In 1944, MGM finally gave Ava Gardner a part in one of their homegrown movies. The picture was Three Men in White, and it was a spin-off from the Dr. Kildare series, which had required retooling when the actor who played the doctor, Ginger Rogers’s ex-husband Lew Ayres, filed as a conscientious objector and got himself fired from MGM. Never having had this many lines to speak in front of a camera, Ava called Mickey for advice. For all that had gone wrong between them, he was still the best actor Ava knew, and her career could be made or broken based on this performance.
Once they were alone in a room together, one thing led to another, and Ava and Mickey began sporadically seeing each other again. Ava—grieving her mother, bored and anxious at MGM—was also still seeing Hughes. She figured that what was good for the gander was good for the goose. After all, Hughes “was still seeing plenty of other women,” Gardner acknowledged. “But that didn’t stop him proposing to me all the fucking time.”
Chapter 16
Disappearing Act
Marriage proposals had become part of Hughes’s courtship ritual. He counted on women to relinquish any qualms regarding premarital sex in exchange for a ring. But to Howard Hughes, an engagement ring wasn’t a promise—it was a write-off, the cost of doing business.
Ava managed to cut off Howard’s proposals, for marriage and for sex, until after her divorce was final. Then, she explained, “[m]y curiosity got the better of me.” She wanted to test his reputation as a “cocksman.” She wasn’t sure what was true and what was a rumor, or a Johnny Meyer fabrication. She had heard a lot of things: that Howard was good in bed, that he was bad; that he preferred men; that he could only be satisfied by two women at a time. As Ava explained, “You got all sides of the story in the powder room.”
Ava was pleasantly surprised. Hughes, she’d remember, “taught me that making love didn’t always have to be rushed. ‘Slow down, slow down, kid. We’ll get there!’ he’d say. He was like a fucking horse whisperer.” When Ava complimented Howard on his sexual technique, he responded, “That’s because I don’t drink, kid. Especially when I’m with a lady I intend to please.” Gardner enjoyed her time with Hughes, but she wasn’t in love with him; she wasn’t blinded by his money and she didn’t believe his promises, and she saw no reason to stop seeing her ex-husband. By this point, Ava knew that Hughes was surveilling her. In addition to Charlie Guest, who was still sleeping with Ava’s sister Bappie, Howard had men parked outside Gardner’s house to report back to the Boss when she left and when she came home and who she came home with. Ava knew all of this, so when she resumed sleeping with Mickey, she thought she knew enough to know how to evade Hughes’s spies. She thought wrong.
It all came to a head one night when Ava refused to go with Johnny Meyer to pick Howard up from the airport. Ava refused because she had plans with Rooney, but by the time a furious Howard arrived at her home, she was asleep in bed alone. When Hughes woke her up and demanded to know where she’d been instead of at the airport, Ava told him it wasn’t any of his business. “But if you want to know,” she added, “I went out with Mickey.”
Ava had never seen Howard angry. Now he got really angry. He swung at her, and the next thing she knew she had fallen back into a chair. Then, she recalled, Hughes “jumped at me and started to pound on my face until it was a mess.”
Ava, stuck in the chair, couldn’t fight back. Satisfied that he had made his point, Hughes gave up and started to walk away. Then, Ava recalled, “I looked for some weapon to attack him.” She spotted an ornamental bronze bell on the mantelpiece. Knowing the partially deaf Hughes wouldn’t be able to hear her coming, she followed behind him, and just as she caught up, she shouted his name. He turned, and she struck him down the front of his face, splitting his forehead open and knocking loose two teeth. Livid at what he’d done to her, Ava couldn’t help but continue the beating while Howard was down. She grabbed a chair and started hitting him some more. Finally her maid walked in and put a stop to it.
“I thought I’d killed the poor bastard,” Ava later said. “There was blood on the walls, on the furniture, real blood in the bloody Marys.”
When it was all over, Bappie and Charlie Guest finally came downstairs, saw the condition that Hughes was in, and immediately jumped into action, calling MGM fixers, plastic surgeons, Hughes’s private doctor. Ava’s face was starting to bruise and the maid went to the ice box and pulled out a raw steak to stem the swelling. Otherwise, all the concern was for Hughes, not Ava. It was Ava, everyone made it clear, who had done something wrong. Hughes faced no repercussions for punching Ava’s face in.
All the fixers came and worked their magic, and once Ava’s bruises faded, it was like the fight had never happened. Ava was made to feel like she was lucky to be at a studio like MGM that would help to hide that she did a bad, bad thing. But Ava had no regrets, and she didn’t forget. Though Bappie never stopped telling Ava that she should have married Howard (“If she could have sold me to him,” Ava said of her sister, “she would have”), as far as Ava was concerned, she and Howard Hughes were through.
PRESTON STURGES WAS A brilliant filmmaker who wrote memorable roles for a number of actresses. Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels, Claudette Colbert in The Palm Beach Story—these were some of the feistiest women onscreen of their era. In real life, Sturges was less interested in female autonomy. Eddie Bracken, an actor who was part of the unofficial repertory company from which Sturges cast his films, was once asked how Sturges saw women. He answered with one word: “Slaves.”
In February 1944, Hughes and Sturges made a joint statement that they were collaborating to form a new independent production company called California Pictures, or Cal-Pix. The idea was that Sturges would have creative control and Hughes would foot the bill. “I can’t devote any time whatsoever to the motion picture business until the war is over,” Hughes declared. Sturges was, Hughes said, the “one man in whom I have complete confidence . . . to carry on this business without any attention on my part.”
It was agreed that Sturges would finally give Faith her screen debut, in a film based on the novella Columba, by Prosper Mérimée. But first, Sturges would get to make a passion project, a Hollywood-set comedy with a role for his own mistress, Frances Ramsden, and starring a childhood idol of his, silent comedian Harold Lloyd. Sturges finished his script adaptation of Columba in July 1945, and he believed it was the best thing he had ever written. James Mason, a star in Britain who was looking for a vehicle in which to make his Hollywood debut, was interested in costarring, but Hughes wouldn’t agree to pay the salary he or any other legitimate name commanded. Meanwhile, Sturges’s attention was divided between the Domergue vehicle and his dream project, now called The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. Due to delays over Sturges’s contract, his difficulty getting in touch with Hughes to confirm expenditures like Lloyd’s contract, and the struggle to produce a movie without ties to a conventional studio, Diddlebock did not begin shooting until September 1945, and wouldn’t wrap until January. Then, in the middle of postproduction, Sturges’s wife, Louise, got fed up with the Ramsden affair and very publicly filed for divorce. Sturges put aside all work to deal with the chaos of his personal life, and Faith and her career were asked to hurry up and wait once again.
BY LATE 1944, HOWARD Hughes’s attentions were divided among his war contracts; the management of TWA; The Outlaw, which Hughes couldn’t decide what to do with; and his girlfriends.
And then, things started to get weird.
That fall, Hughes had started exhibiting the kind of behavior, the obsessive-compulsive tics and the apparent confusion, that would come to define his legacy in the public imagination as much or more than his aviation accomplishments. On a phone call with Noah Dietrich, Hughes repeated the same sentence thirty-three times. When Noah asked him what was going on, Hughes seemed totally unaware that he had been caught in this loop. He went to see a doctor the next day, and the doctor told him he must take some time off, get
away from it all, and try to avoid stress. Hughes followed those doctor’s orders in the most Howard Hughes way possible.
Hughes had had the wreck of the Sikorsky removed from Lake Mead and rebuilt. Joe Petrali, who was supervising the rebuilding, fielded calls from Hughes every week for three months after the job was finished. Every week, Hughes would tell Petrali to get the plane ready for flight, but then Hughes would never show up to actually take the plane out. Finally one day Hughes did show up, and he and Petrali went up in the plane and flew for about half an hour. When they landed, Hughes told Petrali he wanted to take the Sikorsky on a trip. Petrali asked where they were going. Hughes said, “Las Vegas.”
What Hughes did not tell Petrali was that they would be gone for months. During that period, Hughes would be completely AWOL—out of touch with Faith and any other women he had been involved with, and totally hands-off on all of his businesses, including the Sturges partnership and the progress of both Cal-Pix movies. For months on end, even Dietrich, who was managing Hughes’s holdings in his absence, didn’t know where he was.
It was not the stress-free time that the doctor had ordered. As if in an attempt to purge the demons of the crash, Hughes stubbornly returned to the cockpit of the plane he had crashed into Lake Mead. Now back in Nevada, the site of the initial Sikorsky wreck, Howard was able to fly the plane without incident for a stretch, and then, once again, he ran into trouble. Petrali believed the narrow landing gear of the plane was no match for the high desert winds.
“Howard couldn’t wrestle her down,” he explained. “We went bouncing and banging across the desert in that clumsy big amphibian and it was a miracle that it didn’t cartwheel and break itself to pieces. We went ripping through bushes and we’d hit those big sand knolls and bounce five, ten, fifteen feet in the air and come slamming down hard enough to break a man’s backbone.”
While Hughes wasn’t hurt, the Sikorsky again required repairs, leaving the pair temporarily grounded. Hughes and Petrali stayed in Vegas for about a week and a half before Howard announced that they were going to move on, but he ordered that they were not to give up their hotel rooms or rental cars—these things were at a premium during wartime, and he didn’t want to hassle with getting more when they came back. They flew to Reno, where they stayed a week, acquiring more hotel rooms and cars, and then to Palm Springs, where they did the same thing. They spent the next three months flying among the three cities.
“Each week we’d move on and all this time we kept nine hotel rooms and six rental cars,” Petrali recalled. “Howard gave me orders not to talk to anybody about where we were or what we were doing. ‘Nobody is to know where we are,’ he told me. ‘I don’t want you to talk to anybody in Los Angeles or let anybody know what we’re doing or anything about us.’” In between trips, Hughes would remain alone in his hotel room.
Around Christmas, Hughes pulled a disappearing act within his disappearing act. No one, Petrali included, knew where he was for more than a month. When he resurfaced in Vegas, where Petrali had been waiting for him, Hughes told him to get the plane ready. They flew to Shreveport, Louisiana—the site of Caddo Parish, where Hughes Sr. had launched his oil drill bit business. They checked into a hotel and at around 9 P.M., Hughes wandered out and found a deli and bought a bag of cupcakes and a bottle of milk—“one of his favorite meals,” according to Petrali. It started to rain, and Hughes stood under the awning of a gas station to eat his dinner and wait out the storm.
A policeman cruised by, saw a man in a cheap suit with a few days’ beard growth, and assumed he was a bum. The cop asked Hughes who he was and what he was doing there. The cop did not believe him when he said he was Howard Hughes, and Hughes didn’t carry an ID. “If you are Howard Hughes,” the cop asked, “have you got any money?’” Hughes reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled five-hundred-dollar bill. The cop arrested him for vagrancy.
Eventually the manager of a local Hughes Tool plant was pulled out of bed and brought down to the station to identify the Boss. Hughes was let go. “You Goddamned country policeman,” Howard swore at the police chief on his way out the door.
Howard Hughes could not conceive that the planet of Los Angeles would keep on spinning in his absence, but it did; in fact, he missed much while he was away. In March 1945, Patterson Dial, Rupert Hughes’s third wife, died in their Los Feliz home of a pill overdose. Twenty years had passed since their marriage, and just over twenty-two years since Rupert’s second wife, Adelaide, had also died via suicide. In the Los Angeles Times story reporting Patterson’s death, Rupert acknowledged that she had been prescribed the pills to help with the anxiety she felt over her own writing. “She had intense depression when she became morose because she felt her own writing was not up to the goal she set for herself. Often she said life was a vanity, and that she could leave it any time.” Later, he would pen a letter to Frances McLain Smith, a daughter of one of his cousins, in which he worried that the long, grueling hours he subjected Patterson to proofreading his own work might have led to her death: “I blame myself because it was more than she could take.”
Even before leaving town, Howard had loosened his grip on Faith to the point where she was able to develop her own social life. She began hanging out with a group of bohemian neighbors, and then, while Hughes was away, her name started making it into gossip columns without association to Howard for the first time. In the summer and fall of 1945, she was seen out at the nightclub Mocambo with actor Paul Brooks; she was reported to have “discovered Jack March, the tennis pro”; she was photographed at clubs and parties sitting next to Kurt Kreuger, a German actor who regularly played Nazis. She was said to have “a new Mexican beau.” Then, in January 1946, she suddenly eloped, with bandleader Teddy Stauffer. The marriage lasted just six months, but it had the effect of getting Faith out of Hughes’s romantic clutches for good.
Furthermore, with Hughes out of town, Faith actually made a movie. Five years after The Outlaw saga began, Hughes agreed to loan out Jane Russell to star in Young Widow, a mess of an independent production in which producer Hunt Stromberg also cast Faith in a supporting role. Thus both of Hughes’s contract brunettes made their nationwide theatrical debuts in a bomb long before it was possible for most people to see the movies that were supposed to be their carefully calibrated star-making debuts.
Over the last few months of Hughes’s walkabout, he popped up in Miami, where he reportedly took off his clothes and burned them in a friend’s backyard. He vacationed in Acapulco with Cary Grant, and then returned to public life in New York City in late summer. By September his name was in the gossip columns as the new escort of Yvonne De Carlo.
Twenty years before she’d become a TV staple as Lily Munster, De Carlo was being promoted by producer Walter Wanger as “the most beautiful girl in the world,” thanks to her starring role in his western, Salome, Where She Danced. After the release of Salome, De Carlo returned to her home town of Vancouver to play the big fish, restarting an old cabaret act that she had starred in before she was famous.
De Carlo looked just like the other Hughes girls of the 1940s: raven-haired, heavily lidded eyes, prominent cheekbones creating chiseled lines that pointed to a pillowy but unsmiling mouth. Her costume in Salome had featured a skimpy bra top over miles of bare midriff. Hughes flew up to Canada just to meet her.
De Carlo was in between sets when Johnny Meyer approached and said, “Mr. Hughes would like to meet you.” Yvonne wasn’t sure who “Mr. Hughes” was, but she said, “Fine.” As the thirty-nine-year-old Hughes approached, twenty-two-year-old De Carlo observed that he looked “lanky, underfed, and remarkably sad.” She thought, “Wow, this would be a terrific boyfriend for my aunt.”
Toward the end of Hughes’s nearly yearlong sojourn away from Los Angeles, he had been out flying with De Carlo when he decided to stop and call in for his messages. They landed, and Howard went inside the airport, telling Yvonne he would be back in five minutes. He was gone a lot longer than that, and Yvon
ne snuck out of the plane to see what was going on.
She found him, as she remembered later, “yelling on the phone . . . saying, ‘You just don’t give a damn. You don’t give a damn.’ And I thought, what’s that?” She scrambled back to the plane, and when he finally returned, Hughes asked Yvonne, “Are you serious about me?” She found out later that Howard had been talking to Ava. “She had given him the go bye.”
Actually, Ava had being trying to give him the “go bye” ever since the bronze bell incident, but Hughes had been very good at not taking no for an answer. Now Ava had told him that she was marrying Artie Shaw. The clarinetist and bandleader had already been divorced three times. His marriage in 1940 to nineteen-year-old Lana Turner began the night of their first date and was over long before Lana’s next birthday.
In Ava’s memory, when she told Howard she was marrying Shaw, he said, “Go ahead, kid, if that’s what you want, but you’ll regret it. It won’t last five minutes. He doesn’t love you—he just loves the idea of screwing you. Lana Turner didn’t last five minutes, and neither will you, honey.”
Ava would last slightly longer than Lana—a total of about eight months. Six months in, columnist Danton Walker claimed that the couple were “already discussing that old theme of the newlywed—marriage vs. career.” One wonders what there was to discuss, given that Ava had still to make a film appearance that matched the outsize presence she had acquired in newspapers and fan magazines on the basis of being gorgeous and being married and/or involved with fascinating, rich, famous men. In any case, the debate between Ava and Artie came to a conclusion in July, when they announced their separation.
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