After the series was published, Birdwell—who had been a press agent for Jack Pickford, had directed three films in the early sound era, and was now working full-time as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner—got a message at his newspaper desk that David O. Selznick wanted to see him. Selznick had left RKO, first for MGM and then to start his own studio, Selznick International Pictures. Curious more than ambitious, Birdwell drove to Selznick’s office in Culver City. Selznick promptly offered Birdwell ten times what he was making as a reporter to serve as his director of advertising and publicity.
Birdwell joined SIP in December 1935, and in time he’d become one of the larger-than-life Selznick’s most trusted employees. Birdwell’s office became his boss’s sanctuary, with the publicist allowing the producer to use it as a love nest (Birdwell sometimes even arranged the arrival of professional dates for Selznick to “love”). Birdwell’s biggest accomplishment was his campaign to promote the search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. The hunt lasted for three years, a subject of mounting public anticipation all the while, and though most of the open-call audition of unknowns was pure publicity stunt, Selznick’s inability to decide on an actress up until the moment he met Vivien Leigh was legitimate. The casting of Leigh, who was relatively unknown to American moviegoers, increased the must-see factor of the movie: people wanted to buy tickets and judge for themselves this unlikely Brit who had swooped in and taken the role away from dozens of good ol’ American movie stars.
Birdwell left SIP in late 1938, before Gone with the Wind premiered, to start his own publicity firm (Selznick remained a client). A year later, Russell Birdwell and Associates announced it was launching a unit called New Faces Inc., designed to give the proper buildup to unknowns with the potential to become stars. It was around this time that Birdwell first met Hughes.
In December 1939, at the after party for Wind’s Los Angeles premiere, Birdwell was approached by “a skinny chap” in ill-fitting formalwear, including “little tails that he must have had in high school.” This odd figure told Birdwell that he planned to contact him in two months. Birdwell said fine and went back to talking to people he believed to be important, clients like Janet Gaynor and Norma Shearer. When the skinny chap went away, Shearer said, “Do you know who that is? That’s Howard Hughes!”
That Birdwell didn’t recognize Hughes—who had been the most famous man in the world just a year earlier—gave credence to Hughes’s paranoia that everyone in movies had forgotten him. Two months later, he did contact Birdwell—or, he had an aide show up at the publicist’s office with a note, requesting a meeting the following day at the convenient time of 3 A.M.
“I want a high-class build-up, like you gave Gone with the Wind,” Hughes told Birdwell. “I’m sure you do,” came the response. But even when The Outlaw was barely more than a twinkle in Hughes’s eye, Birdwell could tell it wasn’t “that kind of picture.” So, Birdwell told him he couldn’t do what he did for Gone with the Wind, “but maybe I can put on an original Outlaw campaign.”
Hughes said, “That’s a good answer.”
NOAH DIETRICH REMEMBERED ONE day in 1940 when Hughes returned to the office from a visit to the dentist, his eyes swirling with dollar signs, thanks to a woman he had seen there answering phones. “Noah,” Hughes said, “I’ve seen a pair today the like of which I’ve never seen in my life. Brother, am I going to exploit them. That’s what the morons who go to the theaters want to see.’”
This account of the discovery of Jane Russell is colorful, but probably apocryphal. By Jane’s own recollection, she was not working in a dentist’s office when she was discovered. She had put in a couple of weeks as a receptionist at a podiatrist’s office, but that job was long over by the time she got the call. According to her, “Howard hired me for The Outlaw without ever seeing me in person or meeting me or talking to me.”
Russell grew up on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, the oldest of five kids. Her mother, a former wannabe actress turned elocution teacher, had become a born-again Christian when Jane was six, and had instilled in Jane an intermittent belief in faith healing and a love for churches where they spoke in tongues. As the actress would later describe it, the narrative of her life was defined by her deviations away from the path of God, and her returns to the fold.
As a kid, she had been so skinny and flat-chested that boys made fun of her. By the time she was seventeen, Jane’s body had changed—she now had ample curves—but her mindset had not. Russell’s mother encouraged her to go to acting school, if only because it might cure Jane of being a natural tomboy, and teach her how to more comfortably carry her new body.
Right out of high school, in 1939, Jane began studying with Max Reinhardt at his School of the Theatre on Sunset Boulevard. She didn’t exactly take it seriously, frequently ditching classes to go bowling with a girlfriend. It was only after she quit school that Jane realized she had been bitten by the acting bug after all, so she enrolled in another drama school, this one taught by a Stanislavsky disciple named Maria Ouspenskaya, whom Russell remembered as a little Russian woman who drank straight vodka out of a water glass throughout the day. Jane would all but give up on acting after a screen test at Fox, where she was told she wasn’t photogenic, and a meeting at Paramount, where, at five-foot-eight, she was told she was too tall.
By then Russell was living with her mom, and basically just biding time until her boyfriend, Robert Waterfield, a football star at the University of California, Los Angeles, got it together to get to the altar. And then she got the call, demanding her presence at 7000 Romaine Street, the former Multicolor film plant that Hughes had turned into his Hollywood headquarters. An agent named Levis Green had seen Jane’s photo at photographer Tom Kelley’s studio and brought a copy to Freddy Schlusser, who was heading a talent search on behalf of Hughes. Schlusser took one look at the brunette with the listed measurements of 38-22-36 and said, “She looks the type.”
The photo that got Jane Russell in for a test with Hughes, the photo that would make her career, is no straightforward pinup. Kelley had brought the nineteen-year-old brunette in to do some “sports modeling,” which usually meant tame bathing suit pinups, but this shot was framed to stop right under her double strands of pearls. Her heavily made-up eyes are downcast, barely open. Her top teeth are bared, turning a half pout into almost a sneer. This was no skinny, happy, compliant starlet—like Jean Harlow in the press book for Hell’s Angels, this looked like a picture of a girl who didn’t want to please you. If anything, she was daring you to try to please her. Big breasts, brunette, high drama: this would, going forward, become Howard Hughes’s physical ideal. He had shown interest in a variety of physical “types” before (Katharine Hepburn and Billie Dove had no resemblance to one another, other than that they were both extremely famous when Hughes pursued them), but going forward, with exceptions so few they could be counted on a single hand, his preference would be for women so visually similar to one another that a rubber stamp would have offered more variation.
It would be months before Russell and Hughes were actually introduced. First, Russell was summoned to Romaine Street, where she met Howard Hawks, who was then slated to direct The Outlaw. Hawks explained to Jane that the character she was up for was Rio, a half-Irish, half-Mexican girl who tries to get revenge on Billy the Kid, who killed her brother, by attacking him with a pitchfork. In retaliation, Billy the Kid rapes her. It was this scene—the dialogue that, on-screen, culminates with Rio’s rape—that had been chosen for the screen test. Jane was to test alongside four other actresses, all of them voluptuous brunettes.
Jane practiced the scene with a Mexican American girlfriend, mimicking the way her friend said the lines. At the audition, when she was finished, someone told Hawks that the Russell girl “spoke pretty good English for a Mexican.” She got the part. Russell was put under personal contract to Hughes. She would be paid fifty dollars a week.
HOWARD HAWKS HAD SIGNED a contract with
Hughes, his Scarface producer, in 1940, in part because the director was looking for some breathing room from the major studios, and in part because Hawks knew Hughes owned the rights to Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, a novel that Hawks was dying to direct. (He would; Hughes would not be involved.) As part of their deal, Hughes also agreed to finance a film based on a romantic legend that Hawks had heard about Billy the Kid, which imagined that his assassination at the hands of Pat Garrett had been a setup. As Hawks explained it, “When Billy fell in love, Pat Garrett blew the face off another man, said it was Billy the Kid, and Billy and the girl went off to Mexico and lived happily ever after.”
Once Russell had been cast in the pivotal role of the girl, Hawks took the newcomer under his wing, giving her important guidance as to how make an impression on-screen. “He wanted me to keep my voice low, and he said that girls should walk from the hips, not from the knees,” Russell recalled. “He said I should take long strides.” No doubt Hawks was trying to mold Russell into his own feminine ideal, a feat that he’d fully accomplish a few years later with Lauren Bacall, who made her debut in his To Have and Have Not. What stuck to Russell was a version of the laconic body language that Bacall would come to embody, but with Russell’s very different body type, the effect was unique. Russell was shaped like a figure eight, and Bacall was lean and slinky, like the number two. Bacall was cool; Russell, who had been accused of lacking energy by her spirited acting teacher Ouspenskaya, seemed woozy, even lazy. As Russell herself put it, on-screen, “I seemed to be moving in slow motion.”
This turned out to be the closest thing Hawks would give Russell by way of direction, although one piece of crucial career advice was to follow. Hawks spent the first days of the production filming scenes with the male leads, while Russell posed for publicity photographs. The photographers hired by Birdwell knew exactly what Hughes had seen in Russell, and they did their best to exploit it. “I couldn’t have been greener,” Russell later admitted. “Whenever they asked me to bend over and pick up an apple or something, I went along with the gag.”
One night, Russell found herself asked to pose while bouncing up and down on a bed. In a photograph taken by Gene Lester, Russell, who is wearing a fairly demure nightgown, is captured mid-jump, and in the midst of a laugh or squeal. She looks ecstatic, and so girlishly gleeful that you barely notice her size 38D breasts, perfectly round and floating on gravity’s momentum.
But photographs can be deceptive, and as Russell would tell the story later, this was the night when she realized that she was being pushed too far. She ran to Hawks in tears and asked him to do something. He refused, telling her that this was part of the business, that there would always be men who would try to get her to do things she didn’t want to do. She couldn’t rely on other men—the ones she deemed to be nonthreatening saviors—to protect her. She needed to learn how to set limits, and enforce them. “I didn’t get any sympathy from him,” Russell noted. “And he was right.”
Hawks and crew were shooting on location in the middle of the Arizona desert, in a tent city that was so remote that food had to be brought in on trucks. On the weekends, buses would pick everyone up and take them eighty miles south to Flagstaff to blow off steam. “Everybody got loaded,” Russell remembered, “and we sang all the way back.”
Hawks had intentionally chosen a location far from Hughes’s purview. Or so he thought; banning Hughes from the set had allowed Hawks to work in peace on Scarface, but this time, Hughes had dailies shipped back to him in Los Angeles, and after two weeks, the producer had seen enough—or, rather, he hadn’t seen what he was looking for. Hughes waited for an off day to tell Hawks he was relieved of his command.
Columnists whispered that a disagreement over the film’s budget had motivated Hawks’s departure, but this was, as Hughes’s lawyer Neil McCarthy wrote to Noah Dietrich, “of course false. The reason Hawks was displaced was because he was not doing the picture as instructed.”
What was he not doing? According to Hawks, he and Hughes “had different ideas about revealing women’s bosoms, and things like that.” This was probably a simplification—and definitely an easy joke—but it’s true that Hughes’s primary points of interest in the production seemed to be Russell’s two breasts. It was an impersonal obsession. He was not trying to possess the breasts, or the woman attached to them, the way he tended to try to with other women in his life. Instead, he treated Russell’s assets as, well, assets: investments that represented the primary area of value of the picture. Birdwell had been told in no uncertain terms that it was his job to “get some mileage out of her tits.” When two weeks had gone by and Hawks hadn’t even shot with Russell yet, Hughes must have been impatient to see what he perceived to be the true stars of The Outlaw on-screen.
The whole production was moved back to Los Angeles at a moment’s notice, and there, cast and crew waited for further instructions. Jane went back to her life, to her family’s ranch in the Valley, to her God-fearing mom and football star boyfriend. Life was exactly the same as it always had been, except now there were pictures of her in magazines, supposedly promoting a movie that had been stalled seemingly indefinitely.
Eventually production began again, this time shooting on soundstages on the Goldwyn lot in the evenings. In Los Angeles, Hughes could manage his aviation business during the day, and direct the movie himself at night.
Jane became practiced in creating the illusion that she was giving Hughes what he wanted, while retaining her own agency. Hughes wanted Jane’s Rio to appear to be braless, but Jane and her weighty breasts needed some kind of undergarment for support. Hughes took to his drafting board and sketched out a new bra, bringing to bear all of his aviation-earned knowledge of lift and structural engineering. A prototype was produced, and Jane was instructed to put it on under her costume. What Hughes was after was the look of the modern, seamless, strapless bra, but what he actually created was, according to Jane, “uncomfortable and ridiculous.” She put her own bra back on, covered the seams with Kleenex, and slipped the straps down off her shoulders. She went back on set, and Hughes nodded his approval. He assumed she was wearing his creation, and Jane let him labor under that illusion. It was a small, hidden victory for Jane in a film that otherwise would exploit her body shamelessly.
Hughes’s directions were always seemingly minor—Don’t raise your left eyebrow when you say this line. Don’t move your thumb. Don’t lean too far to the right. He tried to tinker with the performances, as though actors were airplanes (or undergarments) that needed mechanical adjustments in order to sustain flight. He couldn’t articulate what he wanted beyond gestures, but he could push the actors to do one hundred takes until he got the indefinable something that he was looking for—or tired himself out in the process. Once Hughes made cinematographer Gregg Toland (a master of his form who had shot Citizen Kane and won an Oscar in 1939 for Wuthering Heights) take eighty-eight different shots of Jane’s face, from slightly different angles. Hughes had sixty of the takes printed, and the director spent days looking at them over and over again, unable to decide which he liked best. When in doubt, Hughes told Toland to point the camera down Jane’s shirt.
Predictably, this resulted in footage of a kind that no one had ever tried to get past the censors. Having completed a cut of The Outlaw a few months into 1941, Hughes spent years wrangling with the Production Code enforcers (who were supposed to vet scripts, finished films, and advertising before they were ever released into the wild), as well as with local censorship boards. First the issue was how to shape The Outlaw to preserve its raison d’être in a form that conformed to the Code enough to allow for release; later, the question became how to advertise the movie. Every step of the battle between Hughes and the censors was documented in the media, and there is some indication that Hughes enjoyed the spotlight so much that he made sure the censorship saga dragged on for as long as possible. After all, a three-year buildup hadn’t hurt Gone with the Wind, which was then and today remains, when fig
ures are adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing film of all time.
On reading the shooting script in November 1940, the Breen office wrote to Hughes and told him they took issue with the fact that Billy was unpunished for his crimes, as well as with “two scenes suggestive of illicit sex between Billy and Rio.” Several pages of suggestions followed. Toward the end of the year, screenwriter Jules Furthman discussed the rape scene with two of Breen’s officers. The censors made suggestions, and Furthman convinced them the scene would not depict a sex act, only violence. Three months later, Hughes himself called Breen’s office and explained that he was thinking of adding a scene to the movie in which Russell’s Rio would get into bed with Billy the Kid, only to use her body heat to keep him from dying of a chill. Head censor Joseph Breen, according to an internal memo, “agreed that the scene sounded fundamentally acceptable,” and that was that.
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood Page 21
