Karina Longworth’s ‘You Must Remember This’ Returns with a Dishy Deep Dive on Bisexual Black Widow Libby Holman

Karina Longworth‘s must-listen Hollywood podcast “You Must Remember This” has, for the past 12 years, taken audiences under the forgotten and oft-seedier surfaces of Hollywood — with entire seasons devoted to directors like John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock, actresses Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg, production designer and Peter Bogdanovich-whisperer Polly Platt, ’90s erotic thrillers, gossipers Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, and even one entirely about “dead blondes” like Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe.

Longworth’s deep research, erudition, and spectacularly precise elocution have made the now-indie podcast essential storytelling for cinephiles. Her newest season, with eight episodes starting September 15, will introduce or reacquaint fans with a lost artist of Hollywood’s Golden Age: racially ambiguous singer/actress Libby Holman, once accused of murdering her Camel cigarettes mogul husband, and who enjoyed bisexual relationships with many familiar faces.

“The Bisexuals” will chronicle the years that led to and came after her being marked as a “black widow,” with a cast of characters including her on-and-off bisexual lover Montgomery Clift, plus Elizabeth Taylor, Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Billie Holiday, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Nicholas Ray. The new seasons will chart Holman’s rise to stardom, starting as a Broadway sensation in the 1920s, and the “friends and lovers who drifted into Libby’s web wound up dead,” per a synopsis shared Thursday. From the ’30s, and Holman’s murder scandal, the season will skip to the ’40s and ’50s, where the Hollywood closet shuttered again amid a sexual revolution that didn’t have a place for queer stars like Holman and the tragically fated Clift.

As with most seasons of “You Must Remember This,” come for the dishy scoop on addictions and traumas and infidelities, but stay for Longworth’s sharp analysis and richly drawn context that makes you yearn for the past — a toxic Hollywood we can now more comfortably sit with. The only other person in the 21st century who might’ve had as uncanny an ability to look beneath the sordidness and sorrow of red carpets and walks of fame to find truth and even poetry might be David Lynch.

“I think of [Holman] as an anti-heroine,” Longworth told Vulture. “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.”

Watch the teaser for the new season below, which promises a lot of chaos, drugs, martinis, and debauchery.