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

by Karina Longworth

  *A doll-like young girl dressed up in a comically overly sophisticated costume is literally the plot of the film that started the trend, The Flapper.

  *Dove is fuzzy on dates. In a deposition dated July 23, 1981, she acknowledged not being able to remember specific dates fifty years after the fact, but noted that she was certain she and Hughes were together when the stock market crashed in October 1929, and believed they were together for three years but had broken up by the time she shot her two Hughes-produced films. The first of those films was released in October 1931. In her interview with Ankerich, she says she met Howard in late 1929—which, importantly, would have been after her separation from Willat—and that their relationship was over in early 1932. News reports suggest their professional relationship was dissolved in the spring of 1932. In her interview with Drew, she mentions more than once that she and Howard were together for “three and a half years.” Analyzing all available information, I believe they became lovers in the fall of 1928 and split up in the early spring of 1932.

  *It’s difficult to know exactly when the masquerade in rural Nevada happened because Billie Dove is the only detailed source on the matter and she is not at all reliable on dates. In many interviews, she noted that she couldn’t remember the specific year when anything happened. I assume the aborted attempt at Nevada residency took place in the spring of 1930, before the Hell’s Angels premiere, because her court date where she sued Willat for divorce was in July 1930, and that court date happened only because the Nevada plan didn’t work. She also commented in an interview printed in Screenland magazine in November 1931 that she had been “a free woman for a month,” suggesting her divorce was finalized in late summer 1931.

  *On March 20, Lincoln Quarberg received a letter from a friend congratulating him on his recent marriage. “May it endure until hell freezes over—I mean Hells Angels [sic] comes out.” Letter from Paul Moore to Lincoln Quarberg, March 20, 1930.

  *Neilan’s recollection that Hughes “crash[ed] Hollywood and in two years time turn[ed] out a colossal hit” is misleading in at least two ways: Hughes had been in Hollywood now for nearly five years, and the two and a half years that he spent in production on Hell’s Angels was much longer than standard. Writing about twenty-five years later, Neilan’s memory was either fuzzy, or colored by the still-lingering glow of Hughes’s success, and his own role in it.

  *Frances Marion and Darryl Zanuck reportedly spread this gossip. See Berg, Goldwyn, 215.

  *Dvorak may have been slightly exaggerating here: her IMDb profile shows she had significant roles in seven films that had likely been shot in the eight months prior to July 1932. She had walk-on/uncredited parts in two films released in mid to late 1931, which she may have been counting as well.

  *Darwin Porter, author of Howard Hughes: Bisexual Billionaire, has written and self-published dozens of “unauthorized” biographies of public figures, all of them thick with what reads as highly embroidered, bawdy dialogue, and dramatizations of pansexual incidents. Charles Higham (Howard Hughes: The Secret Life) had his reputation impugned after his book Errol Flynn: The Untold Story, in which Higham claimed the swashbuckling Robin Hood actor had been a Nazi spy and a bisexual whose same-sex lovers included Hughes, was accused of containing distortions and inaccuracies. Two books were later published disputing Higham’s portrait of Flynn: My Days with Errol Flynn, by Buster Wiles and William Donati; and Errol Flynn: The Spy Who Never Was, by Tony Thomas. Porter and Higham have each published books on Hepburn, Hughes, and Grant.

  *Her longevity became so much a part of her persona that it is noted in the first paragraph of Hepburn’s Wikipedia profile, which describes her as having been “a leading lady in Hollywood for more than 60 years.”

  *Hepburn’s unconventional looks would continue to worry executives throughout production. After an otherwise successful test screening, executive Merian C. Cooper wrote to Cukor, suggesting reshoots of some of Hepburn’s close-ups, which he described as “very bad.” Interdepartment correspondence from Merian C. Cooper to George Cukor, August 17, 1932. George Cukor Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Folder 34.

  *The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood, Diana McLellan’s book on the so-called sewing circle of Hollywood lesbians and bisexuals, including Garbo, barely mentions Hepburn, but does note that Hepburn and Garbo became acquainted through Cukor.

  *As Hepburn later put it, “I was told there was gossip circulating about a rivalry between Ginger and me, about bad feelings because we’d both had relationships with Howard Hughes.” Chandler, I Know Where I’m Going, 111–12.

  *“Boner,” in this context, is the Merriam-Webster definition “a clumsy or stupid mistake.”

  *This actress has been presumed by some writers to be Faith Domergue, but the dates don’t line up. I believe it may have been Ruth Terry, with whom Hughes was linked in several gossip columns in the fall of 1940.

  *As with many Hollywood actresses, there has been some misinformation circulated about Faith Domergue’s age at the time of her relationship with Hughes, which Warner Bros.’ studio records easily clear up. Her first pay stub at Warners states her birthdate as June 16, 1924. Her first contract with WB was drawn up on March 8, 1941. She met Howard Hughes that Memorial Day, and he bought her contract from WB on October 27, 1941. Thus, Faith was sixteen years old when she and Hughes met, and seventeen when he proposed to her and signed her to a personal contract. Warner Bros. files accessed at Warner Bros. Archives, University of Southern California.

  *In later years, more than one gossip columnist would write about how Hughes would regularly call them and feed them stories to help advance his own agenda. See Sheilah Graham, “Chasing Howard Hughes,” Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1974; and Dorothy Manners, “Hughes Calls Always Came in Early Hours,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, January 13, 1972. Manners said Hughes’s requests would come with the demand, “Print it as I have told you . . . not quoting me, naturally.”

  *This was a lowball estimate; other sources claim Hughes was worth $520 million by the end of 1946. See Richard Hack and Jonathan Miles, “Howard Hughes: The Man Who Flew Too High,” Men’s Journal, July 2013.

  *News of Darnell’s divorce appeared directly beside Norma Jeane’s photo in the Town Talk of Alexandria, Louisiana.

  *This is implied in D. L. Lyons, “America’s Richest Wife,” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1968, and stated as fact in Peters’s Reuters obituary. Steve Gorman, “Jean Peters, Ex-Wife of Howard Hughes, Dead at 73,” Reuters, October 20, 2000.

  *Schary made this declaration in a trailer designed to promote Crossfire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf_tJx9SwMk.

  *A document called “RKO Chronology,” from Hughes’s files at UNLV, says Hughes spent $8.4 million on the 929,000 shares. RKO historian Richard Jewell has the purchase price at $8,825,500. Slow Fade to Black, 80.

  *This story comes from Arthur Laurents, who spells her name “Lynn Baguette.” She was credited in films as “Lynn Baggett” or “Lynne Baggett.”

  *Moore would sometimes claim that her mother had told her she had met Hughes at an audition a few years earlier, but if that meeting took place, Terry said she didn’t personally remember it.

  *The debate over censorship of Rossellini’s film The Miracle (which was released in the United States months after Stromboli but had been shot before, and starred his pre-Bergman love, Anna Magnani) led to a 1952 Supreme Court decision recategorizing motion pictures from a purely commercial endeavor, into a form of expression governed by free speech. This decision sent dominoes tumbling that would eventually fully erode the Production Code and lead to the establishment of the modern-day ratings system.

  *Pregnancy tests, for the first few decades of their existence, were colloquially called “rabbit tests,” because in an early version of the test, rabbits were injected with a woman’s urine and then examined for hormonal changes. Due to an urban legend that this process killed each test subject, “the rabbit died” became slang for a positive pregnancy t
est.

  *To offer just two examples: in the 1920s, gay actor William Haines quit MGM when Louis B. Mayer threatened to use the morals clause to fire him unless Haines married a woman, and in 1949, Universal reportedly dropped starlet Barbara Payton for brazenly violating her morals clause by having an open affair with Bob Hope.

  *“Taxi dancers” were hired by certain nightclubs to serve as dance partners for dateless men. These ladies would be paid a fee per partner, per dance, with each coupling lasting the length of a single song. This is the subject of the song “Ten Cents a Dance.” While the practice itself was inherently chaste, taxi dance halls were suspected to sometimes serve as staging grounds for prostitution.

  *For information on Hughes’s decision to cede to the censors, see Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, Columbia University Press, Kindle edition, locs. 309–11. The truncated version of The French Line airs occasionally on Turner Classic Movies. Excised shots were viewable on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVRYy_6m_T0, as of May 2018.

  *This would soon become a common suspicion. Johnny Holmes (Hughes’s closest attendant in 1958) and Jack Real (a pilot whom Holmes would call when Hughes was particularly agitated, so that Real could calm him down by talking about aviation) would feel the same in the coming months and years—but Kane seems to have noticed a change in Hughes first. See “Deposition of Raymond D. Fowler, Ph.D. Vol. 1, April 3, 1984,” Fowler files.

  *In 1931, Nevada state passed a law allowing marriage licenses to be obtained instantly, without waiting periods or verification. Thus, until the early 1960s, Nevada had the most lenient marriage and divorce laws in the nation; both activities became a cash cow for the state in an era when marriages and, particularly, divorces, were highly regulated in most states.

  *“You know darned well by the way it was handled that Howard dictated that story to Louella and ordered that it be buried in the column,” said a Hughes aide in 1968. “He told her, ‘I’ve been married and I want you to announce it and this is the way I want you to do it.’ Louella gasped that this was headline news. Hughes told her if she dared ignore his instructions he would deny the item and call her a liar. Down in the column Louella casually mentioned she had received word that Jean Peters and Howard Hughes were married.” D. L. Lyons, “America’s Richest Wife,” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1968.

  *Terry Moore took credit for the religious background of most of Howard’s aides. “Howard was so impressed by my strict Mormon upbringing, and the fact that we don’t smoke or drink, that he began hiring Mormons,” she wrote. Obviously, another benefit of hiring devout Mormon men was that they would be less likely than the average layman to compete with Hughes for the attention of women. Moore, The Beauty and the Billionaire, 44.

  *After Hughes’s death, stories began to circulate that he had contracted syphilis in the 1930s or early ’40s from an actress who was not faithful to him, and that he subsequently underwent a severe, experimental procedure to rid himself of the disease. These stories have somewhat different details in different tellings and, perhaps like most stories about the venereal diseases of deceased people, are generally vaguely sourced. The biography to include this story that shows its references the best is Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske, which credits the tale to Noah Dietrich (who definitely had an ax to grind, and who in his book, Howard, had claimed that Hughes burned a closet full of clothes after learning that an unnamed girlfriend had exposed him to an unnamed disease); two Dietrich relatives; “anonymous sources” including a Hughes lawyer; and an interpretive reading of Hughes’s autopsy report alongside a document called “Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in 1972. Another source named is Dr. Raymond Fowler, whose extensive published writing about Hughes’s medical history did not mention syphilis. Shortly after Fowler’s death, I was graciously loaned Fowler’s existing Hughes files by his widow, Sandy Fowler, and in the files that I examined Fowler did not mention having evidence or a suspicion that Hughes suffered from syphilis. However, Fowler did speculate about other aspects of Hughes’s health, including, as we’ll see, the possibility that he suffered from epilepsy.

  *Hughes would not have gone to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to seek treatment, because to the extent it functioned at all as anything but a tax dodge, it was merely a research facility. Around this time, Hughes employed former Kennedy family fixer Larry O’Brien to successfully wrangle a loophole in the Tax Reform Act of 1969 to ensure that the Medical Institute would remain protected from new tax regulations that would force other major corporate-sponsored charities to ante up.

  *Slatzer was a questionable authority on secret marriages. In 1974, he published a book called The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe, in which he claimed that he and Monroe had been secretly wed in Mexico in 1952, but that Darryl Zanuck had ordered the marriage dissolved when they returned to Los Angeles. “PASSINGS Robert F. Slatzer, 77; Author Claimed Brief Marriage to Monroe.”

  *According to an April 22, 1985, five-line blurb in Variety, these publicists sued Moore for nonpayment after having “spearheaded Moore’s campaign to establish her Howard Hughes widowhood.” The firm claimed to have given Moore “advice ‘over and beyond’ the normal” publicity duties. Daily Variety, April 22. 1985; Terry Moore Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library.

  *Moore filed suit in Superior Court against the Star for the story in which Schubert was quoted, but not because she claimed it was inaccurate. Rather, it appears that the tabloid had put together a clip job under her byline, and Moore claimed she had been “negotiating rights to the material with various publishers at the time of the article” and that its publication resulted in “her inability to sell rights to the material after it appeared in print.” This suit was filed weeks before the publication of her book based on said material, The Beauty and the Billionaire. See “Moore Files Suit,” Weekly Variety, May 2, 1984.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Part I: Hollywood Before Hell’s Angels, 1910–1928Introduction: The Ambassador Hotel, 1925

  Chapter 1: Hollywood Babylon

  Chapter 2: The Many Mrs. Hugheses

  Chapter 3: No Town for a Lady

  Part II: Billie and Jean, 1928–1936Chapter 4: The Girl with the Silver Hair

  Chapter 5: A Body Like a Dustpan

  Chapter 6: A Cock vs. the Code

  Chapter 7: “A Bitch in Heat”

  Chapter 8: The Bombshell Implodes

  Part III: Hepburn and Rogers and Russell, 1932–1940Chapter 9: The Woman Who Lived Like a Man

  Chapter 10: Box-Office Poison

  Chapter 11: A Love Nest in Malibu, a Prison on a Hill

  Chapter 12: A New Bombshell

  Part IV: Life During Wartime, 1941–1946Chapter 13: The New Generation

  Chapter 14: “The Goddamnedest, Unhappiest, Most Miserable Time”

  Chapter 15: Divorce, Marriage, and Rape Fantasy

  Chapter 16: Disappearing Act

  Chapter 17: An American Hero

  Chapter 18: A Mogul and His Crows

  Part V: Terry, Jean, and RKO, 1948–1956Chapter 19: Marriage, Howard Hughes–Style

  Chapter 20: “Mother” and a Male Idol

  Chapter 21: The Morals Clause

  Chapter 22: Rivalry at Fox

  Chapter 23: “A Movie Studio Filled with Beautiful Girls Who Draw Pay but Seldom Work”

  Chapter 24: Underwater

  Part VI: Hughes After RKOChapter 25: Playacting

  Chapter 26: Prisoner

  Chapter 27: From Vegas to the Grave

  Epilogue: Life After Death

  Notes on Sources and Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Filmography

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Section


  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher