He was also a legendary playboy — and an often emotionally and physically abusive man who seduced and harassed scores of actresses.
#MeToo - A year of progress amid a backlash
Before there was
#MeToo and Harvey Weinstein, there was Howard Hughes, a film producer, owner of
RKO Pictures in the late 1940s through the 1950s, and one of the world’s
richest men.
He was also a
legendary playboy — and an often emotionally and physically abusive man who
seduced, harassed and cajoled scores of famous actresses, including Ava
Gardner, Bette Davis, Lana Turner and more, as Karina Longworth reveals in her
new book, Seduction: Sex,
Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood (Custom
House), out now.
Ava Gardner recalled
Howard Hughes as a great lover, referring to him as the man who “taught me that
making love didn’t always have to be rushed.” But his anger often eclipsed his
passion, as Gardner, then in her early 20s, learned the hard way after refusing
to accompany Hughes’ driver to pick him up from the airport.
Howard Hughes with actress and dancer Ginger Rogers in the early
40s.Source:News Corp
Australia
After telling Hughes
she had been with her ex-husband, actor Mickey Rooney, instead, Hughes lost
control.
“He swung at her, and
the next thing she knew, she had fallen back into a chair. Then, she recalled,
Hughes ‘jumped at me and started to pound on my face until it was a mess,’ ”
Longworth writes.
Gardner, however,
fought back. She found an “ornamental bronze bell” on the mantelpiece, picked
it up and struck him on his face, splitting his forehead open and knocking
loose two teeth.
Livid at what he’d
done to her, Ava continued the beating while Howard was down, grabbing a chair
and hitting him some more. Finally, her maid walked in and put a stop to it.
Katharine Hepburn in the 1933 film Christopher Strong, a few
years before Howard Hughes taught her to fly.Source:News Corp Australia
Hughes and actress
Katharine Hepburn, Longworth writes, were “kindred spirits” who would
“skinny-dip [by] diving off the wing of a seaplane in the middle of Long Island
Sound.” They also shared a robust sex life, with Hepburn calling him “the best
lover I ever had.”
Bette Davis was
equally enamoured, if not entirely impressed, with Hughes’ seductions.
“I was the only one
who ever brought Howard Hughes to a sexual climax, or so he said at that time,”
she once claimed.
“I believed it when he
told me that. I was wildly naive at the time. It may have been his regular
seduction gambit. Anyway, it worked with me, and it was cheaper than buying
gifts. But Howard Huge, he was not.”
Hughes and Ginger
Rogers’ on-again/off-again love affair lasted years, with Hughes gifting her a 5-carat
emerald engagement ring in 1940 and telling her he would build her a mansion.
Soon, though, he demanded that Rogers be available for him whenever he desired,
and “she [began] to suspect he was having her followed and that her phone calls
were being surveilled.”
After Hughes blamed
Rogers for a car accident she wasn’t even in — she had refused to accompany him
to a dental appointment, and he was so angry about this that he crashed his car
— she finally broke it off.
“Howard wanted to get
himself a wife, build her a house and make her a prisoner in her own home while
he did what he pleased,” Rogers later wrote. “Thank heavens I escaped that.”
As Hughes got older,
his targets became younger, his controlling nature, more severe.
Hughes was 35 when he
met Faith Domergue, then 16 and an actress under contract with Warner Bros., at
a party on his yacht. After taking her out for a private sail, Hughes pursued
her relentlessly.
While she initially
had no interest, he wore her down and proposed marriage three months later,
giving her a diamond ring and telling her, “You are the child I should have
had.” In time, his pet name for her became “Little Baby”; her loving nickname
for him was “Father Lover.”
The pair never married
— proposals, it turned out, were a primary tool in Hughes’ seduction arsenal —
but within weeks of his proposal, he purchased her contract from Warner Bros.
“Suddenly, within a
matter of days,” Domergue later recalled, “I and my emotional and professional
destiny were completely in his hands.”
Hughes scheduled her life so completely, from acting lessons to school tutoring, that he controlled it all.
Hughes with actress Ida Lupino in 1940.Source:News Corp Australia
He hired her a
full-time driver who was charged with writing down everywhere she went.
He also moved her
parents into a house around the corner from him, charming (and bribing) them
with his largesse and giving her father and grandfather jobs in his factories.
Soon, she no longer
had friends, wasn’t allowed to drive herself anywhere, was trapped alone —
Hughes rarely returned home — in a 30-room mansion she found haunted and
creepy, and had her family completely in Hughes’ debt.
Hughes, who carried on
with Gardner, Turner and a then-teenage Gloria Vanderbilt while still with
Domergue, would never marry her or make her a star.
He didn’t cast her in
a movie for years and since he owned her contract, she couldn’t act for anyone
else. Whenever she tried to leave him, Hughes would appeal to her mother, who
would pressure her into staying.
Years later, Domergue
wrote an autobiography that was never published. Longworth suggests that the
evidence points to the book having been killed by people connected to Hughes.
But if his
relationship with Domergue became a cautionary tale for young actresses, for
Hughes, it was a template.
Whenever he saw a
picture of a pretty teenage actress, he sought to get her under contract — and
under his full control — right away, installing them in his apartments,
scheduling every moment of their lives and hiring each a personal driver who
was also his spy.
He would then leave
very specific demands for how these women were to be handled, some of which
revealed odd sexual proclivities.
“If we saw a bump in
the road, we were supposed to slow down to a maximum speed of 2 miles an hour
and crawl over the obstruction so as not to jiggle the starlet’s breasts,” a
Hughes driver named Ron Kistler later revealed.
“Hughes was one of the
world’s consummate t-t men, and he was convinced that women’s breasts would sag
dangerously unless treated gently and supported at all times.”
Stories of Hughes’
pursuits are a litany of creep, including that of actress Terry Moore when he
was 43 and she was 19.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in a scene from the 2004 film
The Aviator.Source:AFP
As she wouldn’t sleep
with him until they were married, Hughes married her on a boat — but did so in
international waters.
Records of the wedding
mysteriously disappeared after the ceremony, and the dispute over whether they
were ever really married led to a years-long legal battle after his death.
When Hughes saw a
picture of 23-year-old Italian beauty Gina Lollobrigida in 1950, his
representatives offered plane tickets for her and her husband to fly to LA to
meet Hughes, but sent only one ticket.
When she arrived in
LA, believing it to be the beginning of a career in Hollywood, she was provided
a hotel room with guards outside her door.
“Unless accompanied by
Howard, she wasn’t allowed to leave the room, and Hughes had arranged with the
front desk to block her phone calls,” Longworth writes.
When Lollobrigida
finally had the chance to talk “business” with Hughes after a month and a half
as a virtual captive, he tried to persuade her to divorce her husband and marry
him.
She demanded a plane
ticket home but before she left, Hughes insisted on throwing her a goodbye
party.
At around 3am, he then
persuaded a drunken Lollobrigida to sign a contract.
While she went on to
become a major star in Europe, her fame did not immediately cross the ocean
because due to the contract she had signed, she was forbidden for years from
working in America for anyone but Hughes. Given his behaviour, she refused to
work with him.
Hughes, famously
reclusive and mentally ill in his later years, died in 1976 at age 70.
“By the end of Hughes’
life, when he was a codeine addict who spent his days and nights nodding in
front of the TV, ” writes Longworth, “the former star aviator playboy would
suddenly perk up when an actress he had once spent time with appeared on the
screen.
“Hughes would
allegedly call over one of his many aides, point and say, ‘Remember her?’ and
then drift off into a grinning daydream of better days, days when his power to
draw women to him and control not just their emotions but their movements,
appearances and identities was apparently limitless.”
This
story originally appeared on the New York Post and
is republished here with permission.
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