LOS ANGELES — Romantic hero? Womanizing manipulator? Renaissance man? Weirdo? Industrialist and movie mogul Howard Hughes has been cast as all of them in the 24 years since he died a shadow of his action-man self.
But if Terry Moore, the secret second wife of the thrice-married mystery man, was choosing a role for Hughes, it would be as a James Bond who treated women a lot better than 007.
"I think of him as way bigger than life. He flew the world. He was a visionary. He was so brilliant, and he carried on not nearly as badly with women as James Bond," said Moore, who spent eight years "morning, noon and night" with Hughes in the late 1940s.
Moore, a former starlet famed for being the object of a giant ape's affections in the original version of "Mighty Joe Young," thinks she knew Hughes "better than I know myself." Therefore, she is irked when the man she refers to as being her "first, last and forever" love is portrayed as an insatiable womanizer.
Which is how he is painted in "Howard Hughes: His Women and His Movies," which airs Tuesday on the Turner Classic Movies cable station. The documentary claims Hughes romanced — a Hollywood euphemism — more than 160 beautiful screen stars, linking him with Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and, at the same time, sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland.
The documentary also suggests he bought film studio RKO in 1948 to serve as a private brothel and that his appetite for women was so voracious that he had three separate dates one New Year's Eve at the Beverly Hills Hotel with actresses Jean Peters, Susan Hayward and young beauty queen Yvonne Schubert.
But the the idea of Hughes as sexual predator is at odds with the man that Moore recalls as if it were yesterday as "boyish, adorable, sweet and fun-loving."
Suggestions that Hughes died of syphilis or was gay intrude like a bad dream on Moore's memories of the glorious past as seen in the 1950s movie posters and gilt-framed portraits of herself that decorate her apartment. The photo of Hughes on her grand piano has him looking every inch the handsome American hero.
"He got out of my sight very little, I can tell you," she told Reuters in an interview. "He absolutely did not believe in dipping the pen in the office ink and having affairs with people who worked for him. He was dead-set against it. I think he spent time with women, but I don't think he was sleeping around that much. I think those stories about him are mostly myths."
Hughes' mental collapse in 1957, when he went into a screening room and stayed for months, was preceded by increasingly bizarre behavior, including an obsession for cleanliness, insomnia, deafness and paranoia that led him to spy on his girlfriends.
Their marriage aboard his yacht in 1949 was a closely guarded secret until after his death, and Moore says she knew he taped their phone calls. And she still has some tapes of their calls that she herself made by accident and which are her main contribution to the Turner documentary.
If the marriage by the yacht's captain was kept secret, it was because she was a teenage starlet, featured in movies about dogs, horses and squirrels, and he was the dashing but controversial movie maker and aviation hero who had blatantly exploited Jane Russell's cleavage to promote "The Outlaw."
He was also divorced, 24 years older than Moore and already had a reputation as a ladies' man. "I was this innocent little girl next door and I was afraid the studio would drop me. I knew we had to keep our relationship secret, and I knew he liked to keep secrets," she explained.
Moore had her own reasons for keeping the marriage to Hughes quiet even after she left him. In 1959, she married again, knowing it was bigamy. She said she wanted children and could count on the now-reclusive billionaire to keep his silence.
Moore was finally recognized as Hughes' legal widow after his death in 1976, when the disputes began over the dispersal of his fortune. Two of her own books about Hughes were best sellers in the 1980s, and she is co-producing a movie based on them.
The script is half written and if all goes well, shooting should start later this year. It will portray Hughes as a romantic hero: the aviator who survived 14 air and car crashes, the man who broke transcontinental speed records and set a record for flying around the world in just over 91 hours.
Moore's Hughes will also be a man "who really loved women. He appreciated them. Not one woman who ever dated Howard had a bad word to say about him. He was so boyish, so adorable, so sweet. I think he was the greatest lover who ever lived."
What actor could possibly play such a part? Right now, that is still a mystery.