The Podcast Hollywood's Queen of Golden Age

Chasing silver-screen ghosts and Los Angeles' forgotten secrets with Karina Longworth, the brilliant mind behind You Must Remember This BY ALEX MORRIS

KARINA LONGWORTH'S K house is, quite possibly, haunted. This is not necessarily something she has experienced herself, she tells me of her pale-pink 1926 Mediterranean, where Longworth could be found one July morning on the frond-shadowed patio. But it is something she has on authority from a friend who drunkenly stumbled in from the pool one night and heard, in the empty home, a dinner party going on in the dining room upstairs. Since then, the hauntedness or unhauntedness of Longworth's abode has become a matter of some debate. "My friend thinks my house is haunted," she says wryly.

"I think he drinks too much."

Either way, there is certainly no one better at reviving Hollywood's ghosts than Longworth. A film critic and historian, she is best known for the podcast You Must Remember This, which she researches, writes and records in a tiny, foam-lined closet off the downstairs office of her husband, director Rian Johnson. In the eight years since she launched with an episode on Kim Novak and a promise to expose "the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century", Longworth has proved herself to be a definitive source on its lore, from the abuses of MGM's studio system to the politics of the Rat Pack. The season on Charles Manson has been cited as one of the best cultural examinations of his Family out there, even though "I didn't come to it from the perspective of true crime," she says. "I came to it through Doris Day."