Old Hollywood seduces podcast star
Host of the popular podcast uncovers memories of dastardly deeds in bygone Tinseltown
In a classic early episode of The Simp
sons, Springfield’s malevolent pointylimbed tycoon, Mr. Burns, descends into Howard Hughes madness. He transforms into a wild-haired recluse, develops an acute fear of germs and trades his shoes for tissue boxes. He builds a tiny airplane called the Spruce Moose, a joke based on Hughes’s failed flying boat, the Spruce Goose.
Hughes has always been an easy target for parody, either depicted as a mad man urinating into bottles or an old-school playboy unwilling to take no for an answer. Karina Longworth’s new book, Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in
Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, strips away the preconceptions to focus on Hughes’s manipulative effect on Tinseltown, in particular on the careers of 10 actresses. Some names, such as Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner and Lana Turner, will be familiar even to noncinephiles. Others, Faith Domergue — who believed she was in line to become the next Mrs. Howard Hughes — never enjoyed the same status.
Seduction is not a book about the notorious director and producer, but rather a deep dive into the exploitative business he helped build and operate. “It was always a portrait of that period of time and what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood more than it was a book about Howard Hughes,” says Longworth, creator and host of the cultishly popular You Must Remember This podcast, which combines juicy gossip with deep research to provide a contemporary perspective on the last century of filmmaking. Longworth’s dramatic podcast voice (indistinguishable by phone), is the subject of much debate (is it soothing or irritating?), but indisputably sets the narrative ambiance for her tales of vintage Hollywood. The book, which took Longworth three years to write and research, grew out of a multi-part series she developed for the podcast’s first season in 2014 called “The Many Loves of Howard Hughes.” Some of the stories are angerinducing and heartbreaking, such as how Hughes humiliated star Jean Harlow on the set of Hell’s Angels by impulsively cutting her gown down to the waist with a pair of scissors so that the skin between her breasts was revealed. Longworth, who dug through the 75,000 Hughes-related documents held at the Texas State Archives, also submitted many Freedom of Information requests, which is how she uncovered one of her biggest personal surprises: Another Hughes blond bombshell, actress-turneddirector Ida Lupino, acted as a secret informant for the FBI during the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s.
Though it’s focused on the women, Seduction illuminates why misbehaving men in Hollywood are only now being made accountable for their behaviour. Some of Hughes’s personal myth making and attempts at controlling the press are also downright Trumpian. But Longworth is reticent to make comparisons to today’s #MeToo movement. “I don’t really like to talk about contemporary Hollywood,” she says. “I don’t have a great perspective on it.”
Although most of Longworth’s empathy falls with the women in the book, she does save some for Hughes. “I’m not necessarily proud of this, but I definitely relate to this push and pull between wanting to be known and wanting to have no contact with human beings,” she says. “The other thing I have empathy for is the fact that he died alone without anybody around who wasn’t paid to be there. And I just think as a human being, that’s a horrible situation to be in.”
Longworth grew up in Los Angeles, surrounded by the ghosts of Hollywood past. She began her career as a film blogger before joining LA Weekly as its movie editor. She has several books to her name, most of which are critical surveys of work by contemporary stars including Meryl Streep and Al Pacino.
Every stop on Longworth’s book tour features a classic film screening. At Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox on Nov. 19, she hosted the 1952 small-town drama Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie, starring Jean Peters, Hughes’s second wife. She worries that, in future, as movie-watchers continue to switch media formats and rely more on streaming, we’ll lose more access to cinematic gems. Already, some of the films mentioned in Seduction she could only find as bootleg copies.
“I want people to watch the movies. I want people to take advantage of what is available. Every time you buy a DVD from a company that is working to distribute these old movies, that helps them distribute more movies,” Longworth says. “Most people don’t care, but for those of us who do, I think anything that any individual can do to make sure that, when we add new types of things into the world, we don’t lose the old things, is good.”