In The Light Of Hearing About A Recent Book Expose About Old Hollywood-Karina Longworth’s “Sex, Lies, And Stardom: Exploitation In Howard Hughes’ Hollywood”-Confessions Of A Junkie Film Reviewer

Link to the Terry Gross NPR Fresh Air interview with author Carina Longworth:

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/13/667391184/sex-lies-and-stardom-exploitation-in-howard-hughes-hollywood

By Sam Lowell

The #MeToo movement has opened many cans of worms although the revelations in the Fresh Air NPR interview by Terry Gross with Carina Longworth about her new book Sex, Lies, And Stardom: Exploitation In Howard Hughes’ Hollywood predate those revelations. Nevertheless, and the author states so herself, without  #MeToo this might just be another interesting book about the mores of Hollywood, old Hollywood her specialty and that would be that. The revelations about Hughes’ sexual appetites were well known to me back in the day, well known back then although I could never get close enough to anybody who had any real details to put those ideas into print.    

Partially in those days when I first worked for American Film Gazette as a stringer and then with my own by-line we did not print anything, or everything, fit to print especially without back-up verification. And it wasn’t solely because I, we would have been sued for some kind of defamation by individual actors or the studios, studio bosses where most of the hush-hush got its start or because we had a super fidelity to the truth and nothing but the truth. Far from it. I was more worried in those pre-historic Neanderthal days about being shut-out of the interviewing process by the studios, not invited to galas and special events where I could mix with people who might become sources and that kind of thing. Not good, not good at all.

Here is where reality hit the road. This sex for career advancement, even to just get in the door as the Hughes case points out was widespread, pervasive, on-going well before the revelations of the past few years. It was the way things operated and young women, and men, remember Hollywood was also a hotbed of closet homosexuality top to bottom, accepted that situation as the overhead cost of getting ahead. I will always remember my first vivid example. I was in the room back in the 1970s when Laura Lane, that gap-tooth beauty, was touting her memoirs and made no bones about the fact that she had slept her way to the top. She became sort of persona non grata after that breath of fresh air because that was breaking the rules. Big time.

To finish up this sordid story of my own conduct I knew plenty, people told me plenty and if I had decided that a good expose would have helped out then that would be what was what. I didn’t, didn’t even come close to thinking about such a thought. Jesus what those poor, benighted young women and men must have had to put up with. #MeToo thanks for the spring cleaning-thanks a lot.