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Karina Longworth isn’t that interested in modern Hollywood anymore.
After 18 seasons of her “You Must Remember This” podcast, former film critic Longworth says she doesn’t pay much attention to the industry. She’s too
busy digging up stories from old Hollywood, from gossip and feuds to controversies and murders.
The latest season, “The Bisexuals,” launches Tuesday. Across eight episodes, Longworth explores the history of entertainment industry bisexuals through the lives of Broadway torch singer Libby Holman and movie star Montgomery Clift.
Longworth is taking films from “You Must Remember This” on tour this fall with stops in Houston, New York, Boston, Chicago and more. Although Longworth prefers these classics over modern movies, her husband, filmmaker Rian Johnson, is behind a number of more recent Hollywood titles, including the “Knives Out” series and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”
Before the launch of “The Bisexuals,” Longworth spoke with Variety about the season and her upcoming fall tour.
What is it that keeps you digging into old Hollywood and keeps you engaged with so many new seasons of the podcast?
I just keep finding stories that I want to tell. I feel like the older I get, the less I’m interested in contemporary Hollywood. I used to be somebody that would go to the movies two or three times a week, and I don’t do that anymore. I probably see 10 or 12 new movies a year, and I have replaced that by watching so much stuff from classical Hollywood. Every time that I read a new book, I get new ideas, and then I want to watch all the movies discussed in the book, and then that leads me down these rabbit holes. I’ll keep doing the podcast until I either run out of ideas or nobody wants to listen to it anymore.
Why did you start with Libby Holman, who’s not literally in Hollywood but is connected to so many people in show business?
The podcast season is more of a dual biography of Libby and Montgomery Clift, but it starts with Libby’s story because I like to tell stories chronologically. For a long time, I resisted doing a podcast even involving Libby — even though I was fascinated with her story — because of the fact she’s not a Hollywood creature at all. She never starred in a movie; she never lived in Los Angeles for any long length of time. She was a New York torch singer, Broadway star, and then, after a massive scandal in the 1930s, she continued to try to have a career as a singer to mixed results. It was a hurdle I had to get over in terms of thinking of my podcast as being Hollywood stories and trying to figure out if there was enough Hollywood content here. What I ended up figuring out was, first of all, it can be a split biography between her and Montgomery Clift, and I loved an excuse to watch all the movies of his that I hadn’t seen and revisit the ones I had. Then there’s also other people in their lives that were involved in films like Tallulah Bankhead and Clifton Webb, and then there’s these movies that are about Libby. It was really exciting to be able to discover some of them, but then also to be able to reframe the way I looked at something like “Written on the Wind” as being a story about Libby.
You talk about all of the productions that are inspired by Libby and how she reacted to that. You look at those as something that was inspired by her life, but a lot of these change or add new characters or change the gender of some characters, which is especially interesting given that this season is talking about her as a bisexual.
I think the movie that you’re referencing is “Reckless,” which is directed by Victor Fleming, starring Jean Harlow as the Libby character and Franchot Tone as the version of her first husband, Smith Reynolds, and then it stars William Powell as the third leg of this love triangle as her benefactor, and that role was played in real life by a woman named Louisa Carpenter. It was definitely not something that a Hollywood movie of the 1930s was going to deal with. The idea that a woman could have both a husband and a girlfriend, or that a woman could have a girlfriend at all. Sometimes these things were implied. Somebody like Marlene Dietrich kisses a woman on screen in “Morocco.” But for the most part, this was not something that Hollywood was going to go that deep into, especially after the production code was enforced in 1934, which would put pretty strict rules in the way sexuality was depicted on screen. “Reckless” is also the only film that I could find that Libby commented on. She was really upset at this major motion picture with a big star that was about her story, even though some of the details were changed and the names were changed. Maybe the fact that the details were changed is one of the reasons why she was upset about it, and she thought about suing but decided not to. I have empathy for Libby’s experience there, but I also think “Reckless” is a really good movie, and I hope people check it out.
It’s also a big stereotype about bisexual people in general that they are more sexually promiscuous because they are interested in both genders. Did that play into how you researched that or how you talked about that throughout the season?
I was interested in making a podcast season called “The Bisexuals” in part because I think bisexuality is misunderstood and often misrepresented. Even progressive people, even people who are very queer-friendly or even queer themselves will say that bisexuality is a myth. People say that, or they at least joke about it. Especially when it comes to somebody like Montgomery Clift, his persona went from projecting being a straight man when he was alive and working in Hollywood. Later, people seem to understand that he had relationships with men and branded him as gay. But then finding out the depth of his relationships and the fact that they were sexual, that made me understand that his sexuality was more complicated than even what is considered the progressive read on his sexuality. That was just really interesting to me. I didn’t want to talk about bisexuality in terms of it being a myth or the tropes that people attach to it.
What stood out to you as you were looking at the perception of bisexuality?
I was interested in this idea that progress in terms of sexuality, but also in terms of other social issues, is not linear. It’s a pendulum that swings back and forth. It was interesting to me to read about Libby’s sexual and social life in the 1920s. She was perceived as somebody who was both racially and sexually fluid, and a lot of her social life took place in Harlem, where white people would go to engage in a kind of sex tourism. For Libby, it was not that she went up there to have sex with Black people. It was that, in the clubs up there, there was a safe space for her and her other queer female friends to express themselves more freely in public. They still were doing that in speakeasies down near Broadway, but they were able to have a little bit more freedom in this other community. In general, she had much more freedom being somebody who was involved with both men and women than Montgomery Clift did years later when he was a Hollywood star who was somebody who did have relationships with women like Libby but was sleeping with men. The part of his life where he was sleeping with men, he had to keep totally secret from the public. I was just really interested in how there was a possibility to be a famous person in 1920s New York and have people understand that there was a queerness to you, and that possibility was not available if you were a male movie star in the 1950s.
The time periods were different, Montgomery was a man while Libby was a woman and not part of Hollywood. Were those intersections and things that were converging in both of their identities something that you wanted to peel back the layers on?
In the theater world in New York City, I think there was always an understanding and acceptance that people have a variety of sexual identities. It probably was not as open in the 1920s as it is now, but it was certainly more open than Hollywood was in the 1950s, and partially because of the production code, which was enforced in 1934. That came about, in part, as a response to scandals that happened off-screen in the 1920s. It was a way of cleaning up Hollywood’s image after things like the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. There was this idea that, in both on screen and off screen, Hollywood needed to keep things that were considered unacceptable to a middle American and generally Catholic point of view secret or hidden, or not have it represented in movies. Movies have a narrative on screen, and then there’s also the narrative off-screen about the stars and the people who make movies, and so there was this idea that whether it’s queerness, whether it’s interracial coupling, whatever it is, the stuff that wasn’t allowed in movies was also not allowed off screen. And if it was happening, then it had to happen under a cover. This is why somebody like Rock Hudson was encouraged to marry his female secretary. This is why Montgomery Clift was set up on dates with people like Elizabeth Taylor. In that case, it turned out well. They became extremely close friends. They really loved each other, even if their love was not sexual. But nobody was trying to set Libby Holman up with a man in order to sanitize her image, and in the late 1920s in New York City, nobody wanted a sanitized image.
One of my favorite lines was that there was a “cultural capital in racial ambiguity” and that Libby was afforded the luxury of letting people read into whatever she was playing up. What do you think that was like for her?
Libby was a Jewish girl from Cincinnati who moved to New York City, and she had a slightly olive complexion, but really, it was because of the way she sang, in a deep, throaty voice, singing what we would now call blues songs. People started gossiping that she must be Black trying to pass as white, and she wasn’t. But she let people think that, and she even talked later about how she felt flattered by that misinterpretation of her identity, and that she was excited by it. She thought it made her cooler, and it did help her, I think, in her career at this time. She became very famous in this show called “The Little Show,” in which her big number and what would become her signature song was called “Moanin’ Low.” This is a classical torch song in that it’s a dirge about a woman loving that a man treats her badly, and they dramatize this on stage with her and Clifton Webb, who I talk about later in the podcast. He was a gay man who became a movie star as a character actor, but as a movie star, not being open about his sexuality, but at times playing characters that felt like they had a little bit of a queerness to them. He and Libby are on stage, and he’s playing her pimp, and she’s playing a sex worker, and they’re both wearing black makeup. It’s not shoe black the way that we’ve seen blackface in movies. It’s designed to be more natural, for lack of a better word. It’s designed to look like a Black person, and this was considered normal for a drama of sexual violence on stage at that time. Libby was already considered to be racially ambiguous. She was not perceived as somebody who was white. It was not considered a huge departure for her to do this kind of number, and in fact, it really created her stardom. I found that to be very fascinating, particularly since, as far as I can tell from the many, many materials I read about this, there was no conversation about whether or not this was racist or offensive to Black people, and there was a conversation in the culture about blackface for sure by this time. But in this case, she was welcomed to sing at the Apollo Theater. She was to some extent embraced by a certain Black establishment.
How do you reconcile things like that with a modern perspective on things that were happening?
That’s a lot of the reasons why I wanted to tell this story. When I first read about Libby Holman in Jon Bradshaw’s book about her, “Dreams that Money Can Buy,” I did this very close reading of that book where I’m constantly underlining passages and writing in the margins, like questions and commentary. It felt like there was so much about the racial stuff and the sexual stuff that was not interrogated or was framed in a way that was insulting and belittling. That was the stuff that I was excited to dig into, this thornier stuff. I don’t think of Libby as being a role model or somebody where we can embrace every aspect of her without criticism. What was exciting to me was that she was an anti-heroine and somebody who made choices that today we would not accept at all. But she was also somebody who experienced tragedy, and I can criticize her and also have empathy for her.
There’s a conversation about her potentially making racist remarks. You talk about how there are some reports that say that she said these things, but that also could have just been the person who was writing about it. How do you sort through those kinds of things where there might be conflicting reports?
I’ve come across this in many of the seasons I’ve done. I am a big believer of the fact that there is not one singular truth in most cases about anything, and the best I can do is be a transparent reader, and just talk about different accounts of things, and then make a conclusion that I’m being transparent about is my personal conclusion, as what is the most likely thing to be true. I just try to be really clear that I don’t know exactly what happened or which account to believe. It’s about making a collage of all these different accounts and then telling you what my interpretation is.
You make comparisons to modern culture, such as white rappers or TikTok trends. How do you approach that?
It has been a way for me to understand it. We sometimes have this sense of history as being a musty old painting on the wall. But there’s always been young people. There’s always been a kind of counterculture. Some of the things that we’re experiencing right now in terms of new technology, for instance, and the way it’s upending culture, this was happening in the early 20th century in terms of airplanes. That just became the kind of thing that a young man with a lot of money would want to invest in, the way a young man today would want to invest in crypto. When I see parallels that help me understand history better, I want to share them.
What can we expect from your tour this fall?
I’m super excited. We’ve announced most of the dates, but there’s gonna be some that are to be announced because of when the venues can put tickets on sale. I’m basically going to be on the road from October 3 until November 17, doing events at different repertory cinemas and historic theaters, showing movies from the podcast season. We’re showing everything from pre-code Tallulah Bankhead movies to some of these movies about Libby Holman to a wide variety of Montgomery Clift films. I was just excited to share the movies with people. I spent the past year studying film preservation at the George Eastman Museum, and while I was there, I gravitated towards exhibition, but also came to understand some of the reasons why certain films do not get distribution in terms of restorations of old films or films that have fallen out of availability because of rights issues. What I am really hoping to do with this tour, besides connect with the fans of the podcast and show them these movies, is to get a sense of how these different programmers in these different places approach showing classical Hollywood movies to their audiences, what their audiences want to see, and is there a way to open up space for some of these restorations that rarely get seen outside of archival situations?
You’ve talked before about these old films and how difficult it can be to get access to them and see them anymore.
There’s several films that I talk about in this season where there is no commercial availability for them. The only way you can watch them, the way I watch them to talk about them, is by watching basically a bootleg that you find on a free video streaming site. I don’t think that for a movie released by a major studio in the 20th century, that we should have to be criminals to watch them. Unfortunately, because I went to film preservation school and specifically studied this issue, I now have a more complex understanding of many of the reasons why a film like “Faithless,” for instance, is very difficult to watch. I’m still trying to figure out what I can do to help change the situation.
