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Book Uses Howard Hughes To Illustrate Women’s Plight In Early Hollywood
Karina Longworth discusses her book Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood.
Michael Hagerty | Posted on November 13, 2018, 2:20 PM
Jane Russell, Jean Harlow, and Ava Gardner
Wikipedia Commons
Actresses Jane Russell, Jean Harlow, and Ava Gardner are among those whose stories are told in Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood.

Seduction - Howard Hughes Book
A new book tells the struggles many women faced in the Golden Age of Hollywood, and it uses Houston-native oil magnate turned aviation pioneer turned filmmaker Howard Hughes to illustrate that.

In her book Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, writer and podcast host Karina Longworth focuses on ten different actresses from the first half of the 20th century and uses Hughes obsession with – and manipulation of – them to illustrate what things were like back then.

Howard Hughes
Wikipedia Commons
Howard Hughes posing with his Boeing 100 in the 1940s.

Some of the stars are familiar names, like Jean Harlow, Ava Gardner, and Katharine Hepburn. And others are less so, like Terry Moore or Billie Dove. But, through their stories, we find that Hughes was obsessed with sex, power, and publicity.

In the audio above, Longworth, the creator of the podcast You Must Remember This about the Golden Age of Hollywood, tells Houston Matters producer Michael Hagerty how Hughes pursued many of these actresses relentlessly and – in many cases – both made and destroyed their careers.

Longworth will appear at a Brazos Bookstore event at Rice Cinema on Wednesday night at 7.

Larry Harnisch of the LA Daily Mirror found 6 mistakes on the very first introductory page, which doesn't bode well for any facts in the books.
https://ladailymirror.com/2018/11/13/se ... heck-fail/

missdupont wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 16, 2018 1:47 am

Larry Harnisch of the LA Daily Mirror found 6 mistakes on the very first introductory page, which doesn't bode well for any facts in the books.
https://ladailymirror.com/2018/11/13/se ... heck-fail/

Good for Longworth for bringing attention to classic films to an audience that otherwise would have no idea it exists. That being said, however, she's clearly a novice. Which is fine for a blog and a podcast, but not fine for a book.

These errors, however, pale in comparison to what is probably my favorite error of all time, in Victoria Wilson's A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940, which is my front-runner for Worst Ever Film Biography.

On Page 597, Wilson wrote that John Arnold, head of MGM's camera department in the 1930s, had "started cranking his camera back in 1903, when he worked for Thomas A. Edison, and had since shot more than a billion feet of film." I did the math. Shooting a billion feet of 35mm film at 24 fps would take over 1,200 years.

buskeat wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 19, 2018 2:26 pm

missdupont wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 16, 2018 1:47 am

Larry Harnisch of the LA Daily Mirror found 6 mistakes on the very first introductory page, which doesn't bode well for any facts in the books.
https://ladailymirror.com/2018/11/13/se ... heck-fail/

Good for Longworth for bringing attention to classic films to an audience that otherwise would have no idea it exists. That being said, however, she's clearly a novice. Which is fine for a blog and a podcast, but not fine for a book.

These errors, however, pale in comparison to what is probably my favorite error of all time, in Victoria Wilson's A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940, which is my front-runner for Worst Ever Film Biography.

On Page 597, Wilson wrote that John Arnold, head of MGM's camera department in the 1930s, had "started cranking his camera back in 1903, when he worked for Thomas A. Edison, and had since shot more than a billion feet of film." I did the math. Shooting a billion feet of 35mm film at 24 fps would take over 1,200 years.

Ok, never mind. Maybe this will be as bad as the Victoria Wilson book. I just looked at sample pages on Amazon. A quick glance at Page 12 sees her referring to "David Ware Griffith" and "Other reports say the first film shot in Hollywood was another Griffith production, Love Among the Ruins, starring a fifteen-year-old Mary Pickford." Pickford hadn't met Griffith yet when she was fifteen.

Shooting a billion feet of 35mm film at 24 fps would take over 1,200 years.

But look at the biceps on that guy!

Impressive biceps indeed! The problem is that books like this get into the popular imagination and accepted as facts.

Bob

missdupont wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 16, 2018 1:47 am

Larry Harnisch of the LA Daily Mirror found 6 mistakes on the very first introductory page, which doesn't bode well for any facts in the books.
https://ladailymirror.com/2018/11/13/se ... heck-fail/

To perform a small fact-check on the fact checking: it is true that the Ambassador Hotel opened before The Sheik was made; however, the Cocoanut Grove did not open until the summer of 1921, the hotel having decided to convert their under-used ballroom into a nightclub.

This was exactly when The Sheik was filmed, lending some credibility to the idea that the interior of the Cocoanut Grove may have reused elements of its set.

The Washington Post review, with no mention of the factual errors...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertai ... 6dc1f70bc6


How Howard Hughes manipulated aspiring starlets — and kept it a secret
By Lauren Sarazen
November 21 at 8:33 AM

(Custom House)

By the time Howard Hughes died in 1976, little remained of his reputation as the upstart producer of “Hell’s Angels.” There was no trace of the American hero who pulled off 1938’s record-breaking flight around the world, or the “rugged individualist” who transformed hearings on his misuse of World War II defense funding into an offensive against congressional corruption. The Howard Hughes that loomed large in the collective imagination was a germaphobic recluse: a man who actively cultivated a distance between himself and the world, an isolation enforced by a team of aides, private detectives and switchboard operators.

In “Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood,” Karina Longworth creates a candid portrait of the multifaceted millionaire, revealing the depth of his tendencies toward control, secrecy and manipulation of the women he kept close.

Known for her podcast “You Must Remember This,” Longworth, with “Seduction,” strengthens her reputation as one of our most knowledgeable researchers of Hollywood history. Her approach is twofold: Our focus is, of course, on Hughes in Hollywood (with relevant peeks into his obsession with aeronautics and, ahem, breasts), but we also gain insight into the lives of the actresses he pursued. What was it like to be a woman working in the industry during Hollywood’s Golden Age? Early on, Longworth notes that “the female body has always been a key building block of cinema,” and there’s no question that Hughes viewed the women in his life as units of production.

Laying out her tale chronologically, Longworth grounds us in Hughes’s family dynamic and the workings of Hollywood at its inception before introducing us to the first Mrs. Howard Robard Hughes. His marriage to Texan society belle Ella Botts Rice wasn’t a love match — though Ella would be the last to know. Instead, by aligning himself with a prominent Houston family, Hughes kept tabs on his inherited business without actually having to clock in.

The author Karina Longworth. (Emily Berl)

Moving to Los Angeles, Hughes quickly tired of his marriage, exchanging Ella for silent screen star Billie Dove. But that romance (they never married) didn’t quite take, either.

Between his divorce in 1929 and his second marriage, to actress Jean Peters in 1957, Hughes cycled through a number of the era’s most beautiful women. Within “Seduction’s” pages, we meet such starlets as Dove, Jean Harlow, Ida Lupino, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner and Jane Russell. Their names glowed white-hot over marquees, but the intricacies of their interactions with Hughes remained, relatively speaking, under wraps because of Hughes’s obsession with controlling his image and his paramours’ publicity.

Hiring PR experts like Russell Birdwell, Hughes fashioned an image, and he resented the intrusion of journalism that exposed his actual lifestyle. When news of Hughes and Warner Bros. contract actress Faith Domergue’s whirlwind trip to San Diego, San Francisco and Phoenix hit the gossip columns, she said, “he fell into a silence that lasted several days.” Meeting Hughes when she was 16 and he was 36, Domergue was quickly enveloped by Hughes’s control. Calling her “Little Baby,” Hughes proposed, intimating that she was “the child [he] should have had.”

Longworth muses that this relationship, with its power imbalance and incestuous overtones, was a turning point, altering his ideas about women.

As his romantic tastes shifts from known quantities — like Hepburn, Rogers and Gardner — to powerless unknowns, “Seduction” reveals the root of Hughes’s interest in women: a desire to exert total control, rather than true affection.

Lauren Sarazen is a freelance writer based in Paris.
SEDUCTION
Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood

By Karina Longworth

Custom House. 560 pp. $29.99.

silentfilm wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 22, 2018 11:37 am

Longworth, with “Seduction,” strengthens her reputation as one of our most knowledgeable researchers of Hollywood history.

Really?

I tried a couple of episodes but found the casual approach to factual accuracy too much to handle. The podcast seems to be aimed at people with an amateur rather than specialist interest in classic film, and I guess that includes this reviewer ...

Brooksie wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 23, 2018 2:14 pm

silentfilm wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 22, 2018 11:37 am

Longworth, with “Seduction,” strengthens her reputation as one of our most knowledgeable researchers of Hollywood history.

Really?

I tried a couple of episodes but found the casual approach to factual accuracy too much to handle. The podcast seems to be aimed at people with an amateur rather than specialist interest in classic film, and I guess that includes this reviewer ...

I find the show hit-or-miss, depending on the topic. Her series on Charles Manson and showbiz may be its high water mark for me, and her weird obsession with Lon Chaney Jr. being the worst actor she's ever seen is amusing but misguided.