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

by Karina Longworth

  These skills served Hughes well during his rise and reign as a Hollywood iconoclast, through the release of spectacles like Hell’s Angels, Scarface, and The Outlaw, and a number of scandals and controversies. Then Hughes nearly died in a plane crash in 1946, and after that, much changed. His masterful ability to use the media to control the public’s perception of him slipped as he first became overextended as the owner and manager of RKO, and then began to slip away from a conventional public life, and conventional reality. After his disastrous stint as a studio chief ended in 1955, in January 1957 Hughes married actress Jean Peters, and shortly thereafter he began to hide out from all business and social obligations in screening rooms—and hotel rooms that, thanks to an army of assistants, were transformed into screening rooms. He’d spend much of the last decade of his life in bed, watching movies most of the time that he was awake. A failure as both an artist and a mogul, he became a full-time spectator.

  By the end of Hughes’s life, when he was a codeine addict who spent his days and nights nodding in front of the TV, the former star aviator playboy would suddenly perk up when an actress he had once spent time with appeared on the screen. Hughes would allegedly call over one of his many aides, point, and say, “Remember her?” and then drift off into a grinning daydream of better days, days when his power to draw women to him and control not just their emotions but their movements, appearances, and identities was apparently limitless.

  “NOT HALF A DOZEN men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the unfinished draft of what was to be his last novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. He unwittingly set the template for the next seventy years of film writing with his next sentence: “And perhaps the closest a woman can come to the set-up is to try and understand one of those men.” But how to approach understanding Hollywood’s women, and their experiences of those men? As we move into an era in which there is frank public discussion of the exploitation, subjugation, manipulation, and abuse of women by men in positions of power, it’s time to rethink stories that lionize playboys, that celebrate the idea that women of the twentieth century were lands to be conquered, or collateral damage to a great man’s rise and fall. One way to begin that rethink is by exploring a playboy’s relationship with some of the women in his life from the perspective of those women.

  This is a book about a few of the dozens of women who encountered Howard Hughes in Hollywood between the mid-1920s and early 1960s, whose lives and careers were impacted by their relationship with him. Some of these women were involved romantically with Hughes, others weren’t, but all found the course of their careers marked by his presence. Many are women whom Hughes manipulated, spied on, and even essentially kept prisoner—some of whom Hughes may not have had any sexual relationship with at all, and one of whom was his second wife. These were women whose faces and bodies Hughes strove to possess and/or make iconic, sometimes at an expense to their minds and souls. This is a book about the lives and work of women whose careers would stall out at a variety of points on the Hollywood totem pole, from never-known to canonical star to has-been, and it’s about where they were in those lives and careers when Hughes came along, where they ended up after he moved on from them, and the roles these women and Hughes played in the construction of one another’s public personae.

  Mainly, it’s about what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood during what historians call the Classical Hollywood Era—roughly the mid-1920s through the end of the 1950s, the exact period of time Hughes was active in Hollywood. This period was marked by a number of evolutions and flash points, including the transition from silent film to sound; various sex and drug scandals that led to the institution of Hollywood’s self-censorship via the Production Code; the perfection of star-making through publicity practices that sometimes constituted more satisfying storytelling than the motion pictures themselves; the anti-Communist blacklisting of writers, directors, and stars; the government-mandated consent decree through which movie studios were forced to sell the movie theaters they owned in order to stay in production; and the decline of the star and studio systems in the wake of this monopoly-busting.

  There are two important things to note about the events listed above. They all had an impact on the kinds of opportunities available for women in movies, on the screen and behind the scenes. And, Howard Hughes managed to have a hand in all of them.

  Chapter 1

  Hollywood Babylon

  An orgy enjoyed by movie folk was the stuff of the worst nightmares of the original settlers of Hollywood. Places like the Ambassador became the sites of such casual debauchery in part because the neighborhood proper was so unwelcoming of it. Nestled into foothills and sprawling into wide, flat streets, the city of Hollywood grew slowly over the first decade of the twentieth century. The soon-to-be movie capital originally functioned as a hybrid suburban/rural village, with its population composed in large part of individualists: prohibitionists, suffragettes, retirees, and refugees from bleaker climes, all looking to cash in on the land. Independence came at a price, however, and by 1909, the city of Hollywood, population 10,000, was collapsing due to problems with sewage, drainage, and water. Unable to thrive on its own, the next year Hollywood was incorporated into the city of Los Angeles. By then a slow exodus had begun of film producers, directors, and performers from the East Coast to the West.

  In keeping with its maverick spirit, the city of Hollywood had been resistant to the new fad. Many of those who had established roots in and around Hollywood prior to 1910 looked down on those involved with newly imported trade, who, they felt, were a low class of people whose very presence threatened to destroy their oasis. The locals derisively called these workers “movies”—the new medium’s detractors showing their disdain by not bothering to distinguish between producers and product.* But this ridicule was not enough to stop East Coast “movies” from flocking to the West, often in search of literal changes of scenery. By the end of 1911, fifteen motion picture outfits had set up shop around Hollywood.

  In 1910, the heads of a New York–based outfit called the Biograph Company came to Los Angeles to explore the area’s potential for location filmmaking. They were driven around town by an eighteen-year-old kid, Marshall “Mickey” Neilan, a high school dropout turned car salesman with a ready grin and a shock of red hair. On this trip, Biograph’s top director, David Ware Griffith, made a number of short films. One of them, called In Old California, would go into some records as the first motion picture made entirely within the community of Hollywood. Other reports say the first film shot in Hollywood was another Griffith production, Love Among the Roses, starring a fifteen-year-old Mary Pickford. The fact that fourteen titles separate these two films on Griffith’s IMDb page gives a sense of the volume of production in 1910: it was a quantity business. In a few years, Griffith would stake a claim for quality.

  Nineteen fourteen saw the release of the final Griffith film for Biograph, the biblical epic Judith of Bethulia, which became notorious for its so-called orgy scene, featuring the highly choreographed writhing of female dancers in semidiaphanous costumes. The first feature-length film produced by that studio (running sixty-one minutes and requiring two reel changes), it starred the cream of Biograph’s crop: sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh. Mickey Neilan, the kid who had driven the Biograph guys around on their first trip, also played an uncredited role. By now he was a screen veteran, having appeared in nearly ninety films in two years; he was also beginning to try his hand as a director.

  The year after Judith, Griffith cemented Hollywood’s evolution toward a model based on feature film production with the biggest hit of the silent era, The Birth of a Nation. Today, Birth of a Nation is widely credited with having resurrected the Ku Klux Klan, and at its centenary, the three-hour epic would be considered by consensus to be, as one 2015 critic put it, “the most virulently racist major movie ever released in the U.S.” In 1915, Birth of a Nation was highly c
ontroversial for its content, but it was also an undeniable game-changer for the business of the movies, offering empirical evidence that a medium that most people assumed was merely an amusement could actually be both a viable moneymaking enterprise and a significant form of art. Griffith’s feat was more one of curation than invention—he was not the first person to innovate film techniques like montage, fade-outs, and close-ups, but he did include numerous such innovations all in one film with a fluidity that blew contemporary moviegoers away. Audiences had never seen anything like it. “We sat in the front row of the balcony, and it is a wonder I did not land in the orchestra,” recalled Frederica Sagor, who was fifteen when she saw Birth for the first time. “The picture had me on the edge of my seat in riveted attention.”

  Griffith and Birth’s financiers became the film industry’s first millionaires. A tidal wave soon followed: all over the country, members of the audience were inspired to pick up and head west in search of work making the movies. For the first time in the history of American gold rushes, a majority of the rushers to Hollywood were female. Hollywood became known as a place where women could immigrate in search of legitimate work, and do it without the help or chaperoning of men.

  Back then, it wasn’t such a huge leap from sitting in a theater seat to imagining oneself in Hollywood, working face-to-face with the people on-screen. Beginning in 1914, the popular serial The Perils of Pauline was marketed to young women through media stories about the exaggerated off-screen persona of actress Pearl White, who was described as a single woman who had traveled the world and ended up in the ultimate locus of adventure: the movies. “News” stories, often as fictionalized as the movies themselves, about stars like White stoked the imaginations of girl viewers, as did the design of the magazines the new celebrities appeared in. If the motion picture camera fetishized faces through the close-up, Photoplay, Motion Picture (both founded in 1911), and other such publications took the icon-making process a step further by distributing printed images of those faces—eyes, lips, and hair, all frozen in perfection—often accompanied by heavily embellished origin stories. As moviegoing became more central to young Americans’ lives, the surrounding media swelled with adulation for the stars, and beautiful and ambitious people in every town where motion pictures could be seen started to believe that a greater destiny lay in the West. “Hollywood” was, according to a scrapbook kept by the Studio Club—a home for single women around the corner from the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, founded by Mary Pickford in collaboration with the YWCA—“a magic name to the ambitious, career-seeking girl.” And the fantasy seemed like it was just a bus ticket away from a reality.

  This is how it was for Lillian Bohny, who went to her first movie in 1915, when she was about twelve. Soon thereafter, she was so taken with Birth of a Nation that she wrote her first fan letter to one of the boy actors in the movie. (Her first lesson in the dynamics of stardom: despite the connection she had felt watching him on-screen, he didn’t even write back.)

  Growing up in the north Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, Lillian and her girlfriends would sit on each other’s stoops and talk about the movies. All of them imagined themselves on the screen, and all of them talked about it—except for Lillian, whose fantasies felt so powerful to her that she didn’t dare share them.

  “I’m not psychic,” she would say many years later, “but there have been instances in my life when I have been absolutely so sure of something and this was one of them.” Her friends were just schoolgirls, dreaming, yet when Lillian Bohny went to the movies, she felt that something different was happening to her: she felt the pull of destiny. “I knew I was going to be in pictures,” she later said. “There was no doubt about it. I didn’t know where or how or when. I didn’t want the stage, I wanted motion pictures.”

  The where, how, and when tripped up most dreamers, but in Lillian’s case, fate or coincidence contrived to give her a neighbor who worked as a film extra. Lillian’s mother took her daughter to the neighbor’s agency, where she was signed as an extra, and soon she was appearing in the background of westerns and comedies, shot in New York or New Jersey. It would be years before she would get to Hollywood.

  Many women who were entranced by the movies envisioned themselves as stars, but in the industry’s early days, it was easier than it would become later for women to find positions of power behind the camera as well. By the time Lillian was seized by the vitality of moving pictures, one of her future collaborators was already in Hollywood and on the path to becoming one of the most respected filmmakers of her generation. Lois Weber had been a stage actress, but when she married another actor, Phillips Smalley, she put her own career aside to go on the road with him. Stir-crazy, Weber began writing motion picture scenarios to amuse herself. She was as surprised as anyone when these scenarios began attracting the attention of Los Angeles–based film studios. “Not that I doubted their meriting production,” she explained later, “but I imagined they had to be introduced to the scenario editor by some person with influence. I was wrong, and the check I received testified to the illusion under which I had labored.”

  Weber soon signed a contract with the Rex Motion Picture Company, where Smalley and Weber would collaborate on about one film per week for almost two years, with Lois writing and directing vehicles in which both she and Phillips would star. By 1913, Rex had been absorbed into a new conglomerate of independent companies called Universal, headed by Carl Laemmle—a friendly, folksy German Jewish immigrant who over the past twenty years had gone from working in a Chicago department store to owning movie theaters, to successfully challenging motion picture patent troll Thomas Edison’s monopoly on the tools of the trade, to leading a number of other companies to unite as the Universal Film Manufacturing Company of Fort Lee, New Jersey. In 1913, Universal, with Laemmle at its head, took over a plot of land in the hillside just north of Hollywood, where the studio was installed on a ranch large enough that Laemmle was able to promote his new fiefdom as Universal City. This studio-as-city was proudly utopian: in a September 1913 publicity stunt, Lois Weber ran for mayor of Universal City, and won. A New York newspaper claimed she was the only female mayor in the world at the time, and called Universal “the only bona fide woman’s sphere on the map, where women do all the bossing, and where mere man is just tolerated—that’s all, just tolerated.”

  But as with any gold rush, eventually there was not enough work to go around for the cascade of hopeful, naive pilgrims. As early as 1914, the Hollywood Citizen-News was reporting, “Hollywood is honeycombed with prostitutes.” Casting offices were full of hungry young women suffering from various degrees of disillusion, depending on how long they had been in town. A typical day for a would-be starlet involved a commute of six to ten miles in each direction via packed streetcar or city bus, for the privilege of waiting around an office for hours, only to be told that their services weren’t needed. In a 1927 Photoplay magazine exposé that reads like propaganda meant to discourage young women from heading west, reporter and critic Ruth Waterbury described a scene she witnessed in a casting office: An actor, feeling flush, produced a roll of breath mints and told the desperate ladies sitting around waiting for their big break that they could each have one. He was rushed by one particularly hungry girl, who snatched the mints out of his hand and gulped them all at once: “To her, plainly, they were food.”

  Why didn’t these wannabes give up and go home once they saw how slim their chances really were? Putting aside pride, there were just enough success stories in plain sight to allow all but the most over-it to hold on to hope—and, sometimes, that success happened to real underdogs. In 1922, Lillian Bohny from Washington Heights was on a film set, about to take top billing for the first time, in the feature Beyond the Rainbow. One of her costars in the film would be even less experienced than Lillian, a total newcomer fresh out of Brooklyn. Lillian was unimpressed. “She was not well dressed,” the slightly more established actress, who was making a cool fifty dollars a we
ek as a featured player, observed of Clara Bow. “She looked as though she’d just come off the streets from playing tag or something like that.” Within five years, Clara Bow would be Lillian’s only rival as the most popular actress in Hollywood.

  Those who worked steadily lived well, and partied as if the flush times would never end. Former car salesman Marshall Neilan was one such success story. By 1913 Neilan was both an in-demand actor and a learning-on-the-job director. In 1915 he played Pinkerton to Mary Pickford’s Cho-Cho-San in the first screen adaptation of Madame Butterfly; within two years of that, Mickey Neilan was directing “America’s Sweetheart” Pickford in one of her biggest hits, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

  Neilan could be found most nights holding up the bar at the Hotel Alexandria in downtown Los Angeles. The Alexandria’s grand lobby, flanked by marble columns and canopied with a gold-leaf ceiling, functioned as a kind of living room for the toast of peak silent-era Hollywood. “You could get laid, you could become a star, you could start a new movie company, and you could go broke, all in that same place the same afternoon,” remembered Budd Schulberg, whose father, future Paramount exec B. P. Schulberg, made the Alexandria the family’s first stop upon their arrival in Los Angeles in 1918. Neilan and Griffith would meet to sip champagne cocktails while Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin made the rounds. Joe Schenck, later the president of United Artists and the chairman of 20th Century Fox, would be there with wife/protégée Norma Talmadge; Louis B. Mayer would show up with not-wife/protégée Anita Stewart. Mayer wasn’t yet a bigwig—MGM, the studio to bear his name, wouldn’t be formed until 1924—but that was part of the allure of the Alexandria scene: the most important people in Hollywood were hanging around in plain sight, and even if you were a nobody, if you could muster the courage you could go right up to them and talk to them. And that conversation could change your life.