While fascinating in its past particulars, Seduction is also a very timely book. In recent years the entertainment industry has been rocked by scandal, the #MeToo movement shattering the code of silence around the still-existing 'casting couch' ... The book is a compulsive page-turner, written with a wisecracking style ('[Hughes] had cooked up this cockamamie scheme...') that also manages to be serious and thoughtful ... One look at Longworth's bibliography gives a sense of the scope of her research, as well as her painstaking methodology. She hasn’t just relied on memoirs and official biographies. She has also dug deep into the archives of long-defunct movie magazines, poring through gossip pages, movie scrapbooks and blind items written as the events unfolded in real time ... While Longworth treats Hughes' mental struggles with appropriate sympathy, she never lets you forget the women whose lives were often derailed by their run-ins with him. This is a book about Hollywood and so it is a book about male power run unchecked.
In Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, Karina Longworth creates a candid portrait of the multifaceted millionaire, revealing the depth of his tendencies toward control, secrecy and manipulation of the women he kept close ... Known for her podcast 'You Must Remember This,' Longworth, with Seduction, strengthens her reputation as one of our most knowledgeable researchers of Hollywood history. Her approach is twofold: Our focus is, of course, on Hughes in Hollywood... but we also gain insight into the lives of the actresses he pursued.
This is a book for Hollywood lovers, especially lovers of the golden age when the studio system cranked out movies like products on assembly lines. The moral of the story is that, when the rich and powerful die, they are just as dead as the poor and oppressed. The final exam is how they are remembered for living their lives when they were above-ground. To hear Karina Longworth tell it, Howard Hughes flunked.
Full of insight ... Longworth adopts a conversational tone—this isn’t a treatise on the subject of wealth and power in the first half of the twentieth century as much as it is a story about a man who traded in seduction, mystique, and money. Not a beginning-to-end biography of Hughes, the book is instead a deep dive into a part of his life. Illuminating and memorable.
In her book Seduction Karina Longworth finds her own unique purpose for Hughes’s adventures ... Thus the freshest—and most interesting—parts of Seduction are those where Ms. Longworth refutes the idea that there were no women working in key jobs in early Hollywood ... The author is a dedicated film historian, and in Seduction her basic love for Hollywood and its motley crew of shysters and stars is on full display. She uses Hughes’s entire life—not just his relations with women—as a platform from which to jump off into areas of historical interest ... [The author] is at her best writing about specific movie stars and specific films, such as the bizarro noir delight 'His Kind of Woman' (1951) ... Seduction carefully traces the ups and downs of Hughes’s career over decades that culminated in his personal decline ... Ms. Longworth sheds as much light on Hughes as probably can be shed.
None of [the sexual abuse of Hollywood's 'golden age'] is described more compellingly than in Karina Longworth’s new book, Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood ... This is 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, Texas millionaire, starmaker and film producer ... Written with forceful style and a passionate regard for the forgotten hopefuls who came to California seeking success in a thoroughly sexist era, the book casts a feminist eye on the dark decadence of early Hollywood – from silent-era orgies at the Ambassador Hotel to the impunity with which the founding studio heads manipulated starlets ... Longworth paints a vivid picture of Hughes, his marriages, divorces, feuds and the Hollywood establishment he all but ruled for a while, through hit films such as Hell’s Angels and The Outlaw.
[Longworth's] new book, Seduction, offers an insistent, clear-eyed reminder of the fact that history does not get buried or forgotten by accident, but by design, in order to burnish and elevate the reputations of powerful men, and to cut women down to size ... [Longworth’s story of Hughes] has the pace and intensity of a true crime story, which in a way it is ... By unearthing unpublished material from the archives of Hughes and his contemporaries, and, more often, by astutely reading between the lines of official histories, Longworth shows how valuable and revealing it is to tell the story of a playboy from the perspective of his toys ... Again and again, Longworth’s book shows that power in Hollywood depends on who’s in charge of the story ... Longworth’s essential book reclaims the narrative from a man who obsessively sought to control it and from the many other men who benefited.
Longworth’s book is exceptionally well timed, arriving in the wake of the #MeToo movement during which women in Hollywood have exposed the men using power, wealth and influence to abuse and silence them. As shown here, such stories are as old as the hills ... Thus, far from a showbiz tell-all, Seduction is a vivid, insightful and often disturbing examination of male power and the commodification of women in 20th-century Hollywood ... While the 50 or so pages of references at the end of Seduction attest to Longworth’s scrupulous fact-checking, she isn’t wholly immune to gossip.
Karina Longworth’s Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood is a big, messy, sometimes fascinating, sometimes tedious account of a Hollywood culture of sexual entitlement, embodied by its most flamboyant practitioner — eccentric multimillionaire playboy Howard Hughes ... Seduction is a sprawling, many-faceted story, one teeming with famous names, and despite Longworth’s passion and energy the narrative drags at times.
Karina Longworth has tackled a tough subject but at the right time. Howard Hughes has been written about ad nauseam, but Seduction offers differing perspectives, which is truly refreshing. All sides are explored…Hughes, his women, insiders…an exploration of a troubled man and troubling times. A book that should be read and enjoyed by many.
Deeply researched ... Unfortunately, the narrative is weighed down by digressions into Hughes’s family, associates, planes, and erratic business sense, and by Longworth’s apparent determination to use every single item from her research. This lack of focus dilutes the effectiveness of what could have been a sharp and timely study of film industry misogyny.
