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

by Karina Longworth

  But back when Hughes arrived in Hollywood, Mickey Neilan was notorious. Not only was he one of the top directors in the business, but by his own admission, he regularly partied till dawn, continuing past last call at the Alexandria by driving five miles south to the Vernon Country Club to “roar on into the night.” According to Frederica Sagor, the social scene of Hollywood in the mid-1920s “was a bachanal,” and Neilan was second only to the “depraved” Edmund Goulding, a director who would later work with Hughes, as ringmaster of the circus.

  “These two men initiated more young women—and men—into more kinds of kinky sexual practices than one can possibly imagine,” alleged Sagor. “Morally, Mickey was a shade above the hedonist Goulding, but was louder and cruder,” Sagor wrote. “Neilan’s weakness,” she added, “was pretty virgins.” These assignations often had an implied quid pro quo: “The carrot stick that they dangled was the promise of a screen test, a good part in some picture in which they were involved, or that they would use their clout with some other director shooting a picture on the lot,” Sagor claimed. “Few, if any, of these seductions bore fruit.”

  Soon thereafter, Howard Hughes would begin replicating this behavior exactly—including the failure to make good on the promise, implied or directly stated at the beginning of the sexual transaction, to provide work in exchange for the services rendered. “Howard was a sort of protégée of mine,” Neilan would boast years later. “Shy on the social side, Howard had met very few stars outside of those he met at my parties.” Eventually Hughes would find other men to replace Neilan as an introducer/procurer, but in the meantime, the young man absorbed all his mentor had to teach about how to acquire women.

  Hughes gave Neilan $75,000 to make Everybody’s Acting, a kind of proto–Three Men and a Baby about four vaudeville performers who adopt a baby girl. This time Hughes left the director alone, and this time, the film netted a 50 percent profit. With that success, word started spreading around town that there was a new young Texan oilman looking to finance pictures. Emboldened, Hughes began hiring people under the auspices of his new production company, which he dubbed Caddo—the name of his father’s original oil drilling outfit, and the Louisiana parish where it began.

  Hughes’s first contract signee was director Lewis Milestone, who set to work making Two Arabian Knights, a World War I adventure-comedy in which two American soldiers escape German capture and vie for the love of Mary Astor. His next effort as a producer was The Racket, which, along with the almost simultaneously released Josef Von Sternberg silent Docks of New York, would essentially invent the gangster film. The Racket, directed by Milestone, became Howard’s first experience with the promotional power of controversy. A ripped-from-the-headlines crime picture tracing how police and institutional corruption made gangsterism possible, The Racket was considered so realistic in its language and action that it was widely censored; its subtitles referring to graft were removed in New York, and it was outright banned in Chicago. Hughes began speaking out against the local censorship boards who sought to sanitize films made for adults rather than letting the viewers think for themselves. “I won’t tone anything down,” Hughes declared. “I believe the screen is a powerful influence on the thoughts of the average citizen. It’s a powerful instrument. It bores through opinions like my father’s bits bore through rock.”

  By the time Hughes was making these lofty statements of intent, he had already seen that censorship battles acted as free publicity for the movie in the places where it was screened without restriction or cuts. Where did his stated ideals end and his business savvy begin? “If my pictures didn’t make money, I’d go in some other business,” he acknowledged. But so far, so good: Two Arabian Knights and The Racket were both hits, and would be feted at the first Academy Awards ceremony, with Milestone winning the first (and only) prize for Best Comedy Direction. Hughes himself had been nominated for Outstanding Picture (later renamed Best Picture) for producing The Racket.

  Buoyed by these early successes, in December 1927 Hughes took the most concrete step he’d ever take toward establishing roots in the Hollywood area. Tooling about the Hancock Park neighborhood in a red sports car, probably before or after a round of golf, he spotted a house in construction adjacent to the course’s ninth green. Hughes jumped out of his car and announced to the construction workers that he wanted to buy the house they were building, and that he’d be willing to offer “any price.”

  The house at 211 Muirfield Road was a Spanish-style hacienda built for socialite Eva K. Fudger, but it was only hers briefly, and once Hughes took it over, it would come to loom large in his legend. When Hughes became determined to live there, Fudger agreed to lease it to him, furnished with her own hand-picked antiques, for $1,000 a month (about $14,000, adjusted for inflation). Fudger would later sell Hughes the residence, fully loaded, for $135,000, or about $2 million in 2017 dollars—a relative bargain for a two-story, thirty-room manse tastefully outfitted with authentic Spanish tile, exposed beams stretching across the high ceilings of the vast den and study.

  It was a great house. But why did it have to be that house? Certainly, its proximity to the Wilshire Country Club golf course would have been attractive to a young man who still aspired to become a champion in that sport. But it was also within a block from a far more modest home owned by Felix Hughes, one of Howard’s father’s two brothers. With the successes of Everybody’s Acting and Two Arabian Knights under his belt, Hughes felt he was on his way to amassing a filmography that would prove that his family had been wrong to try to keep him away from the family fortune. The mansion on Muirfield Road, virtually in plain sight from his uncle Felix’s front door, would just further rub it in.

  IN DECEMBER 1925, IN advance of what would have been their first Christmas together as a couple, Howard told his wife to go home to Houston and await his arrival. His subsequent actions suggested he was not eager for a romantic reunion in the hometown that he had dramatically abandoned. “Cannot understand why I have not heard from you today,” she cabled Howard at 11 P.M. on December 22. Two days later, the night of Christmas Eve and her husband’s birthday, Ella had still not heard from Howard. “Did you attend to my account at the bank if not please do so,” began her nightly missive to her husband at the Ambassador Hotel. “And be sure and tell me that you are leaving tomorrow Love Ella.” Hughes arrived in Houston by New Year’s Eve, but he spent the day wiring Dietrich instructions for work he wanted done on the holiday.

  This would be Ella Rice’s experience of marriage to Howard Hughes in a nutshell. He kept her well-supported financially, but also kept her waiting, nearly every day of their marriage, for some sign of affection. She would not be the only woman to relate a similar experience with Hughes—in fact, going forward, once he felt secure that a woman’s affection was trained solely on him, Howard would begin to disappear, and his absences would become more frequent than his presence. He seemed to draw comfort, if not pleasure, from knowing women were waiting for him to pay attention to them—and then withholding that attention.

  If you were the new bride of a handsome, wealthy young man who was so obsessed with learning his chosen trade that he’d sometimes work around the clock to better understand that trade’s tools, maybe you could forgive waking up on occasional mornings to find that your husband had never come to bed. But Howard wouldn’t just occasionally burn the midnight oil, spending all night in an editing room taking film prints apart and trying to put them back together—he would disappear for nights and days at a time, with no word to Ella as to where he was going, or, when he did return, where he’d been. In what would become a lifelong pattern, when Howard didn’t want to be found, he couldn’t be. Even when at home, Howard tended to lock himself up in his study, far away from his wife.

  BY THE END OF October 1927, Hughes was in production on the film to which he was devoting himself body and soul, and on which he was staking his reputation and the financial stability of the company his father had built.

  When
their first collaboration proved to be a success, Neilan approached Hughes with an idea he had been working on for a long time. It would be an aviation epic, taking advantage of aircraft leftover from World War I that Neilan had scouted on trips to Germany and England. Neilan even claimed that he had made “a tentative deal” with controversial Dutch airplane designer Anthony Fokker to borrow his fleet of combat planes. When Neilan finished his pitch, Hughes was enthusiastic. “Sounds great,” he said. “Let’s make it.”

  “Christ!” Neilan shouted at Hughes. “Do you know what it will cost?” Neilan estimated that the film he wanted to make could tally $500,000 just to shoot, never mind the additional expenses of editing, film printing, and whatnot.

  “What’s the difference,” Hughes shrugged. “Let’s make it.”

  The original plan was for Neilan to direct and produce Hell’s Angels, just as he had with Everybody’s Acting. But where Hughes had been an absentee producer on that film, he decided to take a much more active role this time around. Hughes camped out at Neilan’s house in Silverlake, east of Hollywood and north of the Ambassador, and with the help of Paul Bern, a rising producer, they fleshed out the story. Neilan soon found his young financier overruling him on a number of fronts, from Neilan’s plan to shoot with the European planes in Europe (which Hughes vetoed because he did not want to miss a golf tournament coming up in Carmel, California) to the casting of the two male leads. “The story called for two wild American kids like we see every year on our own football teams,” Neilan noted, adding that Hughes instead insisted on casting experienced silent film leading men James Hall as the cuckolded Roy and Ben Lyon as the only marginally wiser Monte—actors whom Neilan dissed as “Vaseline-haired pretty boys.”

  Exasperated, Neilan made an excuse to back out of the directing assignment, and Hughes hired Luther Reed, an aviation reporter turned screenwriter, in Neilan’s place. Reed simply wasn’t much of a director, so Hughes then hired Edmund Goulding, party pal of Neilan, but Goulding wasn’t long for the project, either. Finally, Howard Hughes decided that if he wanted Hell’s Angels done his way, he was going to have to direct it himself.

  PRODUCTION OF HELL’S ANGELS began on Halloween of 1927 at Metropolitan Studios on Romaine Street in Hollywood.* Hughes spent two months shooting interior scenes with his actors Hall and Lyon and a Swedish beauty named Greta Nissen. All of the main characters in Hell’s Angels, a love triangle set against the aerial fighting of World War I, were meant to be English. Greta didn’t have a great command of the English language, but this was a silent film, so that didn’t matter. Hughes got what he needed out of his performers relatively quickly, and after Christmas, he moved on to what he was really excited about: the flying footage.

  By January 1928, when Hughes transferred the production to an airfield in Inglewood, California (which would later become Los Angeles International Airport), to complete the airplane stunts, Hell’s Angels already had a price tag of $400,000. This was an enormous figure, especially considering that Hughes had only captured footage of actors miming in rooms thus far, and the air battle scenes would undoubtedly be extremely expensive to pull off.

  Those scenes didn’t need to be quite as expensive as they ended up being, but Hughes seemed determined to prove to Hollywood that money was no object for him. He exhibited zero sense of economy. In the name of historical authenticity, he assembled a private fleet, the largest anywhere in the world, made up of eighty-seven pieces of antique aircraft actually used in World War I. (He spent more money on airplanes, $500,000, than he had spent on the first two months of shooting.) He kept a hundred mechanics on the payroll to service his rickety old birds. After two months, Hell’s Angels outgrew the space available in Inglewood, so Hughes—and his cast, crew, mechanics, and air fleet—moved twenty-three miles north, to Van Nuys, where Hughes was able to commandeer a hangar and landing strip surrounded by farmland. When his stunt flyers would accidentally take out a row of crops, Hughes would show up with a wad of cash to reimburse the farmer for his lost lettuce. As a director, Hughes was exacting, but his shooting method was not precise. He’d have multiple cameramen shoot the same things over and over again. For a single flying shot that would run about sixteen seconds in the movie, Hughes directed almost four hours’ worth of footage.

  After twelve months in production, Hughes had just two sequences remaining to film. One was an air battle involving forty planes, flying through clouds. But Hughes wasn’t satisfied with the look and feel of the clouds in Van Nuys, so once again, the entire, massive company packed up and moved, this time 350 miles farther north, to Oakland Airport. There Hughes kept his cast, crew, and air fleet parked for four months, until the weather changed and he got the aesthetically exciting clouds he wanted.

  Finally, the production moved one more time, back to Los Angeles, to film the last remaining sequence: the spectacular crash of a German bomber, shot down by the heroes. Hughes’s priority was authenticity, so for this thrilling scene he insisted that an actual bomber plane be flown into a tailspin, which he wanted the pilot to pull out of at the last minute, once the shot was completed, in order to save his own life. Under duress from Hughes, stunt flyer “Daredevil Al” Wilson and mechanic Phil Jones took off in the bomber, with Wilson piloting and Jones operating a smoke special effect from the rear of the plane. Wilson manufactured a tailspin, and then jumped, floating to safety out of view of the camera thanks to a parachute. Perhaps the correct moment to jump was not properly conveyed to Jones, or maybe he got stuck in the fuselage. Either way, he stayed with the craft to the end, crashing to his death.

  Jones was just one of four members of Hughes’s crew to die during the making of the movie. Three deaths were without a doubt the result of the film: in addition to Jones going down with the bomber, stunt pilot Al Johnson was killed moving a plane, and another pilot, Clement Phillips, was killed in a crash. The fourth death was not incontrovertibly connected to the shoot, but happened in the midst of it: cameraman Burton Skeene, who had shot much of the film’s aerial footage, died of a heart attack.

  The body count racked up by the movie would rival its bloated budget as a talking point in the run-up to and aftermath of the film’s release. Hughes himself did not emerge physically unscathed. He wanted airplanes to do near-impossible things in the movie—certainly, things that had never been done in front of a rolling motion picture camera. He had assembled the best team of stunt flyers in the world, but eventually he dreamed up a stunt that even they refused to do.

  “Howard wanted to film a low-altitude maneuver in which the planes swooped past the camera at an elevation of two hundred to three hundred feet, performed a left bank, and returned, all in camera range,” remembered Noah Dietrich. The expert pilots told Hughes such acrobatics couldn’t be done at such a low altitude. Determined, as always, to prove naysayers wrong, Hughes said he’d show them—he’d pilot the stunt himself. However, the plane, as Photoplay magazine put it, “was powered with a rotary motor and Mr. Hughes was unfamiliar with the eccentricities of rotary motors.” Exactly what Hughes was warned would happen happened: he couldn’t make the maneuver at low altitude—and crashed.

  According to Dietrich, Hughes lost consciousness in the crash, and when he regained it at the hospital, his disorientation was such that he couldn’t recognize people he saw every day. His face had been crushed by the impact. Surgeons were able to repair the damage to some extent, but they couldn’t reconstruct his left cheekbone. He never looked quite the same again.

  This deformation, confirmed by a letter from Aunt Annette to Howard,* was erased from the record by the time the movie was finished. Photoplay, printing Hughes-approved spin, made the crash sound like magic: “As he whirled earthward someone was heard to murmur, ‘My God, there goes fifty million dollars and my job!’ They rushed to the wreckage to find Mr. Hughes combing pieces of motor out of his hair and rubbing numerous contusions and abrasions. There were no broken bones. The next day he was back on the job.”

  Relati
ve to comparable films of the era, there is an extensive litany of detail available about the production of Hell’s Angels, from the process through which Hughes himself came to direct the movie, to the day-to-day doldrums of the crew who were forced to wait for weeks at a time for Hughes to become satisfied with the size and shape of the clouds backdropping his authentic fleet of World War I planes. But the sheer volume of information made public about Hell’s Angels actually complicates any attempt to figure out the truth, because most of that information was provided or vetted by Hughes’s new publicist, Lincoln Quarberg.

  Quarberg began putting out fires—and setting them—for Hughes in 1928. As Hell’s Angels stumbled into its second and third years in production, it became the most written-about film of its day. Magazines like America Cinematographer would note that their stories were based on “information [that] comes from the Caddo office direct,” which implied an inside scoop, but did not guarantee authenticity. In the guise of radical transparency, Quarberg issued reams of writing about Hell’s Angels, much of it taking kernels of truth and exaggerating them into self-serving mythology, often transforming potential criticisms of the film and its maker into selling points. As a result, even publications that intended to antagonize Hughes and his aviation folly ended up folding much of his carefully constructed mythology into their critique. Photoplay magazine ran a sprawling, would-be serious work of reporting that took Hughes’s irresponsibility to task in its headline: “4 Million Dollars, and Four Men’s Lives.” And yet, these were the story’s thesis sentences: “For over two years, Hell’s Angels has had the cinema industry gossiping, scoffing, laughing up its sleeve and right out in public, admiring, doubting, amazed, astonished, goggle-eyed and simply flabbergasted. . . . It is surely the most amazing thing that has ever happened in a business where odd and peculiar hocus-pocus is no novelty.” Hughes may have been irresponsible, reckless, tacky, and dangerously ignorant—but he was also entertaining, and Lincoln Quarberg made sure everyone knew it.