Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

How a list of Hollywood actresses led to new book on Howard Hughes

Howard Hughes

AP

Howard Hughes speaks before the U.S. Senate war investigations sub-committee in Washington, D.C., Aug. 7, 1947.

It's been years, but it all started with a list.

On a message board, Karina Longworth came across the post that would inspire her new book on the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and the women in Hughes' life during his years as a Hollywood mogul. The posting was a list of names of women who'd allegedly been sexual conquests of Hughes, and it stayed with Longworth for a long time.

"As I was scrolling down that list I just thought, 'All of these actresses that are on this list have these full lives and interesting careers, and probably not the most interesting thing about them was that they had sex with Howard Hughes," Longworth says. "And so I just thought I would love to tell some of these actresses' stories."

Which she did starting in 2014 when she launched a podcast, "You Must Remember This," dedicated to the lives and legends of Old Hollywood. A year later she sold a book proposal based on some of those podcast episodes, and last month that book, "Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood," arrived, the story of one man and many women, the famous and forgotten, whose stories are woven together into a fascinating history of the movies.

Longworth, whose undergraduate and graduate degrees focused on the history of Hollywood, certainly knows more than most about the classic eras of the film industry, but she admits not knowing an awful lot about Hughes or some of the women before embarking on several years of research and then writing.

"I think I had what is probably a lot of people's understanding of him, which comes from watching 'The Aviator,'" she says of Martin Scorsese's 2004 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes. "I don't think I knew anything about (silent movie star) Billie Dove at that point. I don't think I knew anything about (1940s actress) Linda Darnell. Even his second wife, Jean Peters, I think I've only seen one film that she's in, so yeah, there's quite a few."

So she plowed through all of the published books and memoirs she could find, and staked out a table at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills.

"They have Billie Dove's personal scrapbook, they have all the files from Lincoln Quarberg, who was Howard Hughes' movie publicist in the late '20s and early '30s," Longworth says. "That's where I always go when I start a big research project."

But this time she went even farther. To Las Vegas, where a university had the complete files of a publicity film that repped Hughes from the 1940s through the rest of his life. To Austin, Texas, where state government archives had a massive collection of documents from the long and convoluted legal battles to untangle the $2.5 billion estate for which Hughes left no will.

"The three different states that were fighting over taxing (his estate) collected documents going back to the 1920s including telegrams and letters, business files, tax returns," Longworth says. "And then there was quite a lot of court hearings about this matter, and so in those files in Austin there are hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands, of pages of depositions which were very useful to me."

All of that work gave her new insights into Hughes and the role of women in Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century, she says. Like the ways in which a man publicly famed as an eccentric recluse used publicists throughout his life to secretly shape his narrative. And that despite signs of mental illness that manifested in eccentric ways even as a teenager — he refused to carry money or identification for much of his life — his mind might have also suffered from physical damage.

"The other thing that became very clear to me was just the sheer number of head injuries he had," Longworth says. "He got into an enormous number of car and plane accidents over the course of his life. I don't think he's exactly a likable character, but one of the things I have empathy for, whatever underlying mental illness he had, I think he was brain was changed by head injuries that were not understood at the time."

The women whose stories flow through the 500-plus pages of the book, from well-known stars such as Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn, to lesser-knowns such as Ann Dvorak or Faith Domergue, lived and worked in a Hollywood yet to be changed by the rise of second-wave feminism in the '60s and '70s, and more recently the #MeToo movement.

Between the demise of the studio system and its onerous contracts for performers, and the changing role of women in society at large, it's not likely actresses today would recognize or accept the rules and restrictions of the Hollywood of "Seduction," Longworth says.

"Certainly we've heard stories that women have come out and told recently about experiences that didn't happen that long ago in which they were exploited sexually or abused sexually," she says. "But just the fact that they're coming out and saying it, and that there's any kind of open conversation, is enormously different than the period I write about in the book."

As a companion to "Seduction" Longworth recently did a six-episode run on "You Must Remember This" of episodes featuring women — and one man — from the book, the podcast now up to 138 individual episodes. Longworth says she was initially surprised at how many listeners were new to the history of Hollywood, having thought it would mostly appeal to cinephiles and Old Hollywood die-hards. She's delighted that more and more people seem to be interested in what came before the era of modern-day blockbusters and popcorn movies.

"I think it's just like, 'Why is it important to read novels before 1980?'" she says. "'Why is it important to look at older art?' It's a way of understanding history. Hollywood. Art. It's a way of understanding human history."