The always self-effacing Jane Russell writes in her 1985 autobiography, My Path and My Detours, that her buddy (and possible lover) Robert Mitchum always said she was “the most inarticulate girl he’d ever known, and he was right.”

If that’s true, then this fact makes for a refreshing, straightforward, highly enjoyable celebrity tell-all from Russell, the towering star of classics including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Outlaw. The woman who friend Edith Lynch called a “roaring mouse,” whose bluster “couldn’t quite hide the humor and kindness in her,” comes off as just that: an unpretentious, empathetic eccentric who introduces everyone with their astrological sign and repetitively praises the Lord with plain good humor.

Not big on details, the extroverted Russell—who kept performing her nightclub routine at local hotels until her death in 2011—presents in plain prose a life filled with hard drinking, lots of laughter, and opinions galore. “Imagine what a hell raiser I might be if I didn’t have the Lord!” she writes. “I shudder to think!”

Born on June 21, 1921, Ernestine Jane Russell grew up in a Bible-loving household, the oldest child and only daughter in a brood of five. Her father, Roy, a taciturn man, was outshone by his wife, Geraldine, a charismatic, caring former actress who preached from her kitchen table until her children built a chapel on the family’s property in California’s San Fernando Valley.

Russell clearly adored her religious yet rambunctious family and fervently loved the Valley. “It was lush with green fields and orchards, and ranch-style houses, with horses and dogs,” Russell writes. “It was easy ‘blue jean and T-shirt’ informal country, where most people knew each other a little and no one paid much attention to movie stars.”

A rambunctious tomboy and bossy mother hen, Russell describes her family in loving detail, and praises the childhood friends she would keep for the rest of her life. Perhaps it’s that security that led Russell to become a rarity: a movie star who was really interested in other people. Russell’s genuine concern for other people is a common thread, saying more about her character than anything she writes about herself.

And no one loomed larger in Russell’s life than her first husband, Robert Waterfield, whom she met when she was 14 and married in 1943. A future college and NFL football star, the “sexy, dynamic, opinionated, extremely bright, witty, and stubborn” Waterfield would dominate much of Russell’s life (and autobiography)—for better or for worse.

In the fall of 1940, Russell’s life was forever transformed when eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes chose her to star in The Outlaw. Hughes would have her under contract for the better part of four decades, and he would earn Russell’s unending (if undeserved) loyalty.

Launching Russell as a sultry pinup and hard-edged star, the obsessive, womanizing Hughes had a disturbing obsession with Russell’s bust. Russell considered this fixation to be just one of the boss’s many quirks, something she learned to outsmart and outwit. (Her own biographer, Christina Rice, explores things from a different, much-needed feminist perspective in 2021’s insightful and sympathetic Mean…Moody…Magnificent! Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend.) When Hughes designed a special bra for his protégé, Russell—who found it uncomfortable—writes that she simply pretended to wear it.

With her boatload of tight-knit friends and family, Russell clearly felt sorry for her isolated, oddball boss. According to both herself and Rice, Hughes often seemed afraid of her strength…and perhaps her sympathy. “I often hollered at Howard, and I think that in a funny kind of way I scared him,” she writes.

In her typically unanalytical manner, Russell does also admit that the hang-dog Hughes—who once summoned her to his mausoleum-like home on Christmas Eve because he did not want to be alone—could also be predatory. According to Russell, after a night of drinking in the late 1940s led to her staying at Hughes’s mansion, he arranged for a lackey to pretend to attack her so Hughes could “save” her and convince her to stay in his room, where she’d be “safe.” He then wormed his way into bed, and attempted to make a pass, which she quickly averted.

The horrifying nature of this story seems lost on Russell, who claims their relationship was a “platonic love affair.” Whatever the case, the earthy Russell certainly brought warmth into the life of the cold, acquisitive Hughes.

After a brutal backroom abortion in 1942 left her unable to bear children, Russell redoubled her commitment to evangelical Christianity. In the preface to My Path and My Detours, Russell makes it clear she views the book as a testimonial. Still, her easy, no-nonsense style somehow makes her constant, repetitive recounting of prayers, prophesies, and glossolalia sessions seem endearing instead of exhausting.

“People were confused with me singing spirituals and reading the Bible,” she writes. “They had the image of the Hughes publicity and his arguments with the censors firmly planted in their minds…I just merrily went on my way doing what I liked and let the confusion lie where Jesus flung it.”

Russell is also unflinchingly honest about her demons—alcohol addiction, mental instability, and family tragedies. Yet there can be no question that her faith spurred her to do awesome and inspiring things. She and Waterfield would adopt three children, and she was “divinely” inspired to start WAIF, a powerful fundraising and lobbying organization that helped the International Social Service place thousands of international children in permanent homes.

Russell also cheekily admits to proselytizing to the heathens of Hollywood. After one of Judy Garland’s suicide attempts in the 1940s, Russell says she received a message from the Lord that she was determined to relay to the troubled star. After being turned away by Vincente Minnelli at the then couple’s home, she finally got Garland on the phone. “She gave a little gasp, mumbled thank you, and hung up,” Russell writes.

Years later, Garland called Russell about a friend who was in trouble. “She…asked for help and if we could pray,” Russell writes. “So, I guess Judy didn’t think we were altogether nuts.”

Russell would have the biggest hit of her career with 1953’s Technicolor musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Her capacity for enormous empathy is on display throughout her reminiscences of her costar Marilyn Monroe, whom she describes as “very shy and very sweet and far more intelligent than people gave her credit for.”

While Russell was always on time and did her own makeup in less than an hour, she describes the obsessive Monroe as paralyzed by her own perfectionism. After director Howard Hawks banned Monroe’s acting coach from the set, Monroe—whom they all called “baby doll”—became nervous and chronically late. Russell took on her usual role of big sister, coaxing Monroe out of her dressing room.

According to Rice, Monroe exemplified for Russell the importance of her work with WAIF. “She firmly believed that Marilyn’s lack of a stable home base growing up caused so many of the anxieties…that plagued her,” Rice writes. Perhaps this is why the most poetic (non-prayer) passage of My Path and My Detours describes a beach day Russell spent with her beloved girlfriends in 1962:

We philosophized, laughed at our problems, and giggled…. At night we showered, put on caftans, had wine, music and more talk by the fire…if the others went to bed, I often sat and stared at the water…. One lone boat was all lit up way out on the horizon… I thought of Marilyn Monroe. I wished I had her phone number, because I knew she belonged there, where we were all laughing about our problems…

The next day, Russell was told Marilyn had died.

Russell admits to a penchant for “bad boys” and a love of sparring with men in a way that today reads as dated and dangerous. She recounts harrowing instances of physical violence by Waterfield during their consuming 25-year marriage, but often states outright that she also behaved badly.

Conversely, one of the most refreshing (if perverse) things about My Path and My Detours is Russell’s unique take on coworkers that many found difficult or aloof. And no bad boy attracted Russell more than Robert Mitchum, her costar in His Kind of Woman and Macao.

Mitchum clearly titillated Russell from the start, when he antagonized the legendarily dictatorial director Josef von Sternberg—who had banned food from the set—by spreading out a picnic feast in the middle of a shoot. “When visitors were around set, he’d do things to deliberately shock them, like running his tongue up my bare back,” Russell writes. “But when he saw someone being abused or mistreated, he very quickly put a stop to it.”

According to Rice (always there to fill in the blanks left by Russell’s disinterest or discretion), there has long been conjecture that Russell and Mitchum had an affair. In her autobiography, Russell admits only to cheating on Waterfield in 1957 with an old love she calls “Lance,” who Rice and others speculate may have been Mitchum.

Whatever the case, the two tough softies continued to make each other laugh for the rest of their lives. According to Rice, when asked why the two sizzled onscreen, Jane’s answer was simple: “We looked like we deserved each other.”

In 1968, Russell and Waterfield finally ended a marriage that she admits had become “degrading and humiliating.” That same year she married the debonair, kindly actor Roger Barrett, who died only three and half months after their star-studded wedding.

Barrett’s death would lead to Russell’s increasing alcoholism and a brief stay in a mental hospital, which preceded Russell’s triumphant 1971 run on Broadway in Stephen Sondheim’s Company. In 1978 she was briefly jailed for drunk driving, and spent her time inside learning the stories of her fellow inmates. Though Russell is usually straightforward about her struggles, at times she lets friends recount the most painful parts of her story, as if she couldn’t bear to tell them.

Russell’s stabilizing final marriage and “lazy, lovely life” with retired Air Force lieutenant John Peoples lasted until his death in 1999. Her politics and religious beliefs appear to have increasingly hardened in her final years, which Rice compassionately yet unflinchingly chronicles—including her disastrous interview with the Daily Mail in 2003, when she proclaimed herself “a teetotal, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded, conservative, Christian bigot.”

Jane Russell died in 2011, surrounded by her children and still in love with the Lord. “Through all my ups and downs I’ve never been alone,” she writes in My Path and My Detours. “He was there…telling me that if I could just hold tough a little longer, I’d find myself around one more dark corner…and have one more drop of pure joy in this journey called life.”

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