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

by Karina Longworth

  By the time Sonny was a sentient child, his father was comfortably wealthy, and the boy never lacked for material comforts. Houston was segregated along both race and class lines, and though Howard Sr.’s riches may have been nouveau, he and his pedigreed bride and young son easily slipped into the highest echelon of local society. This bubble was threatened in 1917. With the United States’ entry into World War I, a battalion of 156 African American soldiers was sent from New Mexico to Houston to guard the construction of a new military base there. A pattern of aggression from the local white police force toward the black troops snowballed over the course of several weeks. On the night of August 23, word hit the camp that a corporal had been killed by the police. In fact, this corporal had been beaten and shot at by cops who eventually arrested him, but the rumor and subsequent rumblings that a white mob was heading for the camp prompted the alarmed servicemen to organize a mutiny, seizing weapons to defend themselves. What ensued came to be known as the Houston Riot of 1917, and it left nineteen people dead—fifteen of them white. It was the first recorded race riot in the nation’s history to end with a higher white death toll than black. After a court-martial, nineteen black soldiers were executed, but an eye for an eye was hardly the end of it. Howard Hughes, who was eleven going on twelve that summer, would hold the events of August 23, 1917, in his memory for the rest of his life. “I lived right in the middle of one race riot in which the negroes committed atrocities to equal any in Vietnam,” Hughes claimed, many years later. His childish picture of what had happened in Houston curdled into an acute racism: Howard Hughes Jr. grew into an adult who didn’t just dislike black people or think them to be inferior to himself—he was mortally afraid of them.

  Months later, after his twelfth birthday, Sonny was sent off to boarding school. He was extremely distraught to be separated from his mother. Allene Hughes had been an almost suffocating presence in her son’s life, but young Howard had come to depend on her coddling. She closely monitored her only son’s hygiene (even performing nightly checks of his feces) and apparently instilled in him the belief that he was an exceptional creature who needed to be protected from the pestilence of the outside world. Though he played with local kids and developed a close relationship with Dudley Sharp, the son of his father’s business partner, Sonny had also spent much time at home, under the watchful eyes of Allene, tinkering with inventions and devices like a motorized bicycle and a ham radio station. Mother and son’s first significant separation had come when she sent him to summer camp at the age of ten, a separation cut short when she picked him up early out of paranoia that he could contract polio. What Howard seemingly took away from the experience was not the freedom to find himself that Allene briefly allowed him, but the danger awaiting him in social situations should his mother fail to ultimately rescue him. When he then went to boarding school, first in Massachusetts and then in Ojai, California, Sonny isolated himself and was generally miserable.

  Allene Hughes died suddenly and almost inexplicably in March 1922, losing consciousness in the midst of a routine curettage procedure, involving the scraping of tissue from the uterus. “She was taken for a minor operation and they gave her too much anesthetic, I think,” recalled Allene’s sister Annette. Sonny had just turned sixteen. It was a devastating loss for Howard Sr., who could not bear to return to the house he had shared with Allene in Houston. He decided to relocate to Los Angeles, where by now his parents and brother Felix had settled, along with Rupert. Sonny’s latest boarding school, the Thatcher School in Ojai, was not far north.

  Howard Sr., lonely in Los Angeles and wanting the familial company of his son, eventually pulled his son from school entirely after Christmas 1923, rendering Howard Hughes Jr. a high school dropout. Though he evidently took classes at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Sonny was more enthusiastic about his off-campus education. He’d follow Rupert to Goldwyn Studios and wander around, asking questions, soaking up the process of filmmaking. He acted as a part-time playmate and protégé for his father, who took him along to parties, modeled the process of wooing starlets, and gave him lectures about business. The father stressed to his son the importance of autonomy. “Never share control,” Howard Sr. told Howard Jr. “Never share credit, and never share profits.”

  With business his foremost priority and his social life a close second, Big Howard proposed a deal to Annette Gano, Allene’s sister, who had been living with Allene and Howard Sr. in Houston since 1919. Allene’s widower wanted Annette to move out to Los Angeles with him and Sonny for one year, so that she could help take care of the teenage boy. After the year was up, Annette would be free to return to Houston and marry her fiancée, Fred Lummis. Annette agreed, with the proviso that she could bring her cousin, Kitty Callaway, with her.

  Annette, Kitty, and Sonny lived at Vista del Arroyo, a then-brand-new resort hotel in Pasadena—a good twelve miles from the Ambassador, where Big Howard set up shop in a luxury suite. (Before the construction of freeways, this was a significant distance.) Sonny, according to Annette Lummis, was then “a charming young boy, and that year I was with him in California he couldn’t have been more thoughtful. We ate dinner together every night.” Big Howard, Annette said later, “was keeping an eye on us. But he was really interested in the movies, movie people.”

  Possibly one movie person in particular. There is some evidence that Howard Sr. had begun an affair with future silent film star Eleanor Boardman before Allene’s death; Noah Dietrich, who would work for Howard Hughes Jr. for three decades, claimed he found a letter from Allene to Big Howard, telling him she forgave him for this illicit relationship.

  The year of Allene’s death was a watershed for Boardman. After years of modeling in New York (as “the Kodak girl” her face was used by the manufacturer to sell film), she was selected by the powers that were at Samuel Goldwyn Pictures as one of the “New Faces” of 1922, an honor that included train fare to Los Angeles and a token contract with Goldwyn’s studio. Was it mere coincidence that Goldwyn was the studio home base of Howard Hughes Sr.’s brother?* Boardman’s first film part came in The Strangers’ Banquet, directed by Marshall Neilan, who had become friends with the elder Hughes men. Her second and third parts were in movies made by Rupert Hughes, Gimme and Souls for Sale.

  Based on Hughes’s own novel, Souls for Sale anticipates the French New Wave maxim that every fiction film acts as a documentary of the moment in which it was made. Featuring an unprecedented glimpse behinds the scenes of the film factory, with Charlie Chaplin, Neilan, and other power players of the day playing themselves, Souls was Hughes’s passionate defense of the film industry against its scandal-mongering detractors. Between priceless footage of the real Hollywood of 1923 and propagandistic title cards, Souls tracks the adventures of an ingenue with the unlikely name of Remember “Mem” Steddon (Boardman, very good), a young bride who feels a “sudden revulsion” for her husband en route to their honeymoon. Mem ends up jumping off a train and wandering, dehydrated and confused, into the desert shoot of a movie. Mem’s dad is a fire-and-brimstone preacher who rails against Hollywood as “movie-mammon,” but the film colony Mem falls into bears no resemblance to the hellhole she’s heard of in headlines and church: the movie folk are kind and helpful, and their party habits are constrained by the fact that they have to get up at the crack of dawn every morning and work eighteen hour days in order to make the products that “thrill millions.” At one point, Mem even watches a gorgeous girl offer to “pay the price” to a casting director, who rejects her: “You poor simp!” he exclaims. “It’s the public you’ve got to sell yourself to!” In every way, Rupert Hughes depicts Hollywood as a paragon of American hard work and ethical virtue—which is notably lacking outside of the movie colony, as shown in the return of Mem’s husband, who has turned out to be a thief, con artist, and serial wife killer. When he demands the return of his “property”—meaning Mem, who is now a star—she stands up for her own autonomy: “I don’t belong to you, or anybody,�
� Mem says. “I belong to myself.” This may be the boldest aspect of Rupert Hughes’s polemic: while insisting that almost every scary thing that God-fearing Americans had heard about Hollywood was untrue, in Mem he boldly confirms Hollywood’s detractors’ fears that the film industry was in fact breeding and cultivating independent women who posed a real threat to the default patriarchy.

  It seems likely that whatever kind of relationship Big Howard had had with Boardman, by this time they were not engaged in a serious romance. Immediately after Souls for Sale, Boardman made her first film for director King Vidor, whom she would marry in 1926. And Howard Hughes Sr. was enjoying being single in Hollywood, during the peak of his brother Rupert’s film fame.

  Souls for Sale would open in March 1923, two months after the wide release of Gimme, which was promoted as “the truest film play you ever saw . . . picturing the real joys and monthly bills of wedded bliss.” “Mrs. Rupert Hughes” had collaborated with her husband again, but this time she did not merit a writing credit, and her contributions were no longer highlighted in the press. Adelaide herself was floating out of the center of Rupert’s sphere of influence. The physical pain she was in and her depression fed on one another. Eleanor Boardman saw Adelaide popping pills on the set of a film and thought, “There was something the matter with her.”

  As her husband had been busily crafting his cinematic love letter to Hollywood, Adelaide had given up on her dream of traveling the world with Rupert. Instead she embarked on the voyage without him, sailing to China accompanied by a nurse. Adelaide returned to Los Angeles in early 1923, at which point Rupert was beginning to direct Reno, another film about marriage. His biographer James O. Kemm notes that Reno “gave Rupert an opportunity to expound on his views about the unfairness and inconsistency of divorce laws.” These views were by now legion, part of his persona as expressed to the movie press. “Marriage is the greatest bunco game in the world,” he had declared two years earlier in Photoplay. “If a man has a wife he doesn’t like, he should get rid of her as soon as he possibly can.” In the plot of Reno, a bigamist deals with the consequences of having taken three concurrent wives, each his legal bride in a different state. Rupert himself was more of a serial monogamist than a bigamist: losing interest in his second marriage, he would soon begin the relationship that would become his third. A small part in Reno was played by a redheaded actress born as Elizabeth Patterson, who went by the screen name Patterson Dial. If Rupert had a type, Patterson was it; when Eleanor Boardman first met Patterson, she thought that she looked like a younger version of Adelaide.

  In August 1923, Adelaide decided to take another cruise to the Far East. Again Rupert stayed home. She arrived in Peking and, enraptured by her surroundings, began devising an idea for a film set in China. She wrote to her husband about her idea, but Rupert shot her down, telling her the concept sounded impossible. Dejected, Adelaide’s depression worsened. She began suffering from an earache, and got off the boat in Haiphong to see a doctor. She returned to the boat on the evening of December 13, 1923, in a terrible mood. The next morning Adelaide’s lifeless body was found hanging from a luggage strap. Rupert learned the news from a man named A. M. Kirby, who worked for Standard Oil in Haiphong. The following morning’s New York Times carried a story including both the text of Kirby’s telegram (“Adelaide Hughes committed suicide here today”) and a two-paragraph statement from Rupert, in which he called Adelaide “a brave, brilliant woman whose lack of self-confidence alone prevented her from being known to the world as I know her.”

  One month and one day after Rupert Hughes’s wife hung herself, he got word of the death of his brother, Howard Robard Hughes Sr. Howard had gone back to Houston for meetings at the Hughes Tool factory, and had dropped dead of a heart attack at work. His eighteen-year-old son, who had himself returned to Houston to take classes at a free public college called Rice Institute, was now an orphan. Like thousands of other orphans before and after, he went to live in Hollywood.

  HOWARD JR. ARRIVED IN Los Angeles around the same time as Mata Stoddard, a gorgeous twenty-year-old woman from St. Louis. Mata’s mom owned a chain of movie theaters, and she had grown up glued to the screen. In the 1920s, if you were the prettiest girl in your town or on your block or in your school, and you loved movies, people would start telling you that you ought to be in pictures, and because you wanted to believe that so much, you’d make your way to Los Angeles, and until fate connected you with your big break, you’d get a job pouring coffee at a hotel diner. That was what Mata was doing the night of February 7, 1924. Mata finished her shift at the Pot and Spigot Grill in the Hayward Hotel and got into a waiting Packard driven by Hal Conlin, a married ex-policeman now working as a chauffeur. Mata and Hal stopped at her apartment, she changed her clothes, and minutes later they crashed into a telephone pole at the corner of First and Commonwealth. Newspaper accounts of the accident revealed that the car belonged to “Howard R. Hughes Jr., son of the late president of the Hughes Tool Company and nephew of Rupert Hughes, motion-picture producer and director.” The location of the crash was in between Stoddard’s apartment in Hollywood and the mansion on Western Avenue where Howard was living with his uncle Rupert. Stoddard’s family suspected that Mata, a former beauty queen and fur model, may have been en route to a late-night date with Hughes at the time of the crash.

  At an inquest two days later, Conlin attended “swathed in bandages” due to a scalp injury he suffered in the crash, and said he didn’t remember anything—other than the fact that Stoddard had been driving, while Conlin snoozed in the passenger seat. In his testimony, Hughes admitted that he had spent time with Conlin earlier that evening. Much of the inquest questioning of Hughes revolved around the fact that Stoddard’s corpse was found not fully dressed. A policeman claimed that when Hughes was asked to come identify Stoddard’s body, he wanted to know if the deceased had been found wearing stockings, and when he was told “no,” Hughes responded, “Then that’s her.” Hughes first denied he had said that, and then clarified that Mata’s roommate had told him over the phone that she had left the house with bare legs.

  Whatever Howard’s connection to Mata Stoddard, after his mother, his father, and his aunt Adelaide, she was the fourth person Hughes knew personally who had died far before her time in a matter of two years. How was all this death affecting him psychologically? Asked at the inquest to demystify the number and nature of his meetings with the deceased, Hughes said, “I can’t remember. I can’t remember everything for the past two years.” This baffled his questioners and they quickly moved on, but given that almost exactly two years had passed since the death of his mother, this seems like it could be a revealing statement about the teenager’s state of mind.

  When Howard Jr. had relocated to Los Angeles, his father’s family expected to be taking in a young man in need of parenting. What they got instead was a teenage boy with no real idea of how the world worked, who was determined to make his way in that world entirely on his own. Right away, there were problems. Sonny’s inability, willful or otherwise, to play by the rules had been readily apparent before his father’s death, when he was living in Houston with Annette and Fred Lummis. Unwilling to carry a house key, when Howard Jr., would get home late at night, multiple times he grabbed a brick and smashed the glass on the French doors. Said Fred Lummis, “It was a constant problem of discipline.” This may have been spoiled rich boy stuff—no one had ever instilled in Howard the awareness that broken things can be expensive to fix—but he also seemed uninterested in acquiring such an understanding.

  In a posthumous study of Hughes’s psychological history, psychologist Raymond D. Fowler concluded that Sonny was incredibly traumatized by losing both of his parents—“the only two people with whom he had a close relationship”—in such quick succession. In the months following his father’s death, the teenager was overwhelmed with thoughts of death, which may at least in part explain the fatalistic recklessness that Howard’s family had so little patience with. Fow
ler suggests that young Howard needed something to hold on to, to help pull himself out of the abyss, and he found it in pursuing control of Hughes Tool. This may be true. It is equally true that Howard Hughes Jr. was, in early 1924, an eighteen-year-old boy, heretofore a sheltered and pampered loner, who was now tantalizingly close to controlling a fortune. He could have waited another three years to come into his inheritance—a period during which his family would probably have forced him to attend school, while keeping him from pursuing his real interests, like airplanes, movies, and women. Or he could shake off his family and start becoming the man he felt determined to be.

  WHEN ALLENE DIED, HER son stood to inherit her 50 percent share of Hughes Tool. With those shares added to the shares willed to him by his father, in 1924 three-quarters of the company belonged to the teenager—or, would, when he turned twenty-one. Hughes Tool was not, at that time, the gold mine that it would be made out to be in later press about Hughes. Though it had just experienced its most profitable year in 1923, its success had been inconsistent, and its patent on the drill bit was due to expire in just two years, rendering the future uncertain. Believing he was the only one who could protect his father’s legacy, Howard became determined to overcome the few obstacles keeping him from assuming total control of the company. One of those obstacles was Howard Sr.’s father, and Sonny’s grandfather, Felix Hughes, who along with his wife and son Felix Jr. had been willed the remaining quarter of the company. Howard Jr. became determined to buy them out.

  That was easier said than done. After a round of negotiations in which Howard’s grandfather drove a hard bargain, the relatives eventually agreed to a deal that would have each of them pocketing $117,000—almost double what Hughes Tool had estimated their shares were worth—but at the last minute Uncle Felix decided that he would not sell for less than $150,000. Howard was set to agree to his uncle’s demands, but then the other relatives withdrew entirely. Bitter correspondence between Howard and his elders followed. Howard’s grandfather made the case that he had always been his father’s silent but equal partner, having invested in his drill bit experiments from the beginning. The grandfather referred to what Howard was offering as “a bare pittance,” and a bad trade for the time and money he had already put into the business. Felix Sr. also felt it unfair that he should have to settle for so little “while you (and I say this in all tenderness) had such a fortune, at your age, for the rest of your life.”