Libby Holman

Her deep research, erudition, and precise elocution have made this podcast essential storytelling for many cinephiles.

And her new season introduces or reacquaints fans with a lost artist of Hollywood's golden age, the racially ambiguous singer, actress, and socialite of the 30s and on, Libby Holman, once accused of murdering her Camel Cigarettes mogul husband, and who also enjoyed a bisexual romantic life with many familiar phrases.

Karina, welcome to the podcast.

Hi,

But they always want you to give some kind of personal spin on the copy.

So as far as this season goes, I've heard the first couple of episodes.

Tell us a little bit about Libby Holman.

How did you discover her and what made you think that she would be the ideal subject for a whole season? She has one official film credit, but this very torrid, lurid personal life and milieu that very much feels like the stuff of movies.

Until death do them part.

Before 1932, Libby Holman had been a national singing star with hit songs on the radio, but only in New York was she a true celebrity with an image to match.

After the gunshot death of Smith Reynolds became public knowledge and international news, Libby acquired a new image, one matching the cinema of the era.

Pre-Code movies were full of sexy young things who committed crimes, usually out of desperation or self-preservation.

In two of her films of 1931, My Sin and The Cheat, Libby's close friend Tallulah Bankhead played glamorous young women of questionable morals who shoot a male predator in self-defense.

It was irresistible for the media to craft a version of Libby Holman that matched these sorts of characters familiar from the movies.

The difference was, in the movies, the women who fired the weapon are believed when they tell their truth.

truth.Libby was soon to find out that in that sense, real life was nothing like the movies.

Yeah, I know right now our local theater is that mainly plays you know first run movies is starting to show rep films last week i saw the departed they had a kubrick festival it's like we need more of that and then we need to invite wonderful people like you to come introduce those movies yeah yeah yeah so as far as uh developing the idea for the bisexuals where did that come about for you

So I started reading about Libby Holman in 2020.

She was kind of a pandemic discovery for me.

And I, you know, I was reading sort of the existing biographies about her and I just had more questions than I felt like the books answered because of the way they framed her story.

And then in the spring of 2025, I knew that I was going to take a year off to go to the George Eastman Museum to study film preservation.

And I needed a story that I could write entirely basically from between May and August.

And so I realized that I could kind of tell Libby Holman's story later.

in a you know in a shorter number of episodes than some of my seasons are um it's still eight episodes which is i think substantial and but um you know a

Yeah, I think that this has to be, for a magazine that wasn't around for a super long time, teen people, this has to be one of the most recognizable covers.

And it's the 25 hottest stars under 25.

Forbes be damned.

I love a listicle.

Yeah.

I would say at this time there were such like defining borders on like tween content and teen content.

And there were so many stars in every category.

This was the first time we ever had a farm of teen celebrities.

Until death do them part.

In our last episode, we talked about the death of Jean Eagles and the urban legend that Libby and Jean were in the midst of an affair when the latter died.

These rumors may have bubbled up because of the company each of them kept.

circa 1929, most of Libby's closest compatriots were queer, or at least very queer-friendly.

The straightest man in her friend group was Franchot Tone, who was about three years away from making his film debut and was frequently accompanied by his hard-drinking mother, Gertrude, a feminist activist who some reports suggest had a romance in the 1920s.

with journalist Dorothy Thompson, later the wife of Sinclair Lewis.

The other man in Libby's social set was the decidedly not straight Clifton Webb, her initial connection to Eagles, who, like Tone, was also usually chaperoned by his mother.

Otherwise, Libby's trusted circle consisted of women who might be married to men, but who arranged their lives to sideline their husbands so that they could spend more time with like-minded women.

Yeah, it's called The Bisexuals.

It's primarily about two people, Montgomery Clift and Libby Holman, who was a torch singer who came...

She was a Jewish girl from Cincinnati who came to New York City in the late 1920s, became famous as a Broadway singer, and... was part of sort of like queer group of people who were sort of partying at that time.

And then she shocked everybody by marrying the straight male heir to the Campbell tobacco fortune, moving to his plantation with him in North Carolina.

And then it it traces her arc until she connects with Montgomery Clift, who becomes her sort of soulmate and occasional lover.

And then it tells both of their stories intertwined and also talks about some friends of theirs like Tallulah Bankhead and the movies they made.

And then there were three or four movies made about Libby Holman, even though she herself never starred in a film.

So I talk about those as well.

[Instrumental music] This season is built around the story of a woman who I have been fascinated with for a while.

Libby Holman has been credited with everything from popularizing strapless dresses to becoming the first New York actress to paint her nails red.

A singer who became a sensation on Broadway in the late 1920s and '30s, her more significant claim to fame comes from popularizing a number of jazz and blues songs that would later become standards of the Great American Songbook.

A Jewish girl from Cincinnati, Libby's deep voice and olive complexion led many to believe that she was secretly Black and was passing as white.

We will talk about Libby's ethically thorny relationship to Black music, as well as the prejudice she faced as a Yankee Jewess in the South, and how this led to a witch hunt

huntWhich permanently scarred Libby's reputation and career.

Then, we will skip to the 1940s, and a very different cultural climate than the freewheeling 1920s when Libby Holman thrived.

During an effort to reinvent herself as a serious stage actress, Holman met and became involved with one of the greatest actors of that era, Montgomery Clift.