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

by Karina Longworth

  By now Harlow was in bad shape. Her relationship with Powell had all but petered out. “I am so constantly trying to be what Bill wants me to,” she told Louella Parsons, “but I know we have a feeling we’ll never be married.” In March 1937 she discovered she needed to have all of her wisdom teeth removed, and Mother Jean found a dentist who was willing to extract all four teeth at once, so that “the Baby” would be able to swiftly return to work. After the third tooth was removed, Harlow’s heart stopped beating briefly. She managed to recover enough to report for work on a new movie, Saratoga, but two months after the surgery she was still draining fluid from her infected mouth.

  On the set of that film, in late May, she started complaining of abdominal pain. She went home for the weekend to Powell’s mansion and spent the weekend in bed with what everyone thought was the flu. On Wednesday, now vomiting and becoming delirious, Jean finally was seen by a doctor, who diagnosed a swollen gallbladder and prescribed dextrose injections. On June 3, the Associated Press claimed Powell had gone to visit a hospitalized Harlow, who had “virtually recovered today from what her doctor diagnosed as a cold.” This doesn’t jibe with eyewitness accounts of Harlow’s last days, and was likely fed to reporters by Harlow’s mother.

  In fact, ostensibly because of the elder Jean’s allegiance to Christian Science and desire to control the story, Harlow was treated at home for most of her illness. This decision proved fatal. The first doctor’s gallbladder diagnosis had been wrong, and when she failed to get better, a different doctor came to see her and declared that it was her kidneys that were the problem. Those kidneys had probably been degenerating for years, since an infection that followed the scarlet fever she had contracted as a teenager, and now the hydrating fluids that had been prescribed by the first doctor to treat her, which her kidneys couldn’t process, were killing her. Harlow was finally admitted to the hospital on the evening of June 6. Her kidneys had caused her whole body to swell so severely that, as one doctor recalled, “her face looked like Fatty Arbuckle.” The next day, a doctor told journalists waiting outside the hospital that Harlow had already had “two blood transfusions and intravenous solutions” and was now on a respirator, but “there does not seem to be much chance to save her life.”

  Today, Jean Harlow would benefit from modern antibiotics, dialysis, or even a kidney transplant. Then, two days after her correct diagnosis, on June 7, 1937, Jean Harlow died.

  It all happened so fast, or maybe it had been happening slowly for years. And by the end of it, the Baby had given up. In her last days, a visitor to her bedside tried to console her, by telling her she’d get better. Possibly delirious, the girl born Harlean Carpenter said, “I don’t want to.”

  Loos believed that Harlow had died of a broken heart, a heart broken by William Powell. “After Bill’s rejection, Jean seemed to lose interest in everything; and, when stricken, she refused to put up a fight.”

  It seemed impossible that someone so beautiful and young, whose screen presence was so full of energy and vitality, could have just died like that. Maybe that’s why rumors persisted that there was something else going on. The most Hollywood of these was the one that held that Jean Harlow had died from long-term exposure to the bleaching chemicals she used every Sunday, but in truth, Harlow’s hair bleaching habit destroyed only her hair—and that hair helped to invent a new lineage of Hollywood star, the blond sex goddess. In 1937, an eleven-year-old girl named Norma Jean would identify herself as one of Jean Harlow’s biggest fans. Within fifteen years, Norma Jean would have remade herself in Harlow’s image, even visiting Harlow’s own hairdresser, under the name Marilyn Monroe.

  “I think it was a great shame about Jean. I really do,” sighed St. Johns. “What was done to that child. And also again they did it to Lana Turner. Ava Gardner. I mean, I think these were women who were fine actresses and could have had a good career as actresses. If they hadn’t been such great sex appeal that that’s all anybody ever thought of or only cast them for or all they were ever allowed to do.”

  Howard Hughes was not the only mogul in Hollywood who profited off treating actresses as sex goddess flavors of the month, good for consumption in a brief window but disposable as soon as the next variety came along. As with so much in his career, Hughes did the same things that other men did—he just did them more crudely, and with even less of a regard for the person these actresses were before they came into his life, and what would become of them once he had moved on. And he always, eventually, moved on. By the time Howard Hughes’s first Hollywood discovery shuffled off this mortal coil, Hughes was deep into a new career. A new, persona-defining romance would follow.

  Part III

  Hepburn and Rogers and Russell, 1932–1940

  Chapter 9

  The Woman Who Lived Like a Man

  Technically, it was a crash landing. The prop plane had run out of fuel midair, and the pilot had no choice but to bring it down into a field of beet plants outside Santa Ana. But once the gleaming silver craft finally reached a complete stop, having plowed a runway for itself amid the greens, the pilot emerged grinning, victorious. It was September 13, 1935, and Howard Hughes had just set a new record land speed time of 347 miles per hour. “She’ll do better,” he said of his plane. “We’ll fix her up and try again.”

  In the mid-1930s, while his father’s drill bit company steadily refilled the coffers Hughes had depleted on his first go-round in the film colony, Howard turned his professional attentions to aviation. He spent much of the mid-1930s obsessed with speed, and tasked pilot and mechanic Glenn Odekirk with rebuilding a Boeing prop plane into the fastest aircraft in the world. Hughes Aircraft thus born, Hughes began a run of breaking and setting new aviation records. In 1933 he established a new world land speed time of 352.388 mph, flying over Santa Ana, a mark that he broke two years later with the flight that ended among the beets. In January 1936, he set a new nonstop transcontinental flight time record, making it from Burbank to Newark in 9 hours, 25 minutes, 10 seconds. When asked for comment on landing, Hughes said, “I wanted to go to New York, so I tried to see how fast I could do it in.” A year later, he shaved a full two hours off this landmark time, landing at Newark on January 19, 1937, just 7 hours and 28 minutes after leaving Los Angeles.

  Having transitioned his professional attention from moviemaking to these cockpit victories, Hughes would literally fly into the life of a woman who would become key to both his lasting legacy as a romantic hero and his reentry into the film business.

  Katharine Hepburn has been depicted, in biographies of herself and of Howard Hughes, as one of the eccentric aviator’s very few true loves, a portrayal that domesticates a nontraditional relationship between two self-styled mavericks into something easily digestible in gossip columns (including a multipart series by Adela Rogers St. Johns published in April 1947, nearly a decade after the Hepburn-Hughes affair ended) and stylized biopics like Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. Hughes left behind faint but tangible traces of his obvious lasting affection for Hepburn: a letter here, a stray comment to a later girlfriend there. But Hepburn said much more publicly about Hughes than vice versa, and her version of the story made their relationship out to be a passionate fling, reaffirming for Hepburn that her main priority in life during the 1930s was not a man—not even the man she would describe as “the best lover I ever had”—but herself.

  Very shortly after her romance with Hughes ended, Hepburn met and became involved with Spencer Tracy, the actor whom Hepburn herself would put forth as her great love. Hepburn outlived Tracy by thirty-six years, and over those decades, in writings and in interviews, she placed her relationship to the actor and the films they made together at the core of her legacy. In fact, because their real-life relationship and the films they made together combine so powerfully as a Hollywood love story, the history of Katharine Hepburn’s life and career can be divided into Before Spencer and After Spencer.

  Hepburn’s lasting legacy is as an iconoclast who demanded a leve
l of liberation uncommon for women of her day, and though there is a lot of truth to that image, as an actress in the 1930s Hepburn was able to carve out spaces for her own freedom thanks to her alliances with powerful men. From the vantage point of today, we can see that a variety of different men helped to influence and support Hepburn in the Before Spencer years: directors George Cukor and John Ford; her frequent costar Cary Grant; her agent turned lover Leland Hayward; and Howard Hughes. And since confirmation of her off-screen relationship with Tracy was withheld from the public until after Tracy’s death, Hughes remained the most public paramour of Hepburn’s acting career.

  Grant and Hughes are the two men most visibly associated with Hepburn’s legacy as a romantic heroine in the late 1930s. With Grant as her on-screen partner, Hepburn would make one of the greatest screwball romantic comedies in Bringing Up Baby, and perhaps the most utopian romantic film of the decade, in Holiday. With The Philadelphia Story, they would collaborate to create the sterling example of what philosopher Stanley Cavell would dub the comedy of remarriage—referring, essentially, to the plot device in which lovers are torn apart so that they can work their way back together. Meanwhile, off-screen, Hepburn and Hughes would star in a drama that proved to be irresistible to the press, and circulated a more conventionally lovable idea of Hepburn than the one she put forward in most of her films. The span of their romance would coincide with the peak of Hughes’s global celebrity; his daring feats in the realm of aviation and reports of his movie star girlfriend combined for a potent image of a 1930s idol.

  In discussing the ways in which Hepburn and Grant, and Hepburn and Hughes, projected fantasies of heterosexual romantic ideals, it should be noted that the sexual preferences of all three have been a matter of speculation. Hepburn acknowledges in her memoir Me that there were rumors about her lesbianism from the moment she arrived in Hollywood, because she lived not with her husband, but with her best female friend, heiress Laura Harding. Her “unconventional” taste in clothes was also frequently noted, with magazines like Modern Screen drawing connections between Hepburn and all-but-confirmed bisexual Marlene Dietrich in reporting things like “Miss Hepburn was going Miss Dietrich one better by going around town in blue overalls.”

  Biographers working in cooperation with Hepburn or her estate have dismissed or ignored these rumors and insinuations, while others have seized on them. William J. Mann, who is also the author of several books on the contributions of gays and lesbians in Hollywood, suggested in Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn that Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were beards for one another. Mann’s star source was Scotty Bowers, a self-proclaimed “madam” to the stars who told Mann that he (Bowers) had a sexual relationship with Tracy. Bowers later wrote in his own book Full Service that he had procured “over 150 different women” as dates for Hepburn. “Hepburn was a lesbian,” Bowers insisted, “and I could not imagine this incontrovertibly butch lady having an affair with a man, any man.”

  Writing after the release of Mann’s Kate and a year before Bowers’s book was published, Spencer Tracy’s biographer James Curtis furiously discredited both Mann and Bowers, writing off the former’s book as “part of a curious sub-genre pandering to an audience that apparently wants to be told that practically everyone in Old Hollywood was secretly gay” and accusing Mann of falling into the laziness of stereotyping and guilt by association. Curtis also used his formidable knowledge of the timeline of Tracy’s life to refute many of Bowers’s claims, all of which, he noted, remain “cheerfully unverifiable” so many years after so many of their subjects are dead.

  In Full Service, Bowers, whose matchmaking operation was based out of the fuel station where he pumped gas on Hollywood Boulevard, boasted that he had “got into a lot of sexual mischief” with Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, the actor who served as Grant’s roommate before and after they came to Hollywood. Grant would marry five women over the course of his life, and though those close to him and involved in his estate have defended his heterosexuality, stories like Bowers’s continue to circulate. One of the venues in which they have circulated are selected biographies on Howard Hughes.* What we know to be true for sure is that Grant and Hughes were close friends from the early 1930s until late enough in Hughes’s life that Jean Peters, Hughes’s final wife, assumed Grant would be assigned to oversee Hughes’s estate. For what it’s worth, Bowers claims that Hughes was “straight as an arrow and really liked women but, ironically, he hardly ever had sex with them” because he insisted that all of his paramours have immaculate skin—which, Bowers notes, Hepburn did not.

  I bring this up not because I intend to prove who these now long-deceased people really had sex with; I don’t, because I don’t think it matters. What does matter is that three of the most famous and glamorous figures of the 1930s, who worked together to model, on-screen and in real life, powerful heterosexual romantic fantasies, have over time had their authenticity as messengers for those fantasies called into question. Particularly in the case of Grant and Hepburn, the efforts to out their alleged secret gay lives after their deaths robs the stars of the agency they exercised while alive to define their own public personas. Even if Cary and Kate had worked in a Hollywood era in which they could have openly identified with a more complex, less heteronormative sexuality, we can’t know exactly how they would have identified themselves, and what they would have chosen to share with the public about their private lives.

  Hepburn’s case is unique, though, because unlike Cary Grant’s, her screen presence was never a conventionally heteronormative one. Hepburn presented herself and projected something, from the very beginning of her time in movies, that seemed like a threat to the dominant, patriarchal order. The lesbian rumors about Hepburn began in part because her life and persona so defied expectations for straight women in the early to mid twentieth century. Whether or not Hepburn had intimate physical relationships with women, the fact that she was suspected of being queer before anyone knew anything about her other than that she had a female roommate and appeared in public wearing pants has more to do with the limited, and sexist, vocabulary available until relatively recently to describe women who don’t try to conform to expectations set by the male gaze—or deliberately set out to defy them.

  This matters because, for a period in the late 1930s, it seemed like Katharine Hepburn was not going to survive in Hollywood. She was too “unusual,” and because she wasn’t a previously branded “type,” producers and studios struggled to know what to do with her. After her meteoric initial rise, audiences seemed to be indifferent to her. By the end of the decade, this had changed, and she was thus set on the path of one of the longest, steadiest careers of any actress in Hollywood history.* It was in the interim that she was very publicly linked to Howard Hughes.

  KATHARINE HEPBURN ARRIVED IN Hollywood on July 4, 1932, an apparent bachelorette, escorted not by the husband whom she would neglect to tell the media about until they asked, but instead by Laura Harding—and Harding’s two dogs and mountain of Louis Vuitton luggage. Hepburn, who had just turned twenty-five in May, had left Ludlow Ogden Smith (“Luddy”), to whom she had been married for four years, back in New York, planning to make her first movie, A Bill of Divorcement, and then head back east as soon as possible.

  Hepburn had been lured from the New York stage by director George Cukor, who had already helped to launch the careers of female stars such as glamour queen Kay Francis and operetta diva Jeanette MacDonald. Cukor would become known as a famously fantastic “woman’s director,” and female star after female star would testify to the confidence he inspired in them. Some historians have noted that to describe Cukor as a “woman’s director” was to reveal homophobia: it was a coded way of acknowledging that Cukor was gay, and a backhanded way of suggesting that a gay man could not succeed in genres geared toward straight men. Hepburn herself made the latter suggestion in her autobiography, in a statement about why she wanted George Stevens to direct her and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year instead of Cukor: �
�I had to explain to Cukor that this script had to be directed by a very macho director from the man’s point of view and not the woman’s.”

  Perhaps it would be too much to ask even a gender-standards iconoclast like Katharine Hepburn to stay within the lines of twenty-first-century political correctness. As disappointing as her conflation of “macho” and “heterosexual” reads today, it seems likely that Cukor’s sexuality played into his success directing many of the great female stars of the twentieth century in performances that humanized them and/or depicted a wider range of female experience than was typical in Hollywood at that time. It stands to reason that these actresses were able to let their guards down and communicate in a different and more open way with Cukor because, unlike so many men in power in their industry, he wasn’t sexually predatory toward them.

  Cukor’s empathetic sensibility when it came to actresses put him at cross-purposes with RKO production chief David O. Selznick, the brilliant maverick producer who behaved for much of his career as though capturing beautiful women in a predatory gaze were the whole point of making movies. Selznick didn’t understand what Cukor saw in Hepburn at all, and had tried to get the director to consider other options. “I hear great things about a girl named Peggy Entwistle,” Selznick wrote to Cukor. Cukor did consider Entwistle for the female lead in A Bill of Divorcement, but she ended up being cast instead in another RKO film, Thirteen Women—in a part that was cut down to almost nothing, when the Hays office forced Selznick to remove an implied lesbian relationship from the story. Thirteen Women would turn out to be Entwistle’s first and last movie: in September 1932, two weeks before A Bill of Divorcement premiered, Entwistle would climb to the top of the H of the Hollywood sign and jump to her death, leaving behind a note that was interpreted as blaming her suicide on her failure to achieve movie stardom.