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

by Karina Longworth

  We made love.

  High Heels was never made; with Terry back in the Hughes fold, it didn’t need to be. Hughes and his employees would soon be conducting subterfuge operations to hide Terry and Howard’s ongoing affair from Glenn Davis. One afternoon, Jeff Chouinard, Hughes’s top security man, got a call ordering him to come to the Beverly Hills Hotel immediately. When he got there, a driver handed Chouinard an envelope and instructed him to drive to Balboa, in Orange County, to drop it into the mail. The envelope was addressed to Davis. Terry was holed up in the hotel with Hughes, but she wanted Glenn to think she was visiting a girlfriend out of town. The following week, Jeff got another call to pick up another envelope addressed to Davis, but this time he was told to deliver it to Terry’s husband in person, and then tail the football player for the rest of the day. This envelope contained Terry Moore Davis’s wedding ring.

  Chouinard drove to Glendale, handed Davis the envelope, and waited, but though Davis seemed upset, he didn’t go anywhere but to visit Terry’s sick mom in the hospital. Later, after losing Chouinard, Davis showed up at the Beverly Hills Hotel and waited until Hughes emerged from a back entrance. According to Chouinard, Davis then “pummeled Hughes into unconsciousness and left him bleeding in the grass. Within an hour [Hughes] was on his way to San Francisco for treatment in a hospital and Hughes’ aides were swarming everywhere at the hotel to be sure the incident was covered up.”

  An FBI informant observed Hughes in San Francisco, and sometime later J. Edgar Hoover was given a report about the fight, noting that Hughes had “suffered several broken ribs and facial bruises,” and that Davis had suffered an undisclosed injury that would prevent him from playing professional football that year.

  According to Terry, after this she moved in with Hughes, although not into a permanent home—ever since vacating the house on Muirfield, he liked to relocate constantly. Sometimes they stayed at a house rented at 10000 Sunset Boulevard, the driveway of which had been enshrined in Hollywood history a year earlier when it was used to film Joe Gillis’s flight from debt collectors and into the web of Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Sometimes they stayed at Howard Hawks’s house, sometimes a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The latter, Terry would say, “was convenient, especially when I was on a picture because we could get room service.”

  It was also convenient for Hughes, because he could command several bungalows at once for his exclusive use: he could call Terry in her bungalow from another bungalow, tell her he had to work all night, and then carry out a rendezvous with another woman in yet another bungalow. On at least one occasion, Hughes had a new, teenage contract actress move directly into a bungalow upon her arrival in Los Angeles. This girl, like most of the new arrivals, was accompanied by her mother—at least at first, until Hughes’s aides had convinced the young would-be actress that she would need to persuade her mother to go home if she was serious about her career. A month passed, and the girl had still not met Hughes—who was living in the bungalow across the way. One night he called her from his bungalow and told her he was in New York but would soon fly in to have dinner with her. Then the next night, he called her and said, “I’m in Denver and as soon as the weather clears I’m going on to Houston then I’ll be in Los Angeles.” Every night he called, and told her he was getting closer to her—while all the while he was just a few feet away. Finally, Hughes decided that the time was right. He told the man he had surveilling this girl to go home for the night—he could take it from here.

  JEAN PETERS’S FIRST FILM, Captain from Castile, had been directed by Henry King, a fixture of Hollywood’s old school—he had helped establish the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and had discovered Ronald Colman, Tyrone Power, and Gary Cooper—whose sensibility was generally old-fashioned. Jean would star in three King films, the most interesting of which was Wait ’til the Sun Shines, Nellie. Based on a novel called I Can Hear Them Sing, it tells the story of Ben (David Wayne), a barber who arrives in a brand-new, tiny town in rural Illinois at the turn of the twentieth century, determined to grow a business and a family in lockstep with the development of the community. Ben doesn’t share this ambition with his new wife, Nellie (played by Jean), whose idea of the American dream is an exciting life in the big city. The movie begins with the two of them on their wedding night, on a train headed west. Ben has promised Nellie they will settle in Chicago, but instead they get off the train in nowheresville and move into the apartment in the back of a barbershop. He’s just temporarily renting the shop, Ben tells Nellie, and someday soon they will get back on track to pursuing their shared dream life. In fact, this is Ben’s dream life—he’s bought the business and the building, setting up roots in this town without consulting his spouse, and lying to her that their long-term vision of the future is the same.

  Nellie is a dutiful wife, at first, churning out children and keeping house while her husband continues to lie to her that they will someday leave the small town for the big city. Whenever Nellie agitates to move on to Chicago, Ben buys her something lavish, which has the dual benefit of distracting her and making it harder for the family to just pick up and go. But as time drags on, Nellie starts to lose her ability to buy in to the life her husband has locked her into, and she breaks from the chains of what’s expected of her. She becomes the first woman in their small town to wear lipstick, and indulges in a flirtation with a married man. When Nellie finally finds incontrovertible proof that her husband has been deceiving her for their entire marriage, she boards a train for Chicago with the other man. They immediately die in a catastrophic wreck.

  Nellie’s death occurs about forty-five minutes into the two-hour-long movie that has her name in the title—and in which the actress who played her was first billed—and it’s absolutely shocking when it happens. By the end of the film (which turns into an epic morality play, spanning fifty years in the life of Ben and his growing city), you realize that what was really shocking is that for forty-five minutes, this deeply strange movie about the darkness that underlines the American experience sympathized with a female character who wasn’t satisfied playing her role in an archetypical cornfed domestic drama.

  Throughout her time on-screen, Jean Peters is fierce and feisty. When Nellie gets mad, Peters spits out a rage that feels uncomfortably naturalistic, like a precursor of the kind of acting Gena Rowlands would be doing under the direction of her husband, John Cassavetes, in the 1970s. Wait ’til the Sun Shines, Nellie was not the film that made Jean Peters a star—that was Viva Zapata, a turgid but high-profile and well-received Elia Kazan effort in which both Peters and Marlon Brando donned brownface to play Mexicans—but Nellie was the film that distinguishes her, in retrospect, as a real actress.

  Peters’s star-making process took some time. Two decades after his love letter to Billie Dove’s silver hair and strategically placed moles, Sidney Skolsky was still churning out “Tintypes,” and in his first such profile of Jean, published in March 1948, he presented Peters as almost painfully down-home. Noting that she lived on a farm in Ohio until her arrival in Los Angeles two years earlier, Skolsky wrote that Jean had yet “to become Hollywood. She likes to think she economizes by making her own dresses.” In addition, Skolsky claimed that Jean didn’t know how to dance, was “a better than average skeet shooter,” and “eats three big meals a day and munches between them.” Conforming to his own format as if by force, Skolsky added his customary sexy details at the end: “She prefers a shower to a bath and takes a delight in drying herself. She is ticklish. . . . She sleeps in a short nightgown in a double bed.” This perfunctory creeping aside, the overall picture you get is that Jean Peters is somewhere between Ingrid Bergman–natural and Katharine Hepburn–mannish. (Skolsky was not the only one to notice Jean’s lack of polish. “While Jean was pretty,” Sheilah Graham allowed, “[s]he was not particularly chic. She made her own clothes and had no use for a razor or depilatory. Jean was determined to remain as nature made her.”)

 
By 1949, Jean had made just three films since her arrival in Hollywood three years earlier (in contrast, Ava Gardner appeared in three films released in 1949 alone), and she hadn’t yet captured the imagination of either the public or the men in power at Fox who could have pushed for her to be cast in more movies. With the initial presentation of Jean as a farm girl who refused to be changed by Hollywood clearly not working as a propellant of stardom, around this time the coverage of Jean began to change, reflecting an effort to jump-start her stalling career by transitioning her star persona into something more conventionally glamorous. The Los Angeles Times’ John L. Scott reported that Jean had changed during her three years in Hollywood, for the better: “When Jean arrived at the 20th Century Fox studio in 1946, she was a very pretty, wholesome-looking but slightly chubby girl,” Scott judged. “Three years have turned her into a svelte, grown-up beauty with a fine sense of humor and a charm that is not turned on and off, in the Hollywood fashion, like a faucet.” Nonsense stories about Jean’s sex appeal started popping up, such as one claiming that Peters had been voted as having “the most kissable lips in Hollywood.” The makeover was blessed by Louella Parsons, who allowed that “in the beginning [she] wore jeans and a funny little cap and cared very little about her appearance, but a transformation took place last year and Jean Peters, once a plain Jane, has become a real glamor girl.”

  By 1952, Skolsky had issued an updated Jean Peters Tintype. It included a few of the same pieces of information, such as Jean’s love of sports and distaste for makeup, but it toned down the potential implications that Jean was too unusual. “She’s a tomboy,” Skolsky allowed, “but when necessary can display all the feminine charms.” And this time he kicked up the sex at the end. Instead of the “short nightgown” Jean was said to wear to bed in 1948, in 1952, “She sleeps with absolutely nothing on.”

  As her star persona transformed from farm girl to fabulous, she was graduating to more important roles in the process (the heavily hyped Zapata, for which Fox chief Darryl Zanuck personally selected Jean, was a big break; it was Marlon Brando’s next film after A Streetcar Named Desire had made him a major movie star). Now Hedda Hopper latched on to Jean’s guarded “real” life as a source of mystique. In a March 1952 Photoplay profile, Hopper, without naming Hughes, implied that Jean’s unwillingness to offer her personal life up for public consumption began when she was shooting Captain from Castile on location in Morelia, Mexico. “One of the most eligible bachelors landed his plane there,” Hopper wrote. “Whereupon the place swarmed with reporters and photographers—and the days of Jean’s free give-and-take ended abruptly.” With that, Hopper added, an “iron curtain descended on her life.”

  If her private life was increasingly hidden, Jean was working more than ever. Nineteen fifty-three would be the only year of her career in which she’d have starring roles in four feature films. Two of these movies came and went and were swiftly forgotten: Vicki (a remake of the 1941 noir I Wake Up Screaming, in which Jean would take on the role played in the original by Carole Landis, the blonde whose suicide shared the pages of Time with Hughes’s purchase of RKO), and A Blueprint for Murder, a plodding procedural in which Peters plays the most boring murderous gold-digger in midcentury cinema. The other two movies were more significant.

  For all of the publicity promising that Jean was a fully functional glamour girl, she could still be useful to Fox as a comparatively sexless counterbalance to the actress who would soon prove to be the most valuable of her era. In Niagara, Peters was tasked with providing opposition to Marilyn Monroe, who had her first billed-above-the-title A-film role as Rose, a sexpot who drives her insecure husband George (Joseph Cotten) to murder both his wife and her lover. Peters played Polly, one half of a couple on a delayed honeymoon at the same Niagara Falls cabin complex as Rose and George. Polly’s husband promises her that even though it’s happening three years after their marriage, and only because he wants to network with a colleague vacationing in the same place, the trip will be just like a “real” honeymoon. “It should be better,” she answers. She pauses meaningfully, then looks at him with sly eyes. “I’ve got my union card now.”

  Practiced in marital sex though Polly may be, the film places in diametrically opposed boxes Peters (dressed in oversize blouses and cardigans, at one point with a girlish bow tied around her French braid) and Monroe (whose costumes were always simultaneously too tight and falling off, and whose wiggle-skirted walk away from the camera was promoted as the real sight to see in a movie set at a famed sightseeing locale). When her husband catches a glimpse of Rose dancing, he teases Polly: “Why don’t you ever get a dress like that?” Polly smirks. “Listen, for a dress like that, you’ve got to start laying plans when you’re about thirteen,” she says.

  Sex is clearly not the center of Polly’s appeal, and the sentiment of Niagara is that it’s safer that way, that it’s better to be a Jean Peters—not sexually exciting, maybe, but serviceably pretty and not dangerous—than a Marilyn Monroe. But her response also distances her from the world of women who exist to be ogled by men, and puts her in the company of the men—namely, as the kind of woman who will join a man in making leering jokes about other women. It’s an odd spin on the male gaze for an actress whose sexual appeal had already been a subject of public discussion. What’s even odder is that while Niagara portrays men broadly dismissing women as whores or hysterics (Peters’s character is at first accused of being delusional when she insists that Rose’s husband is up to no good), by the end the sympathies of the movie are entirely with the women.

  Niagara would be followed by the film in which Jean gave her finest performance, in the most difficult and, to modern eyes, problematic role of her career (and given that Ohio-born Peters was twice cast as a Mexican and once as an Apache, that’s saying something). In Pickup on South Street, Peters played Candy, a sometime streetwalker who finds herself on the road to redemption after discovering that the ex-boyfriend for whom she’s been working as a courier is a Communist spy. When pickpocket Skip (Richard Widmark) steals a cache of microfilm that Candy was unwittingly transporting to the enemy, she tries to get it back, and finds herself instantly attracted to the thief. What follows is an unsettling and unabashedly sexualized depiction of domestic violence. Skip socks her, believing, in the dark, that she’s a male intruder. When he realizes she’s a beautiful woman, he seductively caresses the jaw he smashed, his lips inches away from her face as he interrogates her in a whisper. It’s foreplay—it leads to a kiss, which casts a spell, which breaks when he threatens her. She leaves, but comes back. Every time Candy visits Skip, they can’t keep their hands off one another, in two senses of the word: he is always violent toward her, and she is always receptive to the passion that comes with his aggression.

  20th Century Fox had pushed Marilyn Monroe for the role of Candy, but director Samuel Fuller had decided to cast Jean Peters instead, and not because he liked her work (all he had seen was Captain from Castile, and he wasn’t impressed), but because, while casting Pickup, Fuller was introduced to Jean at the Fox commissary, and after a brief round of hellos, had watched her walk away from him.

  “I looked at Peters’ pert figure and her legs and thought to myself that she had Candy’s bowed legs,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The kind of gams you get from streetwalking.” When he auditioned her, Fuller was surprised to find that Jean was also “a very intelligent woman, a fine human being.” When she asked him why he had decided to cast her, Fuller told her the truth: “Your legs, kid. They’re very sexy. They’re also a little arched. I’m not saying a tank could drive through them. But maybe a small Jeep.”

  None of Jean’s previous directors had looked at her and seen a “streetwalker’s gams,” and her screen presence totally transformed under Fuller’s gaze. In previous films, even when Jean looked beautiful or was coded as an object of desire, there seemed to be a disconnect in her performances. You never got a palpable feeling of what it felt like to be in her body, not even in h
er very good depiction of a deceived woman’s rage in Wait ’til the Sun Shines, Nellie. The difference in Pickup on South Street is evident in its first scene. As Skip’s picking her pocketbook on the subway, he moves to face her, their bodies almost pressed together on the crowded train. Fuller’s camera fixates on her gaze at the thief, her lustful, come-and-get-me eyes and busy, bitten lips. Candy is so distracted ogling Skip that she doesn’t realize until it’s too late that she’s been robbed. The styling plays a role—Candy’s overdone makeup, clunky jewelry, and deep V-cut belted dress are all new looks for Peters on-screen—but the power of Jean’s projection of desire, and the physicality of that performance, can’t be discounted. It’s the rumbling, queasy-making engine of the whole movie.

  When Candy reports to her ex that the parcel she was meant to deliver for him was stolen, he insists she use her connections to the underworld from her “past” to find the thief. “You’ve knocked around a lot,” he says meaningfully. “You know people who know people.” Candy scowls. “You going to throw that in my face again?”—confirming that he was implying that she had “knocked around” as a prostitute. We now have the idea that Candy is a “professional,” and thus able to pretend she wants to have sex with a man in order to get what she really wants from him, in our heads as we watch Candy and Skip’s relationship form. But even knowing that, we forget that she could be manipulating him, because her desire for him is so convincing.

  “I like you,” she breathes at Skip, halfway through the movie.

  He doesn’t want to believe her. “Everybody likes everybody when they’re kissing.”

  “I’ve kissed a lot of guys, but honestly, I’ve never felt like this.” We believe her—in spite of the fact that his every tender action toward her is matched by an act of violence.

  Are Candy and Skip practicing sadomasochism—a consensual performance of violence as foreplay, or a sex act in itself? Whatever is going on here, it’s not exactly portrayed as a pattern of abuse that we should be worried about. The film presents Candy as a girl who has not just “kicked around” but been kicked around her whole life, who not only comes to expect it but maybe even fetishizes it—with the right person. When her old boyfriend beats her up so bad she ends up in the hospital, Skip becomes protective. Has he suddenly realized that violence against women is ugly and wrong—or is he mad that another man tread on his turf? Like much about this wildly expressionistic crime noir, made under the strictures of the Code, that is left ambiguous, but when Candy and Skip end up together at the fadeout we are meant to think it’s a happy ending—and stop thinking before we wonder what that relationship will actually look like.