Faith Domergue

Faith Domergue was a film actress, with a long career from her first film role as an uncredited part in the 1941 Blues in the Night, to 1974’s The House of Seven Corpses. Her busiest period was in the 1950s when she appeared in a number of science fiction, monster and horror movies, as well as a number of westerns. She was known as a Scream Queen.

But the reason I know who she is, is because she was mentioned in the podcast You Must Remember This. Written and presented by Karina Longworth it is a film history podcast looking at the secret and/or forgotten history of 20th Century Hollywood. Faith Domergue was briefly engaged to Howard Hughes and that is how she is most often recalled - usually fleetingly, with little attention to her story. For example, blink and you would miss the five minutes that Kelli Garner plays her in the Hughes biopic The Aviator.

To many she is a foot note in film history. She was one of Hughes’ women. Howard Hughes’s story has been told many times. He has a past, a career and a death. But Faith Domergue has no hinterland.

But I stopped in my tracks when I heard about her.

This is what I found out:

• Faith Domergue was 15 or 16 years old when she met Howard Hughes on a yacht party. He was 36.

• Hughes purchased her contract from Warner Brothers

• He promised to marry her and make her a star

• He gave her an engagement ring, which was reported by Louella Parsons

• She was moved into a mansion

• Hughes took over the responsibility of her education

• She planned a lavish New Year’s Eve party, but instead she was taken to a diner with a couple of Hughes’ friends, as Hughes refused to be seen with her public

• Hughes was romantically linked, dated and seduced other women over the course of their engagement.

• When Faith tried to call off the engagement, he bought a new mansion and moved her in there

• Faith rammed her car into Hughes car when he was driving his other fiancée Ava Gardner on a date

• She attempted to call off the engagement again, but Hughes bought her mother a mansion with servants in an attempt to persuade her to stay

• And then she disappears from the story

Faith never married Hughes.

He didn’t make her a star.

He cast her in Vendetta. She was not well-reviewed.

I couldn’t leave it there. Faith’s story left me uneasy, haunted.

I had this image of a lonely, neglected teenager roaming a large house, mainly on her own.

So, I read Karina Longworth’s book on Howard Hughes, dug around in my film history books and searched out her press clippings on the internet. What I discovered was both much worse and much better than I had imagined.

Story-telling is at the centre of the film industry. Movies are there to tell stories. Gossip columnists and publicists tell stories about the making of stories. There is the meta-story of how some people are stars, luminous and special to be balanced against the countless other stories of how most people aren’t.

My work now is to tell comedic stories. My old job was about uncovering stories about domestic abuse. I was a social work researcher trying to say something about the importance of narrative for survivors of abuse and who gets to tell their own stories or how they are refracted through the lens of professional practice. I looked closely at the words of official documents and listened to women conversing in focus groups.

And alongside all that, I have a passion for Old Hollywood.

Faith Domergue’s story brings together all those strands for me.

As a domestic abuse researcher I would use words like love-bombing, coercive control, grooming, surveillance, isolation and gas-lighting to describe abusive relationships, like Hughes and Domergue.

Howard Hughes proposed to Faith just three months after meeting the teenager (an example of love-bombing). According to Faith the proposal included the words “You are the child I should have had”. What could that mean in the context of a romantic relationship? The best reading is that he wanted to look after her. But it smacks of something more sinister, an attraction to her youthfulness and innocence and an unhealthy power dynamic.

That dynamic had an effect on her personal life, but also her professional life. He bought her contract from Warner Brothers. He didn’t have an incorporated movie company at the time so she was officially under his Aeronautical company – like a piece of equipment (an example of control.)

He moved her and her family into a house around the corner from him. She was at arms reach at all times and her family was also dependent on him for their lodgings and in the case of her father and grandfather, employment. This is grooming. Grooming involves buying of gifts in return for loyalty. It also involves seducing those around the victim so that extrication from the situation is more difficult. Faith’s mother was pivotal in persuading Faith to stay on more than one occasion.

Staff at the house would record and report every detail of her life to Hughes (surveillance).

Faith was kept busy so that she didn’t notice how quickly she was isolated from her friends and peers.

This is coercive control, and is an example of what Liz Kelly identifies as reducing the space for action.

Faith would read reports and see pictures of other women with her fiancé, and he would say that gossip columnists were simply making it up. She was not expected to believe her own eyes. (Gaslighting).

According to Longworth, Faith said,

“It had taken eight months to capture and tame me, but now it was accomplished.”

That is one way to tell the story. But what it doesn’t do is imbue Faith with any agency. It suggests a hapless victim. But here’s the thing, she did leave. She confronted him over his relationship with Ava and then left. At 21, she is married to another man. She goes onto marry three times and have two children, a life lived travelling around the globe and a career in film and TV.

Her life didn’t start when she met Hughes and end when she left. There are questions I would love to know about her early life and childhood as an adopted daughter, or at her Roman Catholic High School. I want to know what it was like to be a working mother living in different continents, working on film sets.

I would love to know what Faith has to say, what her story felt like to her. There was supposed to be a book called “My Life with Howard Hughes”. There are conflicting reports as to whether or not it was ever published, with the Hughes estate supposedly threatening to sue. I have been unable to find a copy.

When she talked in press interviews, her words are filtered through a publicity machine, but she makes it clear that there was a spirited, adventurous woman who knew she was wild, undisciplined and very pretty.

She was also resilient and resourceful. She may not have been happy with her all career opportunities, but as she said:

“I took what came along—I had two children, no support from my ex-husband, and there were bills to pay.”

That story of survival beyond abuse needs to be told and celebrated. For me, it is much more interesting than the sordid details of the life of the abuser.