Karina Longworth
Podcast Transcript Season 1 Episode 8
Interviewer: Liz Goldwyn
Liz Goldwyn: Hello, welcome to The Sex Ed. I'm your host, Liz Goldwyn, founder of thesexed.com, your number one source for sex, health and consciousness education. My guest today is Karina Longworth, creator of You Must Remember This, a hugely popular storytelling podcast about the secrets and forgotten histories of early Hollywood. And it's one of my personal favorites.
Karina is also the author of the book, Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood about the women whose careers and lives, the legendary Hughes changed. If you like me can't get enough Golden Age of cinema scandal, I highly recommend you pick up a copy. I caught up with Karina during her book tour to learn about what behind the scenes dirt she uncovered during her research, and the film industry's treatment of women as sex objects back then and now.
Liz Goldwyn: Thank you for being here.
Karina Longworth: Of course.
Liz Goldwyn: Did you always have a fascination with the seedy side of Hollywood growing up?
Karina Longworth: Well, I think growing up, I was fascinated with Hollywood and old Hollywood. I mean, I grew up in LA in the 80s and 90s and it just didn't seem unusual to be interested in the old stars. I mean, I remember them talking about whatever Elizabeth Taylor was doing that day on the local news. My mom was really into Natalie Wood and various different stories that were tragic, I guess. But for me, it was just normal and fascinating.
Liz Goldwyn: Who was your, sort of, silver screen icon when you were a kid?
Karina Longworth: I think the first person was Lauren Bacall. And I think I just really responded to her style and her sarcastic, slurry way of talking. And then, I saw How to Marry a Millionaire and she's just a boss in that movie. And it was really exciting to see that when I was 13, 14, 15.
Liz Goldwyn: Mine was Barbara Stanwyck.
Karina Longworth: Oh, of course. Amazing.
Liz Goldwyn: Yeah. When she crosses her legs with the ankle bracelet. I didn't see actresses --contemporary actresses at that time-- radiate as much strength. I think probably in the 80s and 90s, those roles weren't really around for women.
Karina Longworth: Not as much for sure.
Liz Goldwyn: Let's talk about the Hays Code, which was enforced with an iron fist. And the Hays Commission rules reshaped and watered down what the public saw on screen. Can you, sort of, break it down for us?
Karina Longworth: Yeah. So, there were all these scandals in Hollywood in the early 1920s. People have maybe heard of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, where this comedian was accused of raping and killing a woman. And there's some evidence that he maybe did have sex with her. There's no concrete evidence that he did rape and kill her. But it became the first nationwide Hollywood scandal. And there were nationwide calls to just basically end the film industry from Catholic groups and other reforming groups.
These groups had just pushed through prohibition. And so, the film industry was really afraid that they could actually kill the movie industry. So, as a show that they were changing their ways, they hired the former postmaster general, Will Hays, to come to Hollywood and police them. And they hired this guy specifically because they thought they could control him and that there wouldn't actually need to be, like, severe change. And so, what you get in the late 1920s and the early 1930s is actually more sexual permissiveness in movies. We call this the Pre-code Era.
A lot of this has to do with the beginning of sound film. And with dialogue, you could have a new type of flirtation on screen. You could have new, more adult sexual situations. And so, that really, really brought back this new wave of people saying, "We have to crack down on the movies." And so Hays, and a bunch of Catholic leaders, basically put together this code which became known as the Hays Code. And that was instituted in 1934.
And some of the rules that were in the code were that you could only have people kissing for a certain length of time. Anybody who had sex out of wedlock needed to be punished either with jail or murder. There was no, quote unquote, "miscegenation", which meant that white people and black people or Asian people or anybody who was not white could not be seen having a romance on screen, which helped to make the screen whiter. There was, you know, controls about things like guns and booze and stuff like that. But most of the controls were about sex.
Liz Goldwyn: They were very controlling as well about costumes. I read through all the papers in my grandfather's archive relating to the film Ball of Fire. It was a Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper film, directed by Howard Hawks. Billy Wilder wrote the script in which Barbara Stanwyck's character originally was a burlesque queen. Of course, that was a no from the Hays Commission. And then, they made such specific cuts and suggestions to her wardrobe, where it was the waistband of her skirt had to be taken up, like, three centimeters. It's just so nitpicky and specific.
Karina Longworth: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's in my book but there was a point where Howard Hughes was trying to release this movie, The Outlaw, which featured Jane Russell in a lot of low cut blouses. And he and his publicist actually mounted a stunt when they were appealing to the Hays Code, where the Hays Code was saying that there was too much of her breasts being shown. And so, they took blowups of these other actresses and other movies and they hired a scientist to go from each one with a protractor, measuring the amount of flesh being shown to prove that Jane Russell was not showing more flesh than the other actresses.
Liz Goldwyn: Speaking of Jane Russell, I was wearing a bullet bra last night.
Karina Longworth: Nice.
Liz Goldwyn: And I was explaining to my boyfriend the origin of the bullet bra. (Karina laughs) And I mentioned you in that and Howard Hughes and his engineering skills. Can you give us some of the truth behind this myth that Howard Hughes invented the bullet bra?
Karina Longworth: Okay. So, actually, what he wanted to do with breasts was the opposite of that. He wanted to give the illusion that a woman was not wearing a bra on screen and that her breasts were just jiggling naturally while at the same time, obviously having them be lifted up. And so, he used, you know, his aeronautical knowledge and he designed a bra for Jane Russell to wear in The Outlaw and she tried it on and she just thought it was uncomfortable and ridiculous and that it actually looked bad under the costume. So, she took her existing bra and covered the seams with tissue so that you couldn't see the seams of the bra under the costume. And Howard Hughes didn't notice the difference. He thought that she was wearing his bra.
Liz Goldwyn: I guess men always like to think that they reinvented the wheel. (Both laugh) It's interesting too, at this time in Hollywood, with the Hays Code being so strict about portraying these heterosexual romantic ideals presenting to the public that certain movie stars are heterosexual but behind the cameras, it was a totally different story. Can you speak a little to that, because you go into quite a bit of detail in the book.
Karina Longworth: So, in the book, I talk a lot about Katharine Hepburn, who, when she arrived in Hollywood, she did have a husband but he didn't come with her. He stayed on the East Coast and she came to Los Angeles with her female best friend and Katharine Hepburn wore pants. And she projected this image on screen that was really unlike what other actresses were doing at the time. It was much stronger. And to eyes of that time, it was considered to be masculine.
And there was actual gossip in, you know, newspapers and magazines and fan magazines about what her sexual orientation was. And of course, it was the early 1930s, so, it was coded but it wasn't that coded. And it really seems like there was this panic about was Katharine Hepburn heterosexual? And if she wasn't, that would be a huge problem. And so, around the same time, she starts this relationship with Howard Hughes, which changes the way that she's covered in the media. And suddenly, all of the media is about when is she going to marry this dashing playboy aviator.
And immediately after that, her career, which had been slumping, she had had a series of box office bombs, her career is resurrected through the play and then the film, The Philadelphia Story. And so, I mean, I think from looking at everything I looked at and I write in the book, that this relationship with Howard Hughes, which some people don't think was real but I think was a genuine relationship. I don't know how intensely sexual it was but I think they did love each other. I think that relationship rehabbed her image so that she was able to continue this long really fruitful Hollywood star career.
Liz Goldwyn: That was great for his image too.
Karina Longworth: Absolutely.
Liz Goldwyn: He was a master publicist, and especially at using his relationships and women to build himself up as this billionaire playboy, which I found interesting when you went into some of the economics that he actually wasn't, especially at the beginning of his career, as wealthy as we think he was.
Karina Longworth: No. He was really highly leveraged in the 1930s. When he arrived in Los Angeles, he had actually had just had to spend most of his fortune buying off his family members so that he could have sole control of his dead father's oil drill bit business. And then he continued to spend money on things like arranging his divorce, arranging the divorce of the silent actress, Billie Dove, who he thought he was going to marry but did not, paying for movies for Billie Dove to be in that then became box office bombs. So, he actually got to the point around 1932 where even though he had just produced a major hit in the first Scarface he had to get out of the movie business because he couldn't afford to keep going.
Liz Goldwyn: Going back for a moment to Kate Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, George Cukor, I found also interesting in your book that even the homophobia of Hollywood at that time was so latent, left such a big mark, that even decades and decades after the death of some of these icons, there are states remain invested in keeping them closeted.
Karina Longworth: Absolutely. And I mean, I think that from everything that it is available to read about Katharine Hepburn and it seems that she was definitely bisexual. But there is a woman who is in charge of her estate who says, "No. That's not true." And certainly, there are biographers-- the biographer Spencer Tracy, who wrote James Curtis, who wrote an excellent 900 page book, he is fervent that they had a real heterosexual romance. So, you know, I mean some of these things, I don't know if it matters that much exactly who people had sex with but it really is interesting just to think of how they might've presented themselves in a different time when we can have a more honest and transparent conversation about how complicated sexuality is.
Liz Goldwyn: Although to speak on that point, I mean, even today there's major male movie stars who remain closeted because it would ruin their bankability of being a romantic lead. Which I find fascinating even now.
Karina Longworth: I mean, I want to say it's easier for women to come out as at least bisexual. I think it's still definitely difficult for men.
Liz Goldwyn: Men in the public eye, you mean?
Karina Longworth: Yeah. Yeah. I think that culture is more accepting of women because there is still this dumb thing of, “Oh, sexy. Girls having sex together.” Do you know? I mean, in a way that culture is still patriarchal and the gaze of culture is still male, it's more acceptable to think of the idea that a woman might have sex with women than it is acceptable to think of men having sex with men.
Liz Goldwyn: You detail in the book how gender roles were culturally enforced by matinee idols, which may have something to do with it. The idea of men as macho or swashbuckling Lotharios and women as either pure or fallen, which I mean, the time in which you're writing about and which your show, you must remember this, details has literally taught generations of people how they're supposed to behave.
Karina Longworth: Yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, I think it was actually there was more nuance to these things in the silent era and in the early 1930s. The gender roles really became codified with the Hays Code and it got, I think, worse after World War II when culturally there was this return to the home, this idea that women who had gone to work, like now they had to go back to their "real job" of taking care of men and taking care of families. And the movies really just put all their chips into reinforcing those ideas.
Liz Goldwyn: What's one of your favorite fallen women pitcures?
Karina Longworth: Wow. I mean, talking about Barbara Stanwyck I really like Baby Face. Does that count?
Liz Goldwyn: I think that counts.
Karina Longworth: Yeah. I mean, because she actually is, sort of, rising through sex, but…
Liz Goldwyn: And then, what about, you know, I guess Mary Pickford would be the ideal, pure heroin, right?
Karina Longworth: Yeah. The D.W. Griffith model of a woman who is basically a child who is, as soon as she is tainted by male lust, she's ruined.
Liz Goldwyn: The virgin and the whore myth. It's hard to get away from that. At the time, magazines like Confidential were publishing these exposes of the sex and drugs scandals of the stars. While simultaneously, Hollywood gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were on studio payrolls to present more cleaned up versions. So, in researching a book like this, how do you separate the reams of fact from fiction?
Karina Longworth: I mean, it is difficult. And I just try to be transparent about ways, like, places where I am able to look behind the curtain because I have information from, say, a publicist file or somebody's memoir or somebody's unpublished memoir in some cases. And, you know, I mean, it's all just material for me to analyze. And I just try to be honest about when I don't know what the truth is and what I think the truth is probably most likely to be.
Liz Goldwyn: Did you spend a lot of time at the Academy Library?
Karina Longworth: Yeah. I'm always at the Academy Library, which is an incredible place. I'm always looking at the microfiche and in like the folders of clippings. But a lot of this book is based on research I did in Austin, Texas at the state house where they have just hundreds of boxes of files that were collected after Howard Hughes died when many parties were fighting over his will or lack thereof, like fighting over his estate. And then there are files from his publicist, Russell Birdwell, who helped create the image of Jane Russell at UCLA. And then, I spent time in Las Vegas where Hughs’ publicists that he hired from the mid 40s until the end of his life. All of their files are there.
Liz Goldwyn: Yeah. I love that period of the end of his life in Vegas where he's locked up in the hotel rooms.
Karina Longworth: Yeah. And just like, literally, he bought a television station so that he could call in and request movies to be played all night long on TV.
Liz Goldwyn: Imagine having that kind of power. There's a great line in your book, which for me was an interesting take on the way that you're looking at Howard Hughes and these women, really these women whose careers and lives he affected, which is the reality of women quote "carving out spaces for freedom, thanks to their alliances with powerful men." And so many of these women's stories have been previously lost in the footnotes of Hollywood history.
Karina Longworth: Yeah.
Liz Goldwyn: Was that the only choice we had as women back then?
Karina Longworth: I don't know if it was the only choice but it was definitely a pattern I noticed of, like, let's take, for example, Ida Lupino, who was an actress, a movie star and she wanted to be a director. She was only able to do that by basically marrying a guy who had the power to be a producer and to help her create these independent productions. And then, even after they divorced, they continued to work together.
Liz Goldwyn: Yeah. I have a real problem with this phrase, “trophy wife” or “gold digger” because it negates the fact that really up until a hundred years ago, women didn't have that many economic choices. So, you're basically saying that anyone who does what they have to do to get a foot in the door is immediately labeled well, a fallen woman, I guess.
Karina Longworth: Yeah. Or is taken less seriously. But I mean, I don't know, I mean, in Hollywood, I think that maybe it wasn't quite looked down upon as much. I think that there was an understanding that if you were somebody like Lois Weber, who was co-credited as a director with her husband, I think everybody knew that she was the real director but it was still just too politically hot for the idea to be out in the world that these movies were being directed by a woman by herself.
Liz Goldwyn: And what about Dorothy Arzner?
Karina Longworth: Yeah. I mean, Dorothy Arzner was an out lesbian in Hollywood and a director for, I don't know, I think about 20 years. Yeah. I mean, and I write about a movie that she made in the book called Christopher Strong starring Katharine Hepburn, which I think is a really fascinating movie about the gender roles of the early 1930s.
Liz Goldwyn: Can you break that down a little bit?
Karina Longworth: Yeah. So, Katharine Hepburn plays, like, an Amelia Earhart style aviatrix and she gets involved with a married man. And at first, she's resistant because she's never seated her career to love before. And she wants to break all these aviation records but slowly, this man kind of wears her down and makes her his mistress. And then, she finds that she's lost everything that she had worked so hard for and he's still not giving her anything in return. He still won't leave his wife. She's more hemmed in than she ever has been. So, the movie ends. Sorry, spoiler.
But the movie ends with her in the airplane about to break this record and she's pregnant with her lover's baby and she, like, takes her oxygen mask off and she crashes the plane because-- and I mean, I just think, like, that you watch that movie today and you want it to be possible for the movie to end with her saying, "Well, fuck this guy, I'm just going to raise this child by myself and continue to be, like a wonderful stunning female pilot." And then you understand that it would be impossible to make that movie in the early 1930s and that if any women in the audience watch the movie and felt the same way that you feel now watching it, that is subversive and that is powerful.
Liz Goldwyn: Oh absolutely. Another scene I was really struck by in the book was the dynamic between Howard Hughes and Jean Harlow when she's still a teenager during the filming of Hell's Angels. And you describe Hughes sitting next to the camera, telling Harlow to open her negligee wider and wider. And I was just putting myself in her position in this, most likely all male crew, feeling so vulnerable.
Karina Longworth: Yeah. Also, the thing about Jean Harlow was it, I mean, there maybe would have been some actresses who were more comfortable with their sexuality and more comfortable with their bodies who wouldn't have minded that kind of exposure but she was the opposite of that. She really didn't see herself as being a sexually empowered person. And she was extremely uncomfortable playing this, kind of, sex bomb but because she was so good at it, because she became such a hit in Hell's Angels, that became her star persona.
Liz Goldwyn: Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting when you look around at what's happening now with the #MeToo movement, across all industries, I think, you know Hollywood, because there's already such a big lens shown on it due to the power of celebrity has pretty much had to clean up its act. And now, you have intimacy coaches that are on movie sets. So, something like that would not happen. But this is just in the last two years.
Karina Longworth: Absolutely. Yeah. Things like that are happening so fast.
Liz Goldwyn: From your vantage point of being a historian of this, do you feel a real sea change and can you pinpoint when that started to shift? Do you think just the fact that people are getting into trouble now, this is why it's drifting?
Karina Longworth: I think it maybe started earlier than that. I think it might've started with the election, with the run up to the election. I know that the morning after Donald Trump was elected, I wrote a line in this book that's in the introduction, which is, kind of a thesis statement just about how the time has come where we have to take playboys off a pedestal and really-- or, quote unquote, "playboys", this idea that a great man plows his way through all these women. We have to take them off that pedestal and think about the women, and think about what their lives are like and what their experiences are like.
And I think for a lot of women just seeing that, like, there were so many accusations against Trump, there's so much evidence that he has treated women terribly for so many years and it just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's so many other people. They just don't care. And if anything, they still think it's cool and good. I think it just made people so angry that we started having a new conversation about these things
Liz Goldwyn: And beyond just the sexual abuse and abuse of power that's happening in Hollywood, the sexism of the industry. I mean, as someone who's grown up in a Hollywood family, I have four brothers. Most of my family's in the movie business. And I love them. God bless them all but it's a boys club. I mean, I'm tired of being in rooms where I'm the only woman. And they say, "It's the year of the woman." And it's, like, September. So, they only wait for a few months left for it to be my year. I mean, can you even imagine, what would women have done back in the 1930s when you had somebody like Eddie Mannix? I mean, can you tell us a little bit about him because you've covered him in your series?
Karina Longworth: Yeah. Eddie Mannix was the fixer of MGM. So, he kind of, like, was a satellite of the publicity department. If the publicist realized there was a problem with a star; they were pregnant, they were having some sex scandal, they got into a car crash-- there was a problem that you needed to keep away from the public, Eddie Mannix would step in and fix those problems. And he also had, you know, a pretty terrible personal life that involved beating his wife, beating mistresses.
He was a suspect in the murder of George Reeves, the actor who played Superman because of a complicated sexual triangle that was going on with him and his wife and George Reeves. And yeah. He was just a pretty terrible guy that ruled with an iron fist using violence and intimidation and often a lot of cash to make sure that MGM kept, like, a relatively lily-white persona.
Liz Goldwyn: And wasn't he responsible for, supposedly, for procuring women for out-of-town distributors when they would have conventions?
Karina Longworth: Right. There's this story that David Stenn has reported, he made a documentary, I think it's called Girl 48 or Girl 47, but it's about this woman, Patricia Douglas, who was just hired for what she thought was an extra gig, I guess. And it turned out that she was being hired to stand around in a costume at this party being held for MGM out-of-town salespeople. And at that party, she was raped. And she tried to sue MGM and she tried to have a public accounting for this and MGM silenced her through Eddie Mannix.
Liz Goldwyn: And this was just par for the course.
Karina Longworth: Yeah. Well, what was unusual in her case was that she spoke out publicly about it. I mean, most women were successfully silenced before it got to that point. And, you know, it is-- there are parallels to the things that we've seen come out recently about people were afraid that they would never work again. They were afraid that the people close to them would never work again. They thought it was worth it to just accept a cash payment or to accept some renumeration rather than to cause trouble because you didn't want to be known as a troublemaker or a bitch.
Liz Goldwyn: How would you define the predatory gaze of Hollywood?
Karina Longworth: Well, that's really… complicated. I mean, I think that-- I don't want to say that it's all negative because I do think that there is imagery of women from mid-century movies and earlier that is really strong and powerful and exciting to watch as a woman but so much of it is about turning women into objects and sexualizing them in a way that dehumanizes them.
Liz Goldwyn: What's one of your favorite movies or sex, cinematic sex scenes, that made you feel empowered?
Karina Longworth: Well, I think like Rita Hayworth. I think of her in movies like Gilda and even The Lady from Shanghai. Like that sexuality of, where she seems stronger than the men in the film, is really exciting. One of the things I was excited to write about in this book was Jane Russell. Because even though we now understand that behind the scene she was being made to do things she didn't always want to do, her image on screen after The Outlaw in movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and I don't know, a lot of her other films, was very strong and she had a withering gaze. And she often was able to express her own sexual feelings towards men in these movies.
Liz Goldwyn: And then you have someone like Mae West who didn't come to Hollywood until she was close to 40 and wrote her own scripts. So, she's kind of an anomaly.
Karina Longworth: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the idea of a woman generating her own material to act in was very unusual in the 1930s when Mae West was doing it.
Liz Goldwyn: Can you think of anyone else in the 30s through the 60s who had that level of output?
Karina Longworth: I mean, well, Ida Lupino became the first actress to direct herself in a sound film with a bigamist, which I think is 1955. But yeah, for the most part, there wasn't a lot of triple threat actresses out there.
Liz Goldwyn: No. Probably not until-- It's funny. They're nothing alike but I always think of Tina Fey when I think of Mae West, which, what was interesting about Mae is that she completely presented herself as this sexualized ideal but was holding the reins.
Karina Longworth: Yeah. Absolutely. I would actually-- I'm making a podcast episode about her right now that's going to come out next week (Liz gasps, Karina laughs) and a lot of it is about her interplay with Cary Grant and the two movies they made together, where she is really the sexual aggressor and he's the wilting ingenue who is just being pummeled by her advances.
Liz Goldwyn: She's one of my favorites. Her book on sex, health and ESP is a Bible for me. There's so many women in this book, Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes Hollywood that I'm fascinated by. And one of them, who you don't get into too much in the book but you do in your season, Dead Blondes, is Barbara Payton. And she is rumored to be at another one of his paramoures.
Karina Longworth: Yeah. I couldn't include everybody. And so, I had to make decisions. But she's-- another person I couldn't include whose incredible is Hedy Lamarr-- but Barbara Hayden, in just a couple of films really, has this really strong presence.
Liz Goldwyn: And then, I love that she used to go around at night with the crescent moon-
Karina Longworth: Tattoo. Yeah.
Liz Goldwyn: Tattoo on her face.
Karina Longworth: She was really into the--yeah, semi-permanent tattoos on her face. And she had quite a wild personal life.
Liz Goldwyn: Let's talk a little bit about Hedy Lamarr. My father told me that he met her when he was really little. Somehow he'd seen Ecstasy. A cut of Ecstasy, his father had run a print of it, and he said the first time he met her, he'd already seen her topless in that picture. I mean, that's incredibly shocking for the time.
Karina Longworth: Well, yeah. Ecstasy was a film that she made when I think she was 16 in Germany and it preceded her arrival in Hollywood. So, by the time she got here when she was a little bit older and she was being molded into a star by MGM, everybody in town had already seen this movie in which she had been naked as a teenager.
Liz Goldwyn: Can you imagine?
Karina Longworth: Yeah.
Liz Goldwyn: How did you-- what was your process in deciding which women's stories you wanted to include and who had to be left out for the time being?
Karina Longworth: Well, it was a juggling act. I definitely wanted to have actresses who were spread out over the course of a long period of time. I wanted to be able to tell this whole story of what we call the Classical Hollywood era. And so, have these actresses sprinkle throughout. And I wanted to have a balance between telling things about actresses that are well-known still like Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers while also including people who are less well known like Faith Domergue and Jean Peters.
And then, as I was doing the research, a lot of duos started forming. It became clear that if you're going to talk about Katharine Hepburn, you have to talk about Ginger Rogers in the same breath because they were at the same studio and they were basically involved with Hughes at the same time. And the same thing with Jean Peters and Terry Moore, who were both at Fox at the same time, they were kind of at the same level of stardom. And they were two of the many women that Howard Hughes was involved with at that time. So, once you started finding these little connections, then it just flows together.
Liz Goldwyn: Tell us a little more about Terry Moore.
Karina Longworth: So, Terry Moore was a child actress and she was a Mormon. And when she was about 19, she met Howard Hughes and they dated for about a year but she wouldn't go to bed with him because she had these Mormon beliefs. And he tried to do a couple of ad hoc wedding ceremonies. Like they drove out to Mulholland's to neck and then he was like, "Let's get down on our knees and God will marry us right here." And she was like, "Okay. But we're not really married." Finally, he was like, "Okay. Terry, we're really going to get married."
So, they went out on a boat into international waters and the captain of the boat married them. And I guess Terry was satisfied by that. And so, she believed that that was a real marriage. Howard Hughes did not behave as though that was a real marriage. And about a year later, Terry caught him involved with another woman and she left him and did not seek a divorce but then went and married another guy. And then she ended up leaving that guy for Hughes and they continued to have an affair over the course of the next few years.
And then finally, Terry left him again and married another guy and married another guy, all without ever seeking a divorce from Hughes. When Howard Hughes died, she came forward and publicly said for the first time that they had had this wedding ceremony in 1949 on the boat. And then, she spent about 10 years in the courts trying to prove herself to be Howard Hughes's legitimate widow. And, I don't want to give away the final lines of the book, so I wouldn't say what happened then, but…
Liz Goldwyn: It's so interesting that revolving doors of spouses that you detail. And I think that most of the, probably the globe, still looks at Hollywood like, “How these Hollywood stars can't keep a marriage together.” I mean, it's obviously an industry that fuels gossip papers even now.
Karina Longworth: Yeah. Well, I mean, I just think also we have to understand that the times were so different. Like I remember reading a quote from Elizabeth Taylor where she was like, "Yeah. I got married a lot but I couldn't live with a man unless I was married. I was a movie star. It wasn't allowed." And so, to some extent, I think if you were in the public eye, it was just expected that if you did want to have sex with somebody, you were supposed to be married because otherwise it would be this huge public scandal.
Liz Goldwyn: That's true. That's true. It's a lot of pressure to keep it together and have any personal life as well when there's that kind of attention directed upon you.
Karina Longworth: And plus, in a lot of cases, you do have the studio trying to manufacture other romances for you and trying to promote another star by saying that you guys, like, are dating or going to the premiers together or whatever.
Liz Goldwyn: What's the most shocking sex scene do you think, sort of, from the 20s through the 50s?
Karina Longworth: I mean, I think they're-- I don't know if you call it sex, but I think the rape scene in The Outlaw is pretty shocking, especially because of what happens narratively in that movie where Jane Russell's character then just falls in this hypnotic love with her rapist.
Liz Goldwyn: Can you imagine today this kind of movie being released?
Karina Longworth: And not only that but that Howard Hughes promoted that aspect of the movie, that he included it, like, cartoons of her being pinned down in a hayloft in the newspaper advertising.
Liz Goldwyn: That's amazing. It's amazing. I mean, it's so fascinating this book, which I urge everyone to get a copy of and read if you're interested in it. And if you're interested in old Hollywood, if you're interested in gender roles, if you're interested in anything that's going on today with the #MeToo movement. It's fascinating too, what you're saying about him and Terry Moore, is that he really was trying-- he proposed almost all of these women. He was not a playboy who was, like, keeping them at bay.
Karina Longworth: Well, I think that it just… marriage didn't mean anything to him but he thought it meant something to them. And so, I don't think he ever thought that he was going to marry one woman and then not be with other women. But he understood that, like, if he got a ring on their finger that they would be faithful to him.
Liz Goldwyn: Did you choose him as a subject because you felt like he would be a good vehicle to tell the stories of these women?
Karina Longworth: Yeah. Absolutely. And also because of his continued antagonism of the Hays Code. I mean, that was a real feature of his work as a producer and then as the owner and manager of RKO. And so, if you're going to talk about what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood during this time, you want to talk about the censorship system and how hypocritical it was and how, finally, it policed sexuality on screen.
Liz Goldwyn: How did the Hays Code end?
Karina Longworth: It was kind of a slow process. Howard Hughes is one of the people that started defying it pretty regularly in the mid 50s. There was also an Otto Preminger film called The Moon Is Blue. These movies, previous to this, movies were not released in theaters unless they had the seal of approval from the Hays Code. And both of these movies didn't get the seal because of sexual content and their producers and their studios decided to release them anyway. And Samuel Goldwyn was involved with releasing The Moon Is Blue.
Liz Goldwyn: I was reading about he and Howard Hughes going against Hays. So, I was wondering what you think of whether Hollywood has a responsibility now, when it comes to portraying sex on screen. Because for so long there was only a certain type of sex portrayed on screen. And now, for example, I saw this movie Duck Butter that was written by Alia Shawkat, which I don't know how many people saw it, I thought it was great, it's particularly because it was a queer love story written from the perspective of a woman and it showed sex very honestly. So, I'm kind of wondering if Hollywood, historically, has been a teacher of gender roles or reflecting what sex should be? Where do you think that responsibility lies now?
Karina Longworth: I mean, I would love it if Hollywood was interested in portraying a wide variety of sexuality in honest and non-offensive ways. But I don't think that they're interested. I mean, I think that Hollywood movies are less sexual than they ever have been. I mean, what do you think in terms of, I know Duck Butter's an independent film but in terms of mainstream Hollywood cinema, I mean, doesn't it seem like they're almost completely sexless?
Liz Goldwyn: It's true because it's so dependent on foreign box office now to make your money back. So, I mean, when I think of the last big Hollywood films, I saw The Crimes of Grindelwald the other night. And so, it's more fantasy.
Karina Longworth: Fantasy movie is for kids, comic book stuff. I love it when you do get a sense of real human connection in those movies, which is very rare. But sometimes there is, like, a flirtatious spark between characters but that's almost as far as it goes for most of these movies. And there's so few actual adult films being made.
Liz Goldwyn: That's true. When I think of one of the scenes in a movie that really impacted me with female sexuality is, like, in the last 30 years, I think of Julianne Moore in Short Cuts.
Karina Longworth: Of course, yeah. (Laughs)
Liz Goldwyn: Where she's just wearing a shirt, pantsless, and she's got that beautiful red bush. And I thought, "Oh, what's, what's strength? What's sensuality?"
Karina Longworth: Oh but also it was just a natural situation where she's just not wearing pants in her house and having a fight with her husband. Just reflecting real life in that way is so exciting. And I wish that Hollywood was interested in reflecting real life but it doesn't seem like they are right now.
Liz Goldwyn: So, do you think we want to see things that reflect our life or do you think we want to see things that take us out of it?
Karina Longworth: Well, I would like to see things that reflect life but I think that there must be more commercial demand for escapism because that seems to be what gets produced and it seems to be what makes money. Although, you know, I mean, I do think that there is sometimes aspects of realism that make their way into big blockbusters. I mean, there's a lot of really authentic feeling in a movie like A Star is Born. But not so much in a movie like Venom.
Liz Goldwyn: (Both laugh) Well, thank you so much for being here.
Karina Longworth: Thank you so much for having me. I love this podcast.
Liz Goldwyn: Oh, thank you. I love yours. And everybody needs to listen to the Dead Blondes season among every other season that you've ever done. But I think that's one of my favorites.
Karina Longworth: Well, thank you.
Liz Goldwyn: Thank you.
Liz Goldwyn: Thanks for listening to The Sex Ed. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. And be sure to visit us at thesexed.com.
The Sex Ed is hosted by me, Liz Goldwyn. Jeremy Emery is our sound recordist and editor. And our production coordinator is Justin D.M. Palmer. Lewis Lazar made all of our music, including the track you're listening to right now.
Until next time, The Sex Ed remains dedicated to expanding your orgasmic health and sexual consciousness.