You Must Remember This Introduces … ‘The Bisexuals’

Karina Longworth has spent the past 12 years of her podcast, You Must Remember This, diving into film history. So why would she center an entire season of the show on a little-remembered singer who rarely appeared on film? Because she was a fabulous, difficult bisexual with two dead husbands, that’s why. The beloved podcast’s upcoming season, “The Bisexuals,” will tell the story of Libby Holman and her cool queer friend group. Holman, a Jewish singer who became famous in the 1920s for her versions of blues songs, was friends with names who are still well known today, including Tallulah Bankhead and Josephine Baker. Until she wasn’t. “Libby shocked her friends in the early 1930s by marrying the male heir to the Camel cigarettes fortune,” Longworth explains. “Eight months later, he ended up dead of a gunshot wound, and she was indicted for his murder.” Now that’s a start to a story.

Longworth first came up with the idea of telling Holman’s story in 2020, when she read Jon Bradshaw’s biography of her, titled Dreams That Money Can Buy. While it was substantive, the book, which came out in 1985, didn’t answer questions about Holman’s cultural appropriation as a white women singing music made famous by Black artists and included outdated views of sexuality. Longworth pitched her own book on Holman, but there were no bites. “The book-publishing industry seems to feel that if they haven’t heard of somebody’s story, it’s not worth telling,” she says. “Whereas the way I feel is that if you haven’t heard of a fascinating person’s life story, that’s the reason to tell it. Luckily, I can do whatever I want on the podcast.”

The first part of the story will cover Holman in the 1920s and ’30s, and then it will give way to her “on-again, off-again romantic relationship” with the closeted actor Montgomery Clift. Clift, who died 60 years ago today, was one of the first actors to use method acting onscreen and is remembered for movies including Judgment at Nuremberg, A Place in the Sun, and From Here to Eternity. He is also known for his ambiguous sexuality — his friend and co-star Elizabeth Taylor famously said at the 2000 GLAAD Media Awards that he was gay. “A lot of people have interpreted his story as being somebody who was very painfully closeted,” Longworth says now. “But he did have this really intimate, long-standing relationship with Libby Holman, and it was sexual.”

When the first episode drops on September 15, listeners can expect Longworth to take them on a journey that will include Holman’s many faults. “I think of her as an anti-heroine,” Longworth says. “I cannot endorse 100 percent of her activities, quotes, or attitudes, but her story is wild. She does things that will make people angry, but she’s worth being the center of the story.” Below, you can find a teaser, edited by Aaron Hillis, for the upcoming series with audio edited by Evan Viola. It isn’t Pride Month anymore, but messy bisexuals can be celebrated year-round.