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

by Karina Longworth

  “RKO WAS SO PECULIAR,” Sally Forrest remembered. “It was like a vacant studio, and the most peculiar things would happen—so strange.”

  While Hughes quarantined his studio and prevaricated on which films to produce and when, his contract stars could only hurry up and wait. “The only thing in production right now on the RKO lot is Bob Mitchum’s truck,” Jane Russell joked to Hedda Hopper. “Bob’s having the vehicle converted into a living quarters to use on his ramblings. I just stand by and heckle Mitch while he works.” Jane had plenty of time to talk to journalists. A misleading headline in the New York World-Telegram promised the scoop on the “Two Men in Russell’s Life,” the two being Hughes and Bob Waterfield, who, it was reported, “budgets her income, pays her bills and gives her a pretty meager portion of her salary for an allowance.”

  Production would resume at RKO in May, but because the studio couldn’t ramp up fast enough to meet their distribution goals, it began investing heavily in foreign films. Thus Howard Hughes’s mismanaged studio, led by an increasingly disturbed xenophobe who had staked its future on eradicating so-called un-Americanism, became responsible for bringing some of the most lauded non-American films of the era to American screens, including Kon-Tiki (the Norwegian documentary that won the Oscar in that category in 1951), Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa’s groundbreaking drama that pioneered the showing of a single event from multiple, different perspectives), and Umberto D, arguably the peak of Italian Neorealism, directed by Hughes’s old friend, Vittorio De Sica.

  By August, the Wall Street Journal was voicing skepticism that Hughes had really shut down RKO to clean out the Commies: “Some industry observers claim the production cutback actually came because the firm’s pictures were having a box office slump.” To call it a slump was to put it gently: RKO’s fortunes had steadily plummeted in the four years that Hughes had owned the studio. So it wasn’t a huge shock when, in September 1952, he agreed to sell his interest in RKO to a syndicate of Chicago-based buyers headed by Ralph E. Stolkin, who had become a millionaire by his mid-thirties thanks to an investment in television tubes. The purchase price was $7 million, at least a million dollars less than what Hughes had paid for his shares in 1948. The buyers made a down payment of $1,250,000, joined the board of RKO, and agreed to pay the rest of what they owed by the beginning of 1955.

  Two months after agreeing to sell RKO, Hughes appeared in court to testify against Paul Jarrico. The key question in the trial was whether Hughes and the studio breached Jarrico’s contract by firing him. The Hughes position held that, on the contrary, Jarrico breached his contract himself by violating its morals cause. It was risky for Hughes to put all of his eggs in the morals clause basket. For one thing, the history of morals clauses in Hollywood is a complicated one, rife with double and inconsistently applied standards. Inserted into all standard contracts after the scandals of the 1920s, morals clauses were mostly used to scare performers into toeing the line. Before the blacklist era, they had never actually been used as the public reasoning for any firing, although they were certainly evoked behind closed doors.*

  Hughes’s own application of the morals clause had previously been indifferent. There was the Robert Mitchum arrest, which had resulted in no censure by RKO, and if anything, the opposite. (Without naming Mitchum, Jarrico cited RKO’s treatment of a star found guilty of “the use of marijuana” in his suit.) Jarrico also stated that RKO “well knows that Howard Hughes, its chief executive, is a person who in the motion picture industry generally, and in Hollywood in particular, is reputed to be an individual whose personal acts and conduct are in constant violation of generally accepted public ‘conventions’ and ‘morals’ in the ordinary sense.” Clearly Jarrico was hoping his lawyers would use Howard’s womanizing against him, and the writer even put together a dossier to help them do it. “Since the issue was his right to take my name off a film under a morality clause,” Jarrico later wrote, “I did think his morality was pertinent; after all, his name was on the film too—and remained on.”

  Rebutting the theory that Jarrico’s morals were a liability to The Las Vegas Story, the writer’s lawyer, after establishing that RKO had marketed the movie as “presented by Howard Hughes,” asked the millionaire what kind of impact it might have had on the film to be “presented” by a man who was famously described in Time magazine as likely to “never die in an airplane . . . [but] at the hands of a woman with a .38.” Hughes’s lawyer loudly objected to the question. Howard just laughed.

  Jarrico’s lawyer then went back to the allegation that Hughes was using the fight against communism as a shell game to avoid responsibility for his failure to sustain RKO as a profitable enterprise. Hughes and his attorneys repeatedly denied that RKO had been “shut down” but conceded that the studio had been and was in a phase of “limited production.”

  When the Hughes side rested their case, Jarrico’s attorney called Richard Davis, one of Howard’s personal publicists, to the stand. Davis acknowledged that he had sent out press releases about Hughes’s clash with Jarrico—which Jarrico’s side said was evidence that Hughes had started the battle as a publicity stunt, as a smoke screen to distract attention from the real troubles at RKO. Hughes’s side protested that Jarrico created the publicity himself by refusing to tell Congress whether or not he was a Communist.

  The trial would go Hughes’s way: by the end of the month, the judge declared he and RKO were within their rights to deny credit to Jarrico on The Las Vegas Story because Jarrico’s conduct before HUAC brought the writer into “public disgrace,” thus violating the morals clause in his contract. But by the time the verdict was issued, the overextended Hughes was hardly in a position to celebrate. A series of Wall Street Journal articles had revealed Ralph Stolkin and his partners in the acquisition of RKO to be shady characters who had ties to mobster Frank Costello. It was revealed that Stolkin and crew had, among other things, presided over a phony children’s charity, and drawn investigation from the Federal Trade Commission and Better Business Bureau for a number of their various commercial ventures, which ranged from the production of gambling machines to the peddling of loans through the mail. As gossip swirled that RKO had been taken over by a group of low-level Chicago gangsters, Stolkin and his men decided to quickly cut their losses. Citing what they called “a mass of unfavorable publicity,” the Stolkin syndicate resigned from the RKO board and within a few months backed out of the deal entirely. Hughes got to keep their $1.25 million deposit. In a year when RKO had lost more than $10 million, Hughes’s personal windfall didn’t sit well with RKO shareholders.

  Hughes now found himself stuck with a studio that he didn’t know how to run, and couldn’t get rid of. And, with the absence of suitable leadership more evident than ever, Hughes would now assume more responsibility over RKO than he ever had before: with the dust still settling from the Stolkin mess, in December 1952 Hughes begrudgingly assumed the position of chairman of the RKO board.

  GIVEN THE INACTIVITY AND disarray at RKO, Ida Lupino had been one of the studio’s most reliable filmmakers. She had very carefully and savvily negotiated her unusual situation, forever crediting the sexist system for giving her a chance, even publicly thanking the censors for their input on her controversial films. A publicity genius like Howard Hughes could not have asked for a better partner.

  He was about to lose her.

  That summer, Ida would make her final film for RKO, The Hitch-Hiker. As if to prove that she could make her gender invisible, Lupino sought out the story of serial killer Billy Cook and worked hard to prepare a script that the MPAA would approve. Aside from the opening moment of the movie, in which an off-camera woman is heard screaming, the film’s cast is entirely male. You could read The Hitch-Hiker as a straight thriller about man’s inhumanity to men, and the Lupino of 1952 hoped that you would. But in hindsight, the film also works as a parable mocking the idea of the male-bonding road trip as a vacation from domestic life, and slyly indicting the horrors of a world free of femin
ine influence.

  As ever, it was the male influence in Lupino’s life that got her in trouble. After The Hitch-Hiker completed her commitment to RKO, Collie Young convinced Ida it was time to go back on their own. He believed that they could make more money distributing their movies themselves. Twenty years after their first date, Ida Lupino’s relationship with Howard Hughes was over.

  Free at last, Ida and Collier set out to make a film that ironically probably would have interested Hughes more than any they’d yet made. In a neat casting gimmick, The Bigamist would star Ida—Collie’s ex-wife—as well as Joan Fontaine, Collie’s current wife. The Bigamist is a loaded ideological weapon, a particularly dangerous one for 1953, and with it Lupino pulled off an incredibly delicate balancing act. The film suggests that the titular man with two wives believed he was entitled to take up with a second woman (played by Ida) because his first wife was barren and had gone to work outside the home. Having seen two marriages dissolve in part due to her professional ambition, Ida cast herself as the opposite of a determined careerist—the agreeable sort of lady for whom it would be a relief to give up work in exchange for a man’s love and a home to keep in order to make that man happy.

  The Bigamist plays out from the husband’s point of view, allowing the film to express all of the anxieties of the postwar American male, who had returned from combat to a world in which women had assumed power in their absence—and didn’t always want to give that power up. By creating a film that dealt with these issues in a way that seemed to be entirely sympathetic to such men, Lupino was able to do a kind of Trojan horse act. No one could accuse her of trying to upend gender norms by depicting a man’s frustrations with a wife who seemed uninterested in wifely duties, or for structuring a story around the fact that to seek solace in a second woman while still married to another is both against the law and against an ethical code that ran deeper in society than the current masculinity crisis. In other words, without saying so directly, The Bigamist understood that men were upset by their wives’ ambitions and desires outside the domestic sphere, but it also told them that finding another, different woman without those ambitions and desires was not the correct solution. The movie ends with a judge wondering aloud if either of the bigamist’s wives even wanted him back—as close as a film of 1953 could get to suggesting that two adult women would be better off alone than with a selfish, duplicitous man. While most audiences at the time would have read the film literally, today we can see The Bigamist as a vicious parable attacking the impossible social climate in which Lupino was attempting to work as a director, in which she would never be able to reconcile her stereotypically “male” job with the era’s propaganda insisting that a “normal” woman’s main priority was to breed and serve a man’s needs.

  The Bigamist made Lupino the first actress of the sound era to direct herself in a Hollywood feature film. But once again, Collie proved to be lacking as a businessman. The independent distribution gamble he thought would make them more money than their RKO deal failed when The Bigamist, which was well reviewed, was not booked into enough theaters to make money at the box office. In the interest of putting her marriage first, Ida then hired Don Siegel to direct her and Howard Duff in a script she wrote, Private Hell 36. Siegel said he had a hell of a time working with Mr. and Mrs. Lupino, whom he wrote off as “talented but pretentious.” There was also, as Siegel put it, “too much alcohol in the air” on set, and his direction and the performances suffered.

  By the time that movie was finished, Ida and Collie’s production company had fallen apart. Ida felt getting into distribution was their “one fatal mistake.” The Bigamist would be the last feature film that Ida Lupino would direct for thirteen years.

  Chapter 22

  Rivalry at Fox

  For a supposed newlywed, Howard Hughes spent a lot of time away from his supposed wife. Before long, Terry Moore became paranoid that he was involved with other women. She’d make accusations, ask him to tell her the truth, but he denied it all. Finally, on one phone call, he said to her, “If you still think it’s true, catch me. Go on. Catch me.”

  Terry almost always did what Howard told her to do.

  She told her father she suspected that Hughes was really in Las Vegas, cheating on her, even though he had told her he was busy with airplane stuff in Santa Monica.

  “The son-of-a-bitch,” Terry’s father responded. “I told you he was full of it. I never did believe there was a ship’s log. I never believed you were married to him for one minute. He’s never believed it for one minute either. If you catch him red-handed, will you give him up?”

  Terry agreed that she would, and her father called a friend who purported to be an ex-agent for the FBI. Terry, her parents and the FBI guy headed to Vegas. They found Howard at the Desert Inn. Terry spied the man she believed to be her husband walking into the casino’s restaurant with his aide Walter Kane, a very young blond woman, and several members of the blonde’s family. Terry watched as the family admired a new wardrobe of bathing suits that Howard had bought for the girl, whom Terry described as “a tall string bean with an unhealthy pallor.”

  Terry couldn’t watch any longer. She approached the table and introduced herself to the new girl. “I don’t want to interrupt,” Terry said to Hughes. “I’m very, very busy.” Terry made her exit, and back home in Glendale, she vowed she would never see Howard again.

  Three weeks later, Terry got a call from Glenn Davis, a football star who played for the Los Angeles Rams and had dated Elizabeth Taylor, who was three years younger than Terry and one of her best friends. Terry and Glenn started going out. With Glenn, unlike with Howard, she could hang out with boys and girls her own age. She could even eat food that Hughes had banned, like garlic.

  Howard called all the time, trying to defend himself for the incident in Vegas. When she would pick up the phone and hear Howard’s voice, Terry’s body would start to shake. “Be strong,” her mother told her—after all, she had made a promise to her father. Her mother would point to a framed portrait of Glenn and make her daughter focus on what was really important to her. “Look at him, Terry,” she’d say. “You can be proud to take him anywhere. You’re back among the living.”

  But Terry still loved Howard, and she told her mother so. “Nonsense,” Louella Koford said. “He has you brainwashed, but you’ll get over it.”

  Terry focused on giving Hughes the impression that she was already over it. One night she took his call just to inform him that she and Davis were going to get married.

  “Are you crazy?” she recalled Hughes firing back. “You’re married to me.”

  “It never happened,” Terry insisted. “It’s all just a bad dream.”

  In fact, Terry didn’t really want to marry Glenn Davis, but she felt that everyone around her—her friends, her family, her studio—was pushing her into it. At the last minute, she agreed to meet Hughes at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He told her he had something for her. She was hoping that he would “beg my forgiveness, slip the largest diamond in the world on my finger, and announce to the world that I couldn’t marry America’s Sweetheart, heartthrob Glenn Davis, because I was already Mrs. Howard Robard Hughes.” (This desire for Hughes to make a bold gesture, claiming her as his for all the world to see, was inconsistent with her claims that it was she who had wanted to keep her marriage to Hughes under wraps for the sake of her career. Then again, consistency is not necessarily the strong suit of twenty-two-year-old lovestruck actresses.)

  A bold declaration of love was not what Hughes had to give. Instead, he presented Terry with three paper drugstore bags. Each one contained diaphragms and contraceptive jelly. “You can have your little fling, Helen,” he told her, “but you mustn’t get pregnant. If you do, your nipples will get all brown instead of pretty pink and you’ll get stretch marks, and then I could never take you back.”

  Sadly resigned to the fact that Hughes was not going to take their supposed marriage vows any more seriously than he had already, Mo
ore took his gifted diaphragms with her on her honeymoon with Glenn Davis, whom she married on February 9, 1951. She and Davis moved to Texas, where her husband hoped to get into the oil business. At Davis’s urging, Terry reluctantly called Howard and asked for help getting Glenn a job. Hughes found a position for Glenn in Houston and then had Terry cast in a film at RKO called High Heels, in which Terry would play a taxi dancer,* and for which Hughes would personally supervise the construction of the costumes. Before the movie could begin filming, Hughes came to visit Terry during a wardrobe test. This is how Terry would describe what happened next:

  He held me fast with one hand and slid his other hand beneath the thin material of the dress he had designed, encircling my breast, holding it firmly.

  “They’re still pink,” I whispered.

  Howard pulled me closer and kissed me deeply. With one smooth motion of his gentle hand, he peeled the dress off my body. This was the moment this dress was made for. It fell down around my ankles and I stood naked before him. I wondered how many times he had enacted this scene in his mind.

  This was Howard’s movie, and I was bound to stick to his script. He lifted me out of the dress and put me on his desk. I hungrily pulled him on top of me.

  “Don’t ever leave me again,” he said.