You understand that all the comment immediately above is with respect to the dress made of metallic cloth. However, this comment is equally applicable to any other dress she wears, and I would like this instruction followed with respect to all her wardrobe.
Regarding the dresses themselves, the one made of metallic cloth is OK although it is a high-necked dress because it is so startling. However, I want the rest of her wardrobe, wherever possible, to be low-necked (and by that I mean as low as the law allows) so that the customers can get a look at the part of Russell which they pay to see and not covered by cloth, metallic or otherwise.
3. In the test, both Jane Russell and Joyce McKenzie were chewing gum. If this was inadvertent and Russell merely did so because she considered it a wardrobe test, I suppose that is of no consequence. But, if von Sternberg intends to play these girls in the picture chewing gum, I strongly object as I do not see how any woman can be exciting while in the process.
20
RKO JUST WASN’T working out as an investment, so I put it up on the block. I’d had it for more than half a dozen years and it was time to cut my losses. In some ways I’d made a mistake – I’d bought the wrong studio. I should have bought Columbia Pictures. I tried to at one point, right after I bought RKO. I don’t mean that I would have bailed out of RKO. I would have kept them both. Columbia was just up the street – very convenient.
And then in 1956 I bought about a quarter of a million shares in Twentieth Century Fox. But that was because I got a tip right from Spyros Skouras himself, and he was the head of the studio. He knew the stock was going up, so for me it was a straight plunge – in and out.
We’d done some business together, but more than that – this is usually the case – I had something he wanted. It was a Greek artifact from Turkey, a figurine of a warrior, and I’d been told that it dated from the time of Alexander the Great. It was given to me many years ago by Estelle Sharp, Walter Sharp’s widow.
Spyros saw it a few times and he had his heart set on it. Anything Greek, he loved. He wanted this statue but I didn’t want to sell it. For me it was something from the old days, from my youth in Houston. But when this thing came up with the Fox stock, Skouras tipped me to a fat profit. And then he said, ‘If you want to show your appreciation, Howard, as I’m sure you do, you can sell me that little Greek soldier.’
I said, ‘Jesus, take it. If you want it that badly, it’s yours.’ I don’t know what the statue was worth, but it damn sure wasn’t worth the two-million-plus I made on the stock. So I was happy to do Spyros a favor.
RKO, however, brought me one thing more than anything else, and that was lawsuits. I’ve been in court plenty, but I’ve never experienced anything like the barrage of subpoenas that came at me from my involvement with RKO. I was sued by the stockholders – that was the biggest suit, but it came last – and before that the first major suit came from Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger.
I don’t like lawyers, I never have, and I don’t trust them. The last man on earth I trust is my own lawyer. I know that probably sounds odd to you, but I can tell you – watch out. You just have to think about how these people can get the goods on you with this ‘privileged information’ crap. They’ve done things behind by back, time after time, by misrepresenting my wishes – and worse. They’re in business to make money and I don’t kid myself about that. I call them vultures.
Didn’t Gail Ganley sue you, too?
For half a million dollars. Her father put her up to it. Her father stood there outside of my offices on Romaine Street and was taking photographs of the girl. We had her under contract, but I gave orders that she should not be allowed into Romaine Street. She would break up the place. She threatened mayhem, and she was capable of it.
I gave orders that when she came round to pick up her paycheck she shouldn’t be allowed in the building. The money was lowered out of a window on a string to her, in a basket. She had to sign a receipt and that would be attached to the basket and pulled up to the people who were lowering the money. And her father came round to take photographs of that, as if it meant anything, as if it proved that I had cheated her in some way.
Don’t you think that was a strange way of paying the girl?
She got paid, didn’t she? It was cash was coming down, it wasn’t spaghetti. I couldn’t send her a check. She didn’t believe in checks. She was a redneck country girl. And a lousy lay, I might add. Tore up my back with her fingernails and made a lot of loud noise, to the point where the people at the next bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel, some English businessman and his wife, complained. She never saw shoes before I set her up with a contract. Finally I had to settle with her, but for a small amount of money, around a hundred thousand dollars.
Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t think $100,000 is a small amount of money. The value of money is directly proportional to the intelligence of the man who has got it. I’ll give you my formula. E=MC squared – with apologies to Mr. Einstein. Ego equals Money times Confidence squared.
But in any case the settlement was a small amount of money compared to what Ganley was asking.
The actress Ann Sheridan sued me too, and we were friends, and had been lovers. I can’t even remember what she sued me for, or why, but I liked her, and so I said, ‘Ann, withdraw the lawsuit, or your lawyer will take most of what I give you, and I’ll give you a private payment of cash. I’ll give you every penny you’re asking, because I like you.’
To finish up with the lawsuits, the big one came from the RKO stockholders. That was a lulu. They started pretty early on, around 1951, mostly because the stock had gone down to around three dollars a share. Nobody wants to admit they’ve made an error of investment judgment, and so they often try to pin it on management, which in this case was me.
You can do things right for forty years, you can have the golden touch, but the moment you do one thing wrong, or even if it just looks like you’ve done one thing wrong, they’re lying in ambush to get you. The hammers are always cocked. I wasn’t even an officer of the company, you understand. I had no official position at RKO. I just ran the studio. I made the major decisions. That’s what control means.
I didn’t take the suit too seriously. I was so used to being sued that it was like another bowl of Rice Krispies for me – I expected a new lawsuit on my breakfast table every morning or evening, depending on when I ate breakfast.
But eventually it got a little too serious – it got up to about $40 million worth of different lawsuits from different stockholders, and it was also getting annoying. I was used to having my name smudged, but I didn’t like to have it colored black-and-blue the way these people were doing. They sued me for mismanagement, driving the studio toward bankruptcy, and also for putting actresses on the studio payroll for my own personal sexual pleasure, which, if you’ve listened to anything I’ve been saying to you, you’ll know is horseshit.
First of all there was a fuss about Gina Lollabrigida. In 1947 she entered a beauty contest and was chosen Miss Rome. I saw a picture of her in a bikini and, as I think I told you before, I invited her to Hollywood for a screen test. I sent a TWA plane to Rome to fly her over. My people met her at the airport, bundled her in a car, and put her in a hotel room in Malibu. She said she was locked up there, but that was nonsense. She received English lessons, saw a slew of RKO films, and rehearsed for her screen test. Later she claimed that she was badgered by lawyers who wanted her to sign a contract written in English that she couldn’t understand. And she said that for six weeks I came by at one o’clock in the morning, hired the hotel orchestra and danced with her for several hours in the hotel’s ballroom. Well, why not? I thought I was being romantic. She was great in bed, when she was in the mood.