Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood

by Karina Longworth

Overview

In this riveting popular history, the creator of You Must Remember This probes the inner workings of Hollywood’s glamorous golden age through the stories of some of the dozens of actresses pursued by Howard Hughes, to reveal how the millionaire mogul’s obsessions with sex, power and publicity trapped, abused, or benefitted women who dreamt of screen stardom.

In recent months, the media has reported on scores of entertainment figures who used their power and money in Hollywood to sexually harass and coerce some of the most talented women in cinema and television. But as Karina Longworth reminds us, long before the Harvey Weinsteins there was Howard Hughes—the Texas millionaire, pilot, and filmmaker whose reputation as a cinematic provocateur was matched only by that as a prolific womanizer.

His supposed conquests between his first divorce in the late 1920s and his marriage to actress Jean Peters in 1957 included many of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, among them Billie Dove, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner. From promoting bombshells like Jean Harlow and Jane Russell to his contentious battles with the censors, Hughes—perhaps more than any other filmmaker of his era—commoditized male desire as he objectified and sexualized women. Yet there were also numerous women pulled into Hughes’s grasp who never made it to the screen, sometimes virtually imprisoned by an increasingly paranoid and disturbed Hughes, who retained multitudes of private investigators, security personnel, and informers to make certain these actresses would not escape his clutches.

Vivid, perceptive, timely, and ridiculously entertaining, The Seducer is a landmark work that examines women, sex, and male power in Hollywood during its golden age—a legacy that endures nearly a century later.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062440525
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	11/12/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	576
Sales rank:	205,952
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Karina Longworth is the creator, writer, and host of You Must Remember This, a podcast on the secret and forgotten history of twentieth-century Hollywood. A former film editor of LA Weekly and critic for the Village Voice, she is the author of four previous books, including Hollywood Frame by Frame and Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor. She lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Cast of Characters ix

Part I Hollywood Before Hell's Angels, 1910-1928

Introduction: The Ambassador Hotel, 1925 3

Chapter 1 Hollywood Babylon 11

Chapter 2 The Many Mrs. Hugheses 24

Chapter 3 No Town for a Lady 43

Part II Billie and Jean, 1928-1936

Chapter 4 The Girl with the Silver Hair 63

Chapter 5 A Body Like a Dustpan 80

Chapter 6 A Cock vs. the Code 95

Chapter 7 "A Bitch in Heat" 116

Chapter 8 The Bombshell Implodes 132

Part III Hepburn and Rogers and Russell, 1932-1940

Chapter 9 The Woman Who Lived Like a Man 145

Chapter 10 Box-Office Poison 162

Chapter 11 A Love Nest in Malibu, a Prison on a Hill 175

Chapter 12 A New Bombshell 188

Part IV Life During Wartime, 1941-1946

Chapter 13 The New Generation 203

Chapter 14 "The Goddamnedest, Unhappiest, Most Miserable Time" 218

Chapter 15 Divorce, Marriage, and Rape Fantasy 232

Chapter 16 Disappearing Act 247

Chapter 17 An American Hero 262

Chapter 18 A Mogul and His Crows 280

Part V Terry, Jean, and RKO, 1948-1956

Chapter 19 Marriage, Howard Hughes-Style 299

Chapter 20 "Mother" and a Male Idol 318

Chapter 21 The Morals Clause 341

Chapter 22 Rivalry at Fox 357

Chapter 23 "A Movie Studio Filled with Beautiful Girls Who Draw Pay but Seldom Work" 378

Chapter 24 Underwater 396

Part VI Hughes After RKO

Chapter 25 Playacting 413

Chapter 26 Prisoner 426

Chapter 27 From Vegas to the Grave 440

Epilogue: Life After Death 453

Notes on Sources and Acknowledgments 469

Bibliography 473

Filmography 489

Notes 493

Index 521

Editorial Reviews

An entertaining and timely tour of early Hollywood mores and manipulation. No matter how much you think you know about golden age Hollywood, Longworth serves up fascinatingly fresh perspective on the ways male desire and power shaped movie mythology.

Joy Press

Full of insight...illuminating and memorable.

Booklist

A compelling and relevant must-read.

Entertainment Weekly

From the force behind the You Must Remember This podcast comes a book exploring the glamour of classic Hollywood cinema through the lens of Texas business magnate, filmmaker (Hell’s Angels, Scarface), and notorious womanizer Howard Hughes—think a Harvey Weinstein–esque character decades before #MeToo.

Vanity Fair

Throughout this densely researched and lively book the siren song of the new medium of film is heard.

Cineaste

An astute and entertaining takedown of the movie industry, the press and the multimillionaire turned wannabe filmmaker Howard Hughes. Hardly anyone emerges from the pages of Seduction unblemished by selfishness and greed once they are touched by the movie business and its promise of wealth, power and fame.

Associated Press

Longworth blasts through the seductive narratives propagated by men in the film business to uncover the dark stories underneath.

The Cut

The stories Longworth uncovers—about Katharine Hepburn and Jane Russell, yes, but also Ida Lupino and Faith Domergue and Anita Loos—are so rich, so compelling, that they urge you to question how much else in history has been lost within the swirling vortex of Great Men.

Atlantic

Vibrant… A compulsive page-turner… Much of Seduction reads like a long overdue act of redress, repositioning women into the more central positions where they belong.

|Los Angeles Times

Vibrant… A compulsive page-turner… Much of Seduction reads like a long overdue act of redress, repositioning women into the more central positions where they belong.

Los Angeles Times

 “An astute and entertaining takedown of the movie industry, the press and the multimillionaire turned wannabe filmmaker Howard Hughes. Hardly anyone emerges from the pages of Seduction unblemished by selfishness and greed once they are touched by the movie business and its promise of wealth, power and fame.

Associated Press Staff

A first-rate work of cultural curation, in which Longworth combs the countless stacks of Hollywood memoirs and biographies, with a focus on the pathological predations of Howard Hughes, Texas millionaire, starmaker and film producer.

USA Today (four stars)

Jam-packed with Hollywood scandal and history.

Refinery 29

Seduction reads like a scandal sheet tempered with primary and secondary research.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Longworth pulls back the curtain on Hollywood’s golden age to reveal, through the stories of some of the actresses pursued by legendary millionaire mogul Howard Hughes, its dark and lasting legacy of power inequity, harassment, and abuse.

Bustle

Karina Longworth loves Hollywood the way it ought to be loved — mercilessly. She is a skeptic without cynicism, a feminist without apology, and in Seduction she has found the great subject that her essential podcast has long promised

James Kaplan

Guaranteed to engross anyone with any interest at all in Hollywood, in movies, in #MeToo and in the never-ending story of men with power and women without.

New York Times Book Review

Audacious and welcome.

Sight and Sound

Full of insight...illuminating and memorable.

Booklist

A candid portrait of the multifaceted millionaire…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.

Washington Post

…guaranteed to engross anybody with any interest at all in Hollywood, in movies, in #MeToo and in the never-ending story of men with power and women without…No matter how much we think we may know about Hughes—the millionaire, the aviator, the studio head, the filmmaker, the eccentric, the commitment-phobic womanizer whose strange allure entranced some of Hollywood's most famous screen goddesses—Longworth puts the man, the women and the whole flesh-peddling movie-biz circus in a new and timely perspective. She does this by giving each woman and girl, each star and starlet, each fresh hopeful and disappointed discard her own place on the page as a person with a soul of her own…Seduction is the valuable synthesis of [Longworth's] curiosity, her analytical strengths and her modern feminist orientation that results in a vibrant writing style poised between warm compassion and cool critical documentation of what ought to have been horrifying, and never was, in show business.

The New York Times Book Review - Lisa Schwarzbaum

09/24/2018
Longworth (Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor), creator and host of the Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This, centers this deeply researched look at Howard Hughes around the famed aviator and film producer’s exploitative treatment of women. She relates that Hughes was born rich in 1905 to the Hughes Tools family and died at 70 in 1976, even richer but isolated and afflicted by physical and mental health issues. Longworth ably summarizes Hughes’s film career and notable productions, such as Hell’s Angels, Scarface, and, most pertinently, his scandalously risqué western The Outlaw. Most vividly, she anatomizes his obsession with “collecting” and controlling the women in his life and his films. In addition to his well-publicized romances with established stars, including Katherine Hepburn, Ida Lupino, and Ginger Rogers, Hughes was also given to signing unknown young actresses to contracts, installing them in bungalows with guards posted outside, and then stalling on putting them in his RKO films. Unfortunately, the narrative is weighed down by digressions into Hughes’s family, associates, planes, and erratic business sense, and by Longworth’s apparent determination to use every single item from her research. This lack of focus dilutes the effectiveness of what could have been a sharp and timely study of film industry misogyny. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

A candid portrait of the multifaceted millionaire…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.

Washington Post

The stories Longworth uncovers—about Katharine Hepburn and Jane Russell, yes, but also Ida Lupino and Faith Domergue and Anita Loos—are so rich, so compelling, that they urge you to question how much else in history has been lost within the swirling vortex of Great Men.

The Atlantic

2018-09-02

A history that shows clearly how powerful men exploited actresses long before the #MeToo movement began.

Hollywood historian Longworth (Hollywood Frame by Frame: The Unseen Silver Screen in Contact Sheets, 1951-1997, 2014, etc.) has mined memoirs, biographies, magazines, newspapers, and archives to create an entertaining, gossip-filled portrait of the film capital's golden age, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Central to the story is the enormously wealthy, paranoid, and erratic Howard Hughes (1905-1976), businessman and aviator, whose self-proclaimed goal was "to become the world's most famous motion picture producer" and whose leering desire for buxom young actresses represented the proclivities of many other men in the industry. These were women "whose faces and bodies Hughes strove to possess and/or make iconic, sometimes at an expense to their minds and souls." They were harassed, abused, surveilled, and, in some cases, imprisoned by a man with the money and power to make or break their careers. Hughes, writes the author, "was not the only mogul in Hollywood who profited off treating actresses as sex goddess flavors of the month, good for consumption in a brief window but disposable as soon as the next variety came along," but he acted "more crudely, and with even less of a regard for the person these actresses were before they came into his life." Those actresses range from the barely remembered (Billie Dove, Faith Domergue) to major stars: Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn (who shared Hughes' home for a while), Bette Davis, Ida Lupino (whose directing career Hughes supported), Ginger Rogers, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Jean Peters (whom Hughes, uncharacteristically, married). Hughes was so famous that he could lure women merely by promising them future stardom: Choosing a young woman's photo from a newspaper or magazine, he sent a team of men to track her down, have his own photographer take new pictures, and, if he was pleased, invite her to Hollywood—and took control of her life. The media, dazzled by his self-created myth, perpetuated his image as an iconoclastic folk hero.

A lively—and often sordid—Hollywood history.

Kirkus Reviews

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