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

by Karina Longworth

  She thought he loved her. He said he did love her. And then he asked her to be patient, to give them time to get to know each other better. When Peters would give Sheilah Graham what the gossip columnist referred to as “the familiar quote”—“We are in love and Howard wants to marry me but he wants us to wait until we are sure”—Graham “felt sorry for the pretty newcomer. I was sure it would never happen.”

  ON JULY 19, 1948, HOWARD Hughes made the cover of Time magazine, with a painting of his now mustachioed face under the headline, “Money + Brains = Fun (sometimes).”

  Inside the magazine—on the National Affairs pages, before the piece on Hughes—came a sad, two-and-a-half column write-up on a girl named Frances Lillian Mary Ridste, better known as Carole Landis. The article declared that because of this woman’s “voracious appetite for happiness,” and “because she lived in what may become known as the era of American brassiere-worship, Frances Lillian Mary Ridste became a motion-picture star.” Time went on to explain that after a brief marriage at the age of fifteen, Ridste ended up in San Francisco, where she acquired her screen name, and then she moved on to Hollywood and the less-than illustrious life of the chorus girl/extra/B-movie player. “Life was a round of cheap rooms, skimpy meals, an endless attempt to look glamorous and ‘sexy,’” reported Time. Her big break came in 1940 when she was cast as the babe in Hal Roach’s One Million B.C., which would be remade in a very different era as One Million Years B.C., with Raquel Welch in the Landis role. According to Time, though success changed Landis’s material quality of life, she remained but “a lovely torso—not an actress.” Three more quick and short-lived marriages followed. The uncredited Time scribe implied that Landis’s failure to gain purchase as an A-list star was tied to her erratic love life; he did not mention that Landis was frequently invited to join the head of her studio, Darryl Zanuck, for what one of Zanuck’s biographer’s referred to as a “sex siesta,” and that Landis was referred to by some at Fox as “the studio hooker.”

  Time was not too discreet to mention that at the end of her life, Landis was in love with big-time serious actor Rex Harrison, who was married to another woman. Two weeks before the publication of the Time article, Landis had dinner with Harrison, then, later that night, alone in her house in the Pacific Palisades, she had a couple of drinks, took a lot of pills, scrawled out a note asking her mother to pray for her, and then collapsed on her bathroom floor. Harrison attended Landis’s funeral with his wife. It was, per Time, “a splendid affair.”

  The story on Hughes that followed was adorned with pictures of Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, Carole Landis’s predecessors in busty glory, one Time article indulging in the “brassiere worship” that the previous one about the dead glamour girl had critiqued. Hughes was described here as a “tall, gangling, aging, sick-looking man of 42 whose life and eccentricities have built a lurid legend.”

  Hughes granted the magazine a rare interview, and he seemed to be in the highest of spirits. He wouldn’t announce who would replace Dore Schary as executive in charge of production at RKO but promised that it would be “someone you least suspect, a shocker.” He added, with evident excitement, “My life is not exactly going to be dull for the next two years. I’m really cooking at RKO and things are going to pop. I’ll make news for you. The only thing that could stop me would be my death—and even that would be a story.” A quote from an unnamed “crony” backed Howard up on this: “Howard will never die in an airplane. He’ll die at the hands of a woman with a .38.”

  This wasn’t the most damning statement in the story. Neither was the revelation that Hughes had slashed and burned his way through RKO, firing half the workforce and canceling all but three pictures that had been in production when he took over. Here was the bombshell (no pun intended): noting that Hughes’s “women friends” could be divided into big stars like Billie Dove “with whom he was seen in public” and “young, eager and not too prudish unknowns with whom he was almost never seen in public” whom a source said Hughes called “crows,” Time revealed Johnny Meyer’s role as a procurer. Because Hughes couldn’t face the possibility of taking no for an answer, “it is part of Meyer’s job to see that the green light is up before Hughes ever appears on the scene.”

  A Time cover story, then as now, looms large in any self-image obsessed man’s conception of his own legend, whether the overall tone is positive or negative. But given what we now know about Howard Hughes, it’s impossible to ignore the ways in which this Time cover story punctured the then-current legend of Hughes the eligible bachelor and American hero and revealed as the real Hughes a man marked by recklessness and bombast, who was secretly so afraid of failure that he couldn’t even approach a woman unless he was certain she was a sure thing. Even worse, after a lifetime of paying men to trumpet him as “the greatest” in any field in which he dabbled, Hughes was starting to lose control of his own story.

  Part V

  Terry, Jean, and RKO, 1948–1956

  Chapter 19

  Marriage, Howard Hughes–Style

  Lynn Baggett had the right look: the cloud of dark curls, the barely containable curves, the narrowed eyes bridging sultry and sad.* What she didn’t have was much of a career. Signed at Warner Bros., she’d walk through the background of movies like Mildred Pierce and Hollywood Canteen, her waitress roles too small to merit credit. When one of Hughes’s “talent scouts” invited her to Vegas for the weekend, she went. She didn’t have anything better to do.

  On the plane, Lynn found she was just one of a whole crew of prospective Hughes “dates” en route to Sin City. All the women were given their own hotel rooms, as well as one hundred dollars in cash. They were told to take the money and gamble with it on the casino floor; Hughes would watch from afar and pick the girl he liked best.

  Lynn was not up for this contest. She pocketed the cash, stayed in her room, and ordered a juicy steak from room service. Eventually Hughes showed up at her room and asked her why she refused to play his game. This turned into a two-hour lecture on economics, and by the end of it, Lynn had decided that Hughes was actually pretty interesting. But he was tired, and left, and she never saw him again.

  Baggett’s story became the “nucleus,” as writer Arthur Laurents put it, of the screenplay for a movie called Caught. After almost twenty-five years in Hollywood, Howard Hughes had now achieved a dubious honor: he had become the thinly veiled subject of a Hollywood film made by a man with a vendetta against him. That vendetta had to do with Vendetta.

  Two years after Max Ophuls was fired from directing the Faith Domergue vehicle, Vendetta was still nowhere near ready for release, but Ophuls had completed two other Hollywood films. Then he was hired by Enterprise, an upstart independent studio launched by former publicist Charles Einfeld, to take over a film they had long been gestating.

  Caught originated as a loose adaptation of the novel Wild Calendar, which was originally intended as a vehicle for Ginger Rogers. By the time the movie was made, the source material had been reshaped by Laurents, a playwright who had recently adapted Rope for Alfred Hitchcock. Ophuls had hired Laurents to write a new Wild Calendar, but the director told Laurents to forget about the novel.

  “I’m not going to make a picture from that lousy book,” Ophuls said. “I’m going to make a picture about Howard Hughes.”

  When Laurents asked Ophuls why, he laughed and said, “Because I hate him.” Laurents started crafting a character with Ophuls’s instructions about how to capture the essence of Hughes booming in his head. “Make him an idiot!” the director commanded. “An egomaniac! Terrible to women! Also to men!”

  Once Laurents had delivered a script skewering Hughes, Ophuls insisted on casting Robert Ryan and Barbara Bel Geddes, both stars who were under contract to RKO. Lanky, square-jawed Ryan had experience embodying the banality of evil, playing the murderous anti-Semite in Crossfire; he also resembled Hughes, particularly in stature. Bel Geddes, pert and petite, was cute rather than extravagantly beautiful (ten
years later, Alfred Hitchcock would use her “everyday” looks in brilliant contrast to the ethereal/vulgar Kim Novak in Vertigo). That she seemed from the start to be at a disadvantage compared to the average bombshell would further exaggerate the power dynamic between her character, a girl with nothing from nowhere, and Ryan’s man who had everything—except, perhaps, a soul. Hughes agreed to loan both performers out to Enterprise, on the condition that certain details in the script be changed so that no layperson would notice that Ryan’s eccentric tycoon was based on Hughes. The alterations were superficial: the character’s costuming was changed, so that he now wore decent suits instead of tennis shoes, and was seen drinking liquor instead of milk. Hughes was mollified, and yet still insisted that dailies be delivered to him for review every evening.

  By the time Caught actually went before cameras in the late summer of 1948, Hughes had cancelled Bel Geddes’s RKO contract, claiming later he did so because he “felt Geddes had no drawing value at the box office.” It would eventually become legend that the real reason was that Hughes didn’t think Geddes was sexy enough, although in the 1980s, former fan magazine writer and publicist Jerry Asher offered a more disturbing explanation: Asher claimed Hughes had really fired Geddes because she had performed interracial love scenes in the play Deep Are the Roots. According to Asher, Hughes “felt Barbara was totally unforgivable for doing that role.”

  In Caught, Geddes starred as Maud, a working-class girl who tries to turn herself into a new person, in pursuit of a new life. She puts herself through charm school, renames herself “Leonora,” and gets a job as a model in a department store, where she hopes to meet a rich man who will pluck her out of her dreary, shared bedsit. (Leonora’s situation is depicted as similar to, but somewhat more squalid, than Kitty’s in Kitty Foyle.)

  Her dreams come true. At the department store she’s approached by the aide of millionaire Smith Olyrig (Ryan), who invites her to a party on his yacht. Though this is a version of what she said she wanted, when it comes down to it, Leonora doesn’t want to go—she knows the men there will only have one thing on their minds—but her roommate convinces her that it’s an “investment in your future.”

  On the dock, before she can board the boat, she meets Olyrig (whose name sounds like the source of Hughes’s initial, drill bit-led fortune) and doesn’t recognize him (a repeat of Faith Domergue’s first encounter with Hughes). Olyrig ends up marrying Leonora, not because he loves her, but instead, in the words of his analyst, “to prove no one has authority over you” (shades of Hughes’s ulterior motive in marrying Ella Rice). The ensuing marriage replicates both Ella’s and Faith’s experiences of waiting, waiting, waiting for a man who gives them everything money can buy, but sadistically withholds the love they really want. When Leonora mopes about never seeing her husband while collapsed on a velvet couch in a ball gown and jewels, Smith’s personal aide (a version of Johnny Meyer or Walter Kane made movie-sidekick fey) tells her she’s greedy—what more could she want? In a moment of humiliating rejection, she wails at her husband, “Look at me! Look at what you bought!”

  As vicious a gloss on Hughes as Caught is, with Robert Ryan’s terrifyingly cold performance all the more unnerving given his natural resemblance to Hughes, the movie is even more effective as a European refugee’s indictment of postwar American materialism. In a sense, Ophuls is saying Leonora deserves what she got, because she so desperately coveted the security that turned out to be a prison. Not that the film is unsympathetic toward its heroine: Ophuls, of course, understood from his experience on Vendetta the attraction of getting involved with a man like Hughes—and he was also intimately acquainted with how it felt to be at Hughes’s mercy.

  Caught’s mixed-to-bad reviews did not cite the similarity between Smith Olyrig and Hughes. The movie flopped—one Illinois theater owner was quoted in the trade journal Motion Picture Herald angrily saying that his audiences stayed away from the film like it was scarlet fever—and Enterprise went bankrupt. Ophuls made one more money-losing Hollywood movie and then returned to Europe, where he directed four straight classics in five years: La Ronde, Le Plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de . . ., and Lola Montes. That streak was broken when he dropped dead of a heart attack on a film set. He was fifty-four.

  EVER THE MULTITASKER, DAVID O. Selznick was deep in production on Gone with the Wind when he spotted a young actress in a Swedish film called Intermezzo and decided he had to have her. Ingrid Bergman was brought to Los Angeles in 1939, leaving her doctor husband Petter Lindstrom and baby daughter Pia behind in Sweden. As with Katharine Hepburn before her, when Selznick first saw Bergman in person he was disappointed. He told her he’d supervise a full makeover. Bergman declined. She insisted that he either take her as she was or else she’d start the journey home the next morning. Selznick was hit with inspiration: why not sell this one as “untouched”?

  “I’ve got an idea that’s so simple and yet no one in Hollywood has ever tried it before,” Selznick told Bergman. “You remain yourself. You are going to be the first ‘natural’ actress.” Of course, there would be no such thing as a truly “natural” actress in movies of the 1940s: Bergman was as heavily coiffed, costumed, and made up as any of her peers, but in her case, all of the cosmetics, and the marketing that went hand in hand with it, stressed Bergman as a “natural,” “untouched” beauty. It’s not as if Selznick were allowing this one actress to truly “be herself”—her persona was as carefully supervised and directed by Selznick as Jane Russell’s had been by Hughes.

  Bergman became a superstar three years later with Casablanca, a great romance in which she is convinced by her lover to go back to her husband, sacrificing her libido for the good of mankind. Her Oscar win for the George Cukor–directed Gaslight (in which she played a naive young wife whose husband uses isolation and intimidation to control her, and send her spinning into mania) was followed by The Bells of Saint Mary, the sequel to the smash hit Going My Way, this time featuring an intense but unconsummated relationship between Bergman’s nun and Bing Crosby’s priest. Throughout this period of her career, ending with Joan of Arc in 1948, Bergman was the innocent victim of vicious men, or she was a vessel of god, or else she was a decidedly earthy mortal who had stepped onto the wrong path but then reversed herself before it was too late. Audiences responded to her “authenticity”; they felt like they knew her.

  Joan of Arc— produced independently by Walter Wanger, financed by Wanger and Ingrid—was RKO’s highest-grossing film of 1948, and Bergman was voted moviegoers’ favorite actress in early 1949, for the third straight year. But the film’s critical reception was mixed and, unfulfilled, Ingrid thought of two Italian movies she had seen recently, Open City and Paisa, directed by Roberto Rossellini. These films, populated with nonactors often playing versions of themselves in stories drawn from their own real lives, were foundational works of a postwar wave of filmmaking spearheaded by Rossellini, Pier Paulo Pasolini, Vittorio De Sica, and others, which came to be called Italian Neorealism. Italian Neorealist films were the polar opposite of the lavish Hollywood epics in which Bergman had previously been cast. In the fall of 1948, she wrote a letter to Rossellini, telling him she’d like to work with him, if he could use an actress who could speak Swedish and English very well, French very badly, and knew only three words in Italian: “Lo ti amo,” or “I love you.” Bergman later admitted that she believed she had fallen in love with Rossellini the first time she watched Open City, and that she “probably subconsciously” wrote to him because “he offered a way out from both my problems: my marriage and my life in Hollywood.”

  Soon thereafter, carrying with him an outline for a potential film for Bergman to star in, Rossellini travelled to Los Angeles. He spent forty days as a houseguest in the home of the movie star and her husband, turning that outline into a screenplay in collaboration with Bergman. Then he and Bergman approached Howard Hughes.

  Hughes had pursued Bergman before, both professionally and personally, and her total indifference
and disinterest in him had left him intrigued. After purchasing RKO, he had called her and said, “I’ve just bought a film studio for you. . . . It’s my present to you. Are you happy now?” Now Hughes, in desperate need of films to release through RKO, agreed to finance Rossellini’s foreign production on a budget of $600,000, which was not a lot for a film of that era, but was a significant amount of money to entrust to a foreign director with no track record of commercial Hollywood filmmaking to speak of.

  Bergman arrived in Rome to shoot Stromboli in April 1949. A location shoot took place on the titular island, where cast and crew waited for weeks for a volcano to erupt so that they could capture it on film. This gave the director and star time to get to know one another, and Ingrid Bergman emerged profoundly changed. “When she returned from Stromboli to Rome,” Adela Rogers St. Johns later wrote, “she seemed bewildered and confused like a woman coming out of a drug.”

  During production, the Italian media had begun to churn out stories of an affair between the Hollywood star and the Italian director. Joseph Breen, Hollywood’s censor in chief, wrote to Bergman in Italy, fretting that the affair reports were “the cause of great consternation among large numbers of our people who have come to look upon you as the first lady of the screen—both individually and artistically.” Breen feared that the gossip “may result in the American public becoming so thoroughly enraged that your pictures will be ignored, and your box-office value ruined.” The original Hays Office had been established in response to scandals in the personal lives of stars, in an effort to displace the policing of the private activity of adults onto the public and commercial sphere of the products those adults made. But American film censors had never been in the habit of writing to actresses directly to warn them that the choices they were making off-screen were likely to prove bad for business. Here, the implication of Breen’s letter to Bergman seems to be that the real crime of her adultery was that she selfishly had not considered how her sex life would impact the bottom lines of the men she worked for. Protecting the bottom line had, of course, always been the real purpose of the Production Code and its antecedents, but Breen’s letter marked a new frontier in invasive, paternalistic meddling in a performer’s private life in the name of commercial security. It’s impossible to imagine a male actor receiving a similar letter from Breen in the same situation; even another actress, without Bergman’s untouched persona, may not have merited such personal intervention.