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

by Karina Longworth

  The plan had changed by the time that book was published in 1996. Now it was called The Passions of Howard Hughes and billed as a biography. It also included the real names of stars like Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Billie Dove, and Terry Moore—unlike The Beauty and the Billionaire, this second go-round, cowritten by Jerry Rivers, played out entirely in third person. Passions primarily consisted of descriptions of events for which the authors could not have been present, including highly florid and explicit accounts of Howard’s sexual encounters with famous actresses not named Terry Moore.

  Hughes, Moore would write in the book’s prologue, “was a man. A flesh and blood man with wants and desires much like every other man. He was one of the 20th century’s great romantics, a swashbuckler of the highest order. Howard shared these stories of his exploits with me, and I know he would have wanted to have been remembered as something other than the portrait that history has painted of him.”

  Would either Hughes or Ida Lupino have wanted history to record what Terry claims was the couple’s first kiss in 1935, during which Hughes took the seventeen-year-old Lupino’s hand and “rubbed [it] over his crotch, and even though he was still in his pants, he came”? Would Hughes have wanted the truth to be known that he had a similar outcome “less than ten seconds” after Marilyn Monroe “guided him expertly into her mouth” in the front seat of his Chevrolet? Did Bette Davis really tell Hughes, “I’m going to show you what it’s like to fuck a real woman,” right before she “sat on top of his chest, grinding herself into him, moving higher until she was over his face and mouth, and he could taste how wet she was”? (According to Moore, this encounter also ended anticlimactically—at least, for Bette—when, “in what must have taken awhile, but seemed only a second, Howard came from deep inside himself as Bette smiled up at him, continuing to stroke him.”)

  Are these really the kinds of thing a man like Hughes would have told a girl like Terry Moore, ten or fifteen or twenty years after they happened, even as pillow talk? It’s interesting to note the one relationship that Moore and Rivers cannot be accused of sexually embellishing: there are no full-on sex scenes between Terry Moore and Howard Hughes in Passions. At one point, “Terry” allows Hughes to “fondle” her breasts while he’s explaining to her what it was like to pilot the Spruce Goose, but when “he took her hand and began to move it behind her towards his penis, which was swollen against the inside of his slacks . . . she jerked her hand away.” That scene, and the book’s section about Terry, ends with Terry laying down the law: “In my family, the way I was brought up, there’s only one way we’re ever going to go further. Marriage.” Although there were sex scenes between the two in her previous book, they were PG-rated compared to most of the sex dramatized in Passions.

  It also seems notable that so many of the stories Moore chose to relate about other women in Passions involved Hughes’s premature ejaculation, feeding into the image she had created of herself as Howard’s true widow by making it seem like the other women were just there for quickies. (As for other women Hughes married, Ella Rice is not named at all in Passions, and Jean Peters is mentioned only briefly—and then, Terry has Hughes aide Bill Gay wondering if “they were married anyway.”)

  Most of Passions is un-fact-checkable. It’s easy to spot a minor inaccuracy, such as that Moore has Hughes first meeting a still-married Billie Dove in early 1931—seven months after Dove’s hearing in her divorce from Irvin Willat, which Hughes financed. But there are no legal documents or news stories to reference, or eyewitnesses to interview, to prove or disprove many of Passions’ stories, such as that on their first solo date, Dove ordered Hughes to “get the champagne and pour it over my feet and up my legs and onto my pussy . . . and lick it off.”

  Many of the projects Terry promised on her victory lap, including the round-the-world flight and the TV movie, never happened, but the Playboy spread did. Terry appeared on the magazine’s cover in August 1984, and inside the magazine in a variety of tasteful topless poses. At fifty-five, she was the magazine’s oldest cover girl to that point—“and,” she boasted, “every photo ran unretouched.” In the accompanying story, Terry explained that she hadn’t chased her piece of Howard’s pie because she cared about money. “To prove to the world that I had been married to him, that I wasn’t some twit who was making up stories—that was what I wanted. I’ve always been able to make a living, so the thing I was most happy about was their admitting I was his lawful widow.”

  Of course, the Hughes estate hadn’t admitted that Terry was Hughes’s lawful widow. In fact, two lawyers had said that the exact opposite was true. But the settlement, coming after Terry’s years of positioning herself as Howard Hughes’s secret great love, and followed up by years of Terry telling her preferred version of the story, created the illusion that Moore had won. The outcome suggested more about Terry and Howard’s connection than any of her claims to their intimacy. She had, clearly, closely observed a master at work. She had pulled off a publicity stunt worthy of Howard Hughes. It was like something out of a movie. Or, to paraphrase something Katharine Hepburn had once said of Hughes, it was better than the movies—it was real life.

  Notes on Sources and Acknowledgments

  This book draws heavily on archival materials, the exploration of which took me back and forth across the United States several times.

  The Howard Hughes Files at the Texas State Archives in Austin contain approximately 75,000 documents. I spent ten days there in September 2016 and in that time, was able to review only the fraction of these files that seemed most applicable to my project, but I found invaluable sources in the dozens of boxes that I opened. Some examples include communication between Hughes and his aides from the 1920s through the 1960s (particularly the “call logs” generated in the 1950s and ’60s out of Hughes’s desire that all incoming phone messages be transcribed word for word); Faith Domergue’s unpublished autobiographical manuscript (which has a note clipped to it, suggesting the Hughes camp was responsible for it never seeing the light of day); and the thousands of pages of depositions from various legal hearings, including the RKO shareholder lawsuits and the many-year, multistate battle over the Hughes estate in probate courts. Thanks to Tonia J. Wood for answering my many questions about how to navigate this massive collection.

  I took two trips to Las Vegas, to explore the Hughes-related files donated to the University of Las Vegas at Nevada by Carl Byoir and Associates, the publicity company Hughes engaged for the last few decades of his life. At their client’s direction, the firm meticulously collected clippings having to do with Hughes and his associates (including women he was involved with or just interested in) and all manner of other topics (from baseball to the mafia). Few activities can give you a sense of how a person was perceived over time quite like reading newspaper clippings about them spanning decades, but the Byoir collection is extra special because of how it lays out what Hughes was interested in, and what was on his mind, particularly as his affairs (in business, in the bedroom, in his own brain) began to become more convoluted in the 1940s and ’50s. The previously untapped gem of this collection is the correspondence between Hughes and journalist Stephen White, occasioned by White’s attempt to profile Hughes for Look magazine in 1954. White allowed Hughes to make notes and corrections on his draft of the story, and the Byoir publicists recorded and transcribed a lengthy conversation between the tycoon and the journalist in which Hughes clarified aspects of his biography and—more fascinatingly—explained why he wanted various facts massaged in certain ways in order to protect his public persona. Big thanks to Peter Michel in Special Collections at UNLV for taking the time to talk to me about these documents.

  Byoir and Associates came into the Hughes fold after two charismatic individual publicists had already made their mark on Hughes’s career and its perception. The files of Russell Birdwell, located at the Charles E. Young Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles, were extremely helpful in reconstructing the publicity c
ampaign surrounding The Outlaw and Jane Russell’s place in it. I’m indebted to Dave Gunn for reaching out to me and helping me make the most of all of the resources at UCLA.

  The copious notes and correspondence kept by Howard Hughes’s first film publicist, Lincoln Quarberg, provided valuable insight into Hughes’s operations in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and into the shaping of Jean Harlow and Billie Dove as stars. These files are located at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, which is always my first stop for any sort of research into Hollywood’s past. Other collections at the Herrick that I drew from include Marshall Neilan’s autobiographical notes, Billie Dove’s scrapbook, the Hedda Hopper papers, the incredibly comprehensive Production Code Administration records, and the clippings files for most of the subjects in this book, but particularly Ida Lupino and Terry Moore. Thanks to Jenny Romero, Kristen Ray, and the whole staff of the Herrick library, as well as Heather Linville at the Academy for walking me through the restoration of Cock of the Air.

  At the library of the Writers Guild of America West, archivist Hilary Swett guided me through boxes of files pertaining to the Guild’s handling of the Blacklist, and specifically the battle between Hughes and Paul Jarrico. A hidden gem in this collection are the files collected by Howard Suber in his research on the Blacklist, in which I found files pertaining to RKO’s paid-for research into the communist pasts of its potential employees. Special thanks also to Suber himself for giving me permission to use these files in my own research.

  Sandy Fowler graciously loaned me the files of her late husband, Raymond Fowler, pertaining to his “psychological autopsy” of Hughes. Thanks to J. C. Johnson at Boston University for his help with the Bette Davis scrapbooks, and to Brett Service at the Warner Bros. Archives at USC for allowing me to access the documents that cleared up the confusion about Faith Domergue’s birth date.

  My research assistant, Lindsey D. Schoenholtz, helped with everything from making appointments with archives to making Freedom of Information Act requests for FBI files, to organizing hundreds of pages of my notes and underlinings on archival sources. I would not have been able to finish this book without her.

  Special thanks to my agent, Daniel Greenberg, and Geoff Shandler at Custom House for believing in me based on a podcast that was still, in early 2015, extremely DIY and had only a small cult audience. I was only able to complete this book thanks to the support and patience of Geoff and everyone at Custom House, including Vedika Khanna and Eliza Rosenberry.

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