Then he goes to Hollywood and becomes a director and studio tycoon, making a star out of his sexpot stepmom (Carroll Baker) and inflicting misery on his wife (Elizabeth Ashley), who suffers nobly while trying to stand by her man, even after the d-i-v-o-r-c-e. Jonas takes over dad’s aircraft firm and runs it like a spendthrift visionary. When callow Jonas Cord (George Peppard) mouths off to his daddy (Leif Erickson), who’s trying to dress him down about his amorous escapades, the old man promptly drops dead of a convenient aneurism and is required to spend no more time in the picture. The story is improvised from the life and legend of Howard Hughes (although apparently Robbins denied this, fruitlessly). This was as Britain was not only giving us James Bond but the Oscar-winning and guilt-free good times of Tom Jones.
Hollywood’s version is that characters may behave in this way, but they’re terribly unhappy. One of the big hits of 1964, it’s part of Hollywood’s attempt in that era to catch up with Britain, France, Italy, and other European countries whose movies were frankly admitting that their characters had sex out of wedlock and perhaps not even in the missionary position.
Based on a novel by Harold Robbins, The Carpetbaggers is trash of the glossy, leering, “lifestyles of the rich and bastardly” variety, which of course is the reason anyone would watch it.
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