This dame was a lady

Janet Leigh rebuffed Howard Hughes, made movies with Orson Welles and collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock. But don't call her an actor.

By Michael Sragow

Jun 29, 2000 | Any number of actors have had a better time playing Howard Hughes than Hughes had playing himself -- at least judging from the Turner Classic Movies documentary "Howard Hughes: His Women and His Movies."

Tommy Lee Jones had a ball playing Hughes as an idiosyncratic and paranoid Jazz Age millionaire in the 1977 miniseries "The Amazing Howard Hughes" (still available on videotape). His Hughes aimed the same hair-trigger concentration at streamlined airplanes and cantilevered bras.

In Francis Coppola's 1988 "Tucker," Dean Stockwell did a dizzying oddball number portraying Hughes as an elusive visionary, hovering in the shadows of his white elephant airplane, the Spruce Goose, almost buried from sight under sunglasses, mustache and wide-brimmed hat.

And best of all, in Jonathan Demme's 1980 classic, "Melvin and Howard," Jason Robards embodied Hughes in his aging-hermit phase as a madman motorcyclist who seized on speed and motion as if they were his sole remaining pleasures. His Hughes was amazingly out of touch -- suspicious, selfish and cantankerous -- yet still had enough latent humanity to connect with the good-natured milkman, Melvin Dummar.

It's no surprise that a man like Hughes inspires so many different portraits. He was an enigma even to those who observed him at close quarters. During a wide-ranging interview last week, I asked movie star Janet Leigh why Hughes continued to have his agents track her movements and phone calls long after she had made clear that she would never succumb to his romantic advances. Was he an incorrigible erotic optimist? Or was he paranoid about her as a potentially disgruntled employee? "Maybe he lived in hope," she laughed. "But, really, who knows?"

Born in 1905, this inheritor of a hugely profitable oil-drill business became a successful movie producer in his 20s and an aeronautical pioneer in his 30s. He was a towering American type, the heir who would be a self-made man. Whether taking over Trans-Continental and Western Airlines (TWA) in 1937 or RKO Studios in 1948, he made the kind of sweeping gestures that often signal greatness -- at least to tabloid sensibilities.

But was the man as big as his gestures? "Howard Hughes: His Women and His Movies" suggests not. The TCM movie, which premiered on June 27 and next screens on TCM July 1 and 11, could have been called "Howard Hughes: The Man and the Myth." It takes an original tack, focusing on Hughes' dual fixation with Hollywood and pulchritude.

Then it reduces everything to purple prose and novelette-ish Freudianism. The fear of rejection bred in an unhappy childhood explains his compulsive skirt chasing; obsessive-compulsive disorder explains his fatal blend of perfectionism and procrastination. In a swift 56 minutes, it makes for absorbing soap opera to follow him producing films high (the original 1932 "Scarface") and low (the 1941 lust-in-the-dust camp classic "The Outlaw") while courting a succession of ever-younger or more vulnerable beauties. He went from Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers and Bette Davis to starlets and teen queens, eventually marrying 30-year-old Jean Peters in 1957.

"Howard Hughes: His Women and His Movies" leaves you with the impression that Leigh was the only actress in Hughes' RKO Studios stable who denied him love or attention. And that impression fit in with everything I knew about Leigh, whether from interviewing her two years ago about "Touch of Evil" or from reading her two books, "There Really Was a Hollywood" (her 1984 autobiography, which covers much of the same ground) and "Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller" (a 1995 memoir, co-written with Christopher Nickens). She confirmed in our phone interview last week that she didn't let this mixture of Lindbergh, Barnum and Lothario get to first base with her. She wouldn't even let him get to bat.

With the level intelligence that typifies her backward glances at the movie industry, Leigh says she doesn't regret starring in Hughes' ruinously expensive "Jet Pilot" (1950-57), an alternately riotous and turgid aviation epic about the love between a Soviet and an American flier -- Leigh and big John Wayne -- just out on a widescreen DVD. After all, this movie helped crumble her white-bread image. Soon after its long-delayed release, she starred in a trio of dark masterpieces: "Touch of Evil" (1958), Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960) and John Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962).

Yet even when she was an ingenue, Leigh worked with a succession of gifted directors (such as Fred Zinnemann on "Act of Violence") in roles that had unexpected shadings. As the aristocratic love interest in George Sidney's "Scaramouche," that euphoric romantic swashbuckler set in 18th century France, Leigh put the hero in a trance -- though he spent most of the movie thinking she was his sister. Shortly after riding sidesaddle in "Scaramouche," she rode rugged in Anthony Mann's "The Naked Spur," playing a gal who drives desperate men wild in a bitter and compelling psychological western. (Leigh has four films in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress: "The Naked Spur," "Touch of Evil," "Psycho" and "The Manchurian Candidate.")

Today, Gwyneth Paltrow would be hailed for going from the ballroom gliding of "Scaramouche" to the mud-kicking tomboy behavior of "The Naked Spur." But back in the early '50s, it was no big deal for Leigh: "That was something we were expected to do -- and given the chance to do, thank God. We were trained for it." Indeed, as an up-and-comer at MGM she was in the position of the court-schooled beauty in "Scaramouche," who tells an intrigued marquis that she has "a nodding acquaintance with geography, geometry, astronomy, philosophy and botany," and gave up on algebra when she was 12.

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