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

by Karina Longworth

  The gossip columnists tried to play it both ways, shaming Mitchum’s behavior but holding out hope for his reform. “He could still be cured,” Louella Parsons wrote, “providing he wanted to be.”

  Hughes had hidden Mitchum at publicist Perry Lieber’s house, to be sure Mitchum wouldn’t stumble across the reporters camped out in front of his own front door. But soon it became clear that in the case of Mitchum, there was no such thing as bad publicity. RKO began promoting the actor’s western Rachel and the Stranger less than a month after the scandal, betting that the fact that Mitchum’s name was still all over the papers couldn’t hurt. They were right: before Marlon Brando or James Dean popularized his brand of laconic rebellion, Robert Mitchum was a totally authentic-seeming on-screen bad boy who was evidently walking the walk off-screen, and audiences loved it.

  Though Mitchum had been judged by the public and acquitted, he still had to face the court. Jerry Geisler made a deal with the DA: Mitchum would waive his right to a jury trial and mount no defense to the conspiracy to possess marijuana charge, leaving Mitchum subject to whatever the judge decided on the charge of possession. They were gambling that, in exchange for the actor’s cooperation, the judge would sentence Mitchum leniently. He did not: Mitchum was declared guilty and sentenced to sixty days in jail.

  Hughes rushed one last Mitchum film into production before this sentence began: The Big Steal, directed by future action auteur Don Siegel and costarring Jane Greer, yet another former Hughes love whom Howard had vindictively been holding out of movies ever since he took over RKO. When Hughes called Greer to tell her he was casting her, he also broke the news to her that “the rabbit died.”* She was pregnant—her doctor had slipped the news to Howard, who was not the father, before telling Jane. As Greer later explained, “He had spies everywhere.”

  The Big Steal is notable for its bonkers car chase scenes, which anticipate the Fast and Furious films, albeit at a much slower pace. The focus on automotive action, performed by anonymous stunt drivers, was necessary, given that the movie’s male star was MIA for portions of the shoot. Mitchum filmed the studio lot–bound portions before sentencing, then spent most of his sentence on an “honor farm,” a low-security agricultural labor camp an hour north of Hollywood. Hughes came to visit him, and by the end of the afternoon, he had agreed to pay Mitchum’s legal fees and loan him money to buy a new house for his family. (Dorothy Mitchum had returned to the fold, to play the role of supporting wife during Bob’s scandal, and the couple would remain married for the rest of their lives; Mitchum was a man who enjoyed having affairs and also enjoyed having a wife to come home to.) At the end of his sentence, Mitchum told reporters, “I feel wonderful. I worked hard, slept well and batted .800 on the softball team. We won seven out of eight games.” He compared the prison to “Palm Springs, without the riff-raff.”

  Siegel had been finishing The Big Steal on location in Mexico without Mitchum. A few days after his release, Mitchum showed up, having ingested at least one bottle of tequila by himself on the journey. This was a problem easily solved by a half hour in the steam room. By the time he got to set, according to Jane Greer, “He looked wonderful.”

  Mitchum was forever loyal to Howard for standing by him during the dark times. Hughes rewarded the actor’s loyalty by casting Mitchum in some of the best movies that RKO would produce during Hughes’s tenure. After Where Danger Lives, Mitchum moved on to shooting two undersung classics of a kind, His Kind of Woman (directed, like Danger, by John Farrow) and Macao. Both films costarred Jane Russell as Mitchum’s love interest. As Lee Server, biographer of Mitchum and Ava Gardner, put it, the pairing of Mitchum and Russell was monumental, a collision of RKO’s “biggest assets, the screen’s two greatest chests.”

  Howard put his special touch on His Kind of Woman—meaning he demanded rewrites and reshoots, and tinkered with the cut until it was to his liking. He would brag to Louella Parsons that this was “the best picture I’ve ever made,” and for once, the boast was accurate. Both a complicated, romantic noir thriller plumbing much metaphorical power out of a plot dealing with false identities and risk management, and a campy-comic spoof of contrived Hollywood action and the stars who perform it, the film anticipated blockbusters of the 1980s in its ability to surf multiple genres successfully.

  It’s also a fine example of Hughes’s preference for titles that misrepresent the content of the film in favor of justifying an ad campaign built around ogling his lead actress’s prized assets. Though the romance between Mitchum’s gambler and Russell’s singer/gold-digger injects some much-needed sex and glamour into a production whose shoestring budget shows in everything from the stark lighting to the extremely limited locations, this is not a movie that’s primarily concerned with any kind of woman. In fact, in order to ensure that the film’s final act is a boys-only affair—in which Vincent Price, as a comically pompous swashbuckling movie star, saves shirtless damsel-in-distress Mitchum from gangsters who want to inject him with a zombifying Nazi anesthetic and surgically steal his face—at some point Jane is literally locked, kicking and screaming, in a closet.

  And yet His Kind of Woman provides the finest showcase of what Howard Hughes saw in Jane Russell—besides for what a character in Macao would call “her obvious talents.” First seen singing for fun in a Mexican bus stop bar, Russell’s Lenore is the kind of globetrotting, independent woman who a movie like this likes to imply is a “professional” (when Mitchum asks the bartender about her, he’s warned he can’t afford her: “She’s drinking champagne, fifteen dollars a bottle”). In fact, she’s a con artist, who has taken a new name and a new debutante identity because she thinks it’ll help her marry rich. Throughout the film, as Lenore maintains her facade when she needs to while also slowly opening herself up to Mitchum’s attentions, Russell rides a fine line between projecting a powerful sexual confidence and exposing an understated neediness that feels more authentic than what you’d typically see in a 1950s Hollywood melodrama. Though Russell is costumed according to Hughes’s tasteless conception of a sex goddess (a skintight sequined gown with a tulle back skirt is one tacky highlight), her beauty is more middle-of-the-road than ethereal, and as such, she paired nicely with Mitchum, the everyman who always looked like he either just rolled out of bed or just got rolled in a bar fight. Jane Russell was Howard’s idea of the girl next door. Here Jane was a prize to be won, but a realistically flawed trophy, within a men’s fantasy that was much more melancholic and world-weary than the juvenile masculinity Hughes had injected into The Outlaw. In the film’s best-written scene, Mitchum and Price discussed Lenore:

  “You in love with her?” Mitchum’s Dan asks Price’s Mark.

  “My wife says I’ve never been in love with anyone except myself.”

  “Who has?” Mitchum shrugs.

  Wistfully, as if lost in a dream, Price responds, “People have.”

  This exchange happens just after Mark, the actor who has been pressed into a real gunfight after acting them out in the movies for decades, has admitted to hiding behind personas: “You know something? All my life I’ve suspected myself of being a phony. Half of it I’ve been acting—a hundred lives, a hundred stories, all of them phony. This is the only time the guns have ever been loaded with anything but blanks.”

  His Kind of Woman imagines a scenario in which fakers and phonies, loners and drifters, can finally stop running, and stop lying, and find something real in one another. It was a B-movie through and through, but it was the most thematically substantive—and possibly personal—movie Howard Hughes had anything to do with.

  Russell’s character in His Kind of Woman gestured toward the kinds of women played in 1930s Hollywood movies by Marlene Dietrich—traveling entertainer/outlaws, frankly sexual creatures brought by love to either doom or domestication (same difference?). For Russell and Mitchum’s next match-up, Hughes hired the man who had directed Dietrich in some of the most beautiful, ambiguous, and adult depictions of sex and love in the history o
f Hollywood film. Josef von Sternberg hit his peak working with Dietrich in the 1930s, on films like Morocco, Shanghai Express, and Blonde Venus, but he hadn’t directed a film since The Shanghai Gesture in 1941. He had been brought into the RKO fold by The Outlaw screenwriter Jules Furthman, who had also written many of the Dietrich-Sternberg collaborations, and whose tastes Hughes trusted enough to assign him to the project most dear to him during this era, Jet Pilot. Jet Pilot was a Hughes pipe dream, an attempt to re-create the success of Hell’s Angels in the jet age, starring Janet Leigh and John Wayne. Von Sternberg would perfunctorily shoot Furthman’s script, and then Hughes and several other directors would spend years tinkering with the footage. In the meantime, Hughes would shift Sternberg over to working on Macao.

  Macao was conceived as a sexy, exotic adventure, not unlike those earlier Von Sternberg–Dietrich films, with Russell as Julie, a singer who has grown weary of going from port to port running various scams, and Mitchum as Nick, a drifter who shot a man in a dispute over a woman five years earlier, and has been on the run ever since. As in His Kind of Woman, there’s a question of identity: here Nick is a petty criminal with a heart of gold who is wrongly suspected of being a cop, and Jane once again plays a singing con artist, but here her modus operandi—to manipulate men any way she needed to—was more blatant.

  On a boat from Hong Kong to Macao, Julie is in a cabin with a man she hustled for ferry fare. Expecting something in return for covering her passage, he tries to force himself on her. She throws her shoe at him and it flies out the cabin window and hits Nick as he’s walking by. He comes in and slugs the would-be rapist so hard he passes out. A second later, Nick takes a hero’s prerogative and kisses Julie. “Now we’re even,” she says as she walks out on him. In the next scene she changes her stockings on the deck of the boat, throwing the old pair to the winds. They blow into Mitchum’s face on the deck below. When she slinks off, disinterested in him, he tucks her stocking in his pocket—and realizes she took the opportunity of their clinch to steal his wallet.

  And yet, for Julie, the thrill of petty crime is gone. Sturdy and statuesque, poured into a wiggle dress with a collar splitting the difference between sailor and Peter Pan, Julie strolls through a Macao casino where she’s heard there’s work for her, and every head turns. Her walk is heavy but quicksand slow. She’s like a brontosaurus, plodding through an open field, with so many meals all around for the grazing that she’s lost interest in food. At the job interview, the boss tells her, “We’ll get along a lot better if you take that chip off your shoulder.” She sighs, and then says, with palpable melancholy, “It never did me any good anyway.” This is Jane Russell at her most unpretentious and over-it, and yet she’s able to drop a wisecrack limned with what feels like a raw truth. She’s never come across more like a female Robert Mitchum.

  The affinity between the characters, and the actors, is best expressed in a scene in which the two lazily cruise around the harbor in a small rented boat. Before she was a singer, she tells him, she was a fortune-teller. The secret to telling a stranger’s fortune, she says, is understanding that “everybody’s lonely and worried and sorry. Everybody’s looking for something.” He invites her to join him on a near-deserted island, where he’s been offered a job managing a plantation. She says she will. She looks at him like she’s serious, and she can’t believe it’s finally happening. He asks her to wait a month, until he gets his affairs in order. Russell’s face floods with silent desperation. The dream they lived in for a moment is over. She can’t wait a month—who can trust a man who says he’s going to do something in a month?

  Jane Russell’s Macao character arc is of a world-weary woman secretly longing to let down her impenetrable guard, who finally does just that when Mitchum’s Nick reveals himself to be a good guy (and not a cop). You do root for her and Mitchum to get together, but at the same time, the persona Julie walks around inside is so tough, so knowing and full of contempt for the kind of bullshit that a woman who looks like her has to put up with (in the movies, in real life), that it’s hard not to root for her to keep it.

  No one on the set of Macao thought they were making a masterpiece, but the material was well tailored for its stars’ talents. And yet it became clear pretty quickly that Von Sternberg believed the casting was the problem. He’d try to buddy up to Mitchum by negging Jane: “Now we have to bolster this beautiful girl with no talent.” But Mitchum and Russell had bonded, and Mitchum’s loyalty was to his costar—as was Howard’s. Von Sternberg was fired.

  As became typical of films in which Hughes took a special interest, no one person was allowed to put a personal stamp on the production, and thus seven writers and four directors (including Robert Stevenson, Mel Ferrer, and Nicholas Ray) each laid their hands on the film before it was done. At one point, Ray handed Mitchum a legal pad and some pencils asked him to write a scene for them to shoot in the afternoon. “The best scenes are the ones he wrote,” Russell said later. “Where we acted like natural people.” Directors came and went, but Jane Russell stayed. “Instead of fingers in that pie,” Von Sternberg quipped of Macao, “half a dozen clowns immersed parts of their anatomy in it.”

  Hughes had only been truly concerned with one anatomical part—well, two. After viewing footage of Russell in a gold lamé gown, he had written a detailed memo about the appearance of the actress’s breasts. “The fit of the dress around her breasts is not good, and gives the impression, God forbid, that her breasts are padded or artificial,” Hughes wrote. “It would be extremely valuable if the dress incorporated some kind of a point at the nipple because I know this does not ever occur naturally in the case of Jane Russell. Her breasts always appear to be round, or flat, at that point so something artificial here would be extremely desirable if it could be incorporated without destroying the contour of the rest of her breasts.” To sum up, he added, “I want the rest of her wardrobe, wherever possible, to be low-necked (and by that I mean as low as the law allows) so that the customers can get a look at the part of Russell which they pay to see.”

  Whatever can be said against Macao’s cobbled-together finished form, the film’s considerable lasting value lies in its few visual ideas that are distinctly Sternbergian (for instance, his insistence on filming action and women from behind nets and thin curtains, giving the mundane a voyeuristic excitement), and in the unusual chemistry between its stars. The film pits an independent woman who is bone tired of living with her guard up and doing it all alone, against a man who has never taken responsibility for anyone but is suddenly moved to stick his neck out (to borrow a phrase from this kind of character’s archetype, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca) for a lady he could love. In a classic Hollywood romance, the friction comes from opposites, or creatures thrown together by chance with opposite fates, finding a small piece of common ground, or recognition. In the Mitchum-Russell movies, from the beginning two iconoclastic loners each recognize themselves in one another, and thus assume the other can’t be trusted. The male/female versions of one another, they spend the course of the narrative letting desire overcome instinct.

  It was no accident that this RKO dream team put together by Hughes consisted of performers that each conformed to Hughes’s personal ideals. Jane Russell, of course, was the first in a long line of brunettes in Hughes’s life, and she set a larger-than-life template for a number of women to follow, from Ava Gardner to Faith Domergue to Jean Peters. And, according to Terry Moore, “The man that [Hughes] thought had the greatest sexual powers in the entire world was Bob Mitchum.” Mitchum was everything Hughes was not: built like a brick wall, never anxious, always cool. (Hughes once admiringly told Mitchum that the actor was “like a pay toilet—you don’t give a shit for nothing.”) Because of these qualities, not only did women flock to Mitchum, but he was able to effortlessly get the kind of publicity that Hughes had to bend over backward over piles of money in order to generate.

  Mitchum’s ability to bumble upward was all the more attractive as the resp
onsibility of running a major studio began to weigh heavily on Hughes. As RKO’s output slowed to a trickle of disappointing movies under Hughes’s watch, the “Managing-Director” seized on an opportunity to misdirect inquiring minds away from the studio’s failures and toward the old-standby image of Hughes the American Hero.

  Chapter 21

  The Morals Clause

  A dozen years into her stardom, Jane Russell was still more likely to be seen in a still photo in a newspaper than she was on a movie screen. The February 1952 premiere of The Las Vegas Story opened up new opportunities for Hughes’s publicity team to plant photos of Russell in major publications on the flimsiest excuses for news. One February morning in 1952, she sneered out from the pages of the Los Angeles Times, white blouse unbuttoned dangerously far, edifying the caption: “Jane Russell’s favorite way to relax is to lie in a tub of warm water scented with oil of pine. She is seen in the new picture, RKO’s The Las Vegas Story.”

  The details of Jane’s bathing habits were likely planted by RKO as an attempt at misdirection, to change the narrative. A few days earlier, the papers were full of reports that Russell had been seen at the Las Vegas Story junket, not in a bathrobe but with a shiner. While the Los Angeles Times had run a photo of a smiling Russell in sunglasses, the top half of the front page of their lower-rent rival the Mirror was occupied by massive type, declaring: “JANE RUSSELL’S BLACK EYE STIRS VEGAS STORIES.” The rest of the page was taken up by a large picture of Russell in a low-cut gown, as well as smaller shots of her husband, Bob Waterfield, and comedian Ben Blue. The photo of the two men was captioned with the tease of a scoop: “Jane Russell is doctoring a black eye, made more conspicuous by huffy flight of husband, Bob Waterfield, to Los Angeles. Hectic Las Vegas weekend started when Comic Ben Blue made remarks about Jane’s assets. Blue said Bob didn’t accept apology.”