The Seducer

Part of Quarberg’s job was to respond to requests from newsmen for “feminine art,” meaning cheesecakey publicity photos that journalists could either print in their publications, or keep for their personal use. But some fans would write directly to their favorite stars to ask for photos.

by the 1950s, Hughes wasn’t interested in sharing credit with anyone, let alone a has-been

A publicity biography of Hughes dated 1930 credited Howard’s “friendship with Marshall Neilan” for igniting Hughes’s interest “in the making of movies.” Almost a quarter century later, Hughes would request that journalist Stephen White remove an innocuous reference to Neilan from a profile White was writing on Hughes for Look magazine

Inducted into the local social scene by his father and uncle, he had quickly taken to this world of uncommon beauty and possibility, populated by strivers from all over, none of them encumbered by the concern for history, propriety, and decorum that patrolled social life in Houston

It is equally true that Howard Hughes Jr. was, in early 1924, an eighteen-year-old boy, heretofore a sheltered and pampered loner, who was now tantalizingly close to controlling a fortune.

he boldly confirms Hollywood’s detractors’ fears that the film industry was in fact breeding and cultivating independent women who posed a real threat to the default patriarchy

Based on Hughes’s own novel, Souls for Sale anticipates the French New Wave maxim that every fiction film acts as a documentary of the moment in which it was made. Featuring an unprecedented glimpse behinds the scenes of the film factory, with Charlie Chaplin, Neilan, and other power players of the day playing themselves, Souls was Hughes’s passionate defense of the film industry against its scandal-mongering detractors

He acted as a part-time playmate and protégé for his father, who took him along to parties, modeled the process of wooing starlets, and gave him lectures about business. The father stressed to his son the importance of autonomy. “Never share control,” Howard Sr. told Howard Jr. “Never share credit, and never share profits

In other words, the first Howard Hughes’s fortune was built on secrecy

moved the studios to preemptively band together to create a group called the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, through which they hired former postmaster general Will Hays to oversee the industry’s efforts