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

by Karina Longworth

  “Yeah, well, she had something on him [Hughes],” Dietrich responded. “I think that’s what compelled the marriage.” What this something could have been, Dietrich didn’t reveal to Terry Moore.

  After the Nevada ceremony, Peters and Hughes moved into her house on Strada Vecchia Road, above the Hotel Bel Air, for “a couple of weeks,” Jean recalled. After that “we went to the Beverly Hills Hotel briefly. Then we went to Palm Springs.” This honeymoon period was over after about a month; by February 18 she was calling in to Operations frequently to try to reach Hughes. By March they were back at the Beverly Hills Hotel, living in separate bungalows and communicating through Operations. Hughes would often give Operations complicated instructions regarding his new bride. All incoming calls to her bungalow were to be blocked, other than those from her sister. He told his aides to tell her, “HRH will call you the minute he wakes up and in the meantime, anything you chose to order from Room Service will be promptly taken care of.” Hughes also told Operations, “If she asks what room I’m in,” tell her, “but don’t volunteer it.”

  On March 10, Hughes issued very detailed instructions regarding how Jean’s food should be prepared and served at the hotel. A “food checker” would be required. Howard would also be informed of her orders, which ranged from “1 steak, hash browns, leaf spinach, sliced tomatoes and avacados [sic] w/French dressing on the side, pot of coffee, cottage cheese, and a vanilla custard” to “a pint of champagne.” It was ordered that aide Stan Wilson be “advised immediately” when Jean ordered alcohol. At some point during this period, Hughes and his aides started referring to his wife by the bizarre militaristic code name “Major Bertrandez.”

  Finally, two months after the wedding, the marriage was reported in Parsons’s column—buried, apparently, thanks to Howard’s instructions.* By Friday, March 15, the news was syndicated nationwide. The union was not confirmed by the Hughes camp, nor by 20th Century Fox, the studio where Jean was still under contract.

  Matrimony had not changed Howard Hughes the way it might conceivably change the behavior of other men. On January 28, two weeks after marrying Peters, Hughes learned that Yvonne Schubert was sick. He ordered that she be sent “some lovely flowers,” a rented portable TV set (“I want one that’s real beautiful, that would appeal to a young lady, because I may decide to give it to her”), and a new copy of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. She swiftly recovered, and soon thereafter Hughes called Operations to order a car to retrieve Schubert from his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel at 3:25 A.M. The next day, Hughes gave instructions for Yvonne to see a number of movies with “good performances,” including Howard Hawks’s film of To Have and Have Not, Notorious (with Ingrid Bergman), and Top Secret Affair (starring Susan Hayward).

  HUGHES NO LONGER HAD RKO as a clearinghouse but he continued to collect young women who believed that to be under contract to Howard Hughes was to have their future in sure hands. They did not know about the dozens of women who had preceded them who had not been transformed into Jean Harlow–level legends. Walter Kane continued to act as a procurer, finding the girls and securing their contractual obligation and proximity to Hughes. These young women were installed in houses, apartments, or bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Sunset Tower, or Chateau Marmont. A fleet of drivers remained on the Hughes payroll to chaperone the women around town, essentially restricting their movements to Hughes-approved activities. There were daily acting lessons, dance classes, and voice coaching. As each type of tutoring took place at the homes of the instructors, spread across the west side of Los Angeles and Hollywood, the girls were led to believe they needed Hughes’s drivers in order to complete the tutelage that Hughes mandated before he would even think about casting them in a film.

  The drivers didn’t know much about the individual girls. To these chauffeurs, most of them clean-cut Mormon young men,* all of the girls seemed the same. “She was invariably dark haired, heavy bosomed and flat hipped,” recalled Ron Kistler, a former Hughes driver. In height, shape, and coloring, Kistler observed, all of the women looked not dissimilar to Jean Peters.

  Also, Hughes gave every driver the same directions for every girl. “They were allowed one ice cream cone a day,” Kistler recalled. “If they wanted to argue the point, they could sit in the front seat. Hopefully they would sit in the back seat of the car.” (There was no arguing the one ice cream rule.) The most important, according to Kistler? “If we saw a bump in the road, we were supposed to slow down to a maximum speed of two miles an hour and crawl over the obstruction so as not to jiggle the starlet’s breasts. I learned that Hughes was one of the world’s consummate tit-men and he was convinced that women’s breasts would sag dangerously unless treated gently and supported at all times.”

  Though the drivers were under strict orders not to develop personal relationships with the aspirants they ferried around (the “no touching” rule was so severe that a driver was not even to offer a hand to help a young lady out of the car), Kistler and his cohorts found their own social lives subordinated to the highly managed night lives of the women they were assigned to drive. A few nights a week they’d be required to chaperone their starlet (and often her mother or agent) to a movie, a play, and/or one of Hughes’s chosen restaurants—usually Perino’s on Wilshire, or the Lanai at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Each of these restaurants would inevitably be full of Hughes drivers, at tables with Hughes girls. This put the drivers in a precarious position in regards to one of Howard’s cardinal rules: “not to let the young lady know there might be other girls like her under contract to Hughes Productions.” The drivers easily spotted one another; the girls had no idea—until they recognized a driver who had taken them around on another shift, in which case she would ignore him. “The starlet you had taken to dinner two nights earlier would literally look right through you when she was being escorted by another driver,” Kistler remembered.

  Both starlet and driver had an incentive to play by the rules: they were all being watched. “The best part of the dinner was the knowledge that lurking in the parking lot, not eating, were the private detectives,” Kistler recalled. “One was assigned to each driver-starlet car to make certain there was no hanky-panky. About half the time that detective would be followed by another detective presumably to prevent any coordinated driver-detective sexual conquest.” This process ensured that if one or two employees fell out of line, there would be another employee, by the law of averages loyal to Hughes, who would blow the whistle on whatever bad behavior was going on.

  Of course, for the young women, the whole purpose of submitting control of their lives to Hughes was the hope that he would turn them into the next Jean Harlow or Jane Russell. They were all to be disappointed. “None of the starlets we escorted,” according to Kistler, “ever became stars.” A few managed to break out of Hughes’s contract and find work, but most languished. There was a simple reason: after Jet Pilot—which was dumped into theaters unceremoniously in 1957, eight years after its production first began—Howard Hughes never made a movie again.

  TWA’S FORTUNES—AND STOCK PRICE—HAD tumbled since the end of World War II. Noah Dietrich—who had been successfully running Hughes Tool, which financed Hughes’s less profitable ventures, while Hughes was otherwise occupied—blamed the airline’s decline on the mismanagement of Jack Frye, who was in charge of day-to-day operations. Dietrich tried to convince Hughes to fire Frye, but Howard wouldn’t do it because Frye was his shopping buddy: together they liked to spend large sums of Hughes’s money on brand-new planes. Eventually, however, Hughes begged Dietrich to help TWA get back on its feet. Dietrich arranged a $40 million investment from the insurance company Equitable, on the condition that none of the funds be used to finance debt. Dietrich went back to his real job, and shortly thereafter found out that Frye had misused the Equitable funds exactly as he was not supposed to do.

  A shakeup followed: Frye was fired, Hughes put $10 million of his own money into TWA, and ensured his control of the board by
appointing cronies who would vote with him to drown out the remaining shareholders. Though Hughes had no official job title at TWA, he took the liberty of behaving as the company’s CEO and creative force, pushing his way into matters from plane design to aeronautical regulations to (no surprise) public relations. Hughes was so determined to treat TWA like his own private company (he’d even make sudden changes to the flight schedule, canceling commercial flights and commandeering passenger planes for his own purposes) that the actual executives ostensibly hired to run the business had a difficult time doing their jobs. After Frye, a new president was hired, Ralph Damon, who served for seven years, and then in 1955 died of a heart attack. Dietrich believed the job—working for Hughes—had killed Damon. The next president of TWA, Carter Burgess, would last less than a year before resigning, rather than have to shoulder the weight of a debacle that Hughes set into motion.

  It began in January 1956, when Hughes, without consulting with anyone at the airline, began placing orders for new, state-of-the-art jets to replace TWA’s aging fleet. By that summer, Hughes had pledged nearly $500 million of TWA money on the new airplanes, which would not be ready for operation for several years. The cost of these planes was far more than what the airline could afford, and while Dietrich tried to work out financing options, all of his proposed solutions involved Hughes giving up his majority ownership of TWA’s shares, which Hughes refused to do. Instead Hughes wanted to finance TWA’s fleet upgrade by selling Hughes Tool—but first he wanted Dietrich to go down to Houston and goose Howard’s father’s company’s earnings by any means necessary. This was not something Dietrich was eager to do, but over the next few months he increasingly found Hughes almost impossible to get a hold of so that they could talk it over.

  While this was going on, two men on Hughes’s payroll—a lawyer and Doctor Verne Mason—suggested that Dietrich try to have Hughes declared mentally incompetent. This would have involved filing a legal petition, after which Hughes would have to be psychologically evaluated (by force of subpoena, if necessary). A court would then decide if Hughes was truly incapable of managing his own affairs, and if the guardian suggested by the petition (which, in this case, probably would have been Dietrich) was fit to run his affairs. If all went according to plan, Hughes could then be committed to psychiatric care, and his employees could run his company without the interference of Hughes himself.

  It is possible—maybe even likely—that the Hughes employees were not seeking this intervention because they were concerned about Hughes’s mental health, and instead were fed up with his erratic and yet despotic management and wanted to get him out of the way. There was some speculation among Hughes’s aides that Hughes knew about the talk of having him sidelined, and he married Jean Peters to prevent it, because a married man’s wife would automatically be considered the guardian of his well-being. That said, there were behavioral signs that all close to Hughes could cite that would make a diagnosis of incompetence potentially likely. In the years since the 1946 crash, as Hughes continued to take steady doses of the codeine first prescribed for his injuries and continually provided to him by Dr. Mason, he began issuing orders to the people who worked for him to accommodate his obsessive eccentricities. His xenophobia had advanced so that he now wanted nothing to do with the typical niceties of business; employees were instructed to not attempt to touch Hughes (meaning no handshakes), or to even look directly at him. His fastidiousness and germophobia had reached the point where aides were instructed to purchase three copies of each magazine he desired to read, and hand him the single copy he needed sandwiched in between two other copies in order to keep the reading material “clean.” And yet, paradoxically, the man would sometimes let his own hygiene lapse, appearing in public unwashed, his clothes filthy. Looks can be deceiving, but he sometimes looked like a man who was not in full control of his faculties.

  Dietrich said he turned down the overture—“I am not about to play doctor,” he insisted—but he was about to face the consequence of working for a man who was, if not clinically incompetent, then certainly indifferent to commonly accepted standards of business practice and human relationships.

  On March 12, 1957, Hughes called Dietrich to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Once Dietrich arrived, Hughes wouldn’t meet with him in person and made Dietrich move to three different rooms before he would finally speak to Noah on the phone. As Dietrich recalled, “He wanted to be certain that our conversation was not being recorded.” Finally, Hughes reiterated his urgent desire to have Dietrich go to Houston and have him manipulate Hughes Tool’s bottom line. Dietrich said he would do it—as soon as Hughes signed an agreement that they had been discussing for fifteen years, which would transfer much of Dietrich’s salary to stock options, in order to alleviate his personal income tax burden. Hughes had been promising to do this for the man who ran most of his businesses for a decade and a half but had dickered that entire time over the exact formulation of the deal. Now Dietrich was refusing to make another move on behalf of Hughes unless he signed the agreement. Hughes refused, and Dietrich quit, leaving Howard to sort out the mounting headaches of TWA, and everything else, on his own. Before Dietrich could show up at his office to collect his personal belongings, Hughes—furious, feeling betrayed by his longest-lasting employee—ordered that the locks be changed.

  There were a lot of long-term factors that led to Howard Hughes’s now-legendary retreat from public visibility and total mental and physical decline, over the last twenty years of his life. The many head injuries he had suffered in plane and car crashes had left a cumulative effect, and the final, massive plane crash in 1946 had led to a dependency on painkilling drugs. But everything was markedly different after the one-two punch of the first half of 1957. First he lost his identity as a lone wolf, and a certain sense of freedom, when he married Jean Peters. Then he lost Noah Dietrich, who had been more than his always-reliable corporate fixer since 1925: Dietrich was also the person who had been in Hughes’s life the longest of anyone over that time. This was an enormous amount of change in a very short period of time for a man who wasn’t totally stable to begin with. He did not handle it well at all.

  Chapter 26

  Prisoner

  “In Hollywood, they say Jean Peters has been ‘kidnapped.’ Then they look around nervously and say, ‘Well, not “kidnapped,” exactly, But—she’s—not exactly—allowed to go out.’”

  About four months after her marriage to Hughes, Modern Screen, one of the longest-running fan magazines, and one that rarely ran anything a powerful studio would be able to call foul on, printed an incredibly dramatic story on Jean Peters and the mysterious man who, after years of on-again, off-again dating, had allegedly virtually imprisoned her and forced her to give up her acting career. This article was loosely sourced and featured a few minor inaccuracies, but big-picture-wise, its tale rang true. The entire first page was a dialogue exchange in block letters:

  HE: “I LOVE YOU AND YOU BELONG TO ME. BUT I WONT MARRY YOU.”

  SHE: “I TRIED TO RUN AND I CANT. I WANT TO SEE YOU ON ANY TERMS. I CANT HELP IT.”

  Twentieth Century Fox, the article claimed, couldn’t find their contract star. “They’ve written to her, wired her, phoned her. Their letters are returned: Address unknown. The wires are never accepted. The phone number has been changed. They haven’t been able to speak to Jean Peters for almost four months.”

  Over the next few years, stories would proliferate of Jean Peters hiding in plain sight: going to baseball games at Dodger Stadium, attending classes at UCLA, shopping up a storm, often accompanied by bodyguards, sometimes disguised and rarely using the names “Jean Peters” or “Jean Hughes.” According to Modern Screen, not long after the wedding, Jean was spotted on the street by “an old friend” who recognized her, despite the fact she was wearing a blond wig, because “there’s only one person in the world whose eyes are that unhappy.”

  Modern Screen may have embellished and narrativized some details, but they didn’t make this
story up wholesale. “After her marriage to Howard it was as though she had been swallowed by an earthquake. No one in Hollywood saw her,” confirmed Sheilah Graham in 1974. “[F]rom being an active, normal woman she became almost as much of a recluse as her husband.”

  Graham had her order of events mixed up. Hughes had been retreating from the public eye slowly for years (in 1951 Louella Parsons lamented that Hughes had already become “curiously withdrawn”), but it was only after the marriage that his reclusion became total. By the end of 1957, Hughes had stopped seeing anyone other than people on his payroll, and Jean Peters.

  By 1958, the TWA affair was a mess that Hughes couldn’t see a way out of. Any action on his part would likely result in a loss of control, and until he figured out how to solve the financing and management problems at the airline, the company was hemorrhaging money, and Hughes himself was open to lawsuits, or a hostile takeover. Afraid of being pressured into a decision (and of being reached by process servers), Hughes began spending most of his waking hours, and virtually all of his nonwaking hours, in private screening rooms. These were standard screening rooms accustomed to being rented by the hour, or maybe day; Hughes would occupy one he liked for months at a time. He’d watch movies for anywhere from eighteen to seventy-two hours straight, then sleep in his chair for a full twenty-four hours, and then start again. He’d only leave the premises when absolutely necessary. The benefits of holing up in a screening room were at least twofold: protected by his spies and aides (not to mention Hollywood etiquette that dictates private screenings proceed free from interruption), he couldn’t be forced into a face-to-face meeting, or easily served a subpoena. Also, if he never went home (“home” these days being the Beverly Hills Hotel), Hughes alone could dictate the terms on which he saw his wife.