Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood Audiobook (Free)

In this riveting popular history, the creator of You Must Keep in mind This probes the inner workings of Hollywood’s glamorous golden age through the tales of some of the dozens of actresses pursued by Howard Hughes, to reveal how the millionaire mogul’s obsessions with sex, power and promotion trapped, abused, or benefitted women who dreamt of screen stardom.

Lately, the media has reported on scores of entertainment figures who used their power and money in Hollywood to sexually harass about Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood and coerce a few of the most talented ladies in cinema and television. But simply because Karina Longworth reminds us, long before the Harvey Weinsteins there is Howard Hughes-the Tx millionaire, pilot, and filmmaker whose popularity being a cinematic provocateur was matched just by that being a prolific womanizer.

His supposed conquests between his first divorce in the late 1920s and his relationship to celebrity Jean Peters in 1957 included a lot of Hollywood’s most well-known actresses, among them Billie Dove, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner. From marketing bombshells like Jean Harlow and Jane Russell to his contentious battles using the censors, Hughes-perhaps more than any other filmmaker of his era-commoditized man desire as he objectified and sexualized women. Yet there have been also numerous ladies pulled into Hughes’s grasp who never managed to get to the display, sometimes virtually imprisoned by an extremely paranoid and disturbed Hughes, who maintained multitudes of private investigators, security workers, and informers to be sure these actresses wouldn’t normally escape his handbags.

Vivid, perceptive, timely, and ridiculously entertaining, The Seducer is normally a landmark work that examines women, sex, and male power in Hollywood during its fantastic age-a legacy that endures nearly a hundred years later.