How do you tell the truth about Hollywood, the greatest fantasy-making machine the world has ever known? One approach is to assume that the glamorous surfaces conceal something sordid, which means that exposing it will be titillating, and also sort of righteous: illusions are punctured, the rich and famous taken down a peg, and so on. Kenneth Anger’s compendium of formative celebrity scandals, “Hollywood Babylon,” first published in the United States in 1965, took that tack, as do tabloids covering Hollywood gossip. One problem with this style of revelation—in addition to its frequent misogyny and its breezy violation of privacy—is that the details are often wrong, fact checking not being a key value for the “Hollywood Babylon” school. At the other end of the spectrum, academic film scholars offer a different promise: by looking at systems of representation, they hope to reveal structural truths about how movies create meaning. Fair enough, but film studies won’t tell us what Marilyn Monroe said at a party. Then, there’s the storytelling approach, practiced by those who try to locate the truth without sniffing too disapprovingly at the dish. Today, perhaps nobody works that line with as much rigor and spellcraft as Karina Longworth, the creator, writer, and host of the Hollywood-history podcast “You Must Remember This.”
Longworth started the series in 2014, during podcasting’s adolescence. By her own account, she was less interested in the medium itself than in a chance to tell “the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century,” in a format more likely to attract an audience than most books about Golden Age Hollywood do. (In 2018, Longworth did publish a book, “Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood,” but she remains better known for the podcast.) In the course of the show’s run, she’s produced seasons on “Dead Blondes” (Jean Harlow, Veronica Lake, Monroe), the Hollywood blacklist, and M-G-M’s stable of stars. One season focussed on Charles Manson’s bizarre adventures trying to make it as a rock musician in L.A., during which he fell in with sun-kissed celebs like Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys. In another, Longworth spent nineteen episodes fact-checking “Hollywood Babylon,” scandal by lurid scandal. Kenneth Anger was a pioneering, queer underground filmmaker, but in his muckraking mode he could be casually vicious, and frequently mistaken. Longworth found that the Mexican-American actress Lupe Vélez did fatally overdose while pregnant, possibly with Gary Cooper’s baby, but she did not die, as Anger claims, with her head in the toilet, vomiting up a Mexican meal. The former silent-screen heartthrob Ramon Novarro was indeed killed, in 1968, by a couple of hustlers he brought to his Laurel Canyon home, but there was no Art Deco dildo involved in the grisly murder. And Clara Bow, the original It Girl, did not have sex with the entire U.S.C. football team—full stop.
Longworth’s newest season, which began in May, chronicles the lives of the influential Hollywood gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. It’s a particularly rich subject for Longworth, since it’s concerned with how some of the stories she’s investigated in the past were manufactured, manipulated, or suppressed in the first place. Hopper and Parsons “became rich and famous in a world of men,” Longworth says in the first episode, “by selling regular people the illusion that they were taking them behind the scenes, while really they were reinforcing a system that relied on audiences having no idea how movies were really made or what stars were really like.” Longworth, too, implicitly promises to take us behind the scenes, while relying on the knowledge that many of her listeners—sophisticated consumers of celebrity gossip, simply by virtue of living in the world as it is—will be skeptical of that very idea.
Longworth, forty, is a former film critic for LA Weekly. She is married to the director Rian Johnson, who made the movies “Knives Out” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” On “You Must Remember This,” her M.O. is to take a story, research widely, sift meticulously through the known and rumored versions of events, and reassemble them into a persuasive narrative. Many of these building blocks can be found in books, which Longworth cites in her show notes, and less often in the podcast itself. But she puts them together in a way that strikes you as reliable—partly because she’s transparent about what can’t be known, and partly because she’s nearly as concerned with why we think we know something as she is with the truth itself.
Why, for instance, do certain Hollywood legends stick even when they can easily be debunked? Sometimes the culprits are racism, sexism, or campaigns by studios to spin a story. But the reasons can also involve a subconscious, affective attachment to specific archetypes and myths. In her episode on Jean Harlow, Longworth refutes a persistent rumor that the platinum-blond actress, who died at twenty-six, was killed by her weekly hair bleaching. That probably is what caused her hair to fall out in clumps—after all, her formula was a mixture of peroxide, ammonia, Clorox bleach, and Lux soap flakes—but Harlow most likely died of kidney disease, which she’d suffered from since childhood. The innuendo about Harlow’s death endured, Longworth says, because “people who love Hollywood love stories about how the things Hollywood people do to become stars end up destroying them.” In her telling, the most salacious or conspiratorial version of Hollywood gossip is often the least likely to be true, but the reasons that people believe it are almost always worth exploring.
Gleeful revisionism is not Longworth’s style, either. If someone has been thrown under the bus by previous chroniclers of movie history, she will pull her out, dust her off, and send her on her way—respectful but seldom besotted. If there’s more credit to be handed out, she’ll do that, but she won’t get carried away with redemptive zeal. In one of her best seasons, Longworth reconstructed the life of Polly Platt, an art director, producer, talent whisperer, and behind-the-scenes macher who, though beloved in Hollywood, never garnered much recognition in the wider world. Platt started her career in the late nineteen-sixties, collaborating closely with her then husband, the director Peter Bogdanovich, on his first and best films, including “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon.” (On the set of the former movie, Bogdanovich began an affair with the ingénue Cybill Shepherd, and left his marriage. In the meantime, Platt, who was doing the hair, makeup, and production design, continued working with Shepherd, insuring that she would look as desirable and luminous as the movie, and Platt’s husband, needed her to be.)
The title of the Platt season calls her an “invisible woman,” but the argument Longworth weaves in is subtler. Platt went on to make major contributions to some of the biggest successes in seventies and eighties Hollywood: “Pretty Baby,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Broadcast News.” She mentored the director Cameron Crowe, helped launch the career of Wes Anderson, and introduced the cartoonist Matt Groening to James L. Brooks, thus planting the seed for “The Simpsons.” If Platt never became quite as famous as she could have been, it’s probably because she never directed a film. And if that was because it was so hard for women to get hired, it was also, Longworth suggests, because Platt got in her own way—she had a chronic drinking problem, and backed off at least one opportunity to direct, perhaps because she had paralyzingly high expectations for herself. Besides, as Longworth reminds us, it’s only if you subscribe to the purest auteur theory—which attributes cinematic achievement almost entirely to the genius of the director—that Platt’s remarkable career can be dismissed.
Complicating the narrative without killing the vibe can be tricky. People who love Golden Age Hollywood really love it. They—and by “they” I mostly mean “we”—don’t want to see it fetishized in some unsavory way, but they don’t want to see it trashed, either. We like to summon up the shimmering shades of John Garfield or Joan Crawford when we sip our Martinis at Musso and Frank. We know the pitfalls of nostalgia, but we don’t want to lose the pleasures that old movies afford us. There are times, listening to “You Must Remember This,” when I miss a certain kind of goofball enthusiasm—something like the joy of settling in for the night when you discover that your hotel’s cable includes TCM, or the mock-heroic debate you get into with the nerdy cinéaste in the popcorn line. Although Longworth will occasionally offer a lyrical aside about an actor’s charisma, or urge listeners to watch an obscure movie that she loves, the podcast generally avoids effusiveness.
But Longworth does set a mood—a little haunted, a little seductive, a little old-fashioned. As podcasts go, “You Must Remember This” has few bells and whistles. It’s basically just Longworth talking, or, actually, reading a written piece on the subject at hand. She enunciates with care, with some faint, period-specific musical cues behind her. (Actors speak some of the quotes from her subjects; this season, Julie Klausner, as Parsons, and Cole Escola, as Hopper, make particularly persuasive grandes dames.) The introduction uses Dooley Wilson singing “You must remember this . . . ” in an echoey, distorted setting; the phrase, taken from the “Casablanca” theme, seems to float to us from across the sea. “Join us, won’t you?” Longworth asks, and off we go, in our little rowboats, borne ceaselessly back into the past and all that.
Hopper and Parsons have been written about before—and we’ve seen versions of them played by Helen Mirren and Tilda Swinton, in “Trumbo” and “Hail, Caesar!” Both were from small-town, middle-class America, and both transformed themselves into capable professionals when the movie industry was new and marginal enough to make room for ambitious women. (Parsons was a script editor in the early years of silent film, Hopper an actress with a flair for extravagant hats.) But Longworth’s take on them makes an especially strong case that Hollywood history is “inextricable,” as she puts it, “from American history.” As longtime Hollywood columnists for the Hearst syndicate and the Los Angeles Times, respectively, Parsons and Hopper essentially created the template for modern entertainment coverage, with its symbiotic, often corrupting relationships and the swapping of access for fulsome treatment. For decades, a good word in one of their columns was the syrup on a mogul’s pancakes; a bad one meant a thundercloud over Burbank. Hopper, in particular, forged a style that was a precursor to a lot of online writing: as Longworth notes, she “captured the sound of a dishy, slightly ditzy friend who always had a story to tell and always seemed to walk into a room with that story in medias res.”
Both women coöperated extensively with powerful men—in Parsons’s case, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and, in Hopper’s, the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover. Parsons saw herself as the protector of Hollywood’s interests, which meant skillfully deflecting attention from the scandals that made the industry vulnerable to government censorship. (The same spirit saw studio heads voluntarily agree, in the nineteen-thirties, to abide by the Production Code, which limited the sex and violence that movies could show.) Hopper, the so-called Queen of Mean, was more politically conservative. She became a handmaiden of the blacklist, with a particular animus toward Charlie Chaplin, whom she helped Hoover to deport. She also indulged in anti-Semitism. During the production of “Gone with the Wind,” Hopper became furious that British actors (Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard) were being cast in the roles of Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes. Deconstructing the politics of this peculiar crusade, Longworth notes that the movie’s producer, David O. Selznick, wanted to promote “British-American relationships and mutual sympathies,” at a time when the America First crowd was warning against getting suckered by foreigners and Jews into fighting the Nazis. Hopper had it in for non-Americans and refugees—though she made an exception for Hitler’s beloved propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl, whose 1938 visit to Hollywood (three years after Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”) she defended. (Hopper found her “perfectly charming.”)
Many of the stories that Longworth tells are not about what Hopper and Parsons wrote but about what they agreed to hide—gay relationships, out-of-wedlock births, all manner of chaos in the lives of stars. Often, these omissions were made in exchange for other, less juicy scoops, or for reasons of narrow self-interest. In the late twenties, Hearst worried about the advent of sound movies because his mistress, the silent-film star Marion Davies, had a stammer; in the papers, Parsons, who had millions of readers, dutifully cast doubt on the whole idea of talkies. It’s partly because the studio system was so good, for so long, at this sort of subterfuge that Longworth can claim to be unveiling “secret” history.
In the end, “You Must Remember This” succeeds because it reveals more of the truth—or at least more of what happened, refracted through what we now believe about gender, race, and the machinations of Hollywood—than, say, Hopper or Parsons did. But some myths are left untouched. When Hollywood tells stories about itself, they tend toward the tragic—“A Star Is Born,” “Sunset Boulevard”—and historians like Longworth seem drawn to that mood, too. It’s not hard, after all, to find movieland lore about talent squandered, or white-hot ambition flaming out. Even the last episodes about the redoubtable Hopper and Parsons link fame to its eclipse. We get less than we might want about the actual work of filmmaking, and the joy that plenty of its practitioners seem to have taken in it over the years. In “You Must Remember This,” the dreams that escape or ruin us tinge the atmosphere with melancholy. This, rather than any glittering, triumphant fantasy, seems to be the Hollywood ending that secretly entrances us. ♦
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The Secret Hollywood of the “You Must Remember This” Podcast - The New Yorker
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