ILLUSTRATION RUSSELL MOORCROFT
HOWARD HUGHES WAS WAITING ON THE STREET.
It was a Sunday evening in December 1949, and the RKO studio head was there to meet gossip columnist and radio queen Louella Parsons as she left her Los Angeles studio: Hughes had a sensational scoop for her about Ingrid Bergman, the star of his upcoming film, Stromboli. Bergman, said Hughes, was pregnant by Italian director Robert Rossellini, while still married to her Swedish first husband, and the studio mogul thought that the inevitable scandal would drum up attention for the film.
Parsons was torn. She wasn’t that friendly with Bergman, who had never kowtowed to the Hollywood gossips by sending expensive Christmas gifts or singing at their parties. Still, Parsons had never written something that could wreck an actor’s career; while she knew where the bodies were buried, she tended to leverage that information to land more wholesome stories.