they were working together on Come Back, Little Sheba. Terry, Slatzer claimed, was very vexed about the fact that she was a bigamist. In the same affidavit, Slatzer claimed he had been working on a screenplay with Preston Sturges in 1953, and that the pair were sitting at the Players Club when Hughes came in, and Slatzer overheard a private conversation between Hughes and Sturges in which Hughes acknowledged that he was still married to Terry Moore. Nineteen fifty-three would have been several years after Hughes and Sturges’s falling-out over Vendetta and other matters; also, if you trust Sturges’s memory for chronology as laid out in his posthumously published memoirs, a bankrupt Sturges had been forced to auction off what was left of the failing Players Club to pay an IRS debt by February 1953, after which the club was closed and transformed into a Japanese restaurant. It’s possible this meeting happened in January 1953, but given where Sturges was in his life at the time, with his impending bankruptcy and his apparent lingering distaste for Hughes, it seems highly unlikely.

  In 1978, Terry appeared on a TV show called The Truth with Jack Anderson, where she was given a lie detector test by polygraph expert and advocate Chris Gugas. Gugas asked Terry about the marriage and the baby she had claimed to have given birth to, sired by Hughes. Terry, who had been an actress since she was a very young child, passed the test. Around this time, Greg Bautzer, Howard’s longtime friend and lawyer, produced a page of notes he had written after Hughes’s death. It included a list of items, ordered A–H, on which Bautzer planned to investigate the impact of Hughes’s passing. Several items had to do with “funds.” Item D was “‘Girl’ contracts—expirations?” Item E? “Instructions Re: Terry Moore.”

  In 1979, Moore was deposed by the lawyers representing the three Rupert Hughes grandchildren who were presenting a united front in fighting for the money. Terry hadn’t filed a legal challenge, but as lawyer Paul Freese put it, “It is my position that she has stated a claim against the estate publicly, that under probate procedure and practice the fact that she doesn’t file a formal claim anywhere doesn’t obviate the fact that she is an obstacle to the administration of the estate unless and until she disclaims, at which time there would be no problem about delaying distribution.”

  In the first of multiple depositions, Moore noted she wasn’t surprised that Hughes had left no will. “He said he would put something aside for me and that I would be very, very well taken care of and I would never have to worry, but he didn’t want his will—anybody be able to contest it,” Terry said. “Just what has happened is really what he never wanted to happen.”

  Often during these depositions, Moore would vex her lawyer by offering information that hadn’t been solicited by opposing counsel. At one point she said she didn’t remember giving an interview to the UPI and claimed that if she did, she was misquoted as saying “Howard Hughes is the greatest lover.” “That is something I did not say,” she insisted. “I am not that distasteful. That is why I remember it.” She denied that she kept a press agent on retainer in order to facilitate getting such comments in print. Instead, she said, “I have a suppress agent that tries to keep my name out of the paper.” (At the time of this deposition, Terry Moore was a client of the publicity firm Solters/Roskin/Friedman Inc.*) She admitted to be “terrible on [remembering] dates,” adding, “I mean, really just one year goes into another. And especially the past, because I live for today.”

  In a later deposition, she blamed her confusion during questioning that day on a horrible-sounding incident: “I am just feeling very, very woozy and very hazy because of the blows to my head,” Terry explained. “It was last Thursday that someone came and tried to choke me, tried to kill me. My stepson came home and he ran away.” When asked by one of the lawyers if she was on medication, she said, “I am just on codeine and Tulenol [sic].”

  Terry may have avoided coming off like a little bit of a flake if she had presented a stronger case, but what it all kept coming down to was that she had no physical proof of the marriage that she could produce. The closest she had were tapes she had made of conversations she had had with Hughes, and about Hughes.

  In June 1979, the court listened to a recording of a conversation between Terry and a man who she purported was Hughes. On it, the man tenderly asked her, “Why don’t you let someone take care of you? Why don’t you let me have the job?” A month later, this tape ended up in the hands of the tabloid Star, which quoted Terry’s conversation with Howard at length—allowing Moore to present her evidence in the court of public opinion before the actual court had made a decision.

  Moore also submitted to the court recordings of conversati
ons between her and Noah Dietrich, made around 1972. Under the pretense of interviewing him for a newspaper article, Terry had slipped in a few questions that seem designed to bolster her campaign to prove she had been Howard’s wife—and also to find out the status of his will.

  Speaking of Hughes and Jean Peters, Moore asked, “Do you know if in actuality they were ever married?”

  Dietrich was not willing to play into Moore’s conspiracy theory. “Yes, they were married,” he said.

  “Is Captain Flynn still alive?” Moore asked.

  “Captain who?”

  Terry immediately shifted gears back to Hughes and Peters. “Where did they get married?”

  “Tonopah, Nevada,” Dietrich answered. “It’s in my book,” he added, referencing Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, the tell-all Noah was about to publish about his time working for Hughes.

  “Oh, okay. I want stuff that isn’t in your book. Is Captain Flynn still alive? His Captain?”

  “No, he’s dead.”

  “Well, did you know that he married me and Howard on a boat one night?”

  “Yes, [Las Vegas real estate mogul] Del Webb told me that. I don’t know if it was a legal marriage or not. Was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Moore admitted, adding that, “if it is . . . I’m still married to him.” She told Dietrich she had wanted to keep the marriage quiet, because she didn’t want her children to know they were “illegal” and “illegitimate.” But, she would add, “I’m actually heiress to everything he’s made since nine [1949]—half of what he’s made when he lived in California.”

  Dietrich did not dispute this during that conversation. He even gave Terry some fodder for her theory that it was Peters who was the illegitimate Hughes wife. “She said it wasn’t a marriage, wasn’t any real marriage,” Dietrich told Moore. “But she said this: ‘You know, I’m just a plain country girl; he’s given me a Mercedes automobile, he’s given me a little bungalow in Beverly Hills. . . .’” Dietrich added that he had advised Peters to calculate the wages lost due to the fact that Hughes “kept you off the screen for fifteen years” and ask for that much in a settlement.

  The transcript of another of Terry’s tapes begins with her excitedly recapping what she apparently learned while the recorder was off. “Noah just told me that how double, how Hughes, how Howard double-crossed me, how he had the log of our marriage destroyed, ’cause it was a legal marriage, the log on the boat.”

  “Yea, he destroyed the evidence,” Dietrich confirmed. “I know.”

  Milton Holt, who had given Moore the assignment to write for the Hollywood Citizen-News, for which Dietrich was ostensibly being interviewed, then asked Dietrich how he knew what he was claiming to know. “Well, I was told about it by one of [Hughes’s] men,” he replies. “I can’t disclose his name.”

  These recordings may have complicated Dietrich’s testimony, but they were not considered more compelling evidence than previous statements Terry had made in court, in the context of her previous divorces. In July 1981, probate judge Pat Gregory denied her request for a jury trial at which to prove her right to a share in Hughes’s estate, when she could not produce a marriage license or any other hard documentation proving that the marriage had taken place. Terry appealed this verdict, and in February 1982, she lost the appeal, with a three-justice appellate panel noting that Terry’s claims of marriage to Hughes were “clearly inconsistent” with the claims she had made in California courts when divorcing her other husbands. “Having done so, Ms. Moore cannot now be heard to maintain a contrary position in the absence of proof that the statement was made inadvertently or by mistake, fraud or duress.” Terry appealed all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, which upheld the previous court’s decision in June 1982.

  Even as she was losing appeal after appeal, Terry was still presenting herself to the public as Howard’s rightful widow. In a long interview with soft-core gentleman’s magazine Oui in February 1982, she dismissed the idea that the marriage needed paperwork to be valid. Hughes, she said, “destroyed the log of our marriage. If the court house where you or anybody else is married is burnt down, that does not annul or nullify your marriage. So Howard and I were never divorced.” She also claimed that she had papers documenting Hughes’s marriage to Peters, and that these papers were invalid because Howard hadn’t signed them.

  “Notice how quickly the whole world accepts her marriage and does not want to accept mine,” Terry protested. “They never checked. That doesn’t mean that she didn’t think she was married, and I think that he fooled her and he may have fooled me but I didn’t know he fooled me.” The bottom line, according to Terry? “I was legally married to him. Jean Peters wasn’t.” Terry went on to explain her theory that Hughes had been murdered by the aides tasked with taking care of him: “They found hypodermic needles in his bones! Even a person with full strength has no way of shoving hypodermic needles into their bones.”

  In mid-May 1983, Terry informed the media that she’d be holding a press conference, at which she’d reveal “startling statements and legal documents” to bolster her case as Hughes’s legal widow. When the day arrived, Moore strode into the Beverly Hills Hotel wearing a pink jumpsuit under a blazer patterned with pulsatingly bright blue, pink, and purple stripes. In her hands she carried not documents, but a single rose. She waited in the wings until her lawyer Arthur Leeds invited the assembled journalists to meet “Mrs. Howard Hughes.” Terry then emerged and said, “I waited thirty years to hear those three words.” Posing in front of a poster of Hughes’s face, she announced that Howard’s blood heirs had agreed to pay her a settlement. Terry was coy about the dollar amount, but promised it would be enough money to allow her “to live comfortably on the interest for the rest of my life.”

  She dramatized the payoff as the rightful happy ending to a fairy tale that had been playing out for decades. Through the years, every time she heard Howard’s name linked romantically with others, she said, “My stomach would fall. I’ve always loved him. I’m a Mormon and I believe in eternal love. He’s a hard act to follow.” Terry was accompanied that day by her lawyer Leeds, and Jerry Rivers, her manager-boyfriend, whom she would marry in 1992.

  Both sides agreed not to disclose the exact amount of the settlement, but Terry’s lawyer Leeds declared the dollar value to be “more than five figures and less than eight.” This payment wouldn’t technically come from Hughes’s estate, which was still being contested, but instead from the other presumptive heirs, who wanted Terry out of the way so that they could sort out the fortune among themselves. Hughes family lawyer Tom Schubert downplayed Terry’s claim to widowhood: “The family does not accept her claim to be Mr. Hughes’ legal wife,” he said. “Rather than have the matter tied up in courts for another two years or more, we agreed to pay her a modest sum.”* Another lawyer for the heirs, Wayne Fisher, was more direct: “No, the estate has not acknowledged her as Howard Hughes’ widow,” he said, adding that the settlement amounted to “substantially less than eight figures.”

  Terry either didn’t hear these statements or refused to acknowledge them. After the settlement was announced, Terry began referring to herself as Hughes’s “legitimate widow” and signing autographs as “Terry Moore-Hughes.” She gave interviews previewing the tell-all book The Beauty and the Billionaire, which she had sold to Simon & Schuster with the help of agent Swifty Lazar. In it, she said, she would finally spill the details on Howard’s storied love life. As a preview, Terry revealed that the real reason Billie Dove and Hughes broke up was that the silent star had cheated on him with her golf instructor. The marriage to Jean Peters, Terry claimed, was entirely a matter of protecting Hughes from being forced into a mental institution, and as part of the agreement, Peters had signed away her ability to comment on Hughes or try to contest his estate. “And if I’m wrong,” Moore posed to columnist Frank Swertlow, “how come there has been no Jean Peters claim to the Hughes estate?” (The answer to that question was likely that Peters had already ag
reed to accept her lucrative divorce settlement and nothing more.) The book, Jerry Rivers declared, was his idea—the lynchpin of what he described to one journalist in 1983 as “the scheme.”

  “I said, ‘Forget the litigation, because it will be 500 moons before it’s settled, just write the story,’” Rivers claimed he had advised Terry. “She has a story that no one else has. I said, ‘We will hire the best agent in the world, Swifty Lazar, and just the noise that you have the definitive book on what Howard was like, that should give you enough publicity that people will say, “Hey, she’s for real, and take a look at her! She’s 50 and she’s gorgeous.”’”

  Terry told the world of a flurry of projects to follow. She planned to pose for a pinup poster, and for Playboy. She would pilot herself around the world, in an attempt to re-create Hughes’s flight of 1938. She claimed her book would be turned into a TV movie. She admitted that Hollywood hadn’t been “knocking down my door” prior to her revelation of the Hughes marriage, but now she was, as People magazine put it, “a born again celebrity.” Her constant companion Rivers promised, “Terry will be the celebrity of 1984.”

  That year Moore’s long-threatened autobiography finally hit the shelves. Reviews of The Beauty and the Billionaire ranged from amused (“If a court can accept Moore’s ‘marriage,’ we can just as easily believe” her book, wrote US Magazine, seemingly not realizing that no court had actually accepted the marriage as legitimate) to highly skeptical (“If Hughes was emotionally cruel to her, as it seems he was, it still doesn’t justify cashing in on a dead man’s fame,” sniffed Dale Pollock in the Los Angeles Times).

  In 1976, shortly after Hughes’s death, Terry had said that Howard “taught me secretiveness—never to put anything in writing.” Now Moore announced plans to write a second book about him while she was still promoting the first one. “I’m writing it as a novel,” she said in 1986. “It will be like when you read a Jackie Collins book. You know, you recognize Maria Callas and all these people in the story, even though she doesn’t call them by their real names.” She planned to call it Howard’s Women.