'Seduction': New book looks at Howard Hughes’ Hollywood through a #MeToo lens

By now, our perception of Hollywood’s “golden” age, when stars were born in the studio era of the 1920s through the ‘50s, has been thoroughly tarnished by the awakenings of the #MeToo era. The sordid, sexually abusive history of powerful men, their casting couches and exploitation of female talent is being writ large – if all too belatedly.

None of it is described more compellingly than in Karina Longworth’s new book, “Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood” (Custom House, 560 pp., ★★★★ out of four).

This is a first-rate work of cultural curation, in which Longworth combs the countless stacks of Hollywood memoirs and biographies, with a focus on the pathological predations of Howard Hughes, Texas millionaire, starmaker and film producer.

Film critic and creator of the popular Hollywood-themed podcast “You Must Remember This,” Longworth delivers much more than a warmed-over recounting of the eccentric Hughes saga and the famous women who helped define it.

Written with forceful style and a passionate regard for the forgotten hopefuls who came to California seeking success in a thoroughly sexist era, the book casts a feminist eye on the dark decadence of early Hollywood – from silent-era orgies at the Ambassador Hotel to the impunity with which the founding studio heads manipulated starlets.

“The female body had always been a key building block of cinema,” Longworth writes, “a raw material fed into the machine of the movies, as integral to the final product as celluloid itself.” Most of the studio czars who manned the machine, such as Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, were robust immigrant overachievers.

But Hughes came to the film world as inheritor of the Hughes Tool Co., its fortune built on an innovative oil drill bit. Hughes had been traumatized in his teens by the early deaths of his parents, but as a nephew of Rupert Hughes, a successful film producer/director, he took to the Hollywood of the 1920s with brash energy and appetites.

Aviator, playboy and instinctive promoter, Hughes made his own rules, dallying with and famously influencing the careers of legends such as Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Jean Harlow. Then there were Hughes discoveries such as Jane Russell, renowned for the cleavage Hughes fought the censors to reveal.

But dozens of lesser-known actresses suffered under the thumb of the increasingly paranoid mogul, his private eyes, security men and the informers who helped him control them.

Longworth paints a vivid picture of Hughes, his marriages, divorces, feuds and the Hollywood establishment he all but ruled for a while, through hit films such as “Hell’s Angels” and “The Outlaw.”

It’s familiar territory for cinema history buffs, but Longworth’s narrative comes to life through the emblematic character of Faith Domergue. A Hollywood hopeful from New Orleans who made only a marginal impact on film history with her acting, Domergue met Hughes when she was 16. The 35-year-old mogul proposed to her within a year, and his controlling temperament defined their relationship. (They never married.)

With Faith, Longworth concludes, “Hughes recreated the dynamic he had experienced as a child with his supercontrolling mother, but in reverse.” Weirdly, amid the courtship, Hughes even told her she was “the child I should have had.”

Nonetheless, Domergue’s narrative reveals her to be an astute, undeceived witness to Hughes’ monomania, surviving his clutches to carve out a respectable career in sci-fi and horror films. She, at least, proved an exception to the damaging rule of Hollywood’s patriarchal seducers.