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

by Karina Longworth

  This was the period when Hughes was the most social, and the most visible. If invited for the weekend to one of the Hearst properties, or Palm Springs, or Catalina Island, Howard would fly the boys there in one of his planes. Hughes even, on at least one occasion, hosted a party of his own. The Los Angeles Times would report Billie Dove’s attendance at the opening of a new nightclub at the airport, where Hughes entertained fourteen guests, in May 1932. This was the last mention of the pair together in their hometown’s paper of record.

  Hughes was putting on a devil-may-care show in public, but privately he was increasingly cash poor. In May 1932 he had to restructure his agreement with Ella to give him more time to pay off her settlement. The new arrangement stipulated that Hughes may “not engage in any new, major under-taking, and particularly will not engage in the production of a motion picture,” nor was he allowed to sell or trade Hughes Tool stock without essentially asking his ex-wife’s permission. Between securing both his own divorce and Billie’s, and funding the two failed Billie Dove pictures, Hughes had committed a fortune to a romance that was now over. This was on top of losses he had sustained producing Hell’s Angels and creating the public perception that the film had been highly profitable. Now he would remain financially hamstrung for the next few years, at least temporarily unable to further his ambitions in Hollywood.

  In fact, due to his frittering away of Caddo’s assets, Howard’s financial connection to Billie would last much longer than their romantic relationship. Hughes’s lawyers and Dove’s were engaged in a battle over Billie’s contract to Hughes for years. Still owing Dove $252,000 as of April 1934, Hughes had petitioned to settle for a note worth $100,000, on the grounds that “the liabilities” of his film company Caddo had become “greatly in excess of its assets.” Dove was willing to settle for less than half the worth of the contract, but only if Hughes paid cash. As Hughes’s attorney Neil McCarthy later explained it, they could not do so, because “the Caddo Company did not have any money”—it had been depleted by Hughes’s investments in Multicolor and an exhibition business, as well as, of course, failed films. In September 1935, Dove’s lawyers cited “corporate fictions” that allowed Hughes to claim that his film company was in the red while in fact the finances of all of his companies were tied together, meaning he was technically capable of reaching with Dove “a mutually satisfactory and fair arrangement.” Genuinely afraid of a lawsuit that would expose all manner of the inner workings of Hughes’s businesses, not to mention the Billie-Howard romance, by the end of 1936, Hughes Tool paid Dove $100,000 in cash.

  By that point, Billie Dove no longer existed; the actress who played her was long retired. Billie’s final film, made in the wake of her breakup with Hughes, was Blondie of the Follies, in which she costarred with Marion Davies. It was financed, like all of Davies’s pictures, by William Randolph Hearst, who shut down the production before the last scene was shot, and held a cast and crew screening. It was obvious that Billie had stolen the picture. “I had given a damned good performance,” she boasted many years later. That was the problem. Hearst demanded rewrites and reshoots so that Marion could steal the movie back—and so that Billie could be minimized, and recast as the villain. The final version of Blondie of the Follies was so different from what Billie had agreed to appear in that if it had been produced by anyone else, she might have filed a lawsuit. “I couldn’t sue Marion and Mr. Hearst,” Dove explained decades later. “They were friends of mine.” When Billie went to see the finished film, it was a painful experience—halfway through, she turned to her date and said, “Let’s go. I’ve had enough.”

  For a couple of years, while working with Lois Weber, Billie Dove had been able to transcend the typical petty politics of Hollywood and star in films that sought to speak to female viewers, and asked them to question the images of femininity they were generally given by the movies. By 1932, however, that brief two-film run seemed very far away. Blondie of the Follies had been written by women (Frances Marion and Anita Loos), but they were women in the pocket of Hearst, who sought to protect and promote Marion Davies at all costs. Billie had had her own version of Hearst in Hughes, but that hadn’t worked out professionally or personally. She didn’t go into Blondie of the Follies thinking it would be her last movie, but it ended up that way. Soon after, in May 1933, Billie married a wealthy rancher named Robert Kenaston, with whom she would have a son and adopt a daughter. Marriage to Kenaston allowed an opportunity for early retirement, before she could age into anything other than the most beautiful woman in movies.

  Like so many silent stars, much of Billie’s work eventually went missing, and other than The Black Pirate, none of the extant films are well known today. Late in life, Billie (now Lillian Kenaston) was not only still carrying around that letter sent by the Burbank postmaster in 1926, demanding that she pay for extra staff to handle all of her fan mail, but would pull it out of her purse to show to virtual strangers at Palm Springs garden parties. All of that ambition of the girl in the movie house, looking up at the screen and imagining herself there, had not fully burned out. With the period of her stardom so many decades past, the failures and the heartbreak faded away, she held tightly to the memory of what it felt like to be on the highest pedestal in moving pictures, even if just for a little while. “All my life has been interesting, but back in my picture days, I was happy all the time,” Dove said. “I was on the screen.”

  Of course, she hadn’t been happy all the time. She hadn’t been happy when Irvin Willat was running her life; it didn’t make her happy when he sold her off to Howard (and for more than three times what she had netted from her own settlement with Hughes). She hadn’t been happy when Hughes had squandered what remained of her star power, forcing her to carry subpar material and leaving her to answer to critics of The Age for Love alone; she hadn’t been happy when William Randolph Hearst had dismantled the performance that could have been her comeback. But all of those troubles receded when she looked back from so many decades into the future. Sitting on that old couch that Howard had given her, all she recalled was the kind of glamour staring back at her from her scrapbook. All she remembered were the bright lights, the silk pajamas, and the thrill of knowing there were girls like her, in the audience, watching.

  Chapter 7

  “A Bitch in Heat”

  “Would things have been different if Jean Harlow’s first picture had been for someone other than Howard Hughes?” mused her friend, columnist Adela Rogers St. Johns, long after “things” with Harlow had ended. The columnist believed that once Hughes had created the indelible image of Harlow the bombshell, “no producer in his right mind would throw away the box office draw represented by Harlow to put her in another type of role.”

  Harlow would get stuck for much of her career in a trap of typecasting, forced to embody a sexual fantasy that felt to her nothing like the real her. This made Harlow’s already shaky self-worth plummet—because clearly there must be something wrong with the real her if all Hollywood wanted was for her to pretend to be someone she was not. Of course, the truth was that it wasn’t personal; Hollywood wasn’t judging her as a person, but as a commodity.

  “I feel like a bitch in heat,” Harlow complained. “With the way men behave, even my stepfather, even my best friends’ husbands—that’s what I feel like.” Harlow was aware of the irony: “And I’m not all that interested in sex.”

  Harlow’s best films would reveal the nihilistic sex bomb caricature of Hell’s Angels to be a farce. Not coincidentally, the first of those films would be written by the most subversive female screenwriter of the Classical Hollywood era.

  MOST PEOPLE WHO WANTED to work in the movies on the cusp of the 1920s were heading west. Anita Loos, who already had the scripts for five Douglas Fairbanks hits, including His Picture in the Papers, under her belt, went the other way. Her husband John Emerson (the second Mr. Anita Loos) was licking his wounds after having directed Mary Pickford’s first flop. In New York, the pair could start o
ver.

  In Manhattan, Loos was drawn to a group of male intellectuals, including journalist H. L. Mencken. Highly observant of socio-sexual dynamics, and never afraid of taking the piss out of the supposed “great men” in her midst, Anita wrote a short story mocking Mencken’s relationship with what Loos described as a “stupid little blonde.” When Mencken first read it, he said, “Do you realize, young woman, that you’re the first American writer ever to poke fun at sex?” Published first as a serial in Harper’s Bazaar, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes made Loos a star—and put strain on her marriage. “From the beginning, my tough little blonde proved to be a healthy financial enterprise,” Loos recalled, adding in her perfectly dry, ironic tone that she “never had to bother my head with business, for John, as usual, took my money as soon as it came in.”

  Then Loos discovered her husband was having an affair. When she confronted Emerson and asked if he wanted a divorce, he said, “I’ll never leave you; you’re so gullible you might fall into the hands of some crook who’d get ahold of your money.” Instead they separated, and John gave Anita an allowance drawn from what they had accumulated during their marriage, much of which Anita had earned. After the stock market crash, Emerson suggested Loos go looking for work, for the better of their shared bottom line. “And then,” Loos recalled, “with poverty drawing closer and closer, there suddenly came out of left field an offer from MGM for me to write a movie script at $3500 a week!”

  Irving Thalberg, the head of production at MGM, had sent for Loos to rescue a screenplay that was in trouble. It was based on the bestselling novel Red-Headed Woman, a pulpy story of a social climbing sexpot. The most recent attempt at an adaptation had been penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, Thalberg exclaimed, “tried to turn the silly book into a tone poem!” Thalberg had hired Loos, as he told her, “To make fun of the sex element, as you did in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” It would be the only way to get a film about sex as big-game hunting, in which an independent-minded woman was the hunter, to get a pass from a censorship board so literal-minded that it performed line edits on song lyrics and used a stopwatch to patrol kiss length.

  For Thalberg and Loos, the challenge was to figure out how Red-Headed Woman, a story about a girl who steals a foolish husband away from his wife, could work as a romance: “The poor girl has the flashy type of looks that frighten off any man with the qualities of a hero,” Thalberg mused. “Who is there for her to love, when she only attracts fools?”

  Such was essentially the lifelong dilemma of Jean Harlow, who had become incredibly famous since meeting Howard Hughes. This eighteen-year-old girl suddenly skyrocketed from nobody to internationally known femme fatale on the steam of one inexpert performance in a heavily hyped but—aviation spectacles aside—not very good movie. All eyes were on what she’d do next.

  Other than moving into a new house in Beverly Hills, Harlow had not been able to make the most of this moment, because her contract to Howard Hughes forbid her to work for anyone but him without his permission. And after Hell’s Angels, Hughes didn’t have any movies with parts for Harlow ready to go into immediate production. (This, in the long run, was for the best, judging by the material Hughes was able to scrounge up for Dove.) Instead of casting her in movies, he sent Harlow on a never-ending publicity tour. First, there were appearances at the Hell’s Angels premieres in New York and Seattle, and then in her hometown of Kansas City, where she greeted a crowd of four thousand at the Midland Theater and had an awkward reunion with her estranged father. Then it was back to New York for more publicity.

  By the end of 1930, it had been more than a year since she had been on a movie set, and an incredibly frustrated Harlow felt that Hughes was taking advantage of her. With Jean having relinquished managerial control over her career to her mother and stepfather, Marino Bello approached Hughes and accused him of breach of contract for not providing Jean with opportunities to actually act. In response, a Hughes lawyer sent an extremely strongly worded telegram, asserting that Harlow had been “generously treated and splendidly handled.” Hughes, the lawyer added, would “refuse to cancel [the] contract and resent her ingratitude in requesting it.” Harlow was then ordered to “comply or we will no longer be responsible for her hotel bills which by the way have been extremely large.” There persists to this day the myth that Harlow and Hughes had a sexual relationship, but this telegram seems more indicative of their dynamic, which was not only strictly professional but, in every way imaginable, made her feel terrible.

  Finally, at the urging of Paul Bern, the writer and producer at MGM to whom Harlow had long been confiding her troubles, Hughes began lending Jean out to other studios, with Hughes pocketing a substantial loan-out fee every time. Soon Harlow found herself with the opposite problem of unemployment: she had been loaned out to work on three films simultaneously, at three different studios. In a typical deal, Hughes would net $1,000 a week for her services. Harlow’s weekly salary was a quarter of that.

  This was a relatively good cut for Harlow compared to the discrepancy between what Hughes earned and what she did on her personal appearances. Hughes could command as much as $3,500 (about $55,000 in 2018 dollars) for a week of Harlow appearances at a Chicago theater; Harlow still got only her standard salary of $200 a week. Adjusted for inflation, Harlow was pocketing $3,200 a week in 2018 dollars, which wasn’t a pittance, but was definitely a mere fraction of what Hughes made on the deal. Jean’s frustration over feeling that she was being cheated out of her fair share would have been bad enough, but the “act” Harlow had been sent to perform was totally humiliating: the evening’s MC would drop his handkerchief, and Harlow would bend over to pick it up. That was it. “That was all she had to do,” according to actor Reginald Owen, “because those wonderful breasts almost fell out, and that was worth any price for admission.” These shows got terrible reviews. Now Hughes was making a killing by putting Harlow’s body on display to be ogled, offering up what appeared to be a lack of natural talent for ridicule.

  Though she was cast during this time opposite James Cagney in the breakthrough gangster talkie The Public Enemy (released a year before Scarface), Harlow’s part was small (and there was gossip that her role had been cut in half because she just wasn’t good enough to handle more to do).* Her first really substantive role after Hell’s Angels came in a film called Gallagher, about a newspaper reporter played by Robert Williams, who ignores his smart, career-girl colleague, played by Loretta Young, and falls under the spell of a rich bitch, played by Jean Harlow. The movie was directed by Frank Capra, who claimed that he cast Harlow “for sex,” knowing “Harlow’s breastworks [would] burst their silken confines on magazine covers and pin-up walls.” And yet the film gave Harlow a chance to show that she was more than the sum of her swollen parts. There’s one scene in which the camera tracks backward to capture Harlow and Williams walking from one room into another. As Harlow’s body jiggles freely under her satin gown, Williams trails behind her, making a rambling joke about “an attack from the rear.” But Capra shows us not the rear, but Harlow’s face, smirking and sighing, conveying the annoyance of a woman who hears this kind of thing every day.

  You’ve never heard of Gallagher, because by the time it was released in October 1931, it was called Platinum Blonde. Hughes convinced Columbia, to whom he had loaned Harlow, to change the title of the picture to Harlow’s brand identifier, even though brunette Loretta Young was the first-billed actress in the movie, and its romantic victor. But Platinum Blonde was the right title for a movie about a regular joe, suckered into a fantasy of sex and wealth, who learns that living that fantasy means selling his soul.

  As the platinum blonde, Harlow would come to represent an intermingled fantasy of security and sex while maintaining a neighborhood-girl feel that made her an accessible icon to millions of women. A lot of those women wanted to look like her, which led to a rise in the popularity of hair bleaching. Harlow swore publicly that she didn’t dye her own hair, but of course, she did, and touched u
p her roots every Sunday. Her hairdresser used a combination of peroxide, ammonia, Clorox bleach, and Lux soap flakes. Women all over the country attempted to replicate the results with household bleach, often with disastrous results.

  The full platinum blonde look went beyond the hair: copies of the slip Harlow wore in Hell’s Angels were sold in department stores, allowing viewers of the movie to literally try the costume of the heartless temptress on for size. Harlow may have been naive to the ways of Hollywood, but one thing she was used to was being objectified by men because of the way she looked. What she wasn’t used to was being idolized by women and girls, who were drawn to the sexual power Harlow showed on-screen, but instead of wanting to conquer her, these women wanted to emulate her. It was men who put Harlow’s sexuality up for sale, but a lot of women were buying.

  After Platinum Blonde, Harlow’s stepfather took a cue from Hughes and booked Harlow on yet another personal appearance tour. Harlow hated these personal appearances, but she hated Hughes more, and at least this time, he wouldn’t be involved.

  These “shows” started out disastrously—Harlow still didn’t have an act beyond parading her body for the aggressively withering gaze of strangers—and at some point she collapsed and was diagnosed with an intestinal illness. After that, changes were made. Now the curtain would come up to reveal a spotlit Harlow, dressed in an elegant white gown, at the top of an art deco staircase. Harlow, agent Arthur Landau remembered, “shimmered in the light like a star in heaven—the blond shining hair—the gorgeous figure and most of all her smiling beautiful face and just enough of her breasts showing, solid as two rocks to make the men squirm and the women say ‘Ah’ and then applaud.” The show itself wasn’t that different in this incarnation—Harlow still didn’t really do anything but present herself to be looked at, although at least now there was no comedian goading the audience to laugh and setting Jean up to bend over—but the new aesthetics and presentation made all the difference. Stripping her persona down to just the platinum aspects turned the audience’s gaze from a mean-spirited gawk into an act of worship. Literally on a pedestal, it seemed like she was the one with all the power. The crowds went wild.