THE CASANOVA WHO COLLECTED FILM STARS
Reclusive playboy Howard Hughes surrounded himself with Hollywood starlets. But, as a new book reveals, his methods were always predatory and often sinister, writes PETER SHERIDAN
SEX-CRAZED movie mogul Howard Hughes wouldn’t last 10 seconds in #MeToo Hollywood. The millionaire industrialist, aviator and film producer bedded and bullied screen legends from Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn to Bette Davis and Ava Gardner.
But the predatory tycoon also maintained a secret harem of dozens of beautiful young sex-ondemand starlets desperately hoping Hughes would make them famous, reveals a scandal-packed new book – Seduction: Sex, Lies And Stardom In Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, by Karina Longworth.
“Most women would be happy if Howard Hughes wanted to have sex with them,” said screen legend Jane Russell, who Hughes propelled to stardom in racy 1943 hit The Outlaw.
Hughes was a larger-than-life American tycoon: an aerospace inventor who produced classic films such as Hell’s Angels and Scarface, broke the round-the-world flight record in 1938 and surrounded himself with beautiful women.
Katharine Hepburn is famed for her lengthy romance with Spencer Tracy but playboy pilot Hughes captivated the actress by buzzing his biplane overhead as she golfed at the Bel-Air Country Club.
“Howard was the best lover I ever had,” Hepburn confessed. “We weren’t inhibited people. He was not shy about sex. He wasn’t short of testosterone.”
Hughes propositioned two-time Oscar winner Bette Davis at a Hollywood gala, and she confessed: “I was married. I was bored. I accepted. I was the only one who ever brought Howard Hughes to a sexual climax – or so he said… I believed it.” But she conceded: “It may have been his regular seduction gambit.” She added: “Howard Huge he was not.”
Yet Hughes repeatedly seduced many of Hollywood’s most beautiful stars.
Blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe was pursued by Hughes and is said to have confessed to a brief affair with him.
He was also linked with Jean Harlow who he signed up for her first major film, Hell’s Angels.
In 1936, while romancing Hepburn, Hughes proposed to Fred Astaire’s dancing partner Ginger Rogers, pursuing her relentlessly until she finally accepted four years later. But Rogers found Hughes too sinisterly controlling. “She had begun to suspect he was having her followed and her phone calls were being surveilled,” says Longworth.
Rogers returned his engagement ring, and said: “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. Thank heavens I escaped that.”
Here the desertion devastated Hughes. His closest aide, Noah Dietrich said: “It was the only time anyone saw Howard Hughes cry.”
But it didn’t stop his relentless pursuit of further conquests. Ava Gardner, a sexual wildcat who survived explosive marriages to Mickey Rooney and Frank Sinatra, was hounded for years by an obsessed Hughes.
“I couldn’t get rid of him for 15 years, no matter who I was with or I married,” said Gardner, who eventually surrendered to his seduction, but endured a turbulent romance.
When Hughes repeatedly punched her in the face in a jealous rage after Gardner spent a night out with Rooney, she grabbed a nearby bronze bell and split open his forehead, knocked loose two teeth and beat him with a chair. “I thought I’d killed the poor bastard,” BULLY: The #MeToo villain kept a harem of wannabes who desperately wanted him to make them famous. Left, with Jean Harlow. Above, Jane Russell in The Outlaw
she confessed. “There was blood on the walls, on the furniture.”
Hughes chased Lana Turner for months, wearing down the screen siren, and reducing to tears his 17-year-old fiancée, starlet Faith Dorn. When Hughes’ flight of a prototype plane crashed in Beverly Hills and almost killed him, Turner and Russell waited outside his hospital room until dawn, with Turner “greatly upset and weeping”.
Hughes was obsessed with Russell’s abundant bosom, and the Hollywood legend tells of the seamless bra that he famously designed to boost her cleavage while seeming naked beneath her blouse in Western hit The Outlaw. In reality Russell shunned it, says Longworth.
“She put it on and felt ridiculous wearing it, so she ended up taking her original bra and covering it up with Kleenex so that you couldn’t see it through her costume. Hughes couldn’t tell the difference.”
But while the millionaire playboy bedded screen superstars he
secretly kept an army of aspiring starlets – powerless unknowns who were desperate for fame – who he could manipulate.
“Hughes had a network of spies going around the country procuring women for him,” says Longworth. He paid their rent, gave each a chauffeur, financed their acting lessons – and expected them to come when he called.
“He made sure this woman had no agency of her own, by putting her in a hotel room or an apartment that he selected, giving her a driver who was an employee of his, scheduling her entire day so she could not choose to do anything that she was not told to do.”
Their chauffeurs were under
Did he secretly wed Terry Moore? Left. He certainly wanted to marry Ginger Rogers, right
strict “no touch orders” from Hughes and could not even offer the starlets a hand getting out of the car.
Detectives spied on the starlets and yet more detectives watched them for hints of illicit affairs. “He made sure that he had total control,” says Longworth.
Hughes strung his starlets along with promises of movie roles that rarely materialised. At least one, Rene Rosseau, 19, attempted suicide, blaming Hughes.
“He was such a collector and he didn’t want to lose any of the items in his collection, so he would make sure that they believed for as long as possible that he was working to make them a star,” says the author.
But former Hughes chauffeur Ron Kistler confessed to the author: “None of the starlets we escorted ever became stars.”
Hughes even bought RKO Studios but Longworth notes: “In two specific lawsuits he was accused of using the studio as a shell company so he could just basically meet women and pay them off.”
The playboy liked his girls young, and easy to manipulate. He was 36 when he ensnared 16-year-old actress Faith Domergue and proposed marriage, calling her “Little Baby” and telling her: “You are the child I should have had.”
His two failed marriages were to Texas debutante Ella Rice and actress Jean Peters.
IN his later years, Hughes became a germaphobic recluse but still had the millions to finance any whim. “When he was a hermit in Las Vegas who wouldn’t leave his hotel room, he bought a television station so that he could dictate what movies were shown in the middle of the night,” says Longworth.
Hughes died of kidney failure in 1976, aged 70, “without anyone close to him who wasn’t paid to be there,” says the author – though the battle over his £1billion fortune lasted another decade.
Actress Terry Moore, who claimed that she and Hughes had been secretly married for eight years, said: “Howard told me he’d only been in love with three girls in his life: Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers and Terry Moore.”
Of course, Hughes may have said that just to string Moore along – manipulating his women to the bitter end.
● To pre-order Seduction: Sex, Lies And Stardom In Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, by Karina Longworth (published by Custom House on December 27 at £20), with free delivery, call The Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 with your card details. Alternatively send a cheque made payable to Express Bookshop to Howard Hughes Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ. Or buy online at expressbookshop.co.uk