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

by Karina Longworth

  There may have been something else going on, too. Howard Hughes was a man whose early years were full of death: his mother died when he was sixteen and his father dropped dead two years later; four men died during the making of his directorial debut, Hell’s Angels—and this was all by Howard’s early thirties. He had now been involved in a number of plane crashes and accidents that killed others and all of which could have killed him. No wonder he emerged from the hospital and went on to act—first in his fearlessness and then in his recklessness, and finally with his total disregard for the sanctity of his own body—like a man who didn’t believe he could be killed.

  He could be, of course. In thirty years, he’d be dead. But in a dozen years, he’d be married.

  FOR NEARLY TWENTY YEARS, Hughes had been paying men like Lincoln Quarberg and Russell Birdwell to promote a larger-than-life idea of “Howard Hughes.” In 1946 and 1947, the American media, realizing that they had a homegrown folk hero in their midst, started doing that work for Hughes for free.

  This new American hero was the most fascinating man in the world that nobody really knew anything intimate about, which only made him more fascinating. Magazines started filling this vacuum with write-arounds of his biography, each one reiterating the same public-record details, with a few minor variations to evince authenticity. For instance, a profile in Cosmopolitan claimed that in addition to being surrounded at all times in public by an entourage of “business managers, legal advisors, social secretaries, fixers interference-runners and other henchmen,” Hughes had assembled “a kind of personal G-2 consisting of strategically placed hotel clerks, doormen, hat-check girls, headwaiters, telephone operators, and private secretaries all over the United States who feed him confidential information . . . allowing him to locate anyone he wants at any time he chooses.” And yet, with all these people at his fingertips, Cosmopolitan quoted an unnamed “associate” claiming that Hughes was “the loneliest guy in the world. He only knows himself—and I’m not too sure of that. . . . People don’t mean a thing to him unless they have something he can use for himself.”

  Though Hughes’s private life had been the subject of fascination before, now his marital status was occasioning reams of writing. “The best matrimonial catch on earth today is a tall swordfish of a man named Howard Hughes,” wrote Lloyd Shearer in the August 1946 edition of Pageant magazine. “In a sentence, he is everything girls and their mothers dream about,” Shearer swooned. “Unfortunately, they can’t have him.”

  If any single columnist won this race to enshrine Hughes as America’s most eligible (and unsnaggable) bachelor, it was Adela Rogers St. Johns, who published a three-part article about Howard’s romantic history in April 1947. With beautiful full-color illustrations, St. Johns’s story was the most spectacular entry in the wave of biographical ruminations on Hughes flooding print media in 1946–47. For one thing, she had the luxury of serialization. Unfolding over three weeks, her profile of Hughes used his various business and creative accomplishments as set dressing for the real question: why was it that America’s most fascinating divorcé remained unremarried? Literally turning the life of this “great American” into soap opera by stretching the “mystery” over multiple pieces, St. Johns declared that Hughes’s reputation notwithstanding, his interest in women “ran a bad third” to his obsessions with airplanes and movies. She took the mythmaking to the next level by threading throughout her account of Hughes’s failed romances a stanza from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Winners,” the kicker of which is “He travels the fastest who travels alone.” By the end of her third chapter on Hughes, his unwillingness to commit to any single woman for very long, even the ones that he seemed to truly love, was transformed from a character flaw into the cross he must bear as a uniquely American, individualist hero.

  In all of this mythologizing, the women who had been linked to Hughes in the past, and those who had appeared at the hospital while he was recovering, got a bump in their own profiles. The gorgeous brunette actress Linda Darnell was one who had made a nighttime visit while Hughes was incapacitated. Darnell had been one of several guests in Hughes’s plane four months earlier when he had nonchalantly set a new coast-to-coast commercial plane record, piloting a Constellation from New York to Burbank in 9 hours, 46 minutes. Though the least famous of Hughes’s hospital visitors, Darnell was considered one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. A model turned actress, in 1946 she had not yet made her greatest films, A Letter to Three Wives and Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours. After bursting onto the scene in the early 1940s opposite Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro and Blood and Sand, Darnell hadn’t found a role that let her establish herself as anything other than something lovely to look at. She was certainly that, though. When she attempted to visit Hughes at the hospital, the waiting photographers and reporters took delight in her low-cut purple skirt suit and chunky peep-toe slingback heels.

  Darnell was married to cameraman Pev Marley, but Hughes had wooed her anyway, and recently their affair had intensified to the point where Linda believed Howard would marry her if only she were available. A week after Hughes’s crash, Darnell announced she was filing for divorce.

  One paper ran the announcement of Darnell’s move to end her marriage alongside a photo of a young model named Norma Jeane Dougherty, who posed in a bathing suit made out of the covers of the five magazines that had borne her photo in a month’s time. Lying in his hospital bed, perhaps in search of an antidote for the headache he felt coming on upon reading news of Darnell’s divorce, Hughes saw Norma Jeane’s photo and became inspired.* Aides were assigned to find the girl with the golden brown curls and beaming toothy smile and phenomenal curves.

  Norma Jeane’s agent, Emmeline Snively, took the call, and was hit with her own wave of inspiration. Snively called gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper to tell them that Howard Hughes had asked after her client. The first ladies of gossip diligently wrote this up, and because, since the crash, the mere mention of Hughes’s name qualified as national news, Norma Jeane’s name got coast-to-coast play.

  Even before Hedda Hopper took the bait, blurbing Howard’s interest in Norma Jeane in her July 29 column, Snively set about to use Hughes’s name in a way that would actually benefit her client, getting Mrs. Dougherty a meeting with the casting director of 20th Century Fox, who in 1946 was none other than Ben Lyon, he of Hell’s Angels and the tree branch.

  The idea of snatching up a girl Howard was interested in before he could put the Hughes moves in motion intrigued Lyon, who authorized a color screen test shot by Leon Shamroy, a pioneering cinematographer who had already won three Oscars. As Norma Jeane sashayed in front of the camera in a borrowed sequined gown, behind the camera Shamroy, as he later put it, “got a cold chill. This girl had something I haven’t seen since the days of silent pictures; this girl had sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow had.”

  After showing the test to Fox chief Darryl Zanuck, Lyon presented Norma Jeane with a six-month contract, on the condition that they find a new name for her. Lyon told Norma Jeane that she reminded him of Marilyn Miller, a stage star of the 1920s and ’30s who had appeared in a film with Lyon, had a romance with him, and had died tragically at the age of thirty-seven. Norma Jeane thought Marilyn Miller sounded lovely, but she didn’t want to copy a dead actress’s name to the letter. She suggested pairing Marilyn with her grandmother’s maiden name: Monroe.

  ONE CALLER TO THE hospital whose presence was not noticed by reporters was Jean Peters, the brunette beauty whom Hughes had met in Catalina the weekend before the crash. She didn’t visit Hughes right away—after all, she barely knew him. But once she was compelled to come see Howard, Jean Peters would swiftly enter his inner circle and then stay there for twenty-five years.

  Jean had ended up in Hollywood by accident—and had stayed against her will. As a junior at the University of Ohio, she had won a beauty contest prize: a trip to Hollywood and a contract at 20th Century Fox. As she had shown virtually no int
erest in the contest itself, her friends were surprised when she jumped to accept the prize. Jean saw it as an opportunity to travel for free, and figured she wouldn’t last long in California. “When they shove me up in front of a camera with Gary Cooper and tell me to act, it won’t be more than five minutes before they give me my return ticket,” she reportedly predicted. “I’ll be lucky if they don’t ride me out of town on a rail.”

  The type of contest Jean had won usually resulted in a token screen test, a thank-you-very-much, and, after a week or two, an invitation to go home. Jean shot her screen test, spent the rest of the week sightseeing, and then called the studio to ask for her return ticket. She was told that she couldn’t leave town—she was under contract. But they weren’t giving her anything to do, and the novelty had worn off, so after a few more weeks finally Jean decided, the hell with it, and bought herself a train ticket back to Ohio. From the station pay phone, as one version of the story goes, Jean called her handler at Fox, thanked him for everything, and told him she regrettably had to return home. Then she hung up and boarded the train. The Fox flunky then ran into studio chief Darryl Zanuck’s office and demanded that he watch Peters’s screen test. Zanuck reluctantly did, and when it was over, he demanded that someone track down Jean, get her off the train to Ohio, and send her back to Los Angeles.

  On January 11, 1946, the Los Angeles Times elevated this narrative into a mythic origin story even as it was happening. Jean had gotten on the train, the Times reported, and then at Fox they began running her test, and when it was over, “Mr. Big took an extra puff of his cigar and said, ‘Sign her.’ All the little men began scrambling to find Jean, eventually discovering to their horror that Jean, their big find, was choo-chooing eastward. Wires between Hollywood and stops along the train’s route east were humming yesterday as studio officials tried to make connections with Jean. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s in the movies.”

  The more conspiracy-minded believed that Howard Hughes, who was not technically involved in the management of 20th but was a friend of Zanuck and a major stockholder in the studio at the time, had been keeping tabs on Peters from the moment of her arrival in Hollywood, and even though they had not yet met in person, when he found out she had left town he ordered the studio to order her return.*

  Whether he had been watching her or not, Peters had not yet appeared in a film by the time she officially met Hughes, six months later, on that post–July Fourth weekend of 1946. Her first role would come thanks to another of Hughes’s dark-haired inamoratas, and another member of the 20th Century Fox contract girl roster.

  Just before his XF-11 crash, Howard had called Ann Miller, actress and friend of Linda Darnell, for advice. He cared about Linda, Hughes told Ann, but he didn’t want to marry her, he didn’t want to marry anyone. Now Linda’s husband, Pev Marley, was demanding a big payment from Hughes in order to let Linda go. Hughes had seen that movie before—he had been in it, with Irvin Willat and Billie Dove, and it hadn’t turned out well. “It has sort of turned me off,” Hughes told Miller.

  When Hughes was released from the hospital after five weeks, he went to live at Cary Grant’s house in Beverly Hills. Shortly thereafter, Darnell and Marley went to visit him. With Hughes still bedridden, Marley preemptively brought up the topic of a cash settlement, telling Hughes he’d essentially sell Darnell to him in exchange for a yearly stipend of $25,000 for life. This made Darnell livid. “Who the hell do you think you are?” she fumed. “You’re discussing me like a ham. You can both go straight to hell.”

  The Darnell defection opened up a vacancy in Hughes’s life, and Jean Peters began to fill it. “I would have dinner with him practically every night and run films,” she remembered. When he was first released from the hospital, she remembered, “He wasn’t able to get out of the bed, but later on he could sit in a wheel chair, and they set up a projection machine in the living room.” Jean recalled that she saw Hughes almost daily, “from the time he was in the house until October, which is when I left to do a film in Mexico.” The film Peters went to make in Mexico was Captain from Castile, a picture that Linda Darnell had hoped to star in for two years but was forced to abandon when Fox cast her in the epic Forever Amber. (Darnell got the better end of this deal: compared to Captain from Castile, Forever Amber offered a much bigger, more interesting part in a much better movie.)

  In the two months between Hughes’s release from the hospital and Peters’s departure to make the movie, Hughes opened up about himself, speaking extraordinarily candidly about his state of mind and how he hoped to shape the rest of his life, telling Jean that he felt resigned to a destiny that filled him with self-loathing.

  “He felt that it was immoral for one person to have that much money,” she recalled. “But he felt that fate had decreed that in his particular case he had it.” He told her that he hated being a businessman, that he would have preferred just inventing airplanes and testing them. But he couldn’t stop running businesses because, as he put it, “Unfortunately, I am very good at it.”

  “He felt he was trapped,” Jean added. Hughes would lament “how one problem led to another problem which led to another, and he found himself now with a lot of worries, commitments, properties, businesses that he got himself into, and he was very critical of himself for having permitted that to happen.”

  They were so close by the time she left for Mexico that when he visited her there, Howard started talking about writing her into his will. As Hughes explained to Jean, “One of these days I am going to get into a really serious fight with someone. Knowing me, I am not going to give in and I may lose everything.

  “So,” he said, “I have got to make sure that you are protected.”

  TWO MONTHS AFTER THE crash, Hughes would get back in a cockpit, flying first to Kansas City and then to New York to argue with the MPAA, which was still threatening to revoke their seal of approval on The Outlaw over the unapproved advertising. Hughes operated the plane’s controls himself, armed with a packed sack lunch of milk, crackers, and a turkey sandwich. “I am very tired,” he told reporters. “I want to sleep as long as I can.”

  Making his postcrash public debut amid reporters and photographers, Hughes was said to be “sporting a Ronald Colmanesque mustache.” In the photo the Los Angeles Times ran with their story, the mustache is thin and patchy, Hughes’s eyes are dark, his hair slicked back, his mouth caught in a kind of dazed, open grin. He looks less like Ronald Colman than Vincent Price. Hughes would insist upon this facial hair for the rest of his public life as camouflage to cover the scars that now bisected his upper lip, the seam where his face was sewn back together after the crash.

  Hughes was not able to change the MPAA’s minds about the seal, and this meant that major theaters could decline to book the movie. But The Outlaw was proving to be such a draw that the lack of Code approval didn’t matter to independent theaters. By the end of 1946, the film had run an astounding thirty-seven weeks consecutively in some houses, including the Los Angeles Music Hall, where it had smashed the first-run record with a gross of $607,000. Hughes’s publicity machine would take to referring to The Outlaw as “the most popular picture of all time,” which wasn’t true in terms of raw box-office data—but given how effective the marketing proved to be for a full decade, it might as well have been.

  THE OUTLAW, LIKE HELL’S Angels before it, had been so expensive to make that even as a blockbuster, it wasn’t going to do much to increase Hughes’s wealth—not that he needed it to. That had been accomplished by World War II, which massively stimulated business at all of his factories and allowed Hughes to obtain government funding for a number of experimental aircraft. But these projects, particularly the Hercules flying boat, were so innovative they couldn’t just be cranked out on assembly lines like any old prop plane, and Hughes, as a result, had been unable to make good on some of his contracts before the war ended. Despite pocketing nearly $200 million in government subsidies to build three of these flying boats, by 1947 Hughes h
ad only finished one. And while the Hercules represented a massive breakthrough in technology that, some have argued, made the transition into the jet age possible, it was still seen by critics as a phenomenal waste of money—not least because Hughes hadn’t yet proven that it could actually fly.

  As a result of his failure to finish all of the planes he had been contracted to produce, Congress began investigating Hughes’s use of wartime government funds. In July 1947, news broke that subpoenas had been served to Judy Cook and Martha Goldthwaite, two “party girls” who were allegedly witnesses to—and beneficiaries of—Hughes’s wastefulness. The theory was that Hughes spent at least some of the government’s money to give the girls “handsome gifts” in exchange “for favors they may have bestowed on Hughes’ male guests” at “lavish wartime parties.” The papers whispered that more subpoenas were on the way, and that the first two girls “were small fry compared to big glamour-pusses almost sure to be called.”

  Though none of the contemporary news reports mentioned it, the FBI had been aware of these parties for a while. On April 20, 1945, Bureau director J. Edgar Hoover took a call from an employee of MGM Studios, whose name would be redacted from the FBI’s files. This MGM employee called Hoover to tell him about a party he had attended twenty days earlier, in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. The party’s host was Howard Hughes, and the party’s “favors” would include what an FBI report would describe as “a large number of ‘expensive females’ who are well known around New York.” Also at this party, the MGM man had spotted Julius Krug, who was then head of the War Production Board, which supervised the work done by private sector companies like Hughes’s that had diverted their efforts to take government money to produce supplies for World War II.