Even in a culture obsessed with the future, Karina Longworth’s Old Hollywood podcast [You Must Remember This] (http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/) has managed to gain a dedicated following—one that breathlessly awaits what decades-old stories Longworth will offer up next. “I titled the show as I did, because I was thinking about our collective memory,” Longworth says. “As a culture, we can remember certain things about somebody like Marilyn Monroe, but all the details get lost. I wanted to take these myths and these ideas we have about the past of Hollywood and bring in the extra detail that makes it feel more real.”
You Must Remember This started as a passion project, a way for Longworth to escape her thankless teaching job. Three years after her inaugural episode about the life of Kim Novak, it’s evolved into her full-time occupation. Longworth benefited from entering the podcast sphere before the medium was as popular as it is now, and began making waves almost instantly. The buzz continued as she made her way through the loves of Howard Hughes, stars’ involvement in World War II, the chilling Charles Manson murders, the life of MGM in its heyday, the 1950s Blacklist era, the complicated life of Joan Crawford, and most recently, her series on dead blondes. The podcast is now on hiatus until June 25, when it will begin a new series that includes actress Jean Seberg.
For Longworth, every episode is special, and whatever she’s currently working on is the show’s most interesting installment. Even so, when Vanity Fair asked her for commentary on some of her most shocking and surprising episodes, here’s what she had to say.
Episode 4: (The Printing of) the Legend of Frances Farmer
Because of the movie Frances and a story told by Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Longworth thought an episode about Frances Farmer would be the straightforward story of an actress who received a lobotomy. But the project took an interesting turn Longworth didn’t see coming. “This was the first episode I did where the story I found was totally different from my expectations, and it became the earliest episode I can point to as an example of what I think the podcast does best: fact-checking Hollywood legends by researching them from all angles,” Longworth says via e-mail. ”If there's one takeaway from the process of doing this show for three years, it's that no single version of any Hollywood story can be trusted out of context—you always have to consider the source, and how it may be slanted due to what agenda.”
Episode 10: Follies of 1938, Chapter 2: Kay Francis, Pretty Poison
Actress Kay Francis was massively popular in the 1930s and known for her glamorous wardrobe, but Longworth discovered deeper aspects of Francis’s life that really moved her. “On the one hand, Francis's story is all too typical: young, self-destructive woman becomes a huge star but can't sustain her fame as fads change and new, younger models are waiting to take her place,” Longworth says. (Francis would eventually lose her job at Warner Bros. to Bette Davis.) “But the unique details of Kay's life (marriages, drinking, bisexuality, abortions, etc.) turn what could be cliché into a full human story, which I found really bittersweet and touching.”
Episode 51: Charles Manson’s Hollywood, Part 8: Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski
“There are really graphic descriptions of murder, but [what] I found more upsetting was reading about the fine details of the relationship between Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate,” Longworth says. “He used the sexual revolution as an excuse to treat her badly. Seeing those patterns prevalent in other people’s relationships, that to me was shocking and made me feel sort of more viscerally sad about these things that are not as violent as murder, obviously, but are still a kind of violence.”
Episode 56: Louis B. Mayer vs. Irving Thalberg
Episode 65: MGM Stories Part 10: David O. Selznick Part One: The Mayers and Gone with the Wind
Episode 66: MGM Stories Part 11: David O. Selznick Part Two: Jennifer Jones and Robert Walker
Episode 70: MGM Stories Part 15: Mayer’s Downfall
These episodes chronicle the lives of powerful studio heads Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and David O. Selznick—and according to Longworth, they were surprisingly fun to research. “It was not my expectation [to] find the [moguls’ lives] to be as dramatic as the [stars’ lives], but especially in the case of Selznick, I found an epic American story encompassing the greatest success in the history of cinema (Gone with the Wind, obviously) and some of the lowest lows.” These episodes feature actor Adam Goldberg as David O. Selznick and writer/producer Craig Mazin as Louis B. Mayer.
Episode 93: Peg Entwistle (Dead Blondes, Part 1)
Many only know Peg Entwistle as the actress who was cut from her only film (1932’s Thirteen Women), then leaped to her death from the “H” in the Hollywood sign. Longworth was once among them. “What I found, thanks mostly to James Zeruk Jr.'s excellent Entwistle biography [Peg Entwistle and the Hollywood Sign Suicide: A Biography], was a much richer story, which cast Entwistle not as a victim of her own failed ambition as much as a victim of the industry's bumbling attempts at censorship,” Longworth says. Entwistle wasn’t cut out of that film because she was a bad actress, it turns out: it was because she played a woman who was in love with another woman.
Episode 97: Carole Landis (Dead Blondes, Part 5)
“[Carole Landis] was somebody I didn’t know very much about going in,” Longworth says. “I read her obituary in Time magazine, and I found it very strange. It was very transparent about the fact that this actress killed herself because Rex Harrison wouldn’t leave his wife for her, and I just couldn’t believe Time would publish that in 1947.” After learning about the actress’s life, though, Longworth discovered there was more to Landis than had been reported. “The work she did was really interesting, and the struggles she had were unique to her. Then, right in the middle of her career, she has this two-year stretch where she’s going on these U.S.O. tours, and her diary from that time is turned into a book and a movie [1944’s Four Jills in a Jeep]. Landis’s life had been flattened down into a single sentence by Time—but her career was actually vibrant and nuanced in a way not enough people remember.
