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

by Karina Longworth

  This letter was dated January 28, 1924—just two weeks after Howard Sr. had died. Felix Sr. then threatened to take the matter to court, to apply for a receivership with the intention of destroying the company’s reputation and stock price. “Grandfather proving difficult,” Howard wired Colonel Kuldell, the manager of Hughes Tool. “My father bragged so much to him about the Company that he thinks it is worth twelve million dollars.” The actual worth of the company in early 1924 was a fraction of that.

  Howard was advised by Kuldell that a lawsuit could be a disaster—not least because the “Conlin affair may have serious developments” and if Kuldell was called under oath, “everything will come out.” Howard apologized for being “indiscreet in the Conlin affair” but explained that Conlin had been a friend of his father’s who had helped Howard Sr. with his speeding tickets when Conlin was a policeman, so “I thought it only just to try to help him.” The “indiscretion” in question may have been Hughes’s testimony on behalf of Conlin, but the “help” might have gone further. Conlin was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to probation; he went to San Quentin in 1926 after violating parole. Conlin’s correspondence with Hughes’s attorney Neil McCarthy suggests that Hughes was sending Conlin money in prison and had possibly offered him a job upon his release. Whether the “everything” that Kuldell didn’t want to come out was a pattern of possible hush money payments from Hughes to Conlin or not, Hughes was sufficiently convinced that he didn’t want to go to court.

  By March, Rupert—who was not named in the will, and was never going to personally gain financially from any deal—was extremely bitter. In a letter to his mother he wrote that Howard’s “conduct in general throughout the will, has been an absolutely astounding display of grasping—dishonorable ungenerous selfishness. . . .” In his time in Los Angeles, Howard, according to Rupert, had “lied flatly again and again and altogether behaved outrageously,” as part of what Rupert believed was his nephew’s vicious scheme to cheat his paternal relatives out of their inheritance from Howard Sr. Rupert ordered his mother to evict Howard Jr. from the family house.

  So, exiled, Howard returned to Houston, and in April, Rupert and Howard exchanged fierce correspondence, with Rupert slinging accusations at Howard, and Howard refuting them one by one, amid declarations that he could not “forgive . . . my uncle, and one whom I considered my friend, calling me a liar, a thief and a miser. . . .” Howard would indeed not forgive, nor forget; their relationship would never recover.

  Finally, after a contentious conference between Howard Jr. and Felix Sr., Howard’s lawyers advised him to pay off his relatives in cash and be done with it. The relatives demanded a total of $464,000 and got it. These disbursements depleted the company’s ready cash flow, forcing Hughes to put up his own shares as collateral in order to get a loan so that the company—and his own lifestyle—could continue without interruption. “I may have owned it,” Hughes said in 1954, “but I had it in hock up to my neck to the bank.”

  But the precarious financial situation was worth it to Howard, who had bought peace of mind. “The thing I knew,” Howard would say, summing up the situation of 1924 many years later, “was that I would never be able to get along with my relations and that’s why I was determined to buy them out and go it alone. If I hadn’t been a brash kid, I never would have had any such idea—and I don’t advise other brash kids to do what I did. I’ll admit I didn’t realize what hazards faced me—so maybe what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me.”

  Now the only obstacle in Howard’s way was his age: he would still be considered a legal minor until age twenty-one. Certainly, his family treated him like a spoiled child, but their low assessment of his maturity made the young man all the more determined to prove himself, to step out from his father’s shadow. In order to take financial control of his father’s estate, wield executive control of his company, and have the freedom to pursue his real interests, Howard needed the law to brand him as an adult.

  Howard learned that a Judge Walter Montieth in Houston was, like him, an avid golfer and a member of the Houston Country Club. Howard began cozying up to Montieth on the golf course, and when he felt they had established an affinity, Hughes had his lawyers file in Montieth’s court an application to be legally considered an adult, for the purposes of taking on his inheritance. The crux of Howard Jr.’s argument in court was his own admitted lack of patience: Hughes was already due to inherit three-quarters of his father’s estate at the age of twenty-one, so why not let him have access to it two years earlier? The day after Howard’s nineteenth birthday, on December 24, 1924, Judge Montieth granted Hughes his majority.

  Hughes could have lived a comfortable life in Houston, funded by the profits of the company he now controlled. But he had other ideas for those profits, and for his life. In 1930, Howard described having seen Howard Sr.’s imagination “stimulated by thinking that tools he had devised were ripping up the soil of Mesopotamia and Borneo and Siberia. He was plowing up the face of the earth and turning up new wealth and being an influence on the course of the world in an indirect way.” Young Howard longed for the same kind of influence, power, and reach, and he wasn’t content getting it filtered through his father’s achievements. “I wasn’t building anything for myself,” Howard explained. “My father had been a pony express rider, I was being a postman.”

  Having retreated to Houston and moved into his parents’ empty mansion after the Rupert-mandated eviction from his grandmother’s house near Hollywood, Howard began plotting his return to the West Coast. Los Angeles was a hotbed of growth in two industries that had caught his fancy—aviation and the movies—as well as the nation’s most picturesque climate for his favorite hobby, golf. He planned to use the income from Hughes Tool to make a name for himself in all three fields, but if he was going to physically leave the site of that business, he couldn’t afford for the people who actually ran the company to get the impression that he was some silly kid on walkabout. He needed the Hughes Tool management and workers to believe the company was—and would continue to be—financially secure.

  “He needed to convince everybody that he was a steady, sober young man,” recalled Noah Dietrich, who in time would become one of Howard’s closest working employees. “He figured, ‘the best thing I can do is marry the best girl that I know.’ That turned out to be Ella Rice, who was from a good Houston family.”

  Ella Botts Rice had dark hair, which she wore in fashionable but not flamboyant waves. Her almond-shaped eyes were heavily lidded and her mouth looked like a heart. Her grandfather’s brother, William Marsh Rice, had been the richest man in Houston circa the Civil War and had bequeathed much of his estate to the founding of Rice Institute (now Rice University), which Howard had briefly attended. Several men in Ella’s family had served as mayor of Houston. Ella and Howard had been classmates as children, and Howard’s aunt Annette Lummis believed her nephew had harbored a boyhood crush. As an adult, Ella herself was now friends with Annette; one of Ella’s father’s sisters had also married a Lummis man, which made Ella, Annette, and Howard all vaguely related by marriage.

  Dietrich, one of the few witnesses to the Rice-Hughes marriage who was still around after Howard’s death, claimed that Howard wooed Ella by convincing his doctor to help him fake a life-threatening illness. “The doctor called Ella, told her that Howard was extremely ill and that he kept calling out for her in his semi-conscious state. That proved irresistible to Ella and she rushed to his side. They soon after got engaged.”

  If Howard wanted Ella to believe he was a romantic, it was a cruel trick to play on a girl who would find out the truth only after it was too late. (Dietrich would also claim that he “never saw the slightest sign of affection displayed” between Howard and Ella.) But Aunt Annette was operating under the same illusion. She claimed that Howard had set his eyes on Ella in elementary school, where “she was the queen, and apparently he was in love with her from then on.” Though Annette had her doubts about the coupling, she
agreed to facilitate, negotiating with Ella’s aunt Mattie to in essence arrange the marriage, in order to give her nephew some kind of grounding in where he came from before he disappeared to Hollywood: “I said, ‘I can’t send him with all that money to California with all those vampire movie people,’ and Aunt Mattie said she agreed with me.”

  Ella’s family believed Ella should marry the most eligible man who asked, and Howard was certainly eligible. In addition to the fortune promised by his ownership of Hughes Tool, Hughes at age nineteen was, if too slim to qualify as strapping, certainly tall, dark, and handsome, with sparkling dark eyes and an impish, closed-mouth grin. On paper and in the flesh, it would look like you could do worse. And while Ella was in what she believed to be a serious relationship with another man, James Winston, he could not keep her in the lifestyle that her family believed was her birthright. So Ella broke off her relationship with Winston, and on June 1, 1925, she and Howard were married.

  BY MID-1924, RUPERT WAS openly in a relationship with Patterson Dial, the actress whom he had met on the set of Reno. The pair would marry in December 1924 and move into—you guessed it—the Ambassador Hotel, before embarking on the construction of a new, Arabian Nights–inspired Moorish-style mansion on Los Feliz Boulevard, east of Hollywood, at the base of Griffith Park, a 4,300-acre wilderness in the middle of the city.

  The timing of these events was enough to sour Adelaide’s children from her previous marriage, Rush and Avis, on the man who had unofficially adopted them. Recalled Rush Hughes, “Rupert had allowed my mother to go off alone on a trip around the world on a boat that had no medical officer,” and their worst fears of what could have happened if their mother had been left without emotional or physical support had come true. Then Rupert had found a way to rub salt in the wound: “very shortly after my mother’s death, he made an association with another much younger woman.” (Rupert was fifty-two; Patterson was twenty-two.) Rush and Avis never saw Rupert again after the announcement of his engagement to Dial; Rush claimed that Rupert and Patterson had maliciously cut him and his sister off.

  If Rush Hughes had a rival for his stepfather’s animosity, it was Howard Hughes Jr. Eleanor Boardman reported that Rupert told her that Howard would “throw his mother down the stairs if it was to his advantage.” Alston Cockrell Jr., a nephew of Patterson’s who briefly lived in Rupert’s house on Los Feliz, said that when it came to his aunt and Howard Hughes Jr., “She wouldn’t let that son-of-a-bitch in the house!”

  Not that the son of a bitch was banging down the door. Howard was clearly determined to leave behind where he was from, and prove to the Hugheses and everyone in Houston that he didn’t need them. He had already done much to distance himself from his paternal bloodline, even putting his father’s legacy in jeopardy by draining the reserves of Hughes Tool to buy out his grandparents and uncle. But Hughes was still a Hughes: in the fall of 1925, he and his bride Ella moved into the Ambassador Hotel. Their suite had twin beds.

  Chapter 3

  No Town for a Lady

  There were a lot of things pulling Howard Hughes to Hollywood. He genuinely liked watching movies: “I went to see them even when I knew they were cheesy,” he admitted. “I came to the conclusion that I could make better pictures than were being made.” Inducted into the local social scene by his father and uncle, he had quickly taken to this world of uncommon beauty and possibility, populated by strivers from all over, none of them encumbered by the concern for history, propriety, and decorum that patrolled social life in Houston. All of this was part of it, but an added bonus was that success in Hollywood would allow Howard Hughes to enact revenge on the still-living men in his family who had condescended to him, told him he’d never be able to hack life on his own, and grubbed for every penny of his father’s fortune, which Howard had been forced to dole out to them. He was determined to make a name for himself, and have that name drown out that of the already-famous uncle against whom Howard now held a permanent grudge.

  Hughes’s unofficial film school came via Ralph Graves, a crony of Howard Sr.’s who, from 1924 to 1926, starred in a run of two-reel comedies at Sennett Studios. After Howard Sr. died, Graves became golf buddies with his son. Once Howard had legally secured his inheritance, Graves casually mentioned that he had an idea “that will make a hell of a movie.” Graves explained the premise of Swell Hogan, a comedy about a Bowery bum. Graves would write, direct, and star; all he needed was the money. Howard asked him how much. “We could bring it in for $40,000,” Graves said. Howard reportedly guaranteed Graves that he’d cover the entire budget, on one condition: “You’ll let me watch.”

  Filming got under way while Howard was in Houston arranging to marry Ella, and three days after the wedding, Howard got a telegram indicating that postproduction was not going smoothly. Ten days later, Hughes was informed that the situation was getting worse, and the director was “alternately enthused and disgusted.” Graves’s cut of the film proved to be unsalable; several exhibitors declined to take Swell Hogan on because it was “not up to [their] standard.” Rumors have circulated for years that Hughes, embarrassed at his first effort as a producer, ordered the work print burned. Hughes denied this; the official line on Swell Hogan went that Hughes, as a first-time film producer and an independent one at that, was unable to find a distributor, which was true. That said, distribution problems would only explain why Swell Hogan was not released in 1926; it would not explain why the film was, after its first screening, apparently permanently lost.

  What does seem clear is that by May 1926, Hughes had cut Graves out of the process. Over the next forty years, Graves would do his best to remain a thorn in Hughes’s side, frequently writing to the famously rich man with sob stories and asking for money, insisting that Howard Jr. owed Graves a “lifelong debt” relating to some unspecified work he had done for Howard Sr. just before he died. Finally, beginning in the mid-1960s, Graves began harassing Hughes through his aides to the verge of blackmail, threatening to publish a tell-all on Hughes and his businesses, and even putting an ad in a local newspaper soliciting “investors.” This book of Graves’s did not materialize.

  After Swell Hogan proved to be a disaster, Howard took a call from ever-helpful Uncle Rupert, who told his nephew that he had had his fun, but it was now time for him to give up on Hollywood, to take what was left of his money and go home to Houston and become a serious man. Director Lewis Milestone recalled that Howard had told him he had been self-pityingly thinking the same thing—but that Rupert’s admonishment turned him around. “My family made it a challenge,” Hughes told Milestone. “I had to prove me right, and them wrong.”

  “Failure was unconscionable to him,” Noah Dietrich observed. Die trich came into Hughes’s life in the fall of 1925 and would stay there for more than thirty years. A former Certified Public Accountant, Dietrich was hired by Hughes on Thanksgiving 1925 to organize the management of Hughes Tool so that Howard could focus on his true passions. “My first objective is to become the world’s number-one golfer,” Hughes told his new employee. “Second, the top aviator,* and third I want to become the world’s most famous motion picture producer.” Finally, the kicker: “Then, I want you to make me the richest man in the world.”

  The Howard Hughes whom Noah Dietrich got to know in the mid to late 1920s was not yet famous, had little ready fortune to speak of, and had not yet accomplished any of the achievements that he and his publicists would later be able to trumpet as evidence of his greatness. But already certain eccentricities were apparent, most notably the paranoia that guided him in business and in life. He refused to carry money and was constantly borrowing the price of lunch or a tank of gas from friends and employees. “Goddammit, Noah,” he explained to his incredulous deputy, “there are people in this country who will knock you off if they think you have five hundred dollars in your pocket. I want everyone to know that I don’t carry any money.” Hughes was also resistant to any kind of written correspondence. He told Dietrich, “I don’t want
to go on record where they can pin me down.”

  Though a bit chastened by the Swell Hogan experience, Howard was again an easy mark when another actor turned director (and associate of his father and uncle), hard-drinking, fun-loving Marshall Neilan, came calling with a movie pitch of his own. At least Neilan had a proven track record as a filmmaker, having recently left MGM after directing a few films there starring his superstar wife, actress Blanche Sweet.

  Neilan is an interesting character in the Hughes mythology, one whom the Hughes camp initially celebrated, and then tried to erase. A publicity biography of Hughes dated 1930 credited Howard’s “friendship with Marshall Neilan” for igniting Hughes’s interest “in the making of movies.” Almost a quarter century later, Hughes would request that journalist Stephen White remove an innocuous reference to Neilan from a profile White was writing on Hughes for Look magazine. By that time, Neilan hadn’t directed anything in twenty years, and he was living out his last years in obscurity at Hollywood’s fading Knickerbocker Hotel, scrawling his never-to-be-published memoirs in longhand on yellow legal pads. Many readers of Look in 1954 probably wouldn’t have recognized Neilan’s name; by the 1950s, Hughes wasn’t interested in sharing credit with anyone, let alone a has-been.