A New Book Reveals Gossip-Worthy Details About ‘Bisexual Billionaire’ Howard Hughes

By Harry Eugene Baldwin 
 
All Photos www.photofestnyc.com

He was a millionaire while still a teenager, thanks to his father’s Texas tool-bit business. He owned Hughes Aircraft, TWA, and RKO. Yet Howard Hughes remains one of the most enigmatic, oddest, and most contradictory men in public life during the 20th century.

 
 
 
Gore Vidal said he was boring, and called him an “honest-to-God American shit.” But Hughes had a lot more going on than Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated 2004 film, “The Aviator,” depicts. Darwin Porter’s new, exhaustive biography, “Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel” (Blood Moon Productions), reveals that he bedded not only about every female beauty in Hollywood’s Golden Era, but quite a few gorgeous males too. Born in 1905 to a wealthy, libertine father, and cosseted by an incestuous mother, Hughes’ life revolved around three obsessions: airplanes, movies, and sex.

 
 
Cary Grant, to whom Hughes was romantically linked 
 
Porter, who is in his 60s, has had a long career in journalism; he started reviewing movies for the Miami Herald as a teenager, he’s written many Frommer’s travel guides, and he’s published a biography of everyone’s favorite nonlesbian, Katharine Hepburn.  
 
I recently chatted with Porter by telephone from his New York City home. We talked all about Hughes’ dazzling, sometimes puzzling life, including those boys in the back room. 
 
Harry Eugene Baldwin: How did you come to do such a lengthy book on Howard Hughes?  
 
Darwin Porter: It was such an incredible story. I was going to end it in 1948, as “The Aviator” does, but then I had material on the ’50s, when Hughes had some major moments. The part I chose not to dwell on was that long, lingering end. I was more interested in his young and vital period, how he became the richest teenager in the world and took over an empire then because of the early death of his parents. Also, what made him that germ-obsessed man had never been told.  

A young Howard Hughes

 
There have been a number of biographies about Hughes, including some supposedly about his “secret” life. Is yours the first to reveal his bisexual side?

 
No. The well-respected biographer Charles Higham in a 1995 biography [“Howard Hughes: The Secret Life”] pretty much nailed Hughes, although he didn’t have access to a lot of the sources I did. He was the first one to break the story of the sexual connection between [actor] Jack Buetel and Hughes that began during the filming of “The Outlaw,” and the romantic links with Randolph Scott and Cary Grant. 
 
How much of this was a secret? 
 
I got to Hollywood in the late ’50s, and Hughes was still a player … many of these things were well-known, but I always thought someone else would record them. But as time went by, no one really did, except for the Higham book. There were actual “read between the lines” hints in the trades of the day about closeted gay or bisexual stars. There is a whole part of Hollywood that is simply just not represented in the biographies of the last few decades.

 
 
Guy Madison (above) was 'basically straight," says Porter, but was willing to 'play trade' for Hughes in exchange for presents. 
 
 
Hughes certainly was eccentric, but was he actually crazy? 
 
By the mid-’40s, at the time [he was developing his airplane] the Spruce Goose, I now think it was [a late stage of] syphilis . . . coming out. When he had that major crash in Beverly Hills, his syphilis may have resurfaced. It was a physical thing. You can be eccentric without being insane, but I think he was eventually a victim of the disease he acquired I think in 1930. And Billie Dove, his lover, she may have passed it on to him because she got it from this golf pro, who was like a hustler. 
 
Do you think that this man was a sort of a “blah” person himself? 
 
Well, he was no Noël Coward. Many people who went out on dates with him said he virtually said nothing. True, he was hard of hearing, but even as a child he was sort of in his own world. Ava Gardner admitted that he was one of the dullest men she’d ever known. With Katharine Hepburn, she did all the talking. You know, his interest in Katharine Hepburn was not sex; I think she was the boy in a woman’s body that he had been looking for. He was not really educated, and I have no clue [if] he’d ever read a book. He had no interest in music or art; he was interested in aviation, film, golf, and beautiful women and men. He could be charming when he wanted something or someone.

 
 
Ramon Novarro (above left) was one of the first gay actors Hughes met in Hollywood. 
 
 
The men he had sex with that you list in your book is incredible: Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, Errol Flynn, and many more. 
 
These men were the crème de la crème. I used unpublished manuscripts from literary agent Jay Garon that nobody could sell, about people’s connection with stars like Tyrone Power. Much of my material on Hughes and these stars was original stuff—not what you’d find in the library.

 
 
 
Porter says that Hughes had sex with Tyrone Power (pictured).

How do you explain the contradiction between his paranoid fear of germs with wearing dirty old clothes and sneakers, not to mention having all that sex and getting syphilis? 
 
That I never could understand. Lana Turner was supposed to have asked him when she discovered he didn’t wear underwear how he could expose his genitals to a dirty old pair of pants. Yet he would demand that his housekeeper keep 50 shirts for him to change into.  
 
With the possible exception of his lifelong bond with Cary Grant, did he ever really love anybody? 
 
I don’t think so. Some books said that Billie Dove was the love of his life, but he was out dating everybody during that affair, and one time he didn’t see her for eight months. With Cary Grant, maybe in that case it was more an incredible bond rather than a love affair. They were drawn together by their struggles with their homosexuality. Hughes didn’t like to be used and Cary never asked him for anything. 

Author Darwin Porter 
 
 
He seemed to have strong, sometimes long-lasting relationships with men like Tyrone Power, Grant, and actresses like Faith Domergue and his wife Jean Peters. But wasn’t he pretty ruthless about cutting off people who rejected him?  
 
He got very bitter. The worst case was with Jack Buetel from “The Outlaw,” who could have had a career. Buetel ultimately gave in to Hughes, but Hughes punished him by keeping him off the screen. He tried to destroy the career of actress Jean Simmons because she told him that she didn’t want to go to bed with him. And Joan Crawford supposedly never gave in to him. She said to her gay friend, actor Billy Haines: “I love homosexuals, but after midnight I don’t want them in my bed.” She always viewed Hughes as a homosexual. But she was too big a star for him to destroy.  
 
Was he a true bisexual?  
 
I think that he was more strongly bisexual when he was young, in the silent-movie years. And he did have very strong liaisons in the ’30s and ’40s with those male movie idols. By the ’50s he was moving more to women. He never lost his taste for men, but it became second burner. He told his pimp, Johnny Meyer, that he could still get all the women he wanted, but men were repulsed by him so he had to buy hustlers. Hughes was still a powerfully attractive subject for women. Many women said he pretended to have affairs when he wasn’t even coming by to see them.  
 
Was he different sexually with men and women?  
 
From all the books written and witnesses and private talks, the pattern of his sexuality has emerged. With both men and women it was oral gratification time and time again. He was aggressive, performing fellatio on men and cunnilingus with women. Even Lana Turner in her memoirs complained about it. He did have what we could call “regular sex,” but it was not his preferred thing.

 
 
 
Ginger Rogers with Hughes in a nightclub 
 
 
How did he find the time to design airplanes and have all that sex?  
 
This is what had baffled me. He almost never slept; he would stay up for three days then collapse. He kept the strangest hours of any major figure in Hollywood I ever heard of. But when he was really doing something monumental, like getting ready for a transglobal flight, he would just devote himself entirely to the airplane. He wasn’t running around.  
 
Isn’t he like a Tiberius—controlling, even owning people with almost no one to tell him no? 
 
You’re absolutely right. With money and power he could have whatever he wanted. His father also fooled around with actresses and was a role model for him. I do think that mother of his contributed so much to his germ obsession, and trying to sort of make him a girl, and masturbating him when he was a boy. I think a mother like that could really upset your head there.

 
Your book outs a lot more people than Hughes. Some we’ve heard talk about elsewhere, but Clark Gable is kind of a surprise. 
 
With Gable we’re going back to the late ’20s. He would, as they say, fuck anything to get a part. Billy Haines was really the first person to out Gable. Gable wanted a part in a Hughes movie, so Howard flew him off for a weekend, as he often did with his seductions. What happened between Hughes and Gable is not really truly known, but something went wrong. I think Gable was very heterosexual but very ambitious.

 
 
 
You’ve listed pages of sources. How much credence can the reader place in the memories of these people? 
 
That’s always the big question in biographies: Are people telling you the truth? When it comes to famous or infamous people, it depends on how intimately a person might have known them, which would [determine] whether you believed them. Hughes’ publicist and pimp, Johnny Meyer, could have been the biggest liar in the world, but with everything he said he was right down to the date and the place. He confirmed things that had never been confirmed before.  
 
Some of the revelations are amazing. I don’t think anyone has ever written that Spencer Tracy had a secret homosexual life. 
 
With Spencer Tracy the most recent outing was in Vanity Fair. Tracy was a closeted, tortured bisexual. Tracy had a great struggle with his bisexuality as a Catholic, and really suffered.  
 
Concerning the movie “The Aviator,” even though the screenwriter is gay, there’s nothing about Hughes’ bisexuality. Why do you think they ignored it? 
 
First, I don’t want to knock it. [Hughes is] a difficult man to write a screenplay about. My greatest disappointment was, they relegated Cary Grant to 30 seconds [of screen time]. When Hughes has to go testify before Congress in Washington, they created an Ava Gardner situation. But it was actually Cary, not her, who cleaned him up and got him some decent clothes. They were trying to eliminate any bisexual overtones. The original script had a scene where Jude Law as Errol Flynn was kissing Hughes. I found that very tantalizing; Leonardo [DiCaprio] was willing to have a scene with Jude Law. The producers bought Higham’s book and decided not to use that part of it. They had to make a decision not to go that route. The emphasis on Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn in the movie was really odd, since these were probably the two most famous actresses who never slept with him. Rex Reed has said that the Katharine Hepburn affair lasted longer on-screen than the one in real life. Hepburn went for months without seeing Hughes, even when she lived in his house.  
 
Do you expect your book to speak to just a gay audience and be ignored by the mainstream press? 
 
No, I don’t expect it to be. It’s been in the London Daily Press. We are actually getting better press in Europe. Doubleday in Australia is making it a book of the month. There will always be the cranky review, the venomous attack. I never complain about coverage. I don’t get good coverage in red states from the mainstream press. The gay press, yes. But I think it certainly will have mainstream interest. 
 
Hughes is hardly a role model for gay people, is he?  
 
Not at all. But I think gay people could be interested in him. Hughes lived out a fantasy that some gay men had: “If I had all the power in the world, I might seduce Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise.” I don’t know any male who ever did that in Hollywood the way he did.  
 
You mentioned that you had to cut a lot of private stuff out. Why? 
 
I had to be careful of libel; some of the people are still alive and I had material that seriously libeled them. And I had to end the book. It was already really big, which is why I didn’t get into the ’60s and ’70s. Another factor was that some people did exaggerate their role in his life, or I had already established the same points in another context. This would be a pattern that could become repetitious. There were other involvements of Hughes that were minor, and while I didn’t question the legitimacy of them, they didn’t affect his life. 
 
Any final thoughts on the book? 
 
Hughes was one of the most complicated figures I’ve ever dealt with. I think he was a very important man. He lived a life in the 20th century that no other person did. I ended admiring his taste very much in flesh. I don’t want to denigrate what he did in aviation. He was a great hero, a powerful movie producer, and [a] damn good aviator in a leather jacket—a gay fantasy. There’s never been anyone like him. Ultimately, I got sort of turned on by him. You know, unlike Clark Gable, Howard Hughes was extremely well-endowed. He did Texas proud. Imagine having all that money and a big dick too!  
 
For more information, see www.bloodmoonproductions.com.

Back to Top