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

by Karina Longworth

  There was no definitive break to the relationship—in Hepburn’s romances, there rarely was a decisive ending; she’d avoid a confrontation, and use distance as a convenient ramp from lust into friendship. So it went with Hughes. At the end of the summer of 1938, a massive hurricane hit the East Coast. Fenwick was destroyed. Luddy showed up, camera in tow. Hughes’s plane arrived with reinforcements of drinking water—but without Hughes. Hepburn said that when she saw that Howard had sent supplies but had not come himself, she knew the romance was over.

  “At that moment, I wanted Howard more than bottled water. I understood Howard didn’t care about how much a bottle of water cost brought in that way. I knew he never gave that kind of money any thought, but he valued his time.” Hughes could only propose marriage so many times to a woman before deciding that his time was better spent elsewhere.

  If their mutual desire for fame had brought them together, their fundamentally different family backgrounds had helped to tear them apart. Like Hughes, Hepburn had been marked by death in her youth: when she was thirteen, her beloved older brother Tom had suddenly, inexplicably hung himself, and it was Katie who had walked in and found the body swinging from a bedsheet. The tragedy united the Hepburns in denial; they never spoke of it, and as a family became collectively determined to move on. In adulthood, and in stardom, Hepburn’s family became her rock and refuge. She never felt more herself than when at the dinner table surrounded by bickering siblings or competing toe-to-toe with her father on the golf course.

  This was simply not Howard Hughes’s vibe. He was not comfortable or particularly capable in groups of any size, and families seemed to make him particularly anxious. An only child orphaned at the moment of late adolescence when he was naturally driven to assert himself as his own man, Howard had cut himself off from his family and had assiduously avoided looking back. Hughes had visited Hepburn frequently at Fenwick (two long car horn bleats followed by three short braps meant he was coming up the driveway, a code that the Hepburn family folded into their own traditions), but he never fit in there.

  It didn’t help matters that Luddy was still hanging around. On one of Howard’s trips to Fenwick, he found himself on the golf course trying to concentrate on the ball while an impatient Kate and her father looked on, and Kate’s ex-husband swirled around them, Brownie camera in hand. When Hughes protested, Dr. Hepburn put the millionaire in his place: “Howard, Luddy has been taking pictures of all of us for years before you got here, and he’ll be taking them years after you’ve gone. He’s part of this family. Now drive.”

  If this scenario sounds familiar—the new suitor confronting the maelstrom of the headstrong would-be-bride’s large, moneyed family and the ex-husband who won’t go away—that’s because it’s more or less the plot of The Philadelphia Story, the play turned film that finally brought Katharine Hepburn’s career back from the dead and ensured a connection between Hepburn and Hughes that would last a lifetime.

  In the summer of 1938, as the Hughes-Hepburn romance had been winding down, Philip Barry, the writer of Holiday, came to Fenwick to visit Hepburn and tell her about a play he was thinking about writing, about a young divorcee named Tracy Lord who was about to take as a second husband a national hero, a man who looked perfect for her on paper but who ultimately wasn’t her soul mate. Hepburn told him it sounded like fun, and Barry had gone home to flesh out the story.

  Barry had not been a direct witness to the dynamic between the Hepburns and Hughes, and the new man in Tracy Lord’s life in The Philadelphia Story would bear as little resemblance to the real Hughes as lapdog-like Luddy bore to Cary Grant. Perhaps that’s why both Hepburn and Hughes—who now had a heroic public persona to protect—had immediately gotten behind Barry’s play. Indeed, when Hepburn told Hughes about it, he advised her that she should snatch up the movie rights, so that if the play was the hit they all hoped it would be, Hepburn would have leverage with whichever studio was most desperate to make the movie. Hughes himself bankrolled the option, and when the film was made, in 1940, by MGM, Hepburn was able to dictate the director (Cukor, of course) and negotiate with Louis B. Mayer to select two extremely desirable male costars. Grant played the irresistible ex-husband, and Jimmy Stewart the interloping reporter who becomes the wild card in the love quadrangle (the new fiancé was played by nonstar John Howard, which was stacking the deck against his character perhaps a bit too much).

  After the play had become a big hit but several months before Hepburn had closed the deal to make the movie, Hepburn’s brother Richard, called “Dick,” who had been trying (and failing) to establish himself as a dramatist since graduating from Harvard in 1933, revealed that he had been working on a play of his own, this one much more transparently inspired by his sister’s romantic life than the one she was currently starring in. Sea-Air was set at a wealthy family’s estate over the course of a summer that featured both an extended visit by a headstrong movie star’s millionaire boyfriend and a devastating hurricane. The millionaire is depicted as so rude and domineering that it’s a puzzle why the actress even needs the whole of the narrative to consider his marriage proposal.

  Richard had presented his sister with his work in progress as fair warning: he intended to have this play mounted, and he wanted to do so with Hepburn’s—and Hughes’s—blessing. This he did not get. Katharine, who had been providing Dick with a small monthly allowance so he could live in Manhattan and pursue writing, was furious with her brother for writing what amounted to an exposé of her intimate business. By now her relationship with Howard was no longer intimate, but it was business—it was only because of Hughes’s financial investment that she was near to becoming a producer (in action, if not on-screen credit) on the screen adaptation of The Philadelphia Story. Hughes had literally bought Hepburn a new lease on her film career, and he had done so because of the complicated romantic relationship that Dick Hepburn had faithfully reproduced in his play. This was a fact that Hepburn would later feel so comfortable with that she would joke about it. “I slept with Howard Hughes to get The Philadelphia Story,” Kate told biographer Charlotte Chandler. “Well, not exactly, but that’s the way it worked out. We had a lot of fun. He was a brilliant man and going to bed with him was very pleasurable. But the pleasure of owning The Philadelphia Story lasted longer.”

  Hepburn was not ready to be so candid in 1939. She began a concerted campaign within the family to suppress Sea-Air. Sensing he was losing the battle within his own home to translate his own lived experience into art, Dick made a Hail Mary appeal outside of the Fenwick bubble, sending copies of Sea-Air to fifteen Broadway producers. This only inflamed Hepburn further, of course, but she had nothing to worry about. The responses made it clear that Kate’s comeback was complete: thanks to her triumph onstage in The Philadelphia Story, she was now again such a powerful presence and potentially valuable collaborator that no one in the New York theater world wanted to risk offending her. One of the fifteen copies went to Lawrence Langner, whose Theater Guild was producing The Philadelphia Story. Langner told Dick flat-out to take Sea-Air and bury it: no significant producer would go near a play that sought to critique Katharine Hepburn, and Dick would only look like a jerk if he kept trying to make it happen. Dick had little choice but to take this advice.

  So he gave up. If Katharine felt any guilt over handicapping her brother’s career, she didn’t exactly articulate it. “[T]hat play about Howard and me was cheap exploitation and would not have made his career,” she insisted years later. “It would have been a stunt. If Dick really wanted the career thing badly enough, he should have written another play just as good, and another one after that.” Far removed from the late 1930s, when she had had to fight to be allowed to make good work, Hepburn had little empathy for her brother’s bruised ego and diminished ambition. She did, however, keep Dick (whom Hepburn’s friend Irene Selznick dismissed as “that insane brother”) on her payroll for the rest of his life. Brother and sister even lived together in their eccentric old age
at the rebuilt Fenwick, puttering around the big family home, sometimes going days without speaking. The Philadelphia Story gave way to a much cleaner, more fastidious version of Grey Gardens.

  Chapter 11

  A Love Nest in Malibu, a Prison on a Hill

  After the flight around the world, Hughes was feted with a parade in New York, and he got a hero’s welcome in his hometown of Houston. Then it was back to Hollywood. Among his first stops was a nothing diner on Wilshire, where he and Pat De Cicco sat down for a steak dinner. “Well, did you have a good trip?” De Cicco asked. “Yea,” Hughes said. “It turned out alright.” A few nights later, Hughes was an honored guest at a benefit dinner for the animal rescue organization, the Tailwaggers Society. The host of the event was the president of Tailwaggers, actress Bette Davis.

  Though she was essentially the same age as Hepburn, and had in fact arrived in Hollywood earlier, Davis’s stardom was slower to come. So, in a year when stars like Hepburn and Garbo were labeled “box office poison,” Davis was well positioned as a relatively fresh face, and by the end of the decade she had replaced another actress from Brandt’s “poison” list, Kay Francis, as the top female star at Warner Bros.

  Francis had been one of the most glamorous women in the industry, but Davis’s persona as a star was based on something else: acting. Where other female performers used the consistency of their image, their beauty and fashionability, as selling points, Davis thrived in roles that required her to transform and often bury her inherent aesthetic appeal. In mid-1938, Davis had vaulted to a new level of stardom with Jezebel, a movie about a southern belle whose brazenness is embodied by the red dress she insists on wearing to her antebellum community’s social event of the year. On set, Davis had begun an affair with the film’s director, William Wyler, and she credited her performance as a woman in love with Henry Fonda to the fact that her beloved “Willie” was standing behind the camera. But Davis also had a husband, Ham Nelson, who had been her high school sweetheart. When she realized she was pregnant, probably with Wyler’s baby, Davis had an abortion. When the Jezebel shoot was over, Davis and Wyler went their separate ways, and, holding on to her marriage vows, she attempted to move on.

  The night of the Tailwaggers ball, Bette took a cue from her Jezebel character and dressed to impress, in a pale pink gown with a brocade bow sewn into the chest, below a very low sweetheart neckline. This dress couldn’t have been better designed to attract the attention of Howard Hughes, whose interest and expertise in costuming for cleavage remained consistent throughout his Hollywood career. He took notice of Bette and approached her. “He seemed reserved, even shy,” Davis later said. “He spoke softly, and I had to lean close to hear him. When he introduced himself, he looked into my eyes, not down my dress. That really impressed me, though if I didn’t want men looking, why didn’t I wear a higher-necked dress?”

  Before the night was through, Hughes asked Davis if he could see her again. “I was flattered,” Davis recalled. “I was married. I was bored. I accepted.”

  This event was heavily photographed, and one of the images, showing the pair standing next to one another, with Howard’s hand on a table apparently inching toward Bette’s hand, was published internationally. Davis kept clippings of the photos of her and Hughes at this event in a scrapbook, which she would at some point label “DIVORCE.”

  Davis entered into a relationship with Hughes believing that her marriage was all but over, though neither she nor her husband had made moves toward a separation. Bette and Howard attempted to be discreet, renting a cottage in Malibu for their dinner dates. Eventually Ham found out about their secret hideaway, and by early October the papers were reporting that Davis was on “vacation” from her marriage. These were Davis’s actual words, which she wired to journalists directly. On October 3, Walter Winchell breezily led his column with the news that Davis “finally admitted the separation from her groom, [and] will probably make it permanent—to wed Howard Hughes, who Certainly Gets Around. . . .” Bette kept this clipping in her DIVORCE scrapbook, too, although when asked directly about Hughes by Louella Parsons, she demurred. In an article sympathetic to Bette, Parsons noted that the actress “laughed heartily over the fable pulled out of thin air that she would marry a millionaire. ‘I don’t know any millionaires,’ she said, ‘but if I happen to meet one who asks me to share his millions I’ll tell you first.’”

  What Louella didn’t print was that Ham had asked to be paid to go away, and Bette was annoyed that Howard had not offered financial help. She would have to borrow money from Warner Bros. in order to get out of her marriage, and no marriage to Hughes would follow.

  In late November, Ham filed for divorce, presenting a narrative that Bette was so focused on her career that she had become frigid. “I think that Bette is a grand actress—the best on the screen,” Ham told reporters at the courthouse, “but she has become the best to the detriment of her home life.” Nelson’s filing complained that Davis “had become so engrossed in her profession that she had neglected and failed to perform her duties as a wife,” and that she “would become enraged and indulged in a blatant array of epithets and derision when asked to exhibit some evidence of conjugal friendliness and affection.”

  Ham’s statements on the marriage would have been terribly unflattering to some actresses, but for Bette Davis, they were both on-brand and an apparently negotiated act of protection. It was popular perception that working women ceased to be “real” women, meaning that they were apt to neglect their husbands, lose all desire for men, and rebel as if compulsively from their “duties as a wife.” So to say that Bette Davis, an extremely successful career woman, had done these things was to say nothing that her critics had not thought before. And of course, the truth was that Davis may have neglected her husband, but she was not frigid. In fact, as she later put it, “I liked sex in a way that was considered unbecoming for a woman in my time.” Indeed, she was so wantonly sexual that she had defied her marriage by uncorking her passion in a cottage in Malibu with America’s most famous flying millionaire. To blame the divorce on Bette’s career protected her by obscuring her infidelity and sexual appetite and left the door open for Hollywood columnists to empathize with the tragedy of her failure to balance stardom and marriage. Other actresses may be able to “have it all,” but Bette Davis, this incident proved, was not like her peers. She was an artist before she was a woman, the consummate actress of her generation, and she sacrificed the joys and responsibilities of womanhood to her calling.

  Davis’s career not only survived the scandal of her divorce, but thrived—she took home her second Best Actress Oscar in February 1939, for Jezebel. The affair with Hughes, however, didn’t survive the fallout of her marriage. Years later, Davis looked back on Hughes with a mixture of pride and cattiness. “You know, I was the only one who ever brought Howard Hughes to a sexual climax, or so he said at that time,” Davis bragged. “It’s true. That is to say, it’s true that he said it. Or, let’s say, I believed it when he told me that. I was wildly naive at the time. It may have been his regular seduction gambit. Anyway, it worked with me, and it was cheaper than buying gifts. But Howard Huge, he was not.”

  ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1938 going into 1939, Olivia de Havilland phoned Jimmy Stewart to cancel their date for the evening—she was sick in bed with bronchitis. At 10:30 P.M., Howard Hughes—likely having forgotten about the holiday until the last minute and going through his phone book dialing numbers until he found a potential date who was still at home—called Olivia and told her that he was on his way over to her place, and he was going to take her to the house of Jack Warner, head of her studio, Warner Bros., for a party. Hughes wouldn’t take no for an answer, so de Havilland got out of bed and put on a dress—a dress cut so low that, as she put it, “it practically asked for pneumonia.”

  When they arrived at Warner’s house, Howard and Olivia immediately ran into Jimmy Stewart, and then Errol Flynn, de Havilland’s frequent costar and sometime lover. “We
sat down at the bar and Errol Flynn started serving me drinks,” she recalled. “I was 22, with three of the most attractive men in the world around me. I don’t know how my reputation survived but by dawn my bronchitis was gone and my temperature was back to normal.”

  De Havilland kept answering Hughes’s calls, until one night she confronted him over the status of their relationship and he made no attempt to let her down easy. “There is love between us and we have never discussed marriage,” she stated. Hughes responded, “I have no intention of marrying until I am 50. There are too many things to do.”

  And yet, in his mid to late thirties, he asked more than one woman to marry him.

  Seven years after their first date, Hughes was once again pursuing Ginger Rogers. He had first proposed to Rogers in the summer of 1936, after he had declared interest in Hepburn but before their relationship began in earnest. (Hepburn would later acknowledge that she had assumed Hughes was not completely faithful to her: “I didn’t expect him to be chaste during our separations,” she said, adding, “I was only slightly curious about his escapades.”) Rogers had separated from her second husband, Lew Ayres, but had not filed for divorce. Howard said that was just paperwork, that his lawyer could take care of that for her, and then she’d be free to marry Hughes. “What do you say to that?” With wounds still fresh from her last broken marriage, Rogers said she wasn’t ready. According to Rogers, Hughes and she continued to date sporadically, but she wasn’t exactly waiting by the phone. For the next three-plus years, Hughes would be involved with Hepburn and others, and Rogers had a full dance card as well.