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4.17 AVERAGE
4.17 AVERAGE
informative
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
If you are anything like me and love watching old movies and love reading about classic Hollywood, then this book will be right up your alley. Exhaustively researched and endlessly engaging, Longworth gives us a detailed look at Howard Hughes and the ways in which he used his power, money and influence to seduce and entrap women into his orbit. Some were well known, others less so. But they all shared a level of affection for Hughes that often led to their own detriment.
The Aviator is one of my favorite movies of all time. I consider this a supplement to that as it gave us a broader and different picture of Hughes than that movie did. Doesn't take away anything from the movie nor do I believe that it was meant to. It serves as a complement to the movie and gives us a more well rounded picture of Hughes and the various women in his life.
I found myself completely captivated by this book. Longworth kept my interest with her tales of Classic Hollywood and all the famous and not so famous women who crossed paths with Hughes. She also doesn't demonize Hughes, which I really appreciated. The picture she paints of him is less than flattering but she never goes so far as to make him out to be a monster. You are free to draw your own conclusions about him. Personally, I pitied him and empathized with him in equal measure. That's a testament to how solid her writing is. I am unfamiliar with her podcast but after reading this book, I'll have to check it out sometime. This is a real gem. A tough read but also timely, provocative and intriguing. Recommended to any fans of classic Hollywood, old movies or Howard Hughes obsessives.
The Aviator is one of my favorite movies of all time. I consider this a supplement to that as it gave us a broader and different picture of Hughes than that movie did. Doesn't take away anything from the movie nor do I believe that it was meant to. It serves as a complement to the movie and gives us a more well rounded picture of Hughes and the various women in his life.
I found myself completely captivated by this book. Longworth kept my interest with her tales of Classic Hollywood and all the famous and not so famous women who crossed paths with Hughes. She also doesn't demonize Hughes, which I really appreciated. The picture she paints of him is less than flattering but she never goes so far as to make him out to be a monster. You are free to draw your own conclusions about him. Personally, I pitied him and empathized with him in equal measure. That's a testament to how solid her writing is. I am unfamiliar with her podcast but after reading this book, I'll have to check it out sometime. This is a real gem. A tough read but also timely, provocative and intriguing. Recommended to any fans of classic Hollywood, old movies or Howard Hughes obsessives.
Continuing in my somewhat curious and uncharacteristic non-fiction reading trend lately, I picked up this book because I'm a big fan of Karina Longworth and her podcast, You Must Remember This, which tells fascinating and intensely well-researched stories of old Hollywood and film stars. I'll just say right out: Howard Hughes was a real schmuck, and I'm surprised I decided to read completely through a 468-page tome about his various exploits here, there, and everywhere - many of them involving woman (a majority of them well-known like Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, and others) whom he just treated like garbage in his constant efforts to control, micro-manage, and manipulate. He was, seriously, a bit repulsive. Longworth, however, writes in a way that sucks you in and keeps you turning the pages. I thought I would just casually peruse a little of this and then take it back to the library. Not so. Before I knew it, I was halfway through the book and committed. If you can get past the book's main subject a bit, it's a fascinating portrait of some of old Hollywood's back stories and schemes. I've been a fan of classic film for years and consider myself a little bit of an "authority" in some cases, but there were new gems I unearthed in here. A good read, overall.
A long and, at times, exhausting book but nevertheless an admirable job of research and writing. The book centers on the army of starlets hired and controlled by Howard Hughes during his lifetime. The most well-known names include Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, Billie Dove, Jane Russell as well as lesser-known names like Faith Domergue, Jean Peters, (who Hughes was actually married to) and Terry Moore, not to mention scores of unknowns who were hired by Hughes and promised a film career but left to linger with no actual work materializing and them used as pawns controlled by him.
At times, the book is a riveting read (the earlier segments on Dove, Harlow, Hepburn and Domergue are page turners but the author sometimes leaves you hanging with unresolved outcomes (such as the Ben Lyons controversy when he sent a young girl a sexually suggestive photo of himself holding a stump between his legs - he was sued by the parents but whatever happened with the case is not revealed). The whole Terry Moore issue with her marriage claims following Hughes death is so detailed and convoluted, I could not keep up with it. Ditto on Hughes intricate business dealings. Overall, an admirably researched book that film history buffs will love and full of facts often too bizarre to be believed. Life is stranger than fiction!
At times, the book is a riveting read (the earlier segments on Dove, Harlow, Hepburn and Domergue are page turners but the author sometimes leaves you hanging with unresolved outcomes (such as the Ben Lyons controversy when he sent a young girl a sexually suggestive photo of himself holding a stump between his legs - he was sued by the parents but whatever happened with the case is not revealed). The whole Terry Moore issue with her marriage claims following Hughes death is so detailed and convoluted, I could not keep up with it. Ditto on Hughes intricate business dealings. Overall, an admirably researched book that film history buffs will love and full of facts often too bizarre to be believed. Life is stranger than fiction!
Longworth uses the lens of the women Hughes' "discovered", sometimes wooed and undoubtedly abused, to provide a thoroughly in depth examination of this most enigmatic of men and his impact on Hollywood. And it's written in Longworth's wonderfully conversational style.
An absolute must-read for anyone interested in US film history.
An absolute must-read for anyone interested in US film history.
Karina Longworth's thesis—that no one represents or reflects the values of Hollywood better than Howard Hughes—is fascinating. Billionaire, producer, anti-Communist, playboy/predator, war profiteer: there are a lot of angles necessary to take here, and they're all interesting, but sometimes the book feels almost excessively, exhaustively researched. Longworth's writing, as in her podcast, is strong, and at its best when it's analyzing how the stars of Old Hollywood, particularly the women, were commodified and fetishized and how this fetishization is reflected in their public personas and their onscreen appearances. But there's just so much else going on, sometimes distractingly so (names fade in and out of the text so frequently I often had to flip back to remember who was who, and sometimes these names fade out with little closure or explanation) that I ended up feeling a little bogged down, a little bored. And I think that declaring that you're not interested in "who these long-deceased people really had sex with" because you don't think it matters (149) when said long-deceased people were rumoured to have not been straight is a funny stance to take when you're writing a book about, among other things, Howard Hughes's sex life. But there's still a lot here that I enjoyed and I do always appreciate Longworth's perspective on Hollywood, even if I don't necessarily care about all the business deals involved.
Karina Longworth is the real deal as far as research and due diligence goes, which makes this book through and interesting but sometimes too dense and a bit of a slog. But I do love her writing style and am glad I saw the whole thing through.
Like a very long episode of “You Must Remember This”.
Bad guy! Hope nobody ever made a movie about him that shows he was a sort of weirdo whose triumphs we will ultimately cheer for as the climax of the film!
I didn't really know that much about Howard Hughes' actual path through Hollywood, so much of this information was new to me. I hadn't realized he had quite so many famous girlfriends, for one thing. I also hadn't realized how bad he was at being a film mogul. He was just so creepy in so many ways, it's hard to imagine that he must have been at least a little charming at some point. I did bog down a bit toward the last quarter or so as Howard got weirder and the Hollywood connection faded, but for the most part I was quite entertained.