Male dominated Hollywood golden years

The 1943 Western The Outlaw, while making the Texan Aviator and film mogul Howard Hughes became infatuated on its star Jane Russell’s breasts. Hughes had fired the film’s previous director, Howard Hawks, for not focusing sufficiently on Russell’s cleavage and decided to direct it himself.

His first job was to apply his aeronautical engineering expertise to invent  a bra that would give her chest  the required lift  while giving the impression that she was not wearing one at all.

Film critic and historian Karina Longworth  points out in her book “ It was an impersonal obsession as Hughes  was not trying to possess the breasts, or the woman attached to them , the way he intended to try to with other women in his life. He treated Russell’s assets and investment that represented  the primary area of value of the picture.”

“ Hughes  through the women that he  variously pursued, seduced, monetised  and exploited and through whom he cemented his status as one of the leading lights of Hollywood’s Golden Age”.

We are guided through Hughes marriage and divorce to the Houston  society belle Ella  Rice, and subsequently  his relationships with Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Ava Gardener, Lana Turner and Ida Lupino as well as Billie Dove, Faith Domergue, Jean Peters and Terry Moore. Alhtough Hughes mostly lived apart from his second wife, Jean Peters, he still kept her under 24-hours surveillance, even monitoring the food that she ate.

Longworth divulges titbits like Hugh’s mother inspecting her son’s bowel movements until his teens, and Bette Davis’s catty pronouncement regarding his manhood (“Howard Huge, he was not”).

Longworth reveals how Hughes’ professional infatuations with Russell and Jean Harlow , women that he never dated but from whom he profited and sought to control.

In the wake of #MeToo movement during which women in Hollywood have exposed the men using power, wealth and influence to abuse and silence them. Hollywood is an industry in which young women arrived, often unchaperoned thousands of miles from home, hoping to follow in the footsteps of their screen idols. All were depending on men to help them realise their dream.

Following the release of 1930s Hells Angels, which ran catastrophically over schedule and budget, his publicist nevertheless claimed it was a huge moneymaker, but according to Longworth “ the accounting on Hell’s Angles was a black box.”

 As his stars rose, Hughes had journalists and gossip columinists crowding to him to the beat of his drum, dependent on him for tips as to his whereabouts so he could be photographed with the latest popular leading lady.

Howard Hughes styled himself as a cinematic visionary and a genius scout of female talent.

 

Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood by Karina Longworth, Custom House £20, 560 pages.