Seduction by Karina Longworth

Author:Karina Longworth
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

ONE THEORY ABOUT HUGHES’S motivation for acquiring RKO that became popular among RKO’s disgruntled stockholders was that he had bought the studio so that it could serve as a clearinghouse for what sometimes Hughes girlfriend Lana Turner called “six-month option girls.”

When Turner was first signed to MGM at age sixteen, she was surprised to find that many of the young actresses she saw around the studio lot and assumed were her competition for roles were in fact never cast in anything at all. They were only there, Lana learned, “to be passed around the executive offices” and “six months later [they] would have fallen by the wayside . . . those six-month option girls would never go on to a movie career—they were there for the benefit of management.”

As much as Hughes might have heard stories of such practices at studios like MGM and longed for the power and privilege to replicate them, by 1948 he didn’t need a studio for such purposes—prior to his involvement with RKO, he already had his own methods of luring and controlling young women under the auspices of future movie stardom. But owning RKO would allow him to turn an artisanal operation into a volume business.

And now he cast a much wider net. The process would begin with a photo of a young lady in a newspaper or magazine. Maybe she was a professional model; maybe she was a coed or a beauty queen or for some other reason had done something to get her face in the paper. Upon spotting such a picture, Hughes would have a team of men track down the intriguing girl, and then one of his personal photographers would be sent to take new pictures of her.

Hughes was very specific about the kinds of images he was looking for. There needed to be three of the subject sitting down, and another three standing up; she needed to be shot head-on and in profile and without heavy makeup or fancy hairstyling. Hughes would have the photos blown up for more intense and sometimes lengthy study. If he decided there was nothing wrong with what he was looking at, he’d have another aide contact the young lady and invite her out to Hollywood, where she’d be signed either to RKO or to a personal contract with Howard Hughes Productions, at a starting salary of $75 per week.

The nervous system of Hughes’s personal and professional endeavors remained the former Multicolor plant at 7000 Romaine in Hollywood, which he and his employees had taken to calling “Operations.” The key cogs of Operations were a crew of secretaries who answered all calls from anyone, anywhere in the world, who wanted to reach Howard Hughes. They were under orders to transcribe every incoming phone call as faithfully as possible, noting vocal tics, inflections, and meaningful pauses, in order to produce a daily message log, which Hughes would call in to pick up several times a day.

Operations became the nucleus of Hughes’s efforts to surveil and

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