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Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood Audiobook
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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 benefitted 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’s 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, The Seducer 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.
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“A candid portrait of the multifaceted millionaire…As his romantic tastes shifts from known quantities—like Hepburn, Rogers and Gardner— o powerless unknowns, Seduction reveals the root of Hughes’s interest in women: a desire to exert total control, rather than true affection.”
— Washington Post
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“Guaranteed to engross anybody with any interest…in Hollywood…#MeToo, and in the never-ending story of men with power and women without.”
— New York Times -
“A compulsive page-turner…Much of Seduction reads like a long overdue act of redress, repositioning women into the more central positions where they belong.”
— Los Angeles Times -
“Seduction reads like a scandal sheet tempered with primary and secondary research.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books -
“A history that shows clearly how powerful men exploited actresses long before the #MeToo movement began…A lively—and often sordid—Hollywood history.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“A first-rate work of cultural curation, in which Longworth combs the countless stacks of Hollywood memoirs and biographies, with a focus on the pathological predations of Howard Hughes.”
— USA Today (four out of four stars)
Awards
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A New York Times Book Review Pick of Best Books Now in Paperback
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About Karina Longworth
Karina Longworth is the creator, writer, and host of You Must Remember This, a podcast on the secret and forgotten history of twentieth-century Hollywood. A former film editor of the LA Weekly and critic for the Village Voice, she is the author of several previous books, including Hollywood Frame by Frameand Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor. She lives in Los Angeles.