The Nation: The women in the Legend

Women were second only to planes in Hughes’ affections and, until the last years of his life, he changed them as frequently. He took an engineer’s interest in their anatomy, handled them with dexterity but not much warmth. The affair could come to a smooth ending or a crash landing. However Hughes made his exit, his women—out of either gratitude or fear—rarely said a word about him. They were all part of the legend, and part of the reason that America was fascinated with him.

Hughes married twice. In 1925, at 19, he wed Ella Rice, a comely home-town girl from a prominent Houston family. They were divorced four years later. In 1957, he married Actress Jean Peters, who also had homespun qualities. She gave up her film career and joined Hughes in seclusion until they parted after 15 years; she got a settlement of $50,000 annually for life.

A third marriage of eight years, beginning about 1949, is claimed by Actress Terry Moore. She says that Hughes contrived to meet her after seeing her in a film. “He couldn’t take his eyes off me,” she recalls. “It was terrifying. He was an old man of 43. He needed a shave. His collar was frayed. His mustache was scraggly. I was afraid of what the kids at Glendale High would say if they saw me out with an old man like this.”

But go out with him she did. “That was the beginning of our long love affair. He raised me. I was a baby.” He was jealous of all her leading men, she says, except Mickey Rooney, and ordered her out of films. But she forgave his defects because of his assets. “He had Last Supper eyes. I would look in his eyes and cry.” He taught her to fly, and she liked to tease him by putting the plane into a spin. They were married, says Terry, in 1949 on Hughes’ yacht The Hilda, off San Diego. Later, she contends, Hughes reportedly destroyed the record of the wedding in the ship’s log.

More publicized were Hughes’ relationships in the 1930s and ’40s with well-known stars: Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Ida Lupino. Rogers, who claimed he proposed to her, dumped him when she caught him cheating with another woman. Gardner beaned him with a bronze statue at her home after he cuffed her around for seeing another man.

Liaisons did not necessarily mean love affairs. Before he became publicity-shy, Hughes knew how much mileage he could get from being seen with the right woman. Says Bill Feeder, who was director of RKO public relations when Hughes owned the studio: “Sex and showmanship were the same thing to him. The romance stories were a lot of baloney.” Hughes spent plenty of time in public with his star Jean Harlow—but no time in private, according to people who knew them both. He was put off by the blonde bombshell’s four-letter-word vocabulary. He explained earthily why he plucked Jane Russell from obscurity to star her in The Outlaw. But he did no more than stare. He was content to design a complicated brassiere to enhance her charms.

Hughes, in fact, was not particularly at ease with women.

He was a dull conversationalist and did not enjoy being convivial. He used the little-boy approach. “I’m an orphan,” he informed dates. “I went away to school when I was twelve, and I never really knew my mother after that.” Women with an instinct for mothering responded. Often, Hughes was too tongue-tied to ask for a first date. He employed surrogates—to put it politely—to do the job for him. From the 1930s to the 1950s, he established a girl-producing machine of breathtaking efficiency.

First, Hughes combed magazines and newspapers for intriguing faces and bosoms. When somebody struck his fancy, he ordered up a biographical sketch. Then he dispatched his personal photographer to wherever the girl might be—Argentina, Europe, Kansas. The photographer took six shots: three of the girl sitting down, three standing up. Hughes had the photos blown up and examined them at leisure in his office. If she still met his standards, he sent an underling to lure her to Hollywood with a movie contract. In time, he had collected a sizable group of starlets who were doing very little on film to earn their $500 a week.

In the 1950s, minority shareholders at RKO felt that this practice of Hughes, among others, was damaging the company, and they sued. As a consequence, Hughes got out of RKO.

If Hughes was especially smitten, he set the girl up in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel or at a leased home in Bel Air. She was virtually his prisoner, watched constantly by a maid or chauffeur. She was on 24-hour-a-day call, but Hughes seldom called. His idea of lavish attention was to give her 20 minutes every other week. Even then, while she was undressing, he might become engrossed in Popular Mechanics and forget about lovemaking. To entice a French ballerina to Hollywood, he paid the living expenses for her entourage of 20 people for a year. “The funny thing is that right after she arrived,” says his old friend Irving (“Swifty”) Lazar, the Hollywood literary agent, “Hughes got busy and never even looked at her the entire year.”

As little as Hughes touched or talked to his Hollywood harem, he did not allow any woman to leave her gilded cage without his consent. If one showed signs of restlessness, he increased the number of guards observing her—or even invited her parents to move in with her to relieve the boredom. As Lazar notes: “Hughes liked dames under his thumb, not independent.”