Title: Seduction Pdf Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood
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 benefited 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' 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, Seduction 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.
Casting Couch Film historian Karina Longworth could have written a terrific book. Unfortunately she fails with “Seduction” on the life of Howard Hughes and the many women he had relationships with in Hollywood. I think she is a frustrated neo-Marxian Feminist academic (I repeat myself) in that she uses such jargon as heteronormative, commodification and patriarchy. Hughes’ directed three great movies “Hells Angels,” which introduced the world to Jean Harlow, “Scarface” and “The Outlaw” where Jane Russell showed off her physical attributes.Longworth recounts Hughes’ affairs with Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Bette Davis and Ginger Rogers among the many. Although Hughes was certainly in a position of power, all of these relationships were consensual. Hughes also had a retinue of people on his payroll who were responsible for scouting “talent” for him. He certainly was an insatiable cad, but he also was a romantic.For example when he was courting Katherine Hepburn he landed his biplane on golf course where she was practicing on. Even the very wealthy and prominent Katherine Hepburn could not resist such an entreaty. In fact Hepburn stood up to him like none of the others. Perhaps it came from her strong ego reinforced by her patrician background.Longworth discusses the movies made by Hughes’ women and tries to fine deep social significance in them. To me most of those movies were entertainment and were not designed to enforce the mores of the day on an unsuspecting public. If Longworth lightened up a bit, she could have written a much better book.Boring I'm an old-movie buff, and I didn't read anything in this that I didn't already know about. Not that interested in H.Hughes- which is 99 percent of the book. Didn't even finish it.Great gift for the film lover (like me), so I bought myself it Longworth is a delightful storyteller, as I learned being a faithful listener to her podcast/streaming "You Must Remember This." And she does the same on paper in this book.For those who bored their high school friends, or opened new doors to them to watch (before recording to watch later), I have set alarms to wake for the late late show often. Now it is so much easier. But there is a reason that the time covered by this book is considered classic. The music of people like Franz Waxman. The performances by Hepburn and Cary Grant (especially HOLIDAY and the one where he almost played himself as a Cockney.)So read it and get the films you don't know, and watch. Many are classics still.
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