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

by Karina Longworth

  A “topheavy” blonde sat down next to Shearer and introduced herself as Jayne Mansfield. A proud careerist with no bashfulness regarding her figure or her ambition, Mansfield told Shearer that she was sitting next to him because she had asked one of the publicity men which man on board could do the most good for her future. Shearer demurred, told her she’d been had—he was just a writer. But Mansfield had heard he had just written a film for Marilyn Monroe (he had not). Maybe there was a part for her in it? “I’ve just got to become a screen star.”

  Shearer observed her “jiggling her unbrassiered bust.” “You’re obviously talented,” he told her. “But can you act?” To which Jayne Mansfield shot back, “Can Jane Russell act?”

  As it turned out, Jane Russell, the star of the movie that occasioned the junket, was delayed in New York and would show up a full day late. Mansfield saw an opening and took it. According to Shearer, she “cleverly used that one day to steal the spotlight” by posing in a tiny bikini for every photographer she could find. Mansfield struck Shearer as “self-exploitative, bizarre, intelligent and determined.”

  Russell had just signed a landmark new, twenty-year contract with Hughes, which would guarantee her just over a million dollars, disbursed in $1,000 segments per week, until she was fifty-four years old. “Did you ask for approval of advertising in your new Hughes contract?” Jane was asked by Hedda Hopper.

  “I don’t have it in the contract,” Jane admitted, “but there will be no more trouble I trust over ads. We have an agreement.”

  “Do you ever talk to [Hughes]?”

  “No.”

  “Terry Moore does.”

  “She’s playing a different kind of game.”

  As it turned out, Hughes would loan Jane out a few times to other producers, but after Underwater!, he never cast her in another movie.

  THE HUGHES-SPONSORED VEGAS ACT didn’t do much to help Terry Moore’s career, and neither did being with Hughes, who wasn’t encouraging of anything that made her unavailable to him. She didn’t make a movie for all of 1954, and then Jean Peters, whom Terry had thought she was rid of, returned on the scene.

  Jean was already separated in the fall of 1954, when she finally reported to shoot A Man Called Peter, on location in Atlanta and then back in Hollywood. Erskine Johnson, in his “In Hollywood” column, claimed that on set, Jean’s “eyes were so swollen, and her nose so inflamed, she couldn’t do close-ups,” and had to be shot around; the culprit for her cry face was said to be “smog.” A little over a week after that item ran, the United Press ran an interview with Jean in which she gave no indication of trouble in her marriage, and stated that she and Cramer would be settling down on the East Coast and that she would be working in Hollywood only sporadically. In fact, by Peters’s later recollection, she spent the end of 1954 hiding out in Florida, where Howard came to her, checking into the Columbus Hotel in Miami. Peters stayed in Miami “through Christmas and into the spring.” Howard went back and forth between her and Hollywood.

  The news that Cramer and Peters were divorcing finally broke in Louella Parsons’s column in September 1955, five months after A Man Called Peter was released. In December, Jean filed divorce papers, in which she estimated the length of her cohabitation with her first husband to be thirty-three days.

  Cramer didn’t hold a grudge against Hughes. “I’ll say this,” he later said, “if your wife is going to get a divorce, you might as well let her marry someone who can afford to support her. It’s the cheapest way out.”

  Now, finally, Terry Moore gave up on Howard Hughes. After so many years, she had realized that he didn’t just lie the way other people lied—to avoid hurting your feelings, or to get away with doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. He was either a sociopath, and thus not totally in control of his pathological lies, or else he got genuine pleasure out of manipulating people. Either way, Terry was through.

  On New Year’s Day 1956, Terry married Eugene McGrath, a Panama-based businessman. She moved to Panama, and the newspapers all claimed she was retiring from showbiz. Then she ended up coming back and costarring, at age twenty-eight, as a high school tramp in one of the biggest movies of 1958, Peyton Place.

  Soon McGrath was gone, replaced by Stuart Cramer—Jean Peters’s ex-husband.

  HUGHES HAD FIRST BORROWED Janet Leigh from Dore Schary’s MGM in 1949, when Jet Pilot first went into production. Every so often, Schary would get another call from Hughes, asking to borrow Leigh again, for reshoots. The last time Hughes called Schary about Leigh, Schary remembered, “I told him I was sorry he was having so much difficulty. He told me that the picture he was about to finish would be his last one. He said it was a ridiculous business and said, ‘I have had my belly full.’ That was the last time I spoke to him. The finished film was a disaster. Soon he got rid of the studio.”

  In July 1955, Hughes made a deal to sell RKO to General Tire and Rubber Company, headed by Thomas F. O’Neill. This time, the deal stuck. “That man didn’t need a lawyer,” O’Neill marveled of Hughes after the negotiations. “He knows more about corporate law than any attorney I ever knew.”

  So ended perhaps the most infamous, bizarre run of any mogul in Hollywood history. If what Hughes had wanted to do going into RKO was hasten the demise of the studio system, to give independents like himself a more level playing field, he succeeded. By most other metrics, he failed. Some observers believed that giving Hughes credit for trying to do anything at RKO was a mistake.

  “Hughes didn’t mismanage RKO,” said W. R. Burnett, one of the writers who had worked on Vendetta. “He didn’t manage it at all. He didn’t care. It was a write-off.”

  When asked why a tire company would want to acquire a movie studio, William O’Neill, Thomas’s father and General’s founder, responded, “Who says we should stick to the rubber business? Our business is to make money!” At that, they failed. RKO would continue on as an operational film studio for just two more years; ultimately the O’Neills would sell the facilities to Desi Arnaz and the back catalog to television. Though a process was by now well under way that would cause every studio to restructure or die, RKO would become the first of the major, golden-age studios to cease to exist entirely.

  After the sale, Hughes started using the Sunset Boulevard home of his aide Walter Kane as an office. His aides were instructed to never call Hughes there, and women were not to be told the location even existed.

  One day Hughes was working out of Kane’s place alongside Walter, Pat De Cicco, and lawyer Greg Bautzer. Intending on messing with him, De Cicco asked Hughes about his plans for his estate. “What are you going to leave Kane, Bautzer and myself?”

  Hughes responded, in apparent seriousness, “Not a goddamn dime.”

  De Cicco decided to tease further. “Well, you know, Howard, you don’t have too many friends, and three pretty good friends of yours are sitting here. You have got an awful lot of money. You mean to tell me you are not going to leave either one of us anything?”

  “Not a quarter.”

  Now De Cicco was starting to get legitimately annoyed. “Well, let me ask you, Sam,” De Cicco fired back, referring to Hughes by one of his code names. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Hughes shrugged. “I couldn’t exist, if there’s another world, knowing that you and Kane and Bautzer were out with some of my girls, using my money.”

  This would be one of the last times Hughes was in the same room as all three of these men, these friends who had been in his life for as long as two decades. Kane would later say that it was around the time of the RKO sale when he started to notice a change in Hughes. Kane claimed that Hughes had received from the sale a check for $25 million. One day Hughes was hanging out at Kane’s house, and when he left, he absentmindedly left the check behind. A little while later he returned, picked up the check, and walked out again, without saying a word. Soon he’d stop coming around at all: over the next two years, Hughes would restructure his existence so that, if such mental lapse
s occurred, they happened, like the rest of his life, in almost total isolation.

  Part VI

  Hughes After RKO

  Chapter 25

  Playacting

  In the months after he severed ties with RKO, Howard Hughes’s next venture was a hot topic of speculation. Rumors swirled that he was planning to buy another studio, perhaps 20th Century Fox (where Jean Peters was still under contract), or that he would fly the Spruce Goose around the world. But either undertaking would have required a level of public engagement that he seemed increasingly uninterested in and perhaps incapable of maintaining. Over the next three years, Hughes would gradually recede from the public eye entirely.

  Sometime during 1956, Hughes arranged a recording session for his new protégé, a seventeen-year-old would-be singer-actress named Yvonne Schubert. Twenty-two musicians had been booked to play during the session, and Yvonne was intimidated. Her nervousness touched off something in Hughes. He called Kane, upset because Yvonne was upset. Hughes began complaining about the twenty-two musicians. He kept repeating the number: “twenty-two . . . twenty-two . . . twenty-two . . .” He didn’t realize what he was doing. This is when Kane really started to wonder if Hughes was having a nervous breakdown.*

  Certainly, he was becoming more difficult to communicate with, by design. Now the only way for anyone but his closest aides to reach him was to call in to Operations to leave a message for Hughes or, if you were lucky, pick up a message he had left for you. Hughes’s relationships and movements during the next few years can be traced via the voluminous call logs left behind by his staff. Through this process, Hughes was able to foster the illusion of forever being too busy to deal immediately with whichever person was trying to reach him, that whatever issue this person was trying to bring to his attention was less important than whatever he was doing. Like the work of all the publicists he had employed over the previous thirty years, the call log process was a smoke screen designed to make everyone in Hughes’s life believe that he held all the power in their relationship. It was increasingly important to keep up this impression as the real Hughes began to recede from the image of him as American hero-rebel that had hung around in the ether since his last major public stand, before Congress, ten years earlier.

  And it was especially useful when it came to juggling and controlling women.

  Over the next year, Hughes would have detectives surveilling a number of them. In April 1956, Hughes, after reviewing photos of women under contract to him named Barbara Hilgenberg and Patte Dee, left a message for Kane happily describing them as “very good. I was amazed that we had someone that good.” Kane was then instructed to make sure Dee and Hilgenberg were prevented from leaving their houses until Hughes issued further instructions: “I want them available for me this afternoon.” In June 1957, detective Jeff Chouinard (who, in addition to the names “Jeff” and “Gerald,” also sometimes went by the alias “Mike Conrad”) was ordered to tail an actress named Joyce Taylor to “determine the following: Where this girl has been 2. Who she has been seeing 3. Who she returns with.” Others under careful watch were model Pat Sheehan, a high school senior in South Gate named Mitzi Lee Anderson, and Yvonne Schubert, who went by several code names, including “the Party,” and, in a reference to the canyon avenue on which her Hughes-sponsored house sat, “Coldwater.”

  Schubert and Jean Peters were the primary points of Hughes’s interest. He would often leave several messages for each woman every day. On April 9, a typical day, at 8:15 P.M., Hughes ordered that three copies of a script called Pilate’s Wife be delivered to Peters. At 8:56 P.M., he instructed Operations to “dial her number every (1) minute until you get through, then tell her” that he would be busy for a while, but needed to talk to her about the scripts and “also wanted to talk to you about something else,” but it would have to wait. Operations finally reached her at 9:02, and she said, “OK, fine I was trying to reach [Hughes] at the same time I guess.” Peters started calling in to Operations to inform them when she was awake and when she was going to bed, and when she’d be available to take phone calls from Hughes.

  Schubert was less compliant. On the same day that Hughes ordered that “a basket of real nice flowers” without “any purpose flowers, any dead flowers or those flowers from Honolulu” be sent to Jean Peters, Hughes gave a different order regarding Yvonne. Because she had not been following his instructions to the letter, he told his aides to “set up surveillance on the house around the clock except at those times when she is in custody of our people. This is to continue until I give you further instructions. If she tries to leave, I want her followed.” Her activities were thus carefully monitored, at home or elsewhere. Upon learning that Yvonne was planning to go out to the Ambassador Hotel one evening, Hughes commanded: “Have someone go to the Ambassador right away to be there when they arrive and be in the kitchen to be absolutely sure on the food restrictions. Be sure the man checks each item of food for her and also see that she doesn’t get anything to drink, not even champagne (also no dancing).”

  After January 11, 1957, the call log for Peters would go dark until the last day of the month. The next day, Hughes and Peters would marry in Tonopah, Nevada.

  Hughes romantically explained to his bride why they needed to elope to Nevada, rather than have a wedding where they lived: “[California] is a community-property state,” Jean recalled. “He didn’t want to take any kind of legal action in California because he didn’t want to be considered a resident of California.” Another reason for the Tonopah location may have been that in Nevada, it was legal to marry under assumed names.* They used pseudonyms on the marriage license—J. A. Johnson and Marian Evans, aged forty-six and twenty-nine (Hughes and Peters were actually fifty-one and thirty)—because Hughes simply didn’t want anyone to know he was a married man. At least, not right away. When he felt the time was right, he allowed Louella Parsons to release the scoop.

  Why did this marriage happen? Sheilah Graham believed it was Jean’s designed and wished-for endgame of her marriage to Cramer. “Jean had wanted to marry Howard,” Graham explained. “The elopement with Stuart was perhaps to prove her independence. Where she came from if a couple were in love, they did not wait years to be sure.” After the Cramer marriage, Graham added, “I am sure Howard Hughes was angry. Jean was his girl. . . . Mr. Hughes must have now realized that he loved her.” Once her point had been made, according to Graham, Jean filed for divorce, and “Howard replighted his troth to Jean.”

  But few close to Hughes believed that the marriage was something he wanted, even if, in his way, he did love Jean and he had been dismayed when she had married Stuart Cramer, to the point of hiring Robert Maheu, an FBI- and CIA-affiliated private detective, to try to dig up dirt on Cramer that Hughes could use to drive a wedge between him and Peters. (Hughes suspected Cramer had his own ties to the CIA, which Maheu confirmed he did.) Echoing part of Graham’s version, Kane would say that Peters had married Cramer in order to make Hughes jealous, but only so she could then “corner” Howard into liberating her from that sham marriage. Kane also blamed Peters for Hughes’s increasingly evidently diminished mental state. Kane had come to believe his boss suffered a nervous breakdown in part because he had married Peters essentially against his will.

  Terry Moore at first believed that Hughes had voluntarily liberated Jean from the Cramer marriage, not because he loved her (she insisted “sexually Howard wasn’t interested” in Jean, and “that was all he ever thought a woman was good for anyway”), but because “Howard can’t stand anybody else to have what he’s got, and he was afraid she still might go back to Stuart.” But when Terry posed this theory to Noah Dietrich many years later, Dietrich told her that wasn’t the way he saw it. Dietrich, whose own version of events seems based mostly on hearsay and conjecture, believed that Hughes’s continuing relationship with Peters broke up her marriage to Stuart Cramer, so Peters filed for divorce, assuming Hughes would marry her. Furthermore, according to Dietrich, Cramer was ea
ger to be rid of Jean, not least because she had become an alcoholic. “‘She was so polluted all the time,’” Dietrich recalled that Cramer had said of Jean, “‘I don’t even think she knows I was there.’”

  Cramer had an added incentive to have his wife leave him for Hughes: Stuart had inherited a large amount of money since the marriage, which he didn’t want to have to divide with Jean. To complicate matters, as Dietrich put it, “maybe [Cramer] had fallen in love with you [Moore] or somebody else in the meantime.” Given the quickness with which the members of this circle entered into marriages and exited them, and swapped one partner for another, that certainly seemed like a possibility.

  When Jean’s final divorce decree from Cramer came through, Jean delayed in picking it up, perhaps because Hughes had, as he was wont to do, prevaricated on his promise to marry her. According to Dietrich, Cramer then threatened to instigate his own divorce action against Peters, which would have outed her drinking problem and would have been humiliating for her as a movie star. Dietrich believed that Peters then went to Hughes with her own blackmail proposition. “I think that he signed something for her that would have been terribly embarrassing if made public,” Dietrich speculated to Moore.

  “So you think she kind of forced him into this marriage?” Terry asked.

  “That’s right.”

  It’s odd that Terry Moore would need to hear this information about Stuart Cramer from Noah Dietrich, given that she wed Cramer just three years after he divorced Peters. Though she would later say that all topics having to do with Howard Hughes were verboten during her marriage to Cramer, on the call with Dietrich she claimed that Hughes called Cramer one night while this was all going on and asked if he should marry Peters, and Cramer said, “You damn well better.”