YMRT #7: The Many Loves of Howard Hughes, Chapter 1

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

The first episode of a multi-part series on the Hollywood romances of Howard Hughes traces Hughes’ arranged marriage at age 18 to Southern society belle Ella Rice; his affairs with silent star Billie Dove and Jean Harlow, who Hughes helped to establish as a sex symbol whose body was used to evoke both money and military might; and his attempt to invent himself as the most powerful independent producer in town, with his directorial debut, Hell’s Angels. 

Show Notes!

Key research texts this week included Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske; and Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters, by Richard Hack. There were few discrepancies in terms of the way these two books depicted this time period in Hughes’ life, and I take them somewhat more seriously than another book which I mention in the episode, Darwin Porter’s Hell’s Angel: America’s Notorious Bisexual Billionaire (typing this, I’m realizing I got the subtitle slightly wrong in the podcast; sorry!) 

This week, I watched Hell’s Angels for the first time, and was really pleasantly surprised by it. The UCLA restoration currently available on DVD is *gorgeous,” and the dialogue scenes, directed by James Whale, have a kind of vulgar, inelegant honesty to them. 

I wouldn’t consider them direct research materials, but more than nonfiction sources, I picked up the feeling of 1920s Hollywood from a number of novels, including (of course) The Day of the Locust, but also a few lesser-discussed books I’ve read over the past year: The Big Money by John Dos Passos, Hollywood by Gore Vidal, and The Western Coast by Paula Fox. I highly recommend them all. 

As previously noted, this is intended to be the first episode in a multi-part series about Hughes’ Hollywood relationships. Right now the plan is to alternate episodes on Hughes with installments of another series, which I plan to launch next week (however, I’m traveling tomorrow-Monday, so it’s possible my production schedule will get messed up.)

As always, if you like it, put a ring on it by subscribing to and/or rating and reviewing the podcast at iTunes, and tell your friends to follow us on Twitter @rememberthispod. 

Music

“Ill Build a Stairway to Paradise” performed by Whiteman and his orchestra

“Safe in Heal,” performed by Sonic Youth

“Paris,” performed by Dirty Beaches

“S’Wonderful,” performed by Eddie Condon and his orchestra

“Summertime,” performed by the Sidney Bechtet Quintet

“Shadow of a Doubt,” performed by Sonic Youth

“Frelon Brun,” performed by Miles Davis 

“Life Round Here,” by James Blake

“Keechie,” by No Age

“The Man I Love,” performed by Le Quintette Du Hot Club De France

"Skeletons," by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

"Dramamine," by Sebadoh

"Fogbow," by Joan of Arc

"A Foggy Day," performed by Cyril Grantham with Geraldo and his orchestra

"Cemetary Party," by Air

"Drippy Eye," performed by Black Moth Super Rainbow

"Zoetrope," by Boards of Canada

"Alice," by Sunn O)))

"Big Louise," by Scott Walker

"With Plenty of Money and You," performed by Tony Bennett

"I Got Plenty of Nuthin’," performed by Avon Long

"Baby Vampire Made Me," by Helium

"Girl/Boy Song," by Aphex Twin

"This Hollywood Life," by The London Suede 

YMRT #6: Isabella Rossellini in the 1990s

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Today we celebrate the 62nd birthday of actress/model/filmmaker Isabella Rossellini. She was born into Hollywood scandal: her mother, Ingrid Bergman, was denounced on the floor of Congress for her adulterous relationship with Isabella’s father, Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini. Isabella herself would go on to have romances with Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, finding her signature film role in the latter’s Blue Velvet. But her parentage and romantic relationships are only part of the story. She made her own fortune modeling, a career which the former scoliosis patient started at the relatively advanced age of 28, ultimately serving an unprecedented 14 years as the face of Lancome. In the 1990s — a decade which began with her being dumped by David Lynch and ended with her launching a company which she referred to as “a secret feminist plot” against the beauty industry — Isabella Rossellini took her legacy into her own hands. 

Show notes!

This podcast was inspired by an image I stumbled across, from the brochure produced in 1999 to publicize Manifesto, Rossellini’s short-lived “feminist” cosmetics line. Also, I’m always happy for a chance to talk about Death Becomes Her, about which I wrote an entire chapter in my book about Meryl Streep. 

I wanted to try to tell at least parts of Isabella’s story like a short story, which, practically, meant that instead of doing a lot of research from various angles, as I’ve done in previous episodes, I wanted to try to get inside my main subject’s point of view. So, one of my key sources was Isabella’s own 1997 memoir, Some of Me. This seems to be out of print, but if you’re interested in her I highly recommend it. It’s a little nutty, charmingly so, and also beautifully illustrated (it has made me obsessed with a certain 90s-vintage Dolce and Gabbana bra.). Isabella’s 1997 Fresh Air interview, which I’ve excerpted liberally within in the podcast, synthesizes a lot of the key themes of the memoir, as do many of her extended interviews, including this live chat with John Anderson, from which I excerpted a bit in which she talks about becoming a model at age 28.

It didn’t play a huge role into my research for this, but Ingrid Bergman’s autobiography is also very good. 

Of the many magazine articles I read this week, these were the most useful:

“Isabella Makes a Fresh Start” Vanity Fair, January 1991

Isabella Rossellini, INDEX, 1999

“Daddy’s Girl” The Guardian, April 30, 2006

“Have Makeup Will Travel” SF Gate, January 11, 2000

“Isabella Rossellini Makes a Beauty Statement With Manifesto Line” LA Times, January 7, 2000

“Isabella Rossellini’s Manifesto: anatomy of a commercial fragrance failure” Examiner, March 15, 2010

Music:

"Blue Velvet," performed by Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet theme, by Angelo Badalamenti

“Single,” by Everything But the Girl

“Weightless,” by Washed Out

“Jump Into the Fire,” by Harry Nilsson

“But The World Goes Round,” performed by Liza Minnelli in New York, New York

Theme from Cousins, by Angelo Badalamenti

“Middle of the Road,” by The Pretenders

“Theme d’Amour” from Alphaville, by Paul Maraki

“Jonathan,” by Fiona Apple

“Spread Your Wings,” by Spiritualized

“Apartment Song,” by Possum Dixon

"Justify My Love," by Madonna

Death Becomes Her theme, by Alan Silvestri

"Moon River," performed by Morrissey

"Blue Lines," by Massive Attack

"Les Yper Sound," by Stereolab

"Flower," by Sonic Youth

"Naked Eye," by Luscious Jackson

"A Party Able Model Of," by Joan of Arc

"Blue Velvet," performed by Lana Del Rey

We Are the (26th) Best!

Behold - You Must Remember This has cracked iTunes’ Top 50 TV & Film Podcasts! 

Also, check out this interview with Karina, in which she talks about how the podcast comes together, why it exists, etc! 

YMRT #5: The Lives, Deaths and Afterlives of Judy Garland

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Today we’re commemorating the life and career of Judy Garland, who died 45 years ago this month. Signed to a studio contract at the age of 13, encouraged to become a pill addict as a teenage MGM contract player, crowned a superstar by The Wizard of Oz at age 17 and married for the first time at 18, Garland lived more than her share of life before reaching legal maturity. But today, we’re going to pay particular attention to the last two decades of her life, the post-MGM years, during which Garland battled through one comeback after another, ultimately establishing intimate relationships with her fans on TV and in live performances that would cement Garland’s legacy as one of the most powerful performers of all time. These triumphs were, at the time, usually overlooked by an essentially paternalistic mainstream media which, much to Garland’s dismay, delighted in the negative and the tragic. We’ll explore Garland’s struggles to assert herself within an industry that nearly killed her, and against a media which seemed to be out to get her. We’ll also take a look at Garland’s rise as a gay icon, and the connection between Garland’s death and the Stonewall Riots, which took place the night of Garland’s funeral. 

This episode is a little bit different than previous episodes. For one thing, it includes material from interviews with two different experts: Anne Helen Petersen, who writes about Garland in her new book, Scandals of Classic Hollywood, and Peter Mac, a Judy Garland tribute artist whose act features detail-oriented recreations of Garland’s live performances, and who is incredibly well-versed in Garland’s life, work and legacy. 

Also, at two different points, I have Friend of You Must Remember ThisNoah Segan reading excerpts from William Goldman’s The Season. The first of these excerpts is an example of the way that Garland often functions as a kind of folk hero, the star of cocktail party anecdotes that become something like tale tales. The other excerpt is more problematic — it’s basically a document of vicious homophobia, although it wouldn’t have been called or recognized as that at the time — and I debated whether or not to include it. Ultimately I decided that I wanted to have it in there because it helped me to remember how significant Stonewall really was, by showing how much it needed to happen, and how much has changed (although of course there’s still a long way to go). This kind of completely casual reporting on “fluttering fags” shows us how different the world that Judy Garland lived in is from the world that began to come into being after her death. There’s some debate as to whether or not there’s a literal, causal relationship between Garland’s death and Stonewall, but there’s no question that the dividing line between the Before Stonewall and After Stonewall eras coincides exactly with the dividing line between Judy Garland’s existence in the world as a living, breathing human being and her post-death existence as a symbol, angel, martyr, whatever. As I’ve tried to show here, I think it’s the emotional connection, the connection in the public imagination, that really matters. 

I’ve listed my sources as usual below, but I should also note that my fascination with Judy Garland is longstanding, and though I didn’t pick them up this week, there are a few texts that I’ve basically internalized over the years. One is Ronald Haver’s book on the production, destruction and restoration/reconstruction of A Star is Born. A Star is Born is my favorite film, and Haver’s book is definitely amongst the most impactful books about filmmaking, celebrity, the culture of Hollywood and Hollywood’s ability to create culture, that I’ve ever read. Then there’s an article by Adrienne L. McLean which ran in Film Quarterly in the Spring of 2002, called “Feeling and the Filmed Body: Judy Garland and the Kinesics of Suffering.” This article was the final straw that made me decide to apply to graduate schools, and it’s still a gold standard for me in terms of relating what’s happening in a person’s life off-screen to what they make visible on-screen.

Special thanks to Anne Helen Petersen and Peter Mac for making the time to talk to me. Anne’s book is available for pre-order and will be released in September. If you have an opportunity to see Peter’s show, I highly recommend it. I first saw him perform at The Other Side, a piano bar in the LA neighborhood of Silverlake, which opened in the late 1960s and, sadly, closed in 2012. In that small room, where we would usually sit and drink around the piano, Peter’s note-perfect renditions of songs like “The Man That Got Away” were known to make me cry. He’s headlining a fundraiser for the L. Frank Baum Foundation in Syracuse, New York in August.

————————————

Music in this episode:

“After You’ve Gone” performed by Judy Garland

“Moonlight Saving Me” played by Blossom Dearie

“The Boy Next Door,” played by Blossom Dearie

“I Feel a Song Coming On,” performed by Judy Garland

“Over the Rainbow” performed by Judy Garland

“Come Rain of Come Shine,” performed by Judy Garland

“Preludes for Piano #2,” performed by George Gershwin

“The Man That Got Away,” performed by Judy Garland, from A Star is Born

“The Man That Got Away” instrumental

“Medley: This is The Time of the Evening/While We’re Young,” performed by Judy Garland

“Stormy Weather,” performed by Judy Garland live at Carnegie Hall

“Olv 26” performed by Stereolab

“My Orphaned Son,” performed by DNTEL

“Who Cares,” performed by Judy Garland live at Carnegie Hall

————————————-

Text sources:

Scandals of Classic Hollywood, by Anne Helen Petersen

The Season, by William Goldman

Get Happy, by Gerald Clarke

A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli, by Mark Griffin

"Judy Garland and Gay Men," by Richard Dyer. From Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society; also available here.

Jeff Weinstein on Judy Garland and Stonewall (Special thanks to Jeff for making the Obit article available to me when it wasn’t online)

"Did Judy Garland start a riot?" by Andrew Alexander, Creative Loafing

"Does Judy Garland still matter?" by Jesse Green, New York Magazine

The (Suddenly, This) Summer Experiment!

I started this podcast in April, and have managed to produce four episodes in two months. I didn’t know what I was doing at first, technically (as I’ve noted elsewhere, I taught myself how to use GarageBand by editing the first episode), but also in a larger sense. I wasn’t sure what this even was, but I knew I needed to do something creative, and that I had to start making it in order to figure it out.

I think I’m still figuring it out (technically, and otherwise), but the response has been encouraging (thanks, you guys!), at least encouraging enough that I’ve decided to try something. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working a job which more or less ends today. I have nothing planned, work-wise, starting next week (although I do have a book coming out in September and I figure I’ll probably need to devote some time to asking people to pay attention to it around then). So, for the next two months, I’ve decided to do nothing except for work on this podcast. My goal is to try to crank out one episode per week, beginning next week (although realistically, the episode I’ve just started to work on might not be ready for publishing until Monday June 9) and continuing through the end of July. I want to get faster, in terms of how long it takes to make these, and I want the storytelling to be a little tighter. Most of all, I want to see if it makes sense to treat this like a full-time job.

Wish me luck! And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the podcast, check out our website, and/or rate and review us on iTunes.

You Must Remember This Episode 4: (The Printing of) The Legend of Frances Farmer

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

During the last year of his life, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain was obsessed with Frances Farmer, an actress from his hometown of Seattle who died in 1970. Farmer’s beauty and unique screen presence made her a star, but her no-bullshit ballsiness made her a pariah — and a target of the hostile media — in 1930s Hollywood. Farmer’s career went down the tubes in the 1940s when a couple of incidents of inconvenient drunkenness led to her being committed to an insane asylum by her own mother, and given a lobotomy.

Or, so Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, frequently told journalists while Cobain was promoting In Utero, the Nirvana album that includes Cobain’s tribute to the actress, “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” (Love also claimed to have been married to Cobain whilst wearing a dress once owned by Farmer, and the couple named their daughter Frances, although that was likely at least co-inspired by Frances McKee of The Vaselines). Unbeknownst to them, the notion that Farmer was lobotomized was a fiction invented by a biographer with ties to Scientology, a lie which was then dramatized in an Oscar-nominated, Mel Brooks-produced movie which helped to make Jessica Lange a star. By the time Kurt and Courtney were championing Farmer as a proto-punk martyr in the 1990s, the legend of Frances Farmer as patron saint of…well, women like Courtney Love, had been printed so many times that it had swallowed up the truth of Farmer’s experience, and loomed much larger than her actual body of movie work. Today we’ll explore how, and why, that legend got printed, and try to explain how Frances Farmer became the patron saint of beautiful, bright, potentially batshit women whose self-destruction can be traced back to their signing of a studio contract.

We have special guest stars! Nora Zehetner (Brick, Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men and most recently IFC’s Maron) played Frances Farmer; Brian Clark played Kurt Cobain, and Noah Segan IS Rex Reed.

And now for a few Show Notes:

Farmerology is a tricky field, because each new contributor to the canon seems to make a point of debunking those who came before them…and also quotes those same predecessors as though their works are unchallenged fact. So while the goal of this episode was to explain how and why Frances Farmer’s legend got printed, I’ve also used aspects of that legend (such as clips from the movie Frances) as “evidence.” When in Rome?

The main texts examined in this episode are Shadowland by William Arnold, and Will There Really Be A Morning? by “Frances Farmer.” As explained in the episode, these texts cannot be taken at face value, and the following resources were invaluable in providing additional information and context: 

“Shedding Light on Shadowland” by Jeffrey Kauffman

“Burn All The Liars” by Matt Evans, The Morning News

Frances Farmer: The Life and Films of a Troubled Star by Peter Shelleyhttp://www.amazon.com/Frances-Farmer-Life-Films-Troubled/dp/0786447451

Also cited within and/or relevant:

Hollywood Babylon, by Kenneth Anger

“Dark Side of the Womb, Part 2” Melody Maker, August 28, 1993

“Strange Love” Vanity Fair, September 1993

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright

In the podcast, I’ve included a quote in which Kurt Cobain admits that he is worried that what happened to Frances Farmer could happen to his wife, Courtney Love. I could do a second episode just on that, but if you’re at all interested in what’s happened to Courtney after Kurt, read Nancy Jo Sales’ excellent November 2011 Vanity Fair profile, “Courtney Love in a Cold Climate.”

Music used in this episode

“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” by Nirvana

“Knife Fights Every Night” by Joan of Arc

“Night City”  by Dirty Beaches 

“Paracosm” by Washed Out

“Lenny Valentino #3” by The Auteurs, remixed by Mu-ziq

“Prelude” by Gene Harris

“ Oh Brother #3” by Joan of Arc

“Pennyroyal Tea [Demo]” by Nirvana

“Rub Til it Bleeds” by PJ Harvey 

“Big Day Coming” by Yo La Tengo

“Asking For It” by Hole

You Must Remember This on AV Club's Podmass!

One of the reasons why I started this podcast is because, as a podcast consumer, I feel like there’s never enough to listen to. One of the resources I use regularly to find new fodder for my addiction is the AV Club's weekly feature Podmass, which evaluates each week’s “best podcasts,” usually breaking down the new output from the big, mostly comedy oriented podcasts (Marc Maron’s WTF, Julie Klausner's How Was Your Week), and also citing a new (or new to them) podcast as being worthy of checking out. This week, to my pleasant surprise, they gave the “New” slot to You Must Remember This!

They even gave us blurbs! We are “well worth a listen for anyone with even a passing interest in cultural history!” And, “every episode is packed with fascinating trivia!” And they praise my “deep pathos for what it means to be a person, not just a star, in Hollywood.” !!!

What’s funny, is that last week, after I published the Val Lewton episode, I thought, “Huh. Is it time to email Podmass and ask them to pay attention to me?” And I decided that no, it was not time, because I still consider the podcast to be in “beta.” I think it gets better with each and every episode, but right now technically it’s maybe 80 percent of what I want it to be, and in terms of storytelling, only a little bit further along. So I decided that I would wait a few weeks, maybe until after the fifth episode, at which point I might even have a real logo. Oh well! I’m happy for the incentive to get better faster. 

And with that, back to work on episode 4…

You Must Remember This #3: Happy 110th Birthday, Val Lewton!

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

A Very Special Halloween Episode! The writer-producer Val Lewton produced and ghost-wrote 11 films in just three years as head of the horror unit at RKO, many of which — Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Curse of the Cat People,The Body Snatcher — were huge hits, helping to keep the troubled studio afloat in the early 1940s, and becoming influential genre film classics. Lewton died super young, but he crammed an enormous amount of life into his 46 years. Before establishing his unique style of horror at RKO, he was a publicist and a terrible journalist; he published at least a dozen books (including at least two porno novels, one of which he was very proud of), and through his career-making apprenticeship with David O. Selznick, collaborated with Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and countless other classical Hollywood luminaries. Today — which would have been Lewton’s 110th birthday, if not for his untimely death in 1951 — we take a look back at his life and career, break down his groundbreaking aesthetic, and ask and answer an incredibly reductive question: did Hollywood kill Val Lewton?

SHOW NOTES!

Bibliography:

Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career, by Edmund G. Bansak

Icons of Grief, by Alexander Nemerov

Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror, by Joel E. Siegel

Music:

Excerpts from the scores of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Bedlam, The Body Snatcher and The Seventh Victim, performed by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra

The Bride of Frankenstein theme, performed by the Cincinatti Pops Orchestra

"Cat People (Putting out fire)" by David Bowie

Film clips:

Cat People

I Walked With a Zombie

Bedlam

The Seventh Victim

You Must Remember This Episode 2: Frank Sinatra in Outer Space

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Welcome to the second episode of You Must Remember This, the podcast devoted to exploring the secret and or/forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century. Today, we look back to 1979, when — while the music world was full of punk and post-disco coke rock, and the movie world was making the transition from the “New Hollywood” of the ’70s into the blockbuster age — Frank Sinatra recorded Trilogy: Past, Present and Future, a triple album with one disc each devoted to big band standards (“The Past”); covers from “the rock era” including Billy Joel and Beatles songs and also “Theme from New York, New York” (“The Present”); and, most amazingly, a 40 minute song cycle about life, love, death and visiting outer space (“The Future”). We’ll take a look at how and why “The Future” was made, and theorize as to why it’s fallen into the dustbin of pop cultural history.  

Show Notes

Songs

Tracks from Trilogy: Past, Present and Future, performed by Frank Sinatra:

“Let’s Face The Music and Dance”

“Theme from New York New York”

“Something”

“What Time Does the Next Miracle Leave?”

“World War None!”

“The Future” 

“The Future (Continued)”

“The Future (Conclusion)”

“Before the Music Ends”

“Can’t Get Started” performed by Frank Sinatra, from the album No One Cares

“Come Rain or Come Shine” performed by Frank Sinatra, from the album Sinatra and Strings

“New York is My Home” composed by Gordon Jenkins, from Manhattan Tower

“This is It” by Kenny Loggins, from The Essential Kenny Loggins

Other audio

“Jonathan Schwartz’s Good Time” from NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1831872

Bibliography

Sinatra! The Song is You by Will Friedwald 

Why Sinatra Matters by Pete Hamill 

Goodbye: In Search of Gordon Jenkins by Bruce Jenkins 

“Frank Sinatra’s Heat-Seeking Missive Finds Two New Targets: a Columnist and a Deejay” by Cherie Burns, PEOPLE Magazine, May 5, 1980 

"Sinatra: The Legend Lives" by Pete Hamill, New York magazine, April 198