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

by Karina Longworth

  At the very least, the next Dove-Hughes collaboration wouldn’t be “namby-pamby.” Cock of the Air was designed to stir controversy. It was a big-budget movie set in palaces and luxury hotels in Great War–era Europe, made in the depths of the Depression. Quarberg’s publicity tried to turn its unseemly extravagance into a selling point: “Producer Hughes recognizes that this is the time to economize, but he doesn’t believe it is economy to short-change the public at a time when the fans are demanding better pictures.”

  Dove’s performance in the film was very good (if slightly broad), as Lili, a respected French stage actress and liberated woman who is asked by a multinational tribunal to leave France for being too much of a distraction to various military men. She goes to Italy, where she learns that an American air pilot (Chester Morris) is cavalierly plowing through the local girls, and she decides to teach him a lesson. The rest of the movie essentially consists of Dove’s Lili—who is dressed for much of it in a skintight lace gown cut to reveal the top half and side quarter of her breasts—teasing the so-called cock until, in the last frames, he finds himself proposing marriage, almost as if under a spell. There is a scene in which Morris spanks Dove’s character as punishment; there is another in which they play a drinking game and she matches him shot for shot; and there is a scene of his “air exploits,” which is remarkably boring compared to the bawdy conversational sex farce, scripted by Marion Davies’s nephew Charles Lederer and Algonquin Roundtable wit Robert Sherwood, that occupies the bulk of the film’s action on the ground.

  Cock was deliberately flagrant, in its content and in its marketing, in a way that was designed to inflame the censors. Sex had helped sell Hell’s Angels, and public conversation over “decency” had boosted the profile of both The Racket and The Front Page. Cock of the Air was a test of just how far Hughes could push the censorship envelope before the censors pushed back.

  The answer: not very far. Proving that even in the pre-Code era there were limits, Cock of the Air hit resistance from the Hays Office for its “obscene and immoral . . . title, theme, and portrayal,” which led to clumsy last-minute edits; the censored version bombed on takeoff. “Will Hays cut about 800 feet from the film,” Dove alleged. “So it was hard to tell where we were and what was happening. It made no sense the way they released it.”

  Actually, Will Hays himself never cut a foot of any film, and in the case of Cock, his office gave Hughes ample opportunity to “fix” the picture to the satisfaction of both parties. Many of their suggestions were nonsensical—“We believe it is quite important to omit any suggestion of a bedroom,” commented the censors on the sex farce’s first script—but Hughes could have complied with them in a way that resulted in a coherent film. Instead, Hughes deliberately antagonized the Hays Office. The cut of the film submitted in mid-November 1931 ignored every request the censors had made on their review of the script, wherein the Hays Office had been vehemently opposed to the very idea of a movie about “the maneuvering of a lecherous young man in his attempt to carry out one more seduction.” A conference was held between producer Charles Sullivan, director Tom Buckingham, and various representatives of the Code, “with a view of finding a means of eliminating the pointed motivation of most of the story.” (The “pointed motivation,” of course, was sex.)

  But Hughes did nothing to placate the censors, and by the end of December the Hays Office had received word from the New York censorship board that Hughes had shipped the unmodified cut of the film to state censors, thereby pulling an end run around the Hays Office. Colonel Jason Joy, who had been appointed by Hays to enforce the Code through a body called the Studio Relations Committee, furiously wired his boss: “While desiring to help this man [Hughes] am certain steps should be taken to keep him from breaking down the machinery.” Will Hays himself wrote to Joe Schenck, president of UA, to essentially tell on Hughes to his corporate father figure. Hays then sent a letter to Hughes telling him that Schenck had been told of his bad behavior. By December 30, Hughes had requested that the uncut film be re-reviewed by a Code jury. The appeal failed, and the picture was deemed in violation of the Code and unfit for release. Sometime over the next week, Hughes gave in and cut out all of the offending lines, as well as a scene in which the “cock” approaches Dove, who is wearing a suit of armor, and makes a crack about the difficulty in opening “foreign cans.”

  Cock of the Air, which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reconstructed, reinstating much of the previously cut footage, in 2016, probably wouldn’t have made much sense even if it hadn’t been cut to suit the censors: the almost nonexistent plot defies not just logic, but a raison d’être. Also baffling are many of the censor’s decisions regarding what to cut: for instance, a scene in which Morris’s valet is revealed to be keeping a notebook in which he bets on whether the pilot “does” or “does not” score with women at each given opportunity was shorn, but the aforementioned spanking sequence, and full reels in which two-thirds of the braless Dove’s breasts are plainly visible, were allowed to stay.

  It’s not a wonder that Cock of the Air wasn’t a hit, but in a just world, critics should have championed Dove’s performance in it. The film’s considerable value lies in its showcasing of Dove’s beauty and comic timing—her look and her performance feel shockingly modern almost ninety years later—and of Hughes’s continued genius for putting his actresses in costumes that turn women like Dove, like Harlow before her, into spectacles at least as riveting as the aerial sequences that Hughes was possibly more passionate about. But in the form in which it was released, Cock of the Air could only hasten Dove’s career decline. Unlike so many other silent stars, it wasn’t the transition to talkies that had cut Billie’s career off at the knees—it was trying to sustain her career in a new era in which stars were being imported from the New York stage every day that was the challenge. After the wave of low-quality First National pictures, followed by the one-two punch of The Age for Love and Cock of the Air, she would get only one more chance.

  BILLIE DOVE HAD DECLARED that she would leave her career behind when it was no longer a source of happiness, and nothing about The Age for Love or Cock of the Air made her happy. She had also said that once she was done with her career, she wanted to have babies. Offspring was something Hughes had no interest in—after his own battle as an heir, he was determined not to create a person who could fight with him over a stake in his fortune. Given his refusal to have a traditional family life, and his bungled handling of Billie’s career, Dove’s suggestion that she walked out on him seems totally plausible—what would have been left for her in this relationship? At the same time, Hughes had pursued Dove when she was an unquestionable trophy. Now her star had faded. If his own profile couldn’t get a jolt from being seen in public with a given woman, it stands to reason that he would have lost interest in continuing a relationship with her in private.

  Dove would say that her romance with Hughes was over by the time Cock of the Air opened in January 1932, and that in fact they couldn’t bear to see each other by this point. But Hughes spent the first quarter of 1932 on a yachting vacation around Cuba and Florida, and based on a telegram Dove sent Quarberg on March 17, 1932, it appears that she was with him on that trip, and that Hughes and Dove were planning to return to Los Angeles together. “Finally tearing ourselves away from Florida,” she wired. “Arriving Monday morning do you think anyone will remember us . . .” That month, a rag called the Hollywood Tatler reported that the Dove-Hughes engagement was off. Shortly after that, Hughes was very publicly seeing other people.

  At the time of Dove’s telegram, Quarberg was desperate for word from his boss, because of a crisis over another film that had been in production since before Howard’s Depression-motivated decision to scale back on his cinematic investments. Scarface, a ripped-from-the-headlines Chicago gangster drama directed by Howard Hawks and starring urban everyman Paul Muni as a character inspired by Al Capone, was virtually a sound-era remake/update of Hughes’s previ
ous hit, The Racket. Quarberg fervently believed that United Artists and the Hays Office were in cahoots to suppress Scarface in order to spite Hughes. Howard was not so convinced, at least not right away. In late January 1932, a week after Hughes sent the agitated Quarberg a telegram politely requesting that he understand that Hughes had to compromise with UA in order to release his films, Quarberg’s hours were cut in half. Quarberg flipped out, and Hughes wired him that he was “terribly sorry,” but it wasn’t personal—everyone was taking a pay cut “with few exceptions.” Hughes encouraged him to “give all your time as long as same is advisable for whatever salary we are able pay you.” Quarberg responded that very day with a confidential letter to Hughes in which he tried to demonstrate his loyalty and indispensability to the Hughes organization by ranting about how “Will Hays and the Big-Shot Jews, particularly the MGM moguls, are secretly hoping you have made your last pictures” and recommending Hughes publicly break from Hays and announce his intention to refuse to follow the Code.

  Quarberg’s anti-Semitic paranoia aside, Hays’s correspondence with his deputies around this time suggests that the censorship authorities were so exasperated over Hughes’s defiance on Cock of the Air that they were not inclined to do him any favors on Scarface. This may not have been equivalent to a conspiracy to force Hughes out of Hollywood, but the Hays Office definitely held a grudge, and they wanted to teach Hughes to stay in his lane.

  Quarberg sent and received much correspondence on these matters in early 1932. It was clear to all that there was some hypocrisy in the application of censorship: at least Cock of the Air contained dialogue that clearly sought to push the limits of decency; Scarface was being censored mainly for humanizing a criminal—or at least, that’s what Hays and his cohorts were claiming, even though the narrative of the film ultimately aligned with the spirit of the Code in its message that a life of crime is a short one bound to resolve in a bloody end. And yet, for months, at no point did Hughes or UA encourage Quarberg’s conspiracy theories. In fact, on the contrary, everyone pretty consistently requested that Quarberg find some chill. Then suddenly, in April 1932, Hughes essentially did exactly what Quarberg had been pushing for six months: he announced that he would go to the courts to fight the Hays Office, and that he had hired a number of attorneys around the country to represent him, including Clarence Darrow.

  Hughes had apparently decided that the conspiracy line might play after all, although unlike Quarberg, he positioned the plot against the film as not one of Hollywood politics, but electoral politics. Hughes, who the Los Angeles Paper noted had “recently returned from a yachting cruise in South Atlantic waters,” declared that a conspiracy was afoot to bring down Scarface for painting a too realistic portrait of the crime wave taking over major cities, rendering law enforcement impotent.

  “It becomes a serious threat to the freedom of expression in America, when self-styled guardians of the public’s welfare, as personified by our film censor boards, lend their influence to abortive efforts of selfish and vicious interests to suppress a motion picture simply because it depicts the truth about conditions which constitute front-page news,” Hughes stated. “I expect to have the support of Will H. Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, who has said he believes censorship is un-American.”

  Howard Hughes would make a career out of fighting the Hays Code and its enforcers, but usually he would be fighting to push the boundaries in terms of sexual content. With Scarface he claimed he was fighting to make movies about things that were really happening in America, even if they challenged America’s image of itself. And for the only time in his career, his stubbornness with the censors paid off, without incurring damage to his reputation. When the Hays Office refused to clear Scarface even after Hughes had made a number of requested changes, Hughes decided to release the uncut version of the film in territories without a local censorship board, beginning in New Orleans in March. Then, after a press screening of that unamended version was rapturously received in Los Angeles, journalists started criticizing the Hays Office for its stance. “The absurdities of film censorship have never been carried further than in the case of Howard Hughes’s new screen sensation—Scarface,” declared the Los Angeles Times. The Hays Office, recognizing they had been beaten by Hughes’s manipulation of the media narrative, began recasting their failure as a victory, claiming that the version shown to the press had been cut and improved by the censor’s suggestions, which it had not.

  After the disappointments of the Billie Dove movies, and another misbegotten Hughes production, the Spencer Tracy aviation pic The Sky Devils, Scarface was a huge victory for Hughes—morally and financially. It was United Artists’ biggest hit of 1932, and Hughes’s contract entitled him to receive 75 percent of the profits netted from the film’s $900,000 gross. It would also be his last hurrah in Hollywood for most of the rest of the 1930s, at least as a producer.

  With Dove in his rearview, Hughes sent the message he was diversifying his interests by showing up at Scarface’s Hollywood premiere with a new actress on his arm. In 1932, Ginger Rogers was fresh in town. A teenage vaudeville trouper from Texas, she had found stardom on the Broadway stage in the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy, but she had yet to play a leading role in a Hollywood film. She was, however, already a divorcee. At seventeen, Rogers had married Jack Culpepper, a dancer she had had a crush on ever since he had dated her aunt when Ginger was a prepubescent girl. Six years after the onset of Ginger’s crush, Ginger had become a professional dancer, too, and Jack visited her backstage after she performed in Dallas. Rogers had thought about her aunt’s ex-boyfriend constantly in the interim years. As her career was gearing up and taking the teenager far from home, Culpepper became a frequent fantasy object, as much a nostalgic symbol of home as a prize for the sexually naive Rogers to aspire to be worthy of winning. When Jack proposed for a few weeks later, Ginger said yes. Rogers later recalled, “I really had never been alone with a man.”

  Her mother, Lela, threatened to disown her, and yet still Ginger married Jack, and went on tour with Culpepper’s dancing act, putting her own career aside to do so. In her autobiography Rogers remembered watching Jack’s show from the wings, sad and bored. Instead of performing, Ginger recalled, her “wifely duties” extended to making sure Jack’s toupee was cleaned after each show. “Otherwise, I was more or less like a third thumb.” Culpepper was also, according to Ginger, a drunk. The newlywed teenager found it “impossible to communicate with any individual who continuously indulges in alcohol.” (Ginger would become one of Hollywood’s most famous teetotalers.) Around the time of her eighteenth birthday, Ginger left Jack and went back to her mother, and back to work. Two years later came Girl Crazy, during which she was spotted on stage by a scout from RKO, and after Girl Crazy closed in June 1931, Ginger and Lela took a train west for Los Angeles.

  In these pre–Code era days of 1932, Ginger kept busy filming saucy chorus girl parts. She began dating director Mervyn LeRoy, who suggested that she be cast in Lloyd Bacon’s musical 42nd Street as chorus girl “Anytime Annie.” LeRoy would then direct Ginger himself in Gold Diggers of 1933. Both of these films featured psychedelic musical numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley. In many Berkeley numbers, countless girls were styled to look virtually identical, so that the eye was overwhelmed by multiple, indistinguishable women, rather than by one stunning face. But in Gold Diggers, Rogers was memorably placed front and center in the opening number, leading dozens of women singing “We’re in the Money” while dressed in bikinis made from giant trompe l’oeil silver dollars. At the end of the song, the creditors of the show-within-the-film’s producers attempt to repossess Ginger’s costume—while she still has it on.

  LeRoy and Rogers were dancing at a nightclub one night in the spring of 1932 when Ginger realized she was being watched. As they both spun around the room with their dates, a tall man she had never seen before would occasionally catch her eye, and attempt to smile. He wasn’t very good at it
—smiling, that is; as a dancer, he wasn’t bad. The tall man eventually maneuvered his date so that they were dancing alongside Mervyn and Ginger. Ginger’s date warned her what was coming. “That’s Howard Hughes,” he said. “The Texas oilman who wants to be a movie producer.” Mervyn and Howard consulted with one another in whispers for a while. Finally, Howard raised his voice so that Ginger could hear him ask LeRoy if it would be possible to loan her out for a dance. Merv grinned. “If you can keep up with her!”

  He could. Hughes danced well enough to get in Ginger’s head, and under her skin, activating reveries not unlike those she harbored for her first husband back when he was unattainable. On the ride home with Merv, Ginger thought about Howard and, as she put it chastely in her autobiography, “wondered what he’d be like as a date.”

  She found out soon enough. As Rogers remembered it, Hughes called her at home a few days later and told her mother Lela he wanted to take her daughter to the Scarface premiere. Ginger agreed. It would be her first Hollywood premiere, and the first of many dates with Hughes, whom she’d be involved with on and off for the next eight years.

  Howard’s pickup of Rogers was typical behavior for him in the early to mid 1930s, when he frequented Sunset Strip nightclubs such as the Clover, the Colony, and the Trocadero. Hughes was part of a gang of young men making the scene, including Pat De Cicco and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, two cousins from Calabria by way of Queens. Broccoli, who would go on to produce the James Bond movies but was then managing a company that manufactured coffins, had come out to Hollywood to console De Cicco, an agent for actors and cameramen, who was splitting up with his movie star wife, Thelma Todd. Broccoli and De Cicco each had the experience of showing up at a nightclub with a young lady only to have Howard Hughes horn in on their date.