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

by Karina Longworth

  But then the censors watched a cut, on March 28, 1941, and noted nineteen unacceptable lines and images, including more than half a dozen “breast shots.” In a letter to Hughes, while describing the screening as a “pleasure” to witness, Breen declared that “the picture is definitely and specifically in violation of our Production Code and because of this cannot be approved.” The criminality of Billy was no longer an issue. Now the problem was, as Breen explained, “two fold: (a) The inescapable suggestion of an illicit relationship” between Rio and two men, and “(b) The countless shots of Rio, in which her breasts are not fully covered.” Hughes was informed that all such shots would need to be deleted. “In my more than ten years of critical examination of motion pictures, I have never seen anything quite so unacceptable as the shots of the breasts of the character of Rio,” Breen carped in an interoffice memo. Russell’s breasts, “which are quite large and prominent, are shockingly emphasized,” Breen added, acknowledging the challenge facing Hughes: “Many of these breast shots cannot be eliminated without destroying completely the continuity of the story.”

  That had been exactly Hughes’s idea, and he wasn’t the only one pushing this particular envelope. Still in a tizzy from the Outlaw screening, the next day Breen wrote to original Code crafter Will Hays about a “marked tendency on the part of the studios to more and more undrape women’s breasts,” and cited unnamed pictures submitted by Columbia and Universal as having unacceptable “sweater shots” and such.

  But Hughes was considered to be a special case. After negotiations between Breen and Hughes’s lawyer McCarthy failed to reach a compromise—even after the Breen office sent Hughes a detailed memo telling him exactly which breast shots needed to be cut, in each reel—Hughes filed an appeal, the first the censors had received in years.

  Russell Birdwell’s version of what happened next was cheerfully hyperbolic. The censors “ordered 102 cuts in the picture,” Birdwell recalled. “Howard said, ‘I’m not going to make any cuts. We’ll release it ourselves.’ I represented him at a meeting of the Producers Association in New York. It was Hughes’ suggestion that we might prove that less of Jane, in proportion to her size, was revealed than any of the present day stars.”

  Birdwell remembered a lesson he had learned working with Selznick: “Humor is the greatest weapon. Next is ridicule if you have to use it.” He ginned up a plan to prove that The Outlaw wasn’t revealing substantially more of Jane Russell than other movies revealed of their stars, while also poking fun of the very idea of the censors measuring the amount of breast meat seen on-screen.

  Birdwell had half a dozen photo enlargements produced of stills of films made by other producers, each featuring evidence of pronounced cleavage-bearing by top-billed stars. He hired a mathematician from Columbia University to show up at the appeal presentation, and the professor went from one blowup to another with a protractor, measuring exposed flesh. “It was the greatest display of mammary glands in the history of the universe,” Birdwell proclaimed. “And these tired old men saw it.” The “tired old men” of the PCA appeals board were forced to acknowledge “that in relationship to her size, less of Jane was exposed than any other star in the business.”

  After some negotiation on the part of Birdwell and Hughes lawyer Neil McCarthy, the number of changes requested was brought down to six, involving about forty feet of film. On May 23, 1941, Joseph Breen’s Production Code office stamped The Outlaw with their seal of approval, certificate number 7440.

  And yet still Hughes did not release the movie.

  IN THE MIDST OF The Outlaw’s production, Howard wrote a rare letter to his aunt Annette. Katharine Hepburn was leading a traveling production of The Philadelphia Story and she would soon be visiting Houston. “She is an exceptionally good friend of mine, and one of the nicest people in the world—next to you, of course,” Howard wrote. “Will you please invite her out to the house one afternoon? Please don’t invite anyone else, as she is she and it gets her upset to meet strangers.” Still highly protective of his ex, he added: “Please see that she gets back to the hotel by four-thirty for her nap before the show. This is most important, as she won’t take care of herself and is headed for complete exhaustion and a break-down.”

  Annette did invite Hepburn to her house, and remembered the visit fondly years later. “She was the first woman I ever saw in trousers,” Annette recalled. “She came out in the most beautiful yellow trousers that ever was.”

  Hepburn would not make it back to Hollywood for the Academy Awards ceremony on February 27, 1941. Not that she would have attended if she had. Over the course of her career, Hepburn won four Oscars but never showed up at an Academy Awards ceremony, admitting later in life that she was “unwilling to go and lose.” And she did lose in 1941—to Ginger Rogers, whose performance in Kitty Foyle had not only revealed previously unrealized depths to her talent, but had also rescued RKO from a long slump. The studio rewarded Rogers by shifting her call time for the morning after the ceremony by a full two hours, so she could sleep in.

  In 1941, Rogers would turn thirty, and Hepburn thirty-four. With her Oscar in hand, Rogers would join Hepburn on the list of rarefied female stars, and though both had major hits in their future, both were also past their ingenue prime. A new generation of girls was coming up behind them. And Howard Hughes would move from pursuing top female stars to pursuing young (sometimes very young) women whose careers had not yet gotten very far off the ground. More than ever before, he would become obsessed with controlling these women, seeking to tie them up via marriage proposals or long-term contracts—or both—and taking ownership over their bodies and how they were presented to the public—or weren’t.

  Part IV

  Life During Wartime, 1941–1946

  Chapter 13

  The New Generation

  Her mother’s family had owned slaves, and her father’s father had fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War, but that was a long time ago, and nothing remained of those days by the time Ava came along. Married just after the turn of the century, Molly and Jonas Gardner had settled in Grabtown, North Carolina, a rural community where residents wouldn’t have electricity or running water until decades after Ava and her family were forced by their desperate finances to move on. When Jonas lost the land on which he farmed tobacco, they ended up in a neighboring town, Brogden, living in a dormitory for young female teachers, where Ava’s mother cooked and cleaned, and her father sharecropped nearby. On summer break from school, Ava would help her father harvest tobacco plants. Jonas died before Ava graduated from high school, before he could see his daughter labelled “Most Beautiful” in the senior class superlative derby.

  For months after graduation, Ava looked for a job, but the economy in small-town North Carolina at the tail end of the Depression was not exactly thriving. In 1940, the seventeen-year-old got a letter from her glamorous older sister Beatrice, whom Ava always called “Bappie.” Bappie was living in New York City with her second husband, a commercial photographer named Larry Tarr, and she invited Ava to come stay with her and look for work in the big city.

  After she arrived, Tarr took some portraits of the beautiful teenager for fun and hung them in the window of his photography studio. One of these photos caught the eye of Barney Duhan, who worked in the legal department of Loew’s, the New York–based parent company of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in Hollywood. Duhan inquired at Tarr’s studio about the girl whose picture was hanging in his window. Ava, who hadn’t found a job in New York, had long since gone home to enroll in secretarial school. Tarr told Duhan the girl had returned to North Carolina, but figuring opportunity rarely knocks twice, Larry made some prints of Ava’s picture and sent them to Loew’s corporate headquarters. In July 1941, Bappie called Ava and told her that MGM wanted to meet her. Ava didn’t know what or where MGM was. Bappie explained, “Where Clark Gable works, baby!”

  Ava scrounged together bus fare and came back to New York to see Marvin Schenck, one member of t
he family that ran Loew’s. Based on that meeting, Schenck decided Ava was worth a screen test, although her “tarheel” accent would have to be fixed. He sent the test on to Hollywood without a sound track. By the end of the summer of 1941, Ava had been offered a seven-year contract by MGM.

  This was the kind of thing girls like Ava—girls from the middle of nowhere, with no connection to show business—had been encouraged to dream about. It almost never actually happened. It rarely happened to girls as unprepared for what was in store for them, and it maybe had never happened to a girl who would become so quickly jaded with what Hollywood had to offer.

  Ava Gardner would eventually catch Howard Hughes’s eye, and their involvement would last for nearly two decades. But in mid-1941, while he was still struggling with how to legally reveal as much of twenty-year-old Jane Russell’s body on-screen as possible, another teenage girl came into his life, and this one gave Hughes a chance to try out the captive scenario that Ginger Rogers believed she had escaped. Over the next few years, while one brunette was acting as the literal poster girl for Hughes the maverick picture producer, his personal life was preoccupied by a number of other dark-haired, very young women, so similar in vital statistics to one another (and to Jane Russell) that they all could have been pressed out of the same mold. In collecting these near-identical women, Hughes paid little mind to the fact that each of his cookie-cutter brunettes was her own person, with her own desires, liable to make her own demands. By signing a girl to a movie contract, he could exert a modicum of control, but a modicum was not enough. As ever, Howard Hughes wanted more. He would begin to test the limits of just how much power he could wield over another person, and what kinds of lies he’d have to tell in order to do it.

  FAITH DOMERGUE WAS SIGNED to Warner Bros. in March 1941 under the name “Faith Dorn,” because, as she put it, “Jack Warner was too stupid to pronounce Faith Domergue.” (Faith pronounced it Doh-MAYR-g.)

  Born in New Orleans in 1924,* Faith had come to California as a young child, when the Depression sent her parents looking for better fortune in the West. In early 1941, Faith was lounging with her parents at the Del Mar Beach Club, north of San Diego, when a man she didn’t know approached her and said, “You are such a beautiful, beautiful young girl. You really should be in pictures.” As Faith well knew, even at that age, “that line was used on everybody,” but this guy meant it. The man took Faith to Zeppo Marx Inc., the talent agency that a few years earlier had been the gateway to stardom for another teenage bombshell, Lana Turner. From there agent Henry Willson brought her to Warner Bros.

  Faith was, by her own description, “pretty, undisciplined, a little wild,” and totally without training, and Warners wasn’t going to cast her in anything until her raw beauty had been polished into something they could use. The studio enrolled Faith in their on-the-lot school, which combined a kind of screen actor boot camp with enough tutelage to meet state education requirements into an eight-hour day. “We studied acting and anything else that might help us in a career,” Faith remembered. In her case, that included speech classes to help her overcome a slight lisp.

  In her drama classes at Warners, Faith discovered what she really wanted to be. “There I met the older girls,” she recalled, “young ladies who were dating top name stars, pretty actresses who were constantly in the columns and movie magazines as the hopefuls of the movie industry; intimates of a world I was just beginning to peek into.”

  Faith got a further peek into that world on Memorial Day, when she was invited to a boat party by another Warner Bros. contract girl, Susan Carnahan. Carnahan was one of those older girls at the studio that Faith looked up to. At age twenty, she had been on the payroll at Warners for about two years, and she had racked up half a dozen uncredited walk-ons over that time before Warners changed her last name to Peters. Soon they’d cast her as the second female in The Big Shot, Humphrey Bogart’s last gangster picture. Not long after that, she’d marry director Richard Quine. For now, though, she was just far enough ahead of Faith that the younger girl was flattered by the invitation. She thought the day sounded “glamorous.”

  When Faith boarded the yacht and was introduced to her host, she observed that this man in a captain’s hat “needed a haircut, wore tennis sneakers, and was holding some kind of rum drink in his hand that he never put to his lips.” She didn’t recognize that it was Howard Hughes, if she even knew who Howard Hughes was, but she did take note of his “beautiful dark, but kind of twinkling eyes, [which] truly seemed to light up when they rested on me.”

  Faith was still only sixteen, although her seventeenth birthday was less than a month away. “I looked more sophisticated,” she claimed twenty years later. “And I was very, very pretty.”

  The party consisted of Faith, Susan, Howard, a few other contract girls, Warner Bros. publicist Johnny Meyer, and Pat De Cicco. De Cicco had survived the scandal of his ex-wife Thelma Todd’s mysterious death and had been working for Hughes for five years. De Cicco claimed he had served as an advisor to Hughes in the movie business during the years when Hughes’s movie business was basically dormant. (The only movie-related action De Cicco directly initiated for Hughes didn’t work out: in 1938, when Hughes was on his round-the-world flight, De Cicco optioned Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not for $10,000. His boss was not pleased—he thought it was too expensive—and unloaded the property on Howard Hawks.)

  De Cicco was a useful man for a guy like Hughes to have on the payroll. Whether or not the rumors that he was connected to Lucky Luciano were true, as the first-generation son of immigrants from Calabria who had brought broccoli seeds from the homeland and made a killing cultivating the crop on Long Island, Pat was comfortable in moneyed situations, but he wasn’t afraid to throw around his muscle. In 1937, De Cicco, his cousin Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, and actor Wallace Beery had gotten into a nightclub fistfight with a drunk comedian named Ted Healy, who died the next day. Healy’s alcoholism surely contributed to his death, but many in Hollywood believed that De Cicco’s fists had had something to do with it, too.

  There’s no documentation that suggests Hughes employed Pat for his powers of intimidation, but De Cicco’s attractive, mysterious, and occasionally scary package made him endlessly alluring to women, particularly very young women, the kinds of girls that Hughes wanted to meet. This was enough for De Cicco to earn the title of “talent scout” in the Hughes organization.

  After they all had lunch on the boat, Howard took Faith by the hand and asked if she’d like to go for a private sail with him on a smaller vessel. It was not really a question—Hughes didn’t wait for an answer, and it was taken as a given that the invitation would not be declined. “Frankly I remember not being too excited about this,” Faith recalled. She preferred not to leave the party, which would have meant leaving De Cicco, who in her eyes was “handsome, Latin-looking . . . [and] rather my idea of what a Hollywood bachelor should be.” But she didn’t want to be rude to her host, so she went with Hughes, and, “true to my fears [Hughes] did not speak more than five words to me for the hour that it took us to complete the excursion.”

  When they returned to the yacht, Faith tried to attract De Cicco’s attention, but to her chagrin, he “hardly seemed to realize I was there.” What Faith eventually came to realize is that now that Hughes had shown an interest in her, no friend or colleague of his would make eyes at her again. “‘The Boss’ had spoken without saying a word,” she wrote later, “and the silent message was simply that he liked this little girl and that was enough, more than enough for everybody.”

  Faith wasn’t interested in Hughes, whose mostly silent fascination with her had done nothing to impress, but the next weekend she accepted his invitation on another cruise, this one an overnight excursion to Catalina. “The trip was not a success,” she reported later. Hughes offered nothing of himself and made no effort to engage Faith in conversation. While his behavior was seemingly the opposite of aggressive, his persistent presence struck Faith as c
onfusing and creepy. “Howard never forced himself, he was just silently always there next to me whenever I was around him.” She spent the whole weekend longing to go home.

  Within days, Hughes’s wooing of Faith became fodder for gossip columns (almost certainly because Johnny Meyer, then a publicist for Warner Bros. but soon-to-be an employee of Hughes, called the columnists with tips), but in Domergue’s recollection, Hughes strategically backed off for most of that summer. Perhaps sensing he was not getting anywhere with Faith himself, he sent two proxies to keep her innocently busy. One was Alex D’Arcy, the rare male actor under personal contract to Hughes, and the other was De Cicco. “It was obvious to everyone in Hollywood but me that they were carrying out ‘The Boss’s’ wishes, keeping me busy and away from the perils of other Hollywood bachelors until I woke up to just what had happened in my life, just who this was who was so interested in me. But I did not wake up.”

  That summer, first De Cicco, and then Hughes, caught the eye of another beautiful brunette teenager, heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Gloria first spotted Pat at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, where he, agent Charlie Feldman, Fox exec Joe Schenck, and a few others who were dubbed “the Wolf Pack” met every summer afternoon to play cards. Everyone said Pat worked for Hughes, but no one knew exactly what he did. Gloria didn’t care—she thought he looked like a star. “True, he wasn’t much in the brain department,” Gloria admitted, “but he did have a flair for gin rummy, and he was funny in his way.” So while Gloria thought the scene at the pool was a bore, still she “lolled around in the sun, waiting for Pat to pay me some attention.”