Hollywood’s CRUELLEST casting couch PREDAT

He was famed for being a billionaire recluse. But a disturbing new book reveals Howard Hughes handpicked scores of young girls as playthings on false promises of stardom ...

THE search for fresh ‘talent’ would begin with a stack of newspapers and magazines. As he flicked through the pages, Howard Hughes was searching for only one thing: photographs of nubile young women.

They might be models, beauty queens or teenagers yet to graduate from high school. Once, it was a girl who had won a local fishing contest.

But was she as pretty as she seemed? From experience, Hughes knew better than to trust a grainy photograph — so he despatched aides to track down whichever girl had caught his eye, with orders to get her to pose for a set of new pictures.

He was very specific about the images he wanted. There had to be three of the girl sitting down, another three of her standing up; she also needed to be shot head-on and in profile, and without heavy make-up or fancy hairstyling.

After the photos were blown up, exposing every tiny blemish, Hughes would examine them at length. Some, like the girl whose picture he’d seen in a fishing magazine, didn’t make the cut: too many freckles and two of her teeth were missing.

Those who did pass the blow-up test were soon paid another visit by an aide. The great Howard Hughes, they would be told, was convinced they could become the next major movie star.

Within weeks, the girls would sign $75-aweek contracts with either RKO studios — owned by Hughes — or with his personal production company.

Convinced that their names would soon be in lights, they poured into Hollywood, usually with protective mothers in tow. That was fine with Hughes; he knew that most mums were at least as eager as their daughters to do whatever he deemed necessary.

So it was the mothers who were instructed to ensure that their girls always slept in their bras (to prevent droop and were never allowed to turn their heads more than 15 degrees to the left or right (only Hughes knew why).

Meanwhile, the young women were each assigned a furnished flat and an on-call driver — although few ever knew that he doubled as a spy for Hughes. Every moment of their days and nights was scheduled: dance, voice and acting classes, followed by dinner out, usually at Perino’s on Wilshire Boulevard, always chaperoned by the drivers.

ASIDE from that, all they could do was wait while Hughes searched for the perfect script. Months would go by, sometimes years. It was hard to give up hope, not when he was housing them, training them, feeding them and paying them a salary. Yet the overwhelming majority never landed so much as a walk-on part.

They had been lured to Hollywood for one reason alone: as potential new lovers for Howard Hughes.

According to Walter Kane, his chief procurer, ‘Hughes didn’t like just one woman, he liked 30 or so and he could choose one or two out of the group.’

This meant that one or two girls out of every 30 would end up in his bed. Most of the others never met him at all. He was simply too busy seducing other women — many of them major movie stars — to devote much time to his spares.

It was enough to know that they were his, that he could catch the most beautiful specimens, tear off their wings, lock them away — and take them out of their boxes whenever he felt the urge.

Hughes operated in the so-called golden age of Hollywood — from the 1920s until the late 1950s. In his prime, he was hailed by the media as an all-American hero and the most eligible bachelor on the planet.

Katharine Hepburn called him ‘the best lover I ever had’. Ava Gardner praised his sexual technique, saying: ‘He taught me that making love didn’t always have to be rushed. “Slow down, slow down, kid. We’ll get there!” he’d say. He was like a f***ing horse whisperer.’

They may have been telling the truth, but it certainly wasn’t the whole truth. One of the first in Hollywood to recognise the power of spin, Hughes hedged his darker activities by hiring the most aggressive publicists of his day. He also reined in the gossip columnists by feeding them stories — and threatening to stop if they wrote anything negative.

Largely, at least until the final two decades of his extraordinary life, this worked. A timely new book, however, has pulled into focus the authentic Hughes: devious, manipulative, sex-obsessed and utterly self-centred. By comparison, modern-day predators seem almost like bumbling amateurs.

After the death of his Texan parents, Hughes had turned up in Hollywood at the age of 18, determined to use his father’s fortune — from making drill bits for the oil industry — to make a name for himself in the movies.

Tall and dark with lustrous brown eyes, he was undeniably goodlooking until he had a plane crash in 1928, which left him with a crushed left cheekbone.

As a seducer, he was awkward and scarily intense. His first major conquest, Billie Dove — known in the late 1920s as the most beautiful woman in the world — recalled that during his pursuit ‘he would just glare at me — he didn’t talk or anything’. He also became her stalker.

‘Every time I’d be at a place where there was dancing, pretty soon the door would open and there would stand Howard,’ she said.

His behaviour on set was equally creepy. After casting 19-year-old Jean Harlow as the lead in a film called Hell’s Angels, he had a fleshcoloured, skintight dress designed for her. At the fitting, Hughes snatched the scissors from the costume director’s hands and slashed the dress to her waist.

To promote the movie, she was ordered to give public ‘performances’ which consisted of Harlow merely leaning down to pick up a handkerchief. ‘That was all she had to do,’ recalled actor Reginald Owen, ‘because those wonderful breasts almost fell out, and that was worth any price for admission.’

Later, Hughes took a similar interest in the breasts of Jane Russell, the star of The Outlaw — designing a bra to showcase them, and later sending skywriters up above Los Angeles to draw two suggestive circles with dots in the middle.

In private, his sex life was thriving as he moved on from Dove to stalk other stars of the day. His bashedin cheekbone, lack of conversation and growing obsession with germs (he was constantly washing his hands) proved no handicaps when weighed against his power as a rich film producer.

A further image-booster was his skill in flying aeroplanes, which led him to break several aviation records — for instance, setting a new non-stop transcontinental flight time record in 1936.

HIS plane also came in handy when he decided to target Katharine Hepburn, landing it in the middle of her golf lesson at the Bel Air Country Club. This was vintage Hughes — selfish, oblivious to how he was ruining everyone’s game, and totally spectacular.

By 1937, they were lovers. ‘He was sort of the top of the available men,’ was how Hepburn coolly summed it up, ‘and I of the women. We weren’t inhibited people. We certainly weren’t inhibited about our bodies...Howard was not shy about sex. I think it was the only thing he wasn’t shy about.’

Was she genuinely in love with Hughes? It seems more likely that they used each other in their burning mutual desire for fame. The end came when Hepburn moved to the East Coast for work — ‘Ambition beat love,’ she admitted.

Hughes’s parting gift was the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which spectacularly revived her career. ‘I slept with Howard Hughes to get The Philadelphia Story,’ chortled Hepburn. ‘Well, not exactly, but that’s the way it worked out. He was a brilliant man and going to bed with him was very pleasurable. But the pleasure of owning The Philadelphia Story lasted longer.’

In 1938, Hughes turned his unsettling stare on Bette Davis, who was married but only too happy to meet him for assignations in a cottage.

‘I liked sex in a way that was considered unbecoming for a woman in my time,’ she said later. ‘You know, I was the only one who ever brought Howard Hughes to a sexual climax, or so he said at that 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.’

Another conquest was Ginger Rogers, who overlapped for a while with Hepburn and later became famous as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner. Eventually, she began to suspect that Hughes was tapping her phone and having her followed.

The final straw was her discovery in 1940 that he was cheating on her. Ginger ended the affair — and that, said a long-serving aide, was the only time he ever saw Howard Hughes cry.

The following year, Hughes’s attention was caught by a newspaper photo of Ava Gardner. After persuading her to go dancing with him, he hired an entire club for the night so they wouldn’t be interrupted (or pick up other people’s germs). He was, said