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

by Karina Longworth

  Pickup on South Street was read by the movie press as evidence that Jean Peters’s transformation from tomboy country girl to sex goddess was complete. In interviews, she insisted that this wasn’t the case, that she was no sex symbol, that how she appeared on-screen was not the real her, and that she’d still rather go to a baseball game than a nightclub. She complained that the expectations that went along with being a star on the “sexwagon” could turn “tragic for the career and for the private life, too.” Candy, she said, was an aberration: “I love a flashy, sexy role—when it’s in character. But to be built up purely as a sex queen—no thanks.” As if deliberately throwing shade at Hughes’s handling of Jane Russell, Jean said that though she might occasionally play “a sexy dish,” she thought “sex has been overworked by Hollywood. Take bosoms, for example. They have been so over-exploited that nobody even notices them much anymore.”

  This criticism of Hughes’s go-to film marketing strategy aside, Jean and Howard were still involved, but now their relationship was kept strictly out of the public eye. As one fan magazine complained: “You can scan the picture pages and gossip columns in vain for any indication that Jean is ever seen breathing heavily, as she put it, toward a male in a night spot at all.” This was a noticeable change: “For a long, long time she was seen, but rarely, in the company of one producer and nobody else. After that, she wasn’t seen at all, out or in print.”

  Fuller saw evidence that said “producer” was not only still in Jean’s life, but was, in a sense, directing it. During the rehearsal period before shooting Pickup, Jean would arrive every day on the Fox lot in a car with a driver. The driver would wait right outside Fuller’s bungalow all day while they rehearsed, sunglasses on, a newspaper stretched out on the steering wheel. “I couldn’t make out his face,” Fuller recalled, “but I knew the big guy wasn’t just reading. He was constantly keeping an eye on Jean too. When we finished the session, Jean went outside and got into the front seat of the waiting car and they drove away. On the second day of rehearsal, it became pretty obvious that the driver was her boyfriend.”

  Fuller told Jean that if she wanted to invite this man to come inside and wait for her in Fuller’s office, she was welcome to. “No, no, it’s fine this way,’” Jean said, with a smile on her face.

  The last couple of days of rehearsal, Widmark and Peters went through the paces of their highly sexually charged scenes together. Fuller realized that from where Jean’s boyfriend was parked, he could sit in his driver’s seat and see through the window of the bungalow and get an eyeful of Jean and the actor going at it. It was only then that one of Fuller’s secretaries told him that Peters’s “chauffeur” was Howard Hughes.

  HUGHES AND COLUMNIST SHEILAH Graham had a deal: she would refrain from going to print every time a Hughes girlfriend told her she expected to marry him “soon . . . but we must wait to be sure,” and in exchange Hughes would answer Graham’s calls and give her legit scoops.

  One night in 1952, Hughes phoned Graham at midnight and told her to meet him at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel—he had a scoop. Graham was sick as a dog, but Hughes was a reliable source of information for her column, so she got out of bed. But this time it turned out Howard’s “scoop” was just some trash talk about director Stanley Donen, who was romancing twenty-year-old Elizabeth Taylor—the one young brunette beauty in town who remained impervious to Hughes’s advances. “I almost collapsed with annoyance and a temperature of 101,” Graham recalled. “I marched out as he was saying, ‘Hedda would give this a lead.’ ‘Then give it to her,’ I flung back.”

  Then Graham started hearing rumors about Hughes’s troubles at RKO, and Howard stopped returning her calls. She decided she’d had enough. “I began my next column with, ‘Terry Moore tells me she will marry Howard Hughes on May 18th. . . . But this is not what Howard is telling Mitzi Gaynor’”—yet another young Fox contract actress whom Hughes dated. “All hell broke loose with Howard calling me threatening to ruin me.”

  Graham was not the only columnist Terry Moore told, in the fall of 1952, that she and Hughes were planning to marry. Why would Moore have done this if she believed that she and Hughes had already married, and had not divorced, before her marriage to Davis began—a situation she would keep mum about for another twenty-five years? By now Terry had graduated out of the kid roles, so she was no longer worried about Hughes’s reputation tarnishing her own. A public marriage to Hughes, she may have believed, would legitimize her as an adult star, as well as their relationship. Of course, Terry certainly hoped Hughes would marry her “for real,” out in the open, but actresses who were not in such complicated relationships also played the rhetorical game of telling gossip columnists that they were altar-bound, whether that was accurate or not. In the context of 1950s Hollywood gossip, a relationship was salacious if it wasn’t going to lead to marriage—especially when one member of that relationship sold herself as a religious devotee—so Terry could only get away with advertising herself as Hughes’s consort by promising columnists that she and Howard would soon make it legal.

  Terry Moore was a tabloid figure, but she was also beginning to quietly amass a resume as a serious actress. In Come Back, Little Sheba, she played Marie, a college coed whose sexual temptation throws the household of a middle-aged couple into chaos. Based on a play by William Inge, the great chronicler of repressed sexuality eating through the placid veneer of the twentieth-century American small town, Sheba takes place in the home of Doc (Burt Lancaster) and Lola (Shirley Booth, making her film debut at age fifty-five), a couple who married when their premarital sex got young, vivacious Lola into “trouble.” She miscarried, and twenty years later, she’s a childless matron who speaks in a baby voice to her husband, a melancholic alcoholic who is just barely holding his sobriety together after a year in Alcoholics Anonymous. Lola invites Marie to move in as a boarder, which allows the older woman to exercise her maternal instinct—and also vicariously relive her own youthful juggling of suitors by paying too close attention to Marie’s vacillation between her decent fiancé, who works out of town, and a hunky classmate who is here for her now but won’t commit to a future together. Reminding her cringing husband of their own youthful indiscretion, Lola chirps, “You said you’d love me forever and ever, remember?” A decade before Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? would take similar themes over the edge of grotesque, Sheba explored the horror of a woman aging faster than a man, becoming (to quote Lola) “old and fat and sloppy” in a blink of an eye while her husband just gets more attractive as he matures. The sadness of a husband and wife on different aging tracks is exaggerated visually by the casting: Shirley Booth was fifteen years Burt Lancaster’s senior.

  It would be Shirley Booth, and not Terry, who would actually win Sheba’s only Oscar, but Moore deserved her nomination. Marie is the kind of flirt for whom banter and even playful physical struggle are autopilot, but in the few moments when we get to see her alone, not performing for a man, Moore makes real the character’s inner conflict, her fear of sex commingled with her curious desire. When Marie changes her mind at the last minute about going to bed with the aggressive Turk, in her facial expression we see her understanding that though it was terrifying, she now knows she has the courage to set her own limits and enforce them—and that this is as significant a moment of coming of age as losing her virginity would have been. The movie is really about the older couple, but in order for Inge’s drama of the mundane tragedy of aging to plumb the depths that it does, Terry had to embody the moment of youth before one of two roads is chosen. That she does much more with the part is a testament to her abilities—abilities that she wouldn’t get many more chances to show off.

  Overextended though he was, Hughes certainly made Terry a priority among his girlfriends. While Moore was in Bad Tolz and Munich, Germany, for the location shoot of Elia Kazan’s Man on a Tightrope, in which Terry played the daughter of a beleaguered circus owner, Moore and Hughes spoke on the phone every night. These conv
ersations (which were a feat of technology and probably bribes, as no other calls from the United States ever seemed to get through to Bad Tolz, a remote village in Bavaria) were intimate, but Terry did not try to keep them private. Kazan, who was curious enough about Terry’s relationship with Hughes to make a failed play at stealing her away, asked Terry what Hughes wanted to talk to her about every night. She explained, “He makes the alligator’s love call.” This was no euphemism. Kazan managed to eavesdrop on a subsequent call between the lovers, and he heard Terry herself emitting a growl that Kazan described as “the subtler cry of the female alligator.” How much Glendale native Terry and Greek New Yorker Kazan knew about what alligators actually sound like is unclear.

  It was while Terry was in Bavaria filming Man on a Tightrope that, per her own account far after the fact, Moore gave birth to Hughes’s child.

  Before her departure for the location shoot, Terry hadn’t had her period for a couple of months. She finally told Hughes, who sent her to see his personal doctor, Verne Mason. Mason was not an obstetrician per se. What he was, was on Hughes’s payroll, which meant he was paid to be discreet.

  “I was pretty far along when I started the picture,” she remembered in 1979. “I was really beginning to show. I had to tie in my costumes and all.” One night, at the end of the shoot, when Terry was between five and six months along, she began bleeding and feeling pain. She told this to Howard when he called to check on her that night, and according to Moore, Hughes immediately put Mason on a plane to Munich, where the production had moved, to attend the premature birth of a daughter, whom Terry named Lisa Marie. The baby was taken away from Terry immediately, and the mother was told the next day that her child had died.

  According to Terry, Hughes was relieved. “He didn’t want a child,” she said. “He didn’t want anyone to have a claim on his estate and he saw to it that I didn’t get pregnant again. I really wanted a child and was heartbroken when our daughter died. I thought he was being selfish. But he argued unless you were around children constantly to create and mold them, they would hurt your image, blacken your name.”

  Hughes was accustomed to talking to Terry about her gynecological issues. In one phone call, he had explained to Terry that it was well within her rights to call in sick from work during the first day of her “curse.” “Any studio understands that,” he told her. “The rule to follow is to tell them when you think it’s going to be. If it’s late then that’s not your fault. And then the first day you have the curse, you just don’t work. Now that’s an accepted rule throughout the industry and many people don’t work for two. And those that follow that rule last a lot longer and don’t have trouble with menstruation and the people who ignore that rule—and especially on the New York stage where certain people just feel the show has to go on and they just wreck themselves. Katie Hepburn’s father, who is a doctor, told me all about that.”

  “I know you’re right,” Terry sighed. “You’re always right.”

  We know the content of this conversation because Terry Moore tape-recorded it. Once as naive to the ways of men as a girl who acted in Hollywood movies for a living could be, Terry had learned a few things over years of being lied to by Howard Hughes.

  “His motto was, ‘It’s okay as long as you don’t get caught,’” she said later of Howard’s infidelities. “He could lie better than anyone.” Hughes’s duplicity, his almost pathological juggling of women, had moved Terry to start using his own tactics against him. She had started surreptitiously taping her conversations with Hughes out of paranoia and jealousy, particularly over Jean Peters. Terry thought she could somehow use recordings of her conversations with Howard—which do seem to be evidence of a loving relationship—to get rid of Jean. She knew Jean wasn’t the only other woman, but she was the only one who bothered Terry, because of her longevity. All the other girls eventually went away. Jean Peters kept recurring.

  Whatever the initial intention had been, Terry didn’t publicly reveal her secret Hughes tapes until after his death. By early 1953, before her divorce from Davis was final, she was downplaying her relationship with Hughes in the press, referring to it in the past tense in an interview with columnist Sidney Skolsky, whose bemused Tintype of Moore noted that the twenty-four-year-old was a bundle of contradictions. “I’m a Mormon,” she told Skolsky, “but I have fun.” She also showed him the “500-year-old Buddha statue” in her otherwise “modern style bedroom.” Skolsky’s final words on Moore: “She is enthusiastic about whatever she is doing.”

  Sometimes Terry’s “enthusiasm” could get her in trouble. Later that year she started dating Conrad “Nicky” Hilton, who had married and eight months later divorced Terry’s friend Elizabeth Taylor. Hilton flew Terry to Istanbul for a party celebrating the opening of a new Hilton hotel there. A photographer snapped her picture at the party, and the image graced the cover of Turkish newspapers. To Terry’s great shock, in print it appeared as though Terry had been photographed nude. She insisted that the photo had been doctored. “I can’t understand it,” Terry exclaimed. “I was fully clothed when he snapped the photo.” When asked for an explanation, she figured that the photographer “took it from an unexpected angle and then retouched it to make it look worse.”

  A tabloid story a few years later included the incident as part of a pattern of events in which Terry “accidentally” appeared to be a public exhibitionist. In late 1953, Terry caused controversy when, as part of a USO show with Bob Hope in Korea, she appeared before the troops wearing a fur bikini; Moore claimed she was asked to leave Korea after rumors were published that she was planning to “strip down to it.” Six months later, Moore made her Las Vegas nightclub debut wearing a bejeweled gown that appeared to be see-through in photographs. Three makes a trend, and by the mid-1950s the gossips were no longer charmed by what seemed to be Moore’s brand of getting caught faux-naked and then claiming to be utterly embarrassed.

  All the publicity about Moore’s “oopsie” exhibitionism obscured her acting work and the fact that, professionally, she was making a case to be taken more seriously. After filming Tightrope, with the highest-pedigreed actor’s director of the decade, Moore found out she had been nominated for the Supporting Actress Oscar for Come Back, Little Sheba. This Oscar nomination was the highest honor reached by any actress whom Hughes was involved with while he was involved with them.

  Terry asked Howard to accompany her to the Oscar ceremony, but he demurred, suggesting that she instead go with his aide Bill Gay.

  “You’d really like that, wouldn’t you?” Terry fumed. “Why don’t I just take one of those detectives you have following me?” There was no chance Terry would go to the Academy Awards with some hired chaperone. “Everybody would think I was a Howard Hughes girl!”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Hughes wondered.

  “I’m not one of your girls. I’m your wife!” She ended up going to the ceremony on a studio setup date with Robert Wagner.

  At the time of Sheba, which she had made on loan-out to Paramount, Terry had been under contract to Columbia. She was savvy enough to realize that her career was not going anywhere at this studio, where mogul Harry Cohn gave the most attention to his casting-couch playmates, and to larger-than-life glamour girls like Rita Hayworth. At Columbia, all that seemed in the offing for five-one Terry was playing the cute love interest to male movie stars of diminutive stature. “I was tired of Mr. Cohn always putting me into movies where I wore bathing suits and stood behind Mickey Rooney looking pretty,” Terry said later. (For the record, Moore had only appeared in one Columbia movie to this point with Rooney, but the title perhaps speaks for itself: He’s a Cockeyed Wonder.) “I knew I had a good thing with Sheba and would have a real chance at acting if I could get away from Columbia.”

  Pursued by three studios, Terry had decided to sign with 20th Century Fox, where director Kazan was also under contract. This had paid off in the short term, as Kazan cast Terry in Man on a Tightrope. “But accepting the Fox c
ontract was ultimately my biggest mistake,” Terry later lamented. “Howard had control over [Fox chief Darryl] Zanuck at the time, and if I were cast in a picture with any male actors Howard felt threatened by, I was taken out of the picture.”

  Zanuck’s many biographers have not broached the topic of Hughes’s “control over Zanuck” as alleged by Moore, but it is true that Hughes and Zanuck were close friends, accustomed to doing favors for one another. It’s also true that, by the mid-1950s, Zanuck was preoccupied with his personal life to the point where he may have welcomed Hughes’s professional guidance. As if failing to learn the lessons of Hughes and Billie Dove, and Hughes and Faith Domergue, Zanuck sunk his studio chief capital into trying to make Bella Darvi—Zanuck’s mistress since 1952—into a star. This turned into a spectacular and embarrassing failure, and by 1956 Zanuck would leave his wife and flee to Europe, where he licked his wounds, working as an independent producer under contract to the studio he once controlled—a long leash that kept him too distant to stop Fox from entering into the prolonged financial suicide mission that was the Elizabeth Taylor–starring Cleopatra.