Karina Longworth wears Jacket Loro Piana. Skirt and Shoes Karina’s Own.
Old Hollywood is filled with secrets, and Karina Longworth has made it her mission to pry them loose. Her podcast, You Must Remember This , is a gripping counternarrative to the cleaned-up version of movie history, with the former critic acting as a cultural archaeologist, excavating stories and perspectives from vintage magazines and unpublished memoirs to piece together panoramic histories time forgot. Longworth put her spin on the Manson murders and the shadow they cast over the industry, as well as the disappeared legacy of production designer Polly Platt. Her newest season, “The Bisexuals,” is an excavation of queerness in Hollywood’s first century, anchored by torch singer Libby Holman, who was accused of murdering her husband and never fully exonerated. To talk about it, she got on a call with longtime listener and fellow Hollywood chronicler Griffin Dunne , who came with a few stories of his own.
GRIFFIN DUNNE: Long time since martinis at that place.
DUNNE: I’m great. I’m going to put in the little ear things. Where are you?
LONGWORTH: I’m in my recording studio in Los Angeles. I bought a little house in Laurel Canyon at the end of a cul-de-sac, where it’s really quiet, and I built this studio. I bought the place from a woman who was kind of an all-purpose healer. She had a room where she did sound baths, so it was already soundproofed.
DUNNE: And do you get the healing vibes? Did she leave any behind?
LONGWORTH: Well, she embedded crystals in the walls, so I left them.
DUNNE: I’m just going to fan out for a moment. I’ve been a huge fan of You Must Remember This for so long. Since you started, there’ve been two significant women in my life, and it’s required listening. We have a shorthand that always makes us laugh. Whenever we’re driving and we hear you say, “Written, produced, and hosted by Karina Longworth,” we look at each other and we both go, “That’s me.”
DUNNE: It’s so good. Where did you grow up and were you always a cinephile?
LONGWORTH: I grew up in L.A. in the ’80s and ’90s, in Studio City, but my family was not in the industry at all. At that time, it felt normal to be interested in Hollywood and its history. My parents had Lauren Bacall ’s book on the shelf. You’d turn on the local news and they’d be talking about what Bob Hope or Elizabeth Taylor did that day. It didn’t seem as dis tant as it does now.
DUNNE: I grew up in L.A. too, and part of every normal day is you driving by movie studios. Where you lived in Studio City, there was Radford Studios, where they did Gunsmoke , McHale’s Navy , and Gilligan’s Island . For anyone who grows up there, it’s an industry town. It’s impossible to avoid, the way I imagine cars are for Detroit.
LONGWORTH: I just spent the past year in Rochester studying film preservation, and that was absolutely a Kodak town. Kodak employed tens of thousands of people, and now people who live and work in Rochester don’t even know that.
DUNNE: You are married to a fanta stic director [Rian Johnson] who seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of movies. Is that what brought you together? Do you guys talk about movies all the time?
LONGWORTH: When we first met, I was a film critic writing about new movies, and I was hired to interview him onstage after a screening of one of his films. We were just friends for a couple of years, and then we started dating. I don’t think talking about Hollywood history was foundational to our relationship, but as I gravitated towards it, he went along for the ride. He often lets me choose the movie we watch at home.
DUNNE: I want to talk about your past episodes. One that really made me aware of your show was your incredible deep dive into Charles Manson. I thought I knew quite a bit about him, but you had details that were totally new to me. When I was making a docu mentary about Joan Didion , that was enormously helpful.
LONGWORTH: Oh, wow. I love your Joan Didion doc. I make her kind of a character in the podcast season because of her perspective on things.
DUNNE: I used your perspective about Joan, so it’s a win-win. When I was a kid, I stole my mother’s car on the night of those murders. I drove right by the crime scene, sitting on telephone books behind the wheel. I had no idea at the time that I’d passed the crime scene, and I didn’t realize it until later that night. And the one about Jean Seberg—the connection you made between Jean and Jane Fonda was absolutely fascinating.
DUNNE: Tell me. The Polly Platt season, no one ever told her story so thoroughly. How did that come about? I heard it was even optioned for the movies.
LONGWORTH: It came about because I became friends and started working with Stacey Sher, the producer. She knew Polly and was close with her daughters, Antonia and Sashy. They really wanted to get Polly’s unfinished memoir out in the world, so Stacey connected me to them. The book she wrote is unfinished, and it needed contextualization. Even still, the writing she did, and her perspective on things, was so singular. Reading it gave me a sense of who this woman was, so I wanted to share as much of it as possible. I tried to sell it as a book first, but my book agent was just like, “You’ll never sell this. This is a terrible idea.”
DUNNE: Oh my gosh. Do you still have the same book agent?
LONGWORTH: No, I actually broke it off with him over the Polly Platt thing.
LONGWORTH: But if anybody is interested… [Laughs]
DUNNE: Do you happen to know if Peter Bogdanovich heard it?
LONGWORTH: He did, yes. I never got a chance to talk to him about it. He passed away pretty soon after it came out.
DUNNE: The one you did about Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin is another example of how you bring in the history of America— racism in America, interracial marriage. It was so thoroughly researched. What’s your process?
Jacket Loro Piana. Skirt and Shoes Karina’s Own.
LONGWORTH: I was only able to do that season because of Nick Tosches’s incredible book, Dino . It’s truly one of the great star biog raphies, or any biographies, ever published. I loved that book for a long time and I wanted to cele brate it. Then I did a lot of research on Sammy. I collect vintage maga zines. They provide snapshots of a moment and show how people were written about in their time. It’s a way to see and understand how their celebrity functioned in what was their present, not our past. I’m always reading as many books as possible and trying to find every magazine and newspaper article. On top of that, I go to places like the Margaret Herrick Library, which is the Academy’s library in Los Angeles, trying to find any original documents or files they have on these people.
DUNNE: Side note, I once met Sammy Davis Jr. with Linda Lovelace.
LONGWORTH: Oh, wow. That’s a whole other thing.
DUNNE: She was in an acting class, for one class. I was her scene mate and she asked me to walk her to the car. It was a big Bentley, with a driver with a cap and jodhpurs. He opened the door and there was Sammy in the back. He said, “Take good care of my lady. How was she?” I said, “She’s terrific, Sammy. She was just great.” And she said, “No, I wasn’t, Sammy. I stunk.” They were an odd couple, but very sweet. But my favorite is “The Old Man Is Still Alive.” It’s something I’ve thought about, particularly as I hit 71, how these directors grappled with not just age, but relevance and the chang ing times and changing audiences. My parents were very social, and when I was a kid there was this hilarious guy with an accent who just made me laugh named Billy Wilder, and then William Wellman and John Huston. Can you talk about what it was like to be that age and still in the busi ness, almost when the movie busi ness was at its nadir?
LONGWORTH: The idea behind the season was that it was these people who really helped invent Hollywood movie language in the 1920s and ’30s—directors who were as identified with classical Hollywood cinema as anyone. And then, as you said, times change, the culture changes. When you combine that with aging and also with the culture changing to focus on youth, they all encoun tered similar challenges, but in different ways. That’s what was exciting to me: to be able to show a multifaceted portrait of this time through these different people’s stories. I mean, somebody like Howard Hawks, who was still going into his early eighties, and only died because he got drunk and tripped over his dog. It’s a dif ferent story than somebody like Vincente Minnelli, who tried to keep going but was just not able to get projects off the ground.
DUNNE: The most fascinating and hopeful example I found was that as all these men aged and aged and found work more difficult, John Huston, in the last years of his life, made three of the best movies of his career.
LONGWORTH: It’s pretty wild to have somebody go from something like Annie , where they’re clearly doing it for the paycheck, to some thing like Under the Volcano or The Dead , which both have so much personal stuff.
LONGWORTH: No, I didn’t. It makes more sense to not do interviews because I can’t do interviews for every subject. Talking to the few people who are still around almost gives those episodes an unfair advantage.
DUNNE: Yeah, understood. So, I fin ished “The Bisexuals.”
DUNNE: I live upstate, and listening made the drive so fast. I was not aware of Libby Holman. So many of your podcasts are about people in movies, or who make movies, and you centered this around a torch singer with a stage career who loathed microphones. She seemed to be a centerpiece for so many people who did all those things. It’s quite an unusual sub ject to start with as the ground zero for your premise about bisex uality in Hollywood.
LONGWORTH: It was never sup posed to be a comprehensive story about bisexuality in Hollywood. The title of the season is inten tionally a little bit provocative. I wanted to tell Libby’s story because I became fascinated with her when I first learned about her in 2020. Then I read Jon Bradshaw’s book, Dreams That Money Can Buy . Libby was a Jewish girl from Cincinnati who came to New York City in the 1920s. She had a slightly olive complexion, but mostly because of the way she sang—a throaty voice, singing what we’d now call blues songs—rumors swirled that she was Black passing as white. She wasn’t, but in the late 1920s, it was advantageous to her career to let people think this was true. Libby becomes a star on Broadway in these revues, and she’s part of a sort of queer social scene. Then in the early ’30s, she shocks every body by marrying the male teen age heir to the Camel cigarettes fortune [Zachary Smith Reynolds]. Eight months later he’s dead of a gunshot wound and she’s indicted for his murder. A media circus and legal drama unfold. Libby does not go to jail, but she’s not fully exon erated either. She lives the rest of her life being whispered about. I’ve compared her to Courtney Love as somebody who, even though they were never convicted of killing their husband, some people believe they did. This is something they can never kick as a reputation. In Libby’s case, unfortunately, sev eral other men in her life also died untimely deaths.
DUNNE: Another great irony you dug up was that Libby’s father or grandfather, [Moses Jacob] Ezekiel, was a sculptor who did the Confederate statues.
LONGWORTH: Kind of a distant uncle. He was a Jewish man living in the South. He went to Italy to refine his craft, and when he came back to the States, he became one of the lead sculptors of Confederate monuments.
DUNNE: What were the gay bars for both men and women like in L.A. and New York? What was the scene and how secretive was that?
LONGWORTH: One of the things I wanted to talk about in this season was how progress is not linear. There’s kind of a back and forth. I read all these stories about Libby and her friends, like Tallulah Bankhead and her girl- friend, Louisa Carpenter, being relatively open in New York City. Certainly if they went uptown to clubs in Harlem, they could be completely open, having these sort of queer romances and queer lives. Even in the Broadway speak easy scene, it was well known Libby was involved with Louisa. Tallulah Bankhead was very open, until she wasn’t allowed to be when she moved to Hollywood. Marlene Dietrich was playing with bisexuality onscreen in the early 1930s. By the time Montgomery Clift becomes a movie star in the late ’40s, moving into the ’50s, it is not possible for someone of his stature, particularly a man, to be openly gay at all.
DUNNE: It’s concurrent with the Red Scare. In the ’50s and early ’60s, you would be arrested and publicly shamed.
LONGWORTH: It’s important, because I think a lot of people think of the ’60s as this time when sexuality opened up, but what we call the sexual revolution was a slow burn. Neither Libby nor Montgomery Clift were able to benefit from it.
DUNNE: The studio system looked at people like Montgomery Clift and some of the stars they knew very well had an alternate life. I think it was Harry Cohn who said, “If you must get into trouble, at least do it at the Chateau [Marmont].”
LONGWORTH: Nowadays, that’s where the paparazzi are.
DUNNE: Now, of course, you couldn’t do that. But they would protect their stars.
LONGWORTH: They protected peo ple who were willing to play the game.
DUNNE: Wow, interesting. Well, Zoom is going to cut us off.
DUNNE: This is a conversation I hoped to have and could go on much longer.
DUNNE: It’s so good to spend time with you.
LONGWORTH: I’m going to be in New York, showing a bunch of movies from the podcast season in October. I hope you can come to something.
Jacket Loro Piana. Skirt and Shoes Karina’s Own.
Hair: Caitlin Krenz using Oribe Hair Care at Exclusive Artist Management.
Makeup: Agostina using MAC Cosmetics at Exclusive Artist Management.
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