WHO’S WHO IN HOWARD HUGHES’ HOOTER HAREM
TYCOON Howard Hughes bought a movie studio — then collected a harem of screen sirens, bedding iconic beauties Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Ginger Rogers!
Hepburn was famed for her long affair with married star Spencer Tracy, but she had an intense fling with the sex-fiend flyboy Hughes.
The pervy pilot won Katharine’s affection by buzzing her in a biplane as she was taking a golf lesson at the Bel-Air Country Club!
They ended up in bed, author Karina Longworth writes in her just-released book, Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood.
“Howard was the best lover I ever had,” Hepburn boasted. “We weren’t inhibited people. He was not shy about sex. He wasn’t short of testosterone.”
Famed for building a bra to hold Jane Russell’s huge 38D boobs, he was interested in the brunette beauty’s chest simply to make his Western The Outlaw a success.
But he was actually obsessed with screen goddess Ava, who said, “I couldn’t get rid of him for 15 years, no matter who I was with or I married.”
He stalked her even when she was with hubbies Mickey Rooney and Frank Sinatra!
In one jealous rage, she revealed Howard beat her and she grabbed a bronze bell and cracked him in the mug, splitting his forehead open.
In 1936, Hughes proposed to Ginger, but he was too much of a control freak and cheater for her taste.
“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,” she said. “Thank heavens I escaped that.”
Fresh off her 1938 hit Jezebel, married Bette plunged into a romp with Hughes at a rented love nest in Malibu.
“I was the only one who ever brought Howard Hughes to a sexual climax, or so he said at the time,” Davis bragged.
“I believed it when he told me that. It may have been his regular seduction gambit.
“Anyway, it worked with me, and it was cheaper than buying gifts.”
Later, germ-fearing Howard turned into a recluse and died at 70, shunning any human contact.