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

by Karina Longworth

  Though his story of how the relationship began differs from Dove’s, Boyd Willat confirmed Billie’s account of what happened next. When Irvin found out his wife was involved with Hughes, Willat accepted a payoff to relinquish his wife to the competition.

  “You have to understand—Billie and my father were going to make movies together forever,” Boyd Willat said in defense of his father. “That was my father’s plan. She was, in a sense, his livelihood.” And by that point, “The Hughes people were known for making payoffs.” Boyd Willat said the negotiations were probably made not by his father, but by his father’s brothers, but he doesn’t argue with the result: for agreeing to divorce Billie Dove, Irvin Willat was paid $350,000, in cash, delivered all at once in a valise.

  When Billie heard about this deal, it broke her heart. “I was very much against the idea of paying money to Irvin,” she said, “I begged Howard not to do it, but he did.” Acknowledging that $350,000 is “a hell of a lot of money, especially in those days,” Dove never forgave her ex-husband for accepting even such a high price to let her go. “I felt like I’d been bought and sold.” According to Boyd Willat, it was not a cavalier thing for his father to accept this payment, and Irvin loved Dove until the day he died. But accept it he did. “After that,” Billie added, “I lost all the respect I had for Irvin Willat.” Remarkably, all of Billie’s anger was reserved for the seller, and not the buyer. “Howard and I were still very much in love,” she recalled.

  The next step was to legally obtain her divorce, so they could marry. Until California reformed its divorce law in 1969 to allow “no-fault” divorces based on “irreconcilable differences,” the only way to legally end a marriage in the state was for one spouse to sue the other for breaking the bonds of matrimony. At least one public hearing or trial would ensue, and if through that process the divorce was granted, after the final court date the plaintiff would be able to file an interlocutory decree, which would start the clock on a one-year waiting period. Even after the year had passed, the divorce would be final only if the plaintiff went to court to receive a final decree. Because this process was so convoluted and took so long, many people who were anxious to be rid of their spouses traveled to Nevada, where the filing process was much simpler, and could begin after the plaintiff had been in residency in the state for just six weeks. This would have been the standard way of doing things for a movie star looking to quickly trade one husband for another, so Billie told Howard she’d go to Las Vegas, where she could get her divorce after just six weeks in residence.

  Howard responded, “What, you go to Las Vegas? Without me?” It would have been unacceptable—unthinkable—for him to let her out of his sight for a month and a half, so Hughes came up with an alternate, extremely unconventional plan. He told Billie to instruct her maid to get her “a dress, very plain and long, something that a farmer’s wife would wear, and get some horn-rimmed glasses and some little thing for the top of your head.” Billie didn’t question what for, she just told her maid to do it, and when the day came, she put the workaday outfit on. Howard picked her up, and he too was wearing “ordinary clothes.” They boarded a train, keeping their distance from one another until they began to pull away from the station, so that if anyone recognized either of them through their normal-person disguises, they wouldn’t connect one to another and blow the plan. Not that Billie knew the plan; they were on their way before he told her, “We’re going to Nevada, but you’re not going to Las Vegas.”

  “After we got off the train,” Billie recalled, “we drove for miles and miles and miles.” Someone on Howard’s team had arranged for the couple to board as workers on a farm. There, incognito and under assumed names, the lovers would pose as brother and sister. They were housed not in the main farmhouse, but in a structure that Billie remembered as “a funny-looking thing, not half as large as your kitchen probably. I think maybe it was built to store food for the winter and then they abandoned it.” It was a concrete rectangle, with two rooms—separate bedrooms for each “sibling”—a doorway unoccupied by a door, and holes cut out for windows, but no glass. If either of the lovers had been hoping for a romantic, rural adventure, they didn’t find it: Billie and Howard, trapped in the fiction that they were down-on-their-luck siblings, were barely able to spend any time together. Howard went out into the fields with the men all day, and Billie stayed in the main house with the housewife, helping with the kitchen work. Even though she was the one who needed the fast divorce, Billie was merely along for the ride of Howard’s preposterous plan; she just made an effort to keep her head down and do what she was told. “I never asked any questions of the farmer and his wife with whom we were staying.”

  Nor did she evidently ask questions of Howard, who had cooked up this cockamamie scheme and put it into motion without realizing that Billie would be hard-pressed to prove the residency required for a quick divorce in Nevada if she spent the six weeks boarding on a farm under an assumed identity. It was all for nothing: according to Dove, they were there only a few days before they called it off.* “We didn’t stay because it didn’t work out the way we wanted. We did it all wrong and it would be another year before I got my final divorce.”

  By then, Howard’s fame would rival Billie’s, thanks to Hell’s Angels—a movie that gave Hughes a taste for the kind of star-making that Billie had left Willat to avoid.

  Chapter 5

  A Body Like a Dustpan

  The screen test was a rush job, its subject hustled into costume and before the camera before she had a chance to think about what was happening. She wore a borrowed white satin gown, stretched to its horizontal limit by the bell of her hips. Her face puffed out around a pout, like she had recently been crying, or drinking. Worst of all, her hair was the same color as the dress—a cloud of ashes atop a girl whose stardom seemed to be dead on arrival to the jaded men who filled the room. The girl had been in movies—playing small parts, breezing through the background—but she had never been the sole focus of a camera’s attention. When a spotlight was turned onto her face, she couldn’t help but squint.

  Joseph Moncure March, a screenwriter who had been called in to rescue the movie she was auditioning for, stood on the sidelines, watching what was shaping up to be the kind of epic failure that he and the boys would laugh over for days. Up walked James Whale, a British director who had been hired to supervise the performances of the new dialogue that March was writing.

  The cinematographer shooting the test complained to Whale that the aspiring actress, a bundle of nerves, couldn’t stand still. Whale tried to calm her down in a number of ways, and finally suggested she brace one arm against the doorjamb to steady herself, which at least allowed her to get through the test.

  Whale asked March what he thought of this girl, this Jean Harlow. March stared and said, “She has a shape like a dust pan.”

  “Yes, she does rather,” said Whale.

  The next day, Howard Hughes would cast Jean Harlow in Hell’s Angels, and sign her to a personal contract, but no one who saw her screen test really understood why. Watching the test from the sidelines, March thought, “There’s a girl who has absolutely nothing.”

  Jean Harlow would have agreed with him. She was a nineteen-year-old divorcee who had been desultorily working as an extra to please her overbearing mother, who was insistent that “the Baby,” as everyone called Harlow, find the stardom that the mother herself had been distracted away from by motherhood. Jean Harlow had no confidence in her acting talent, but she was a realist: she knew that people liked to look at her, and she knew that letting them do it would make her mother happy. And making her mother happy made Jean happy, too, for a while.

  IN FEBRUARY 1929, AFTER spending $2 million to get a silent version of his aviation epic in the can, Howard Hughes decided to reshoot Hell’s Angels as a talkie.

  By then the film had burned through three directors, and the fourth—Hughes—had dragged production out as long as possible, in search of perfection. Lincoln Quarber
g had spent more than a year answering requests from all manner of publications, as far afield as Japan and the Philippines, for stills and information regarding Hell’s Angels. As late as June 1929, he couldn’t comply with a request from Sportsman Pilot magazine for a synopsis of Hell’s Angels. “Film still far from completed,” he wired. “Making important changes now in editing and cutting . . .” Foremost among those “important changes” was the recasting and reshaping of the female lead.

  While Hughes tinkered with Hell’s Angels’ cut, the film industry transitioned from the silent era to the early talkie era, and by 1929 it would have been foolish to release a fully silent feature and expect to make even a fraction of the production budget back, especially as an independent producer, because movie theaters simply didn’t want to rent and project silent product. This made the remaking of Hell’s Angels a simple business decision. Having already gotten what he wanted from the aerial footage, Hughes was able to relinquish some control, hiring director Whale to work with the actors on the new dialogue scenes. Now all he needed was dialogue.

  How had he strung his cast and crew along to this point, and why did they keep coming back to work on a movie that gave all appearances of not wanting to be born? The simple answer is that money talked and Hughes had enough of it so that few would tell him no. But there was also something about Hughes himself. He had star quality.

  Joseph March had met Hughes after hearing stories about the fool millionaire boy who was pouring his fortune into a folly. “Nobody had seen the picture,” the screenwriter recalled, “but the rumor was that it had all the makings of a super colossal bust.” March, a New York intellectual newly arrived in Hollywood, had been around enough rich phonies to be cynical, but upon encountering the Texan he immediately understood why people remained loyal to Hughes, and did his bidding even against their better instincts. Hughes’s eyes sucked him in. “They were brown and lustrous and limpid like the eyes of a young fawn or a doe,” March recalled. “They gave his face a look of such guileless innocence that you couldn’t believe the brain behind them had ever thought anything devious or malicious.” Added the writer, “He had that rare and mysterious quality called charisma, which made people overlook his defects.”

  “I want you to look at a picture I’ve made, and tell me what you think of it,” Hughes said to March. March agreed to watch the three-hour cut of Howard’s vanity project.

  “What I saw on the screen for the first hour was so bad it was embarrassing,” March wrote later. “Cheap slapstick comedy, insipid love scenes, characters without any character and a wavering storyline that lacked dramatic impact. It was silent Hollywood at its worst. I had already decided that I didn’t want to have anything to do with this film, and then the air sequences began. They were magnificent.”

  March was so inspired by the best of the film that he agreed to come on and rewrite the worst of it. Always conceived as a love triangle between two buddy pilots and the Englishwoman they both fall for, the first version of Hell’s Angels had starred the beautiful, but decidedly not English, Swedish actress Greta Nissen. March crafted a completely new female protagonist, one inspired in part by Ernest Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, and described by March as “a beautiful, upper-class slut with a talent for fornication who got tired of her conquests very quickly and left a trail of shattered males in her perfumed wake.” This was the role that would turn Jean Harlow from a “nothing” into the first blond-bombshell movie star.

  THERE WERE TWO JEAN Harlows, and they both first arrived in Hollywood in 1923. The twelve-year-old who would eventually become a legend was then going by her birth name, Harlean Carpenter. Harlean had been brought west by her mother, the original Jean Harlow; “Harlean” had been the mother’s first attempt to turn her daughter into her namesake, by contracting “Harlow” and “Jean.” Recently divorced from Harlean’s father, a Kansas City dentist, this original Jean Harlow now decided it was time to claim the stardom that she was sure was her birthright.

  But by the time Jean Harlow ditched her husband and landed with her daughter in a single rented room in a Sunset Boulevard mansion, she was thirty-four years old—not exactly a prime age for a would-be ingenue in the mid-1920s. Two years passed, and Jean’s dwindling finances forced a move first to a less lustrous address in Hollywood, and then back to Kansas City. Jean moved in with her well-to-do parents, and fourteen-year-old Harlean was sent to boarding school, and then summer camp, where in 1926 she contracted scarlet fever. That fall, on a double date, Harlean met Chuck McGrew, an orphan with a sizable trust fund. The two youngsters fell in love at first sight.

  Harlow didn’t approve of her daughter’s new love; McGrew was rich, but he wasn’t rich enough. Jean was involved with a married man named Marino Bello, who agreed that the teenager should make it a priority to marry for more money than Chuck McGrew had. By early 1927, Bello had divorced his wife and married Harlean’s mother. Nine months later, in one of the few instances when the daughter went against her mother’s orders, Harlean and Chuck snuck off and had their own wedding. A few months after that, McGrew turned twenty-one and received the first six-figure installment of his inheritance.

  The newlyweds did not handle their financial independence particularly responsibly. It was 1927. They were young, in love, and frequently drunk. And Harlean wasn’t fully independent, anyway, because her mother was always hanging around, trying to control her life. In an effort to have his wife to himself, Chuck booked passage for the couple on a cruise from New York to Los Angeles, through the Panama Canal. Once arrived, McGrew bought a house in Beverly Hills, and he and Harlean began introducing themselves to the locals by hosting parties.

  At the end of one daytime gathering at their house, Harlean hospitably provided a ride to one of her guests, Rosalie Roy, an actress who had an appointment at 20th Century Fox but no car in which to get there. Living the life of leisure, Harlean didn’t have anywhere to be, so she offered to wait for Rosalie and drive her home when she was finished with her meeting. When Rosalie exited the building, several male executives walked out with her and noticed Harlean leaning against her car. Stunned by her beauty, the execs offered her a letter of introduction to Central Casting, which the major studios had collaboratively established in 1925 as a clearinghouse for extras and background players, in part so that each studio could lessen its individual burden of besieging wannabe stars. Harlean, who didn’t have her mother’s ambitions, took the letter, thanked the men, but didn’t think anything about it until Rosalie brought it up at another luncheon. Harlean’s friends started teasing her about being too shy to ever do anything about having been “discovered.” It was a hell of a joke: all the beautiful blondes in Los Angeles, and the Fox execs somehow stumbled on the one who couldn’t care less about being in the movies.

  What her friends didn’t count on was that when Harlean was made the butt of a joke, she, much like Howard Hughes, became determined to prove the jokers wrong.

  The next day, Harlean showed up at Central Casting, letter of introduction in hand, and registered for work under her mother’s name, Jean Harlow. By the time a casting agent called for “Miss Harlow” a few days later, Harlean, who had already put the visit to the casting agency out of her mind, answered the phone and was confused as to why anyone would call her house looking for her mom. When she told the real Jean Harlow about this lark, her mom insisted that her daughter accept the next offer. Harlean did what her mother told her to.

  It really can’t be overstated what a powerful force the elder Jean exerted over her daughter. Harlean didn’t need the money she’d make from acting—her husband had money, enough money so that the single-figure paydays she’d net as an extra would seem like a pittance. And she didn’t need the attention—she got attention, everywhere she went, for her milky white skin and cloud of blond hair and gorgeously curvaceous figure. She pursued an acting career simply to please her mother, who had decided to live out her own dreams of stardom vicariously through
her daughter. The new Jean Harlow felt it was easier to make her mother happy than to worry about her own happiness. “Nothing on earth,” she would confide to an aunt, “is worth what I go through when I don’t let her dominate.”

  The day after Christmas in 1928, seventeen-year-old Jean Harlow signed a five-year contract with director-producer Hal Roach. That weekend, Jean and Chuck went to San Francisco, where, in a drunken rage, Chuck destroyed their hotel room. He had taken his wife halfway across the country to avoid the very kind of intervention into their marriage on the part of his mother-in-law that had resulted in his wife selling herself to a movie studio.

  One might argue that if he didn’t want his gorgeous teenage wife to be drawn into the industry for which teenage beauties were the primary raw material, then he should have taken her somewhere other than Beverly Hills. But there was something real, not totally unreasonable, and very of the moment going on here. In previous generations, a man with money could marry a young woman and pretty much ensure that it would be he who would control her destiny, at least as long as he could afford to “keep” her. But in 1928, the passing of women’s suffrage was nearly a decade in the rearview, and rising levels of female enfranchisement were difficult to ignore. The American workforce was, on average, 25 percent less male than it had been before World War I, and while the defining youth culture fad of the decade, the flapper, was somewhat superficial in its liberation of women from old-fashioned modes of dress and social behavior, revolution was quietly rumbling. The flapper was a shallow, unsatisfactory model of “new woman” to the Lois Webers of the world, who noted that the biggest change of the decade was that the new working girls were now welcomed to seize their “empowerment” as consumers. But spending power was at least as tangible to the Chuck McGrews of the world as the political power represented by the vote—and maybe, it was even more threatening, because if a girl like Harlean didn’t need a man like Chuck’s money, then what did she need him for? No wonder he would react so violently to his underage wife signing a long-term contract to be in movies. Especially since he knew that it wasn’t Harlean’s dream, but her mother’s.