Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (35 page)

PLAYS GOLF WITH

Lakeside Country Club, Burbank, California

July 1930

The Lakeside Country Club
¹⁵³
is currently Hollywood’s most fashionable golf course. Howard Hawks is about to tee off on a sunny afternoon in July when the golf pro comes running out.

‘Howard Hughes is on the phone,’ he says. ‘He wants to play golf with you.’

Hawks is a fine golfer – he has a four handicap. This allows him to deal on equal terms with Hollywood executives who make other, less sporty, directors feel out of their depth. And, unlike most other directors, Hawks has even featured golf in his movies, capturing its contrary blend of commerce, exercise, competition and socialising. In
Bringing up Baby
, the lawyer Alexander Peabody hates talking business while playing golf, but in the middle of a game his golfing partner Dr Huxley tries to talk him into donating $1 million to his palaeontology museum. As Peabody prepares to play a shot, Huxley says, ‘If you could use your influence with Mrs Random, that would be nice,’ which enrages Mr Peabody. ‘When I play golf, I only talk golf! And then only between shots!’ he snaps.
¹⁵⁴

Howard Hawks himself stands by no such rules. He is happy to play golf and talk business at the same time. Small wonder, then, that the pro at the Lakeside Country Club is taken aback by the vehemence of Hawks’s reply.

‘Tell him I don’t want to play golf with him!’ he says.

The pro asks why.

‘The son of a bitch is suing me, that’s why!’
¹⁵⁵

He isn’t kidding. The two Howards are sworn enemies, currently locked in a vicious legal battle. Hughes is suing Hawks for plagiarism, claiming that Hawks lifted scenes from Hughes’s air-battle film
Hell’s Angels
and transplanted them into his own air-battle film,
The Dawn Patrol
. Hughes is also furious with Hawks for hiring the very same experts who have just finished working for him, and he is after retribution. In the view of Hal Wallis, Hughes ‘raised competitiveness to the level of mania, trying to buy up all the World War I fighter planes that he didn’t already own’.

A few weeks ago, Hughes turned up at Hawks’s house and forbade him from filming a scene in which a fighter pilot is shot in the chest.

‘Howard, I make pictures for a living and you make them for fun,’ Hawks interrupted the twenty-five-year-old millionaire. ‘I got a hangover. I’m not interested in talking about it.’ In his subsequent legal deposition, Hawks pointed out that people shot in aeroplanes are almost invariably shot in the chest.

Hughes even persuaded one of his writers to bribe Hawks’s secretary to leak a copy of the script; but the secretary passed the news on to Hawks, who had Hughes’s writer arrested for theft. According to Hawks, ‘Hughes called me up and said, “Hey, you’ve got my writer in jail.” And I said, “That’s where the so-and-so belongs.” I said, “Why did you try to corrupt a perfectly nice girl by bribing her? If you wanted a script, I’d have given you one. Now, I don’t give a damn about it.”’

Hollywood feuds don’t come much meaner: Hawks has been driven to issue a restraining order against Hughes. It seems unlikely that such a fierce dispute can be settled over a round of golf.

But golf plays an even more crucial role in the life of Howard Hughes, who is a five handicap. When he was a boy, his mother, a health-obsessive, encouraged him to play golf, as she believed golf courses to be free from infections. She worried about every aspect of her child’s health: his feet, his teeth, his digestion, his bowels, the colour of his cheeks, his weight. She also worried about what she called his ‘supersensitiveness’; young Howard was extremely nervous, and unable to make friends with other children, perhaps because his mother was always worrying that they might pass an infection on to him.

When Hughes was sixteen, his mother died during minor surgery, leaving him with both lifelong hypochondria and a blind faith in the
medicinal power of golf. Two years later, his father died from a heart attack, leaving Hughes heir to the larger part of his thriving tool company. Hughes immediately bought out his relatives, but was prevented from taking complete control of the company by a Texas state law which regards citizens as minors until they reach the age of twenty-one. It is possible for this law to be overruled by the courts, but only when the owner turns nineteen, so until that date Hughes conducted a clandestine campaign. At regular intervals he played golf with Judge Walter Monteith at the Houston Country Club. As they walked together around the course, he promised the judge that if the courts declared him an adult, he would enrol at Princeton University. On December 24th 1924, his nineteenth birthday, he filed his application. The result was a foregone conclusion: the judge declared him an adult, thus allowing him to take over the Hughes Tool Company. From that moment on, Howard Hughes never gave a second thought to enrolling at Princeton.

And so to this sunny July day. The pro goes back to the clubhouse, and returns two minutes later with Hughes’s reply: he has agreed to drop his lawsuit, and is on his way.

A few minutes later, Hughes turns up, and the two enemies embark on their round. Golf works its peculiar magic. Across eighteen holes, they discover that they have a surprising amount in common. They are both tall and lanky, reserved and crafty. They enjoy breaking rules, and view themselves as Hollywood outsiders. They are also both great womanisers, though Hughes prefers the brassy type, and Hawks the more refined.
¹⁵⁶

By the time the round is over, their feud is at an end. Moreover, Howard Hawks has agreed to direct Howard Hughes’s new film,
Scarface
, for $25,000.

Nobody knows what was said, but it might have helped that Hawks won their game of golf by seventy-one strokes to Hughes’s seventy-two.

TALKS BRAS WITH

7000 Romaine Street, Los Angeles

Spring 1940

In April 1983, Cubby Broccoli appears before a Supreme Court investigation into the affairs of the late Howard Hughes.

‘Did you have occasion to meet Mr Hughes on a movie set?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was your first job?’

‘My first job was to take a very lovely young lady on a train up to Flagstaff, Arizona.’

‘Was that Jane Russell?’

‘Yes.’

At this point, as Broccoli remembers it, ‘there was a bit of a stir among the listeners which may have been envy’.

The son of a vegetable farmer,
¹⁵⁷
Albert Romolo Broccoli took jobs in his cousin’s Long Island Casket Company, as a salesman with the Paris Beauty Parlour Supply Company, and cleaning jewellery in Beverly Hills before joining Twentieth Century-Fox as a gofer.

In the spring of 1940, Howard Hawks takes him on as his assistant on the film
The Outlaw
, produced by his old rival Howard Hughes. The male leads have already been cast, but not the female. Hughes takes responsibility for casting. ‘It was the general consensus at the time that Hughes was “a bosom man,”’ Broccoli recalls.

Hawks shows Broccoli a photograph of Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell, who is at present employed as a receptionist to a chiropodist. She
is tall and beautiful, with a thirty-eight-inch chest. Hawks asks Broccoli what he thinks of her. ‘I think she’s terrific,’ he replies.

Hughes thinks the same, and hires Jane Russell at $50 a week. To Broccoli’s delight, the night before she sets off on her long train journey to Flagstaff, Arizona, Hughes asks him to escort her.

‘I’d appreciate it if you’d see to it that she gets everything she needs on the journey,’ he adds.

‘Sure, Howard.’

‘Oh ... and Cubby ...’

‘Yes?’

‘Keep all the characters away from her.’

After two weeks’ filming, Hughes declares himself dissatisfied with the early rushes: there are no clouds in the sky. He tells Hawks that he wants clouds, ‘even if you have to wait for a little while’.

Hawks is impatient – he has a commitment to start directing his next film – and furious. ‘You evidently don’t like what I’m doing. Why don’t you take over the picture?’ he says, and walks out.

This rather suits Hughes, who has always been eager to take over the directing. But where Hawks was empathetic and instinctive, Hughes is distant and perfectionist. One scene alone requires 103 takes. The production, scheduled to last six to eight weeks, ends up taking nine months. Now promoted to Howard Hughes’s assistant, Cubby Broccoli can’t help noticing how much time the director takes studying Jane Russell’s figure. ‘His big preoccupation was how to get the maximum impact from Jane Russell’s breasts.’ It is almost as though he were treating them as stars in their own right. ‘We’re not getting enough production out of Jane’s breasts!’ Hughes barks at his cinematographer.

In one scene, Jane Russell is tied between two trees with leather thongs, and writhes around as though trying to escape. Hughes studies her through his viewfinder, and frowns. He summons Broccoli and complains that her brassière is giving her breasts an artificial look: as she twists about, its outline is clearly visible beneath her blouse. But Jane refuses to go braless; she is not that sort of girl.

Hughes won’t let the matter go. ‘This is really just a very simple engineering problem,’ he tells Broccoli. He retires to his drawing board, suspending production while he redesigns Miss Russell’s
brassière.
¹⁵⁸
‘What he was trying to do was to get a smooth look, a no-bra look,’ remembers Russell. ‘And as usual, Howard was right. He was way ahead of his time.’

Hughes comes up with a cantilevered underwired bra, with rods of curved structural steel connected to the shoulder straps and sewn into the brassière below each breast. It allows for virtually any amount of Jane Russell’s generous bosom to be freely exposed; but when she tries it on, she finds it far too uncomfortable. ‘I
never
wore his bra, and believe me, he could design planes, but a Mr Playtex he wasn’t. Oh, I suppose given several years and a willing model he would have conquered the problem, but fortunately he had a picture to worry about.’

Russell hides her new bra behind her bed, puts her old one back on, covers the seams with Kleenex tissues, and pulls the straps over to the side. This crafty dodge worries her poor wardrobe mistress. ‘What if we get fired?’ she says.

‘Nobody’s going to tell,’ replies Russell, putting her blouse back on.

Russell is tied back to the trees and given the signal to start struggling. Hughes spends a very long time looking through his viewfinder before saying, ‘OK.’ The shoot recommences, and Hughes is delighted with the result.

But the story does not end there. When the Hollywood censor sees the finished film, he is enraged. ‘The girl’s breasts, which are quite large and prominent, are shockingly uncovered,’ he complains, recommending 108 separate cuts.

Hughes takes the matter to appeal. A master of publicity, he employs a Columbia University mathematician. With the aid of calipers, this expert goes along a line of blown-up photographs of leading actresses – Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer – measuring the average percentage of bust displayed, then comparing it with the percentage of Jane Russell’s bust on view, eventually finding in favour of Jane Russell. The censorship board is won round, and agrees to just three cuts. Three years after the film started production, it is premiered in San Francisco, by which time Jane Russell is already one of the most famous
actresses in America. ‘The Picture That Couldn’t be Stopped’, reads one billboard, adding, ‘Sex Has Not Been Rationed’. Other advertisements include a billboard asking, ‘What Are the Two Great Reasons for Russell’s Success?’ and a skywriting plane flying above Pasadena, leaving behind it the words ‘THE OUTLAW,’ along with two giant circles, each with a dot in the centre.
¹⁵⁹

‘It was all fun in those days,’ reminisces Broccoli, half a century on.

SHARES A BARBER WITH

Kurt’s of Mayfair, London W1

November 1965

While Cubby Broccoli, now the producer of the James Bond films, is having his hair cut at Kurt’s of Mayfair, he is struck by the occupant of the next chair, ‘this handsome character with a strong jaw, great physique and a lot of self-assurance’. It crosses his mind that he might make a good Bond, but he imagines that anyone having his hair cut at such an expensive barber’s must be a wealthy businessman. And anyway, the position is already filled.

In fact, the person in the next chair can’t really afford to be there at all. He is a male model, born in Goulburn, Australia, the son of the greens-keeper at a bowls club. George Lazenby arrived in England last year and worked as a used-car salesman before drifting into modelling. He has had some success in his new career, modelling clothes and shampoo and fronting an advertising campaign for High Speed Gas. His most noticeable role is probably as the hero of the TV advertisement for Fry’s chocolate, in which he strides across the screen like a gladiator, bearing a crate of chocolate on his shoulders.

Lazenby wants to launch himself as an actor, and entertains ambitions to be the next James Bond. To this end, he has been secretly plotting to bump into Broccoli. Having discovered that Broccoli has his hair cut regularly at Kurt’s, he duly booked an appointment at the same time.

When Broccoli returns to his office, he instructs his secretary to call Kurt and find out the name of his suave customer. Broccoli jots down the name George Lazenby, thinking it might come in handy.

Three years later, Sean Connery decides to stop playing James Bond. The quest for a new Bond begins. Three hundred potential James Bonds are interviewed or screen-tested for the role, among them Jeremy Brett, James Brolin, Lord Lucan, Adam West (star of the television
Batman
) and
Peter Snow, later to become famous as the wielder of the election-night Swingometer.
¹⁶⁰
Summoned to a meeting with Broccoli, Lazenby wears a Savile Row suit and a Rolex Submariner wristwatch. He is shameless. ‘An actor would go into an audition for the role thinking of Connery, but I wasn’t an actor. I was so arrogant, I had nothing to lose.’