Jean Peters: Hollywood's Mystery Girl

Jean Peters

Hollywood Legends Series

Carl Rollyson, General Editor

Jean Peters

Hollywood’s Mystery Girl

Michelangelo Capua

University Press of Mississippi • Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2024 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

∞

All photographs are from the author’s collection.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Capua, Michelangelo, 1966– author.

Title: Jean Peters : Hollywood’s mystery girl / Michelangelo Capua. Other titles: Hollywood legends series.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2024. | Series: Hollywood legends series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023048931 (print) | LCCN 2023048932 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496850263 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496850270 (epub) | ISBN 9781496850287 (epub) | ISBN 9781496850294 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496850300 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Peters, Jean, 1926–2000. | Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography.

Classification: LCC PN2287.P4 C37 2024 (print) | LCC PN2287.P4 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/809273 [B]—dc23/eng/20231031

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048931

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048932

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Farm Girl

Chapter 2: Catana

Chapter 3: Sense and Sensibility

Chapter 4: Dallas Pruitt

Chapter 5: Lady Pirate

Chapter 6: Kazan and Brando

Chapter 7: Negulesco’s Muse

Chapter 8: Femme Noir

Chapter 9: No Time for Love

Chapter 10: Surprising Girl in Surprise Wedding

Chapter 11: Bye-Bye Hollywood

Chapter 12: A Brief Comeback

Chapter 13: Tranquility

Acknowledgments

Notes

Filmography

Selected Bibliography

Index

Jean Peters

Introduction

From 1947 to 1955, Jean Peters Appeared In Nineteen Films Opposite Hollywood’s leading men such as Tyrone Power, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, and Robert Wagner, as well as international stars including Louis Jourdan and Rossano Brazzi. It wasn’t just her acting ability that caught the eye of producers and directors; her screen presence was electrifying, with 20th Century Fox production head Buddy Adler noting, Jean Peters was an excellent actress. She had a great deal of fire that she kept under control, and you could feel it.

People who knew Pete, as friends and colleagues called her, remarked on her authenticity and down-to-earth qualities. Unlike most film stars of the day, Jean Peters remained levelheaded and was never seduced by fame. Off-camera, her style was informal and ordinary, her face was makeup-less, and she wore clothes that she’d often sewn herself. She had grown up on a farm, was no stranger to manual work, and could wield an ax like the best of them. She’d always been a trousers type of girl, and these rustic qualities never left her.

Vast candy-colored mansions were eschewed for plain rented houses, flash cars were passed over in favor of simple rides, and she never embraced the Hollywood lifestyle. This behavior, at a time when ordinary people were engulfed in post-war austerity and Hollywood was regarded as the height of glamour, contributed to her being described by influential newspaper columnist Louella Parsons as a Hollywood mystery girl. Parsons, whose well-read gossip column could launch or sink careers, could not understand why Jean refused to discuss her love life or embrace the much-coveted lifestyle of a true star. From that moment on, Jean Peters was marked as an enigma.

She became a challenge for reporters who constantly tried to discover tidbits about her personal life. When rumors started circulating that billionaire business magnate Howard Hughes—a mystery in his own right—had fallen hard for Jean and that she was in love with him too, the media went crazy. However, while Jean would talk about her career (she was delighted that she played so many different characters and was never typecast), her dressmaking abilities, and her passion for baseball, her love life remained off-limits.

Her penchant for dressing simply off-screen meant she was rarely noticed and could live an ordinary life. I am not recognized half the time, she told reporters. When fans did recognize her, they would ask, Are you Jean Peters? and she would frown and ask in a puzzled voice, Who’s Jean Peters? leaving them to walk off bewildered.

Howard Hughes would become Jean’s second husband in 1957. After this, she retired from Hollywood and public life for eighteen years. They divorced in 1971, and from then on, she was simply Mrs. Hughes. Despite the many lucrative offers she received from publishers to write a memoir about life with Hughes, she refused, and the intimate details of her marriage remain a mystery to this day. Any information about her unusual marriage that is in the public realm came from Hughes’s biographers. The most extraordinary fact of all is that there is no record of Jean Peters and Howard Hughes being seen in public together and no photographs.

In 1973, two years after her divorce from Hughes, by which time she was married to her third husband, producer Stan Hough (she also married briefly in the mid-1950s), she decided to go back to acting. Announcing her comeback, Jean said, There has been no mystery to my life. I’ve been around all the time, always active. It’s just that I wasn’t going about my activities publicly.

Jean’s oldest friend, Arlen Hurwitz, once said of Jean, who began her career as a trainee teacher in her native Ohio before becoming a Hollywood star and marrying one of the richest men on earth, Jean’s values haven’t changed in the slightest. She always knew who she was, so fame had no effect on her personality. Nor has money. She was never owned by her possessions. If Jean was broke, she’d still be rich.

What makes Jean Peters distinctive? The very fact she eschewed the star-studded lifestyle of 1950s Hollywood—turning down roles that were too sexy, refusing to socialize with other actors, discuss her private life in the press, or lead a glamorous lifestyle away from the cameras—tells everything needed to know about this down-to-earth actress. If she had courted the press a bit more, she would be better known today. In fact, Jean often said that her friend and three-film costar Marilyn Monroe had the drive and the ambition, attributes that she just didn’t have.

Chapter 1

Farm Girl

It was my experience on the farm plus the inspiring spirit of my mother that gave me so little desire to become the victim of my possessions.

—Jean Peters

in 1924, the canton wet wash in stark, ohio, was an innovative laundry service where family washes were collected, washed, dried, and delivered the same day or the following morning. Twenty-four-year-old Gerald Peters, a truck driver working for the business, met Mary Thomas—a pretty twenty-six-year-old—in one of his daily pickups. Mary was living with her parents and her younger sister, Melba, at 1312 14th Street N.W. in Canton, a five-minute drive from Gerald’s house. Every Tuesday afternoon, Mary made sure that the family’s dirty laundry bundle was ready for pickup so it could be returned clean twenty-four hours later. At first, Gerald and Mary exchanged only a few words of formal greetings, but slowly, during those weekly deliveries, words became sentences and sentences became conversations. They found a common ground, discovering that both their families were of Welsh descent. Gerald’s parents were, in fact, immigrants from Wales. His father, Henry Williams Peters, was a plumber and his mother, Sadie Eliza, a housewife, while Mary’s parents were farmers of Welsh and German descent.

Finally, Gerald asked Mary out, and a few months later, the two were officially engaged. On September 12, 1924, after their marriage license request had appeared in a local newspaper, Gerald Morris Peters and Mary Elizabeth Thomas were married at Reverend Pearl Howard Welsheimer’s residence. After a quick, simple ceremony, the newlyweds spent their honeymoon in Kentucky. On their return, the couple took residence in a house at 820 Richard Place N.W. in Canton. Although Gerald had been promoted to manager at Canton Wet Wash, his ambition was to find a job as an engineer in one of the local foundries, an aspiration that he fulfilled a few years later.

On October 15, 1926, Mary gave birth to her first child, a beautiful green-gray-eyed baby she named Elizabeth Jean. Little Elizabeth spent most of her early years in the natural landscape that surrounded the Peters’s house. Her childhood was happy and carefree, and the house was filled with the arts. Gerald enjoyed playing the piano, and Elizabeth proved herself to be a talented painter. Mary taught her how to sew, and from the age of eight, she started to make dolls’ clothes and later sewed clothes for herself, friends, and relatives. She also had a strong work ethic and, from an early age, would help her mother with daily chores around the house.

In 1935, the family welcomed a second baby, Shirley. Sadly, two years later, tragedy struck when Gerald died, aged just thirty-seven, following a long illness. The tragedy shook the family’s finances. Practical Mary, who had been raised by farmers, rolled up her sleeves and invested her husband’s life insurance into a seven-acre chicken farm—replete with magnolia, elm, cherry, and peach trees—in East Canton by Lincoln Highway.

At first, they lived above a stable until Mary heard of a flood control project that was condemning tract houses. She was able to buy enough material from them to assemble a house with the help of her eldest daughter and an aging uncle. They survived by selling eggs, eating vegetables and fruits from their beautiful orchard, and drinking milk from a cow they owned. Years later, little Elizabeth, who was now Jean, would say, It was my experience on the farm, plus the inspiring spirit of my mother, that gave me so little desire to become the victim of my possessions.¹

Shortly after the house’s foundation was up and rough framing had been established, the United States entered the Second World War, which made carpenters and builders scarce. If Mary and Elizabeth wanted to get the house finished, they’d have to do it themselves. And they did, as Jean would later recall:

We moved into rooms over the completed garage. And Mother bought a buzz saw and a cement mixer. Then she and I built most of the nine-room house together. Of course we didn’t do the heavy work, like putting in the beams. But we laid flooring, built the huge stone fireplace, and I nailed on the basic roof—later, carpenters shingled it. Also, Mother and I cemented all the stonework on the outside of the house.²

Once they completed the house, they built a row of cabins, which Mary planned to run as a tourist camp with the help of eleven-year-old Elizabeth Jean.

Jean proved to be a hardworking and determined young girl. Entrepreneurial, too. While in school, she wrote love letters for a classmate who liked a girl but was too shy to make a move. She received twenty-five cents for each letter until, eventually, the girl was won over.

When she came home from school, before she sat down to do her homework, she had to milk a cow named Lulubelle, feed a goat called Josephine plus a lamb named Ali Baba, and attend to three dogs and eighteen cats who lived around the farm. She also had to babysit little Shirley when her mother was not around. Only on Sundays did she rest, along with her mother, without ever missing the service at the local Methodist church. The only shattering of peace on Sundays was the weekly fight Mary and Jean had over the little girl’s hatred of hats and her mother’s insistence that she wore one to church.

It took four years before the house on the farm was completed and Mary could move in with her two daughters. In the meantime, Jean graduated in the class of 1944 from East Canton High, where she was also part of the high-strutting drum majorette corps. She tried hard to become a majorette leader, but, as she revealed later, she never succeeded. I had a disappointment and felt very bitter about it, she said. I tried but failed to become a drum majorette in high school, again at the university. I practiced, could do all the tricks, but other girls were chosen. So I decided I’d better stick to my knitting—my studies.³

As a child, Jean had dreamed of becoming a doctor, but once she graduated from high school, she was determined to be an English teacher. She was bookish and, from the age of thirteen, had started building up her own home library, which included some rare first editions. Over the years, through hard work and thriftiness, Mary had been able to save enough money to send her daughter to college, and Jean won a place at the University of Michigan. She chose not to join any sororities because she saw other girls’ heartbreak after their failed pledges, so she lived off campus with a professor’s family.

For the entire freshman year, she worked as a salesgirl in a department store for four hours every afternoon and all day on Saturday. However, after the first year at college, she was so homesick she transferred as a sophomore to Ohio State University (OSU) College of Education, where she lived with five hundred other girls in the Baker Hall dormitory. Exceptionally studious, on the rare occasions that she went on a date, she preferred the company of medical students, whom she found the most interesting.

Men were intrigued not just by Jean’s self-sufficiency, maturity, and slight aloofness but also her sultry looks. They went crazy for her long, dark brown hair, which parted in the middle and hung softly around her face, framing her greenish-gray eyes. Unfortunately, they didn’t stand a chance. I had only three dates the whole year, Jean revealed years later. At the time, I was quite in love with a boy I’d known in high school. He was in the Army, and I felt it was only right I shouldn’t go out much. He was killed during that year. He was the only real romance I’ve ever had in my life.⁴

Nevertheless, a few months later, Jean almost became engaged to a premed student. Their dates were rather unusual, to say the least. I used to go to autopsies with him, she said. I was a little squeamish at first, but after a whole semester, I got used to it. That attachment didn’t work out, however. I was a bit of a hypochondriac, and he wouldn’t pay any attention to my ‘symptoms.’⁵

Among the young men Jean did date at college was Robert Slatzer, who would become one of her closest friends. The two met for the first time in Hayes Hall at the student medical dispensary when they were both suffering from colds. At the time, Slatzer was the campus photographer for Makio, the Ohio State yearbook, and The Lantern, the college newspaper. He asked Jean to pose for him, but she blushed and said nothing. A few days later, Slatzer visited her at her dorm and asked again, and this time she agreed. She posed for him in the snow near Mirror Lake, where other students were ice skating at the time. It was freezing, and good sport that she was, Jean came dressed in clothing that did justice to her body but didn’t exactly keep her warm, recalled Slatzer.⁶ Jean framed the picture and kept it in her room.

In 1945, during her junior year, Jean shared her room with Arlen Hurwitz, a cheerful girl from Cleveland. Arlen would play a key role in shaping Jean’s career and become a lifelong friend. Unlike Jean, Arlen dreamed of a future as a screen actress and spent her free time going to the movies and reading film magazines.

Arlen had an outgoing personality but was not a beauty like Jean. She knew her roommate had something special, and when the Homecoming Queen contest was announced on campus, she pushed a reluctant Jean to enter. She made it to the final six but did not win. Arlen was disappointed, but she never stopped pushing her friend toward the road to success.

A few days after the contest and following a long afternoon of Shakespearean studies at the library, Jean returned to her room and noticed the frame of her Mirror Lake photograph taken by Slatzer was empty. Arlen explained that she had sent the photo to the Miss Ohio State beauty contest, which was sponsored by a local newspaper. Arlen had paid the $4 enrollment fee, and it was money she wanted back. At first, Jean was furious and refused to pay her, but Arlen insisted that what she had done would make Jean a movie star. One of the prizes was a trip to Hollywood along with a screen test and $250 cash. Jean paid her the $4.

Jean assumed she would not get anywhere and put it to the back of her mind, but then she was contacted and asked to attend several beauty pageant rehearsals. Unfortunately, illness prevented her from attending. She did appear at a couple of press parties and dinners (beauty contestants would be invited to such events) but told Arlen the evening frivolity was interfering with her goal of becoming a teacher and forcing her to spend money on clothes she could not afford. Nevertheless, something made her continue with the contest, and she appeared in a bathing suit event at a local theater. Meanwhile, model expert John Powers, who had selected the initial 267 contestants from the photographs of more than 1,300 applicants, whittled the number down to forty before reducing it to the final twelve, which included Jean.

On the eve of the final, Jean went around the Baker Hall dormitory asking if she could borrow a dress. A classmate named Ginny Hitchcock loaned her a low-cut black velvet gown, which she wore to the final.

That night, Jean was late because her escort’s car had a problem with the engine. She arrived at the RKO Palace Theater in Columbus just in time to be named one of the final six. A few moments later, she heard her name and the words Miss Ohio State of 1945 with a score of ninety-five. Her closest competitor scored eighty-two. Columbus Mayor James A. Rhodes presented Jean with a trophy, a $250 check, and a voucher for an all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood sponsored by two Columbus newspapers. The win also entitled her to a screen test at 20th Century Fox and a radio audition with ABC. Later she would say, I was more surprised than anyone when I won.

As soon as she got home at 2 a.m., she rang her mother from the university lounge phone and shared the good news. She said she had just won a contest and was named Miss Gooch Face of 1945. There was no chance of her retiring to bed as all the students had learned of her victory, and everyone celebrated until dawn. A couple of days later, Jean returned to East Canton to spend Christmas with her family, and in the first week of January, she boarded a TWA flight to Los Angeles.

Jean said later, I took the trip, as it was part of winning, but I worried all during the two weeks because I was absent from classes and was afraid I might not pass in my subjects.⁷ Every girl she knew had insisted on lending her clothes and costume jewelry for the trip, so she left for California with a trunk full of borrowed clothes.

That two-week visit to Hollywood was a wonderful experience, and its highlight was the screen test at 20th Century Fox, which Jean took a week before she was due to return home. It was a five-minute love scene between a secretary—Jean—and her male boss, whom she was trying to seduce. Dressed in a see-through black gown, she spent the entire time reclining on a couch, trying to lure a young actor named Michael Dunne into her arms. The last eight seconds of the test showed Dunne breathing heavily as he succumbed. Jean later admitted that she played the whole thing as a gag.

She waited a couple of days, but when she heard nothing from Fox, she boarded the Golden State limited train home. In the meantime, Darryl F. Zanuck, the studio head of Fox, ordered his executives to sign her. He’d been impressed by her light-hearted approach to the scene.

Studio managers hurried to find Jean, but she had already left town. Frantic wires between Hollywood and stops along the train’s route east were sent to get her to turn around. Jean got the news in the middle of the night when a wire was delivered to her carriage. She had been offered a seven-year contract with Fox.

Incredibly, Jean did not turn around and instead continued her trip back home to her studies. Her Baker Hall dormmates greeted her warmly, full of questions about Hollywood, and Jean felt overwhelmed. Over the next days and weeks, she withdrew, caught up in the dilemma of whether to complete the current school quarter that ended the following March or return to Hollywood immediately.

Paul Robinson, a photographer from Columbus and Jean’s first manager, told the local press, who were fascinated by this student star in the making, that if Jean did return to California immediately, she could finish her schooling there. He explained that Jean was assured six months’ employment at $150 a week, and the studio had an option to extend her contract to seven years. The salary would increase annually until it reached $1,000 a week in the seventh year.

After a couple of sleepless nights, Jean decided that her studies came first and Hollywood could wait until the end of the winter quarter. Fox’s executives agreed, and her agent informed the press.

On March 15, 1946, after passing all her term exams with honors, Jean left for Hollywood. The night before the departure, she made her last public appearance as Miss Ohio State at a Columbus theater. Her parting statement on leaving the dorm was, Don’t sell my bed—I’ll soon be back in it.⁸

Mary Peters was skeptical about a possible film career for her daughter, who was clever and hardworking enough to get a good job elsewhere. Her attitude was, Have fun for six months and then come back and finish college.⁹ In an article she wrote for Modern Screen magazine three years later, Mary recalled the frenzy around Jean’s departure for Hollywood. She said her hometown friends and neighbors were convinced no good would come from Jean leaving sedate Ohio and moving to wild Hollywood:

All East Canton now suddenly became Hollywood-conscious. Gossip about neighbors and neighborly affairs was suddenly supplanted by the latest Hollywood gossip. According to popular conception, my Jean would have little choice but to get involved shortly after her arrival in the film capital in some sort of love triangle or wild party or some other unfortunate happening that would make sensational headlines. Yet my belief in my daughter and her upbringing remained unshaken.¹⁰

Even though she trusted her daughter, Mary was relieved to know that Jean would have somebody to look after her in Hollywood. Two years earlier, Mr. and Mrs. Fink, former farmer neighbors and good friends of the family—whose son had gone to school with Jean for several years—had moved to Los Angeles. They offered to have Jean live with them in their modest bungalow with no telephone line until Mary’s sister, Melba, could go to California and move in with her niece. While this alleviated a lot of Mary’s worries, she still sent Jean regular newspaper clippings about unhappy people who got their names in lurid headlines—just to remind my daughter what could happen and to caution her never to become like that.¹¹

Jean’s first day at the Fox studio was hectic. After a talk with Ivan Kahan, head of the talent department, her first job was to pose for her official Hollywood portrait in an elegant white gown that had been lent by Gene Tierney. Later, she was given a studio tour escorted by actors Peter Lawford and Dick Haymes, who took her on the set of Cluny Brown (1946), where she met cast member Charles Boyer. This was followed by lunch at the studio commissary.

That same evening, Jean dined with Victor Mature at La Rue, a favorite dining spot for movie stars on Sunset Boulevard, after which they visited Ciro’s, Hollywood’s trendiest nightclub. The next day she attended the horse races with actor Don Ameche. Every moment was captured by a photographer for a national magazine layout to build up a buzz around her as Hollywood’s newest starlet.

In April of that year, Jean, who at nineteen was still a minor, appeared in a Los Angeles court where she received judicial approval