Ella wanted to live as a lady, which meant I had to live like her idea of a gentleman, and I’d discovered that I wasn’t interested in that kind of life. It paralleled my mother and father’s marriage. I got married at the age of nineteen because I thought it would make a man of me in the eyes of the world, and then one day I woke up to the fact that not only wasn’t it true, but that the world didn’t give a damn one way or the other.
I could give you a dozen reasons for my marriage and another dozen reasons for my first divorce, and eleven of them might be true, but none of them would be precisely true. The real reason I got married is because I wanted to get married the way a child wants something that catches his eye. He says, ‘I want it.’ He doesn’t know why. Human nature is to want and to not want. The reason I got divorced is because I didn’t want to be married any longer. What we want one season, we don’t want the next season, but usually we’re stuck with it and we haven’t got the courage or wherewithal to haul ourselves out of the hole or the rut. It’s as simple as that, except people don’t like simple reasons and simple answers. They want complicated answers. They’re easier to deal with.
I just didn’t want to be married anymore. Ella and I lived on different schedules. I’ve never been at ease socially. I was interested in pursuing my passions, and my passions were movie-making, flying, inventing—
And women?
Since I know you’ve done your homework, I’ll tell you that there was one other woman during that period who meant a great deal to me. She was an actress named Billie Dove. In fact she starred in one of my films, Age for Love. I’d met Billie while I was still married to Ella. The marriage was breaking up and I was ripe for a serious affair. Not a fling, like with Harlow. A love affair, with all the drama and thrill and potential for disaster that those words imply.
I fell in love the way only a young man can fall in love: to the point of lunacy. Shakespeare called love a form of madness and he knew what he was talking about. I was surrounded by hundreds of girls in Hollywood, all of them beautiful and almost all of them willing, but for a while I was blind to everyone except Billie Dove.
It happened at first sight, corny as you can get. I saw her in the studio cafeteria. I walked right up to her, which was definitely not my habit. I said, ‘Who are you?’ I was twenty-three years old. She was a very beautiful girl.
Falling in love isn’t something a man can help, and if he could explain it like you break down a chemical formula, then it wouldn’t be love. Billie wasn’t a sexy woman, the Yvonne de Carlo type. She was quiet, and underneath that quiet she was sexy as hell. Still waters run deep – sometimes too deep. I wasn’t proud that Billie could twist me round her little finger because of my physical desires.
If you were really in love, why did it break up?
Sanity and day-to-day living restore the balance. I’m not sure whether that’s for better or for worse.
In a way, the end of that affair was far more painful to me than my broken marriage. Billie was roaring along with her career, and at that time I was extricating myself from the movie business, and I knew I would be away from California a great deal. We drifted apart.
That still doesn’t make sense.
I’ll tell you the rest of it some other time. Anyway, the unfortunate aftermath of this was that I was hurt, and lonely for quite a while, despite the fact that I was surrounded by people. Some men can just shrug it off and go on to a second love affair, and a third and fourth, but I couldn’t. I tried one with Carole Lombard, but it didn’t work. I was always shy with girls and it took all my courage to speak to one of them for the first time. So you can see how bowled over I was by Billie when I saw her on the line at the studio cafeteria. I certainly didn’t have the so-called social graces – you could never have called me a charmer.
Why were you so shy?
As a boy I was as tall as I am now. I reached my full height, six foot three, by the time I was seventeen. I didn’t go in for sports except golf, and I felt awkward and gangling, conscious of my height, I wasn’t at ease in my skin. I’d trip over my own feet. I mean it literally. I don’t think I stood up straight until I was thirty years old. Until then I slouched and stooped because I didn’t want to seem too tall. I didn’t want people to have to look up at me, because I thought they resented that. I know that Noah Dietrich disliked me for being tall, and whenever he had the chance, when he felt his position was secure enough, he made fun of me a little bit – that I was gangling and thin and had a neck like a giraffe.
At one point I started going to a gym in Santa Monica. I went almost every day for a couple of weeks, worked out on the bicycle machine, tried to build my arms with weights, but eventually I began to suspect the place was full of homosexuals. They used to stand around flexing their muscles and admiring themselves in the mirrors.
One evening there was a power failure. I had just finished working out and was in the shower. The minute the lights flicked out there was so much shrieking and giggling coming from these guys around me that I fled, all lathered up with soap. I grabbed my clothes and got dressed and ran out into the street, dripping wet. I caught a cold. That was the end of my muscle-building period.
You never had any childhood homosexual experiences?
Are you kidding? When I was a boy in Texas, a fairy would have been run out of the state on a rail. When I went to Hollywood, I was just barely twenty. I wasn’t Errol Flynn or Rock Hudson, but I believe it’s fair to say I was considered handsome. Hollywood then, as now, was full of homosexuals. I don’t know why they latched onto me particularly, maybe just because my interest in women may have seemed halfhearted. I certainly did stand up a lot of girls. I made dates and didn’t keep them, and a lot of girls walked out on me because I didn’t spend enough time with them. Then too, although I was married, I didn’t see much of my wife, and maybe that looked funny to people.
Some years later, one time, Gina Lollabrigida walked out on me. This was typical. I’d brought her over from Italy to star in one of my pictures. Finally she came to my bungalow. I had a cramp and had to go to the john. I had magazines lying around in there. One of then was a technical journal about flying. I was sitting there, poking through it, and the next thing I knew it was an hour later and Gina was gone. She had walked out. I can’t blame her. She was hot to trot, and who the hell wants to hang around an hour while some guy vanishes to take a crap?
Spyros Skouras, the movie magnate, once said to me, ‘Howard, you really and truly like women? I’d heard you were a fag.’
It was a fact that I was being approached by men far more often than I should have been in normal circumstances. This was early in my career, when I was producing my first three or four pictures.
I went to a Hollywood party at Mary Pickford’s house, and I had to take a leak. I went into the bathroom and Ramon Navarro – he was a famous actor, a latin-lover type – stood there right behind me, chatting away to me. I was thinking about something else. I must have said, ‘Sure… yes… sure.’ When I buttoned up, he tried to grab me by the pecker.
I lost it. I popped him one on the jaw. Poor guy, he backed off and apologized, and after that he left me alone. So did everyone else who was that way inclined. The word got around that I was liable to react violently.
What about the stories that you employed a man to look for beautiful, interesting young women and make dates for you?
Sad to say, they’re true. I hadn’t the time. It wasn’t my nature to make quick contact. There was more than one man who did that for me. I had Pat DiCicco for a while, and then Walter Kane and Grady Reed, and then Johnny Meyer, and once there was a fellow called Bill Weston. But things didn’t work out well with Weston. He tried to blackmail me.