Howard Hughes’s obsession with cleavages reached its costly peak with his 1943 sex-western The Outlaw. It started out as a $450,000 tale about Billy the Kid, and ended as a $3 million hymn to Jane Russell’s breasts.
Russell was a 19-year-old chiropodist’s assistant and part-time model when the director, Howard Hawks, cast her in the film. He set to work moulding her into a star, giving her shouting exercises to lower her voice. But after two weeks of filming, Hughes was so frustrated by the footage that he sacked Hawks and took over the directing himself. What he wanted was more of Russell’s breasts — he designed a specially cantilevered “demi-tasse” brassiere to showcase his star’s bosoms (though Russell swore she never wore it) and he badgered his cameraman to devise shots that peered down her front.
The tiniest flaw in one of Russell’s blouses threw him into such a fit of anger that he wrote a detailed memorandum on the problem. Apparently, the material bunched up on a seam, giving the distressing impression (to Hughes) that Russell had two nipples on each breast.
For one scene, he gave her a tray and reshot it endlessly until it looked as if her breasts were actually resting on the tray. He spent a further $10,000 having the image blown-up to create a zoom effect.
The censors were less amused. A judge in Baltimore, who banned the film, said that Russell’s bosom “hung over the picture like a thunder-storm over a landscape”. Another said that the film was to be “pitied more than censored”. After three years of lawsuits, the film was finally released with the iconic shot of Russell lying back on some hay and the slogan: “Mean! Moody! Magnificent!”
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Hughes’s film-making efforts were soon superseded by his aviation exploits and his collapse into drug-addled madness. But Russell went on to make Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Marilyn Monroe and a string of television commercials promoting Playtex bras that were “great news for us full-figure girls”. She also became the only actress whose breasts inspired a mountain range, the Jane Russell Peaks in Alaska.
Sean Macaulay
The Outlaw, Thursday, BBC Two, 1.05pm