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In November 2018, Karina Longworth released Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’ Hollywood, a biography of both the businessman himself and 10 of the Hollywood women who entered and eventually left his life. The Hughes decades of Hollywood are a vessel for Longworth’s snapshots of movie stars as well-remembered as Katharine Hepburn and as lost-to-history as Billie Dove. The bulk of the book covers Hughes’ bursting onto the movie scene in the ‘20s to his gradual retreat into seclusion in the ‘50s.

The facts of Hughes’ Hollywood career remain stunning, 40-plus years after his death. Seduction investigates the Hughes publicity machine, one that exerted significant control over the press and was successful in positioning Hughes as America’s favorite rich aviator. Unknown to the public was Hughes’ incredible security network, the armada of drivers, associates, and spies he collected in large part to surveil the actresses he was constantly signing to contracts. Seduction tries to get to know a man who was known as both a wildly charismatic figure and an uncomfortable, unknowable personality.  

Just weeks ago, Longworth announced that her podcast, You Must Remember This, will go on hiatus due to the expiration of her current contract to make the show. Since 2014, Longworth has taken on stories big and small, and dedicated seasons to matters as disparate as the Blacklist and echoes of the Manson murders in ‘60s Hollywood . More than 140 episodes in, You Must Remember This has taken on some of the 20th Century’s most enduring and misunderstood cultural legacies.

The podcast’s form follows the abundant research Longworth pours into each season, as evidenced by the bibliographies she puts together for each episode. Synthesizing the conflicting accounts originally told by people who have long-since passed is a large part of a cultural historian’s work; with YMRT’s latest and perhaps final season, “Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon,” Longworth made that work the series’ subject, as she attempted to separate truth from fiction in the famous Kenneth Anger gossip collection.

Each YMRT season has acted as a canvas for the smaller stories Longworth is so skilled at telling. In Charles Manson’s Hollywood, Dennis Wilson, Terry Melcher, Kenneth Anger, and Roman Polanski each get their own one-episode biography. The Dead Blondes series uses this style more explicitly, dedicating an episode to the life and times of 11 actresses. With Seduction, she has translated that style from audio to print, producing expansive, decades-long stories without sacrificing or overindulging in the details of the lives that helped sculpt Hollywood’s “Golden Age.”

When I first encountered Longworth’s You Must Remember This, I was thrilled by the Hollywood story she unearthed on the peripheries of the Manson murders: the industry figures who were drawn in and the legacy Manson’s hoodwinking left in ‘70s moviemaking. The efforts to separate the cultural legacy of a Hollywood touchstone from the day-to-day reality of the people involved is why I’m a fan of the show and now Seduction.

I spoke with Longworth over the phone, sitting at the same crowded desk where I had read Seduction, reconsidering the Golden Age as we know it.

Jake Greenberg: Was there a star you found most unknowable in the book?

Karina Longworth: I mean, Howard Hughes (laughs). But aside from him, Jean Peters [Hughes’ last wife] was never very forthcoming, certainly not in talking about her relationship with Hughes. Every interview with her that I came across read like it was written by a publicist, so trying to figure out who she actually was was pretty difficult. The closest thing I feel like I have to something that I didn’t have reason to doubt the veracity of were the depositions she gave during the long battle to figure out who was Howard Hughes’ legitimate heir and, probably more significantly, which state he would be taxed in. She seems to be speaking the most candidly there. But at the same time she’s looking back on this period that was many years before. She has the benefit of hindsight, but is also still holding grudges. So it was fascinating trying to figure out what she was actually thinking and feeling during the time period that most of the book is about.

JG: Was there a star, and maybe it was Jean Peters, whose work you were most surprised by when you revisited it?

KL: Well it wasn’t really a question of revisiting Jean Peters’ work because, besides for Pickup on South Street, I don’t think I’d ever seen a movie she’d been in. Same with Terry Moore — she was someone who was completely new to me. I don’t know that anyone else was that surprising, but I did have occasion to see a lot of films that I’d never seen before — Billie Dove was another person whose work I didn’t know until I wrote the book. And I watched certain Katharine Hepburn films that I don’t think are appreciated as classics, that maybe should be. I think that Christopher Strong is a lot better than its reputation led me to believe. I think Morning Glory is really, really good. It has this reputation of having a good performance but not being a good movie. But I actually do think it’s a very good movie.

JG: One thing I noticed in the book is you kept interrupting these scenes where you’d be talking about Katharine Hepburn, for example, to flash to Jane Russell as a young girl watching Hepburn in a movie theater. You used the same device to show Marilyn Monroe watching Jean Harlow.

KL: I always think about Hollywood as a continuum, and I think it was especially vivid in the 20th Century. I don’t really know how people who are entering the film industry look at film history now, but I know for me, being born in 1980, growing up watching movies you really felt this sense of there being echoes of things happening in the present day in the past, and so I’m always trying to understand events as being part of a continuum.

JG: What was the relationship you were most interested in at the beginning, when you first started thinking about this as a book?

KL: There wasn’t an individual relationship I was most interested in. I was interested in the scope, and of Hughes’ time in Hollywood basically being the exact same years as we consider to be this classical Hollywood era. Just how fascinating that was, and how he was so prolific as a man involved with women, or rumored to be involved with so many women, at the very least. So you could actually make this portrait of what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood, and what it was like to be written about and thought about as a woman in Hollywood, during the most important time in Hollywood’s history.

JG: Are there movies you’re particularly excited that people might discover in reading Seduction?

KL: Yeah, I think for a lot of readers most of these movies will be new. One thing that’s been cool is in promoting the book, I’ve done a number of events where we’ve done a screening of a movie, and two different venues, one in Toronto and one in Austin, requested to show Wait ‘Till The Sun Shines, Nellie, which is a movie I had never heard of before I started writing this book. I think it’s completely off the radar of even a lot of cinephiles, even people who are fans of the director Henry King. It is available on DVD, it’s just kind of a bad color transfer. So those events were really incredible because Fox has this pristine technicolor print of the film that nobody ever rents. It was just so great to be able to share that with audiences, so that would be the number one. But, of the dozens of movies I talked about in the book, I think there are only a couple that are widely revived or seen today.

JG: There’s a passage from Seduction I keep coming back to: “By the end of Hughes’s life, when he was a codeine addict who spent his days and nights nodding in front of the TV, the former star aviator playboy would suddenly perk up when an actress he had once spent time with appeared on the screen. Hughes would allegedly call over one of his many aides, point, and say, ‘Remember her?’” There’s something extremely haunting about it.

KL: I think he was most successful as a spectator. He did try to be a collector, but ultimately in the end, he lost all of these women. He didn’t have what it took to hold onto them in any meaningful way. And over the course of time, he didn’t really even want to be in the room with anybody.

JG: How aware were you of the vastness and extent of his security operation before researching all this?

KL: Oh I don’t think I knew anything about it, other than what you see in [Scorsese’s] The Aviator of Hughes buying up photographs and stuff like that.

JG: It’s stunning to read about him hiring dozens and dozens of people to do this work, and people presumably not knowing that much about it at the time.

KL: Yeah, I think that there were rumors, but from what I could tell, the women who became involved with him either didn’t believe the rumors, or they just thought, “Oh, well, of course, he’s a rich and powerful man. He needs to protect his interests.” And they didn’t think having all these bodyguards and drivers around could be used against them, which is really interesting.

JG: By the end of your research, did you feel like you had a better understanding of what made him so charismatic?

KL: Until his plane crash in 1946, he was super handsome. And I think that there was something in the culture through this whole time, and really until he kind of disappeared from public view, where women were supposed to try to find men like this. In Hollywood and throughout America there was this idea that if you were a young woman, your American Dream was supposed to be to find a rich husband. And he specifically was held up in the media as the most eligible bachelor in America. Terry Moore talks about this: she’s a teenager, alone in a room with this guy and she thinks he’s a creepy old man, but, you know, you weren’t supposed to say no to Howard Hughes. If he wanted to hang out with you, you were supposed to let him.

JG: Transitioning to the You Must Remember This side of things, a uniting style of Seduction and You Must Remember This is the mini-biography. When you first started making the podcast, were you thinking that you wanted to tell larger stories through a series of biographies, or did that form just take hold because of the stories you wanted to tell?

KL: I don’t think that’s ever been a conscious goal. When I started the podcast, I just was interested in this idea that cultural memory is very short, and that Hollywood history is full of things that people either think that they know – like they think that they know who Marlon Brando was, or Marilyn Monroe, or Judy Garland – but they don’t actually know the fullness of the whole life, or they don’t remember specific incidents accurately. And I was interested in whole careers that have just been lost to the cultural memory. Some of my favorite episodes are about people like Kay Francis, and about zero people remember who Kay Francis was. So the podcast was just about trying to bring to life some of these stories that have either been misrepresented or forgotten.

JG: When did Hollywood Babylon the book come into your life?

KL: I think I was about 20. I was in art school in San Francisco, and I don’t remember how I heard about it. But I remember buying a copy on Amazon, which is funny because now if I need to look up something about Hollywood Babylon and go to the Amazon page, it says, you bought this book on, like, April 5, 2000.

JG: You touched on this earlier, but do you think of the accessibility of film history as a goal of the podcast?

KL: Yeah, I definitely hope that people will watch some of these movies. I think that some people found the podcast because of different true crime stories I’ve told, so that kind of exposes people who may not think they’re interested in Old Hollywood to these Old Hollywood stories. But it doesn’t really matter to me if they don’t subscribe to FilmStruck, R.I.P., or start watching TCM, or start buying some of these really good biographies.

JG: The Manson season [“Charles Manson’s Hollywood”] was my way into the show, and I just kept going from there. I knew the basics of the Manson story, but the Hollywood angle I certainly wasn’t familiar with.

KL: Yeah. I kind of only did that season because I had stumbled across the fact that, initially, the police and the newspapers were spreading the notion that the Family had gone to Cielo Drive that night looking for Doris Day’s son. So I was just kind of fascinated with this idea that Doris Day and Charles Manson were part of the same story.

JG: What feels to you like the biggest story you’ve told on You Must Remember This, or the most expansive?

KL: I don’t know. The Hollywood Babylon season was really difficult, because it meant starting from scratch every week, which is the hardest way to do this kind of storytelling. It’s much easier to do something like “Jean and Jane,” [In 2017, Longworth released a You Must Remember This season about the contrasting careers and activisms of Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda.] where the scope is limited to just these two actresses, and just the period of time when they were active. With the Hollywood Babylon season, it was 19 episodes that ranged from the teens to the late sixties.

JG: My next question was actually about “Jean and Jane.” I think it’s become my favorite season. Did it change the way you think of celebrity activism?

KL: I don’t know that it changed anything for me. It was just more interesting to think about these two specific examples. You could say that Jane Fonda has recovered from the bad publicity she received; it doesn’t seem like it’s really holding her back any longer, though it is in the air, and maybe it’s in the air more than it had been 10 years ago because we have the alt-right now, who still hate her. Whereas, everything that happened with Jean Seberg is just not part of the public conversation anymore. And if she is part of any public conversation, I think it’s usually because of Breathless. So it was really interesting to see these two people doing similar kinds of things, and Jane Fonda is able to survive it – not untarnished, but survive it – and Jean Seberg really isn’t. It really destroys her.

JG: What was interesting to me was the scope of both of their activism. I think that that’s very rare for celebrities, for at multiple points for both of them to abandon a lot of what they were doing in Hollywood to support the Black Panthers or go to North Vietnam.

KL: Right. It’s interesting because Jane Fonda has this sort of career resurrection after she does a lot of this stuff. Whereas with Jean Seberg — I think what we don’t think about often with that period of Hollywood is that the things that liberal/leftist activists were supposedly fighting for were so against the grain of what Hollywood was doing as a business. So Jane Fonda was able to stand up for things she believed in, and to some extent to renounce the commercialism and consumerism of Hollywood, but she ultimately went pretty hard back into capitalism, kind of as hard as you could go. And with Jean Seberg, it was really a pure thing, of putting the activism first and not caring about how it would affect her financially or how it would affect her capital as a star. And ultimately, you can’t say that she made decisions that were good for her, even if she was following what she believed in.

JG: On a personal taste level, who are the movie stars you find yourself returning to the most?

KL: I think it varies. With the work that I do, I have to become newly obsessively-interested in whoever I’m researching this week or this month.

Love Is the Journey

Days I’ve driven around the city
because I came too early to pick you up from work.
Sitting in an idling car, running in place,
waiting, didn’t seem an option.
I needed movement, action
on a small scale. I circled blocks,
listening to music, smoking out the open window, 

observing joggers, dog-walkers, drug dealers
leaning against parked cars to offer the sly handshake
or the sudden drop. How often
was I nearly blindsided by a bus?
How many times did I pass the same house—
cracked brick, one boarded window—&
wonder were there ghosts inside? 

Here is my love poem for you:
not the words I’ve written but the pause
between departure & arrival.
It’s then I’ve felt centered, certain.
Farther out I spiraled, the closer I came to you,
counting minutes, singing along
to a happy song about someone’s desperation.

Unseasonable Warmth

Japonicas bloom as the temperature drops,
lipstick buds stretching toes into frigid water. 

Year after year, they do this too early,
race to flame at the first pre- 

spring blush before a chill returns.
Soon, they will lean forward in ice, 

their rosy faces peeking out
from a crystalline lattice of snow. 

We fear the worst as if for trapped koi
frozen in a pond. Yet they go on. 

Photos will be taken, snapshots
of contrast: rebirth, miscalculation. 

The hedge will blaze in embers
already wasting to ash—my god, the absence.

Burning the Worm

Snuffing my cigarette. Didn’t see it
there in dark, in the rain-gray mirror.
Two halves arced in sync
like glow-stick dancers at a rave,
like a nighttime Landing Signal Officer
waving fighter jets around the deck.
Water put both pieces out,
each vanishing into an abyss.
I felt sick about it, despite that I’d done
much worse to worms, serving them
on a hook for sport to frenzied sunfish
in a river niche. I thought
I should be charged with Reckless
Endangerment by the arthropod police,
thrown in a dirt cell, dank & chthonic.
Lord, it was an accident,
but does that make me innocent?
How might one rescue the invisible?
It’s like the old riddle about
what I would save from a house on fire.
I know the correct response & know my heart.

Goodbye, Julie Adams

Didn’t know you were still alive, & now you’re gone.
92—good age to die, as good as any. 

After so many years, how did you see your history,
your figure that inspired love from monsters, 

one Creature? He swam beneath you
in murky undercurrents of desire, 

a timid stranger drinking at the sludge bar,
followed you into the next film hoping you’d save him, 

except you weren’t there. I don’t recall
much of my childhood beyond late-night movies, 

Chiller Theatre with Bela, Boris, Lon, & you,
bathing suit bright like a fire shot in black & white. 

You went by Julia then, a role
you played within the role you played. 

Did you watch yourself on screen?
Did you own every format—Betamax, VHS, laser disc, 

DVD, digital? Did you mourn the Gill Man
as he would mourn you now, 

grieving, raging, & destroying? Or was that
a moment like a brief embarrassment in college, 

something that happened to you once
that you no longer found significant? 

As you please. The myth of you illuminates my screen
when I watch again, am watching, 

voyeur of melancholy, creature as well,
observing you since youth & loving still.

What I Remember

Security guard more than private wing or the one
priceless painting it sheltered. Manet,
I think. Or was it Monet? Don’t recall the face,
flower, female form. There was blue, 

maybe—a lot of it. Cerulean. Could be.
We walked in & out, past the hired muscle
who looked like John Belushi in a herringbone suit.
He was art, standing out as intended; 

art that says something about human nature,
even if we fail to comprehend or pay attention.
In J-school photojournalism, my professor said,
If a picture doesn’t have a person in it, 

then it isn’t news. I remember that &
the guy in the suit: bas-relief against a sterile wall,
his earpiece coiled around the horns,
hands cupped as if a stone St. Francis shone in prayer.

I’ll look like a cunt if I take off now. So I have to stick it out. Keep my word. Hold this fat bastard’s pungent wheelchair underneath him while he stands on shaky legs. Grasping the escalator handrail so tight his knuckles whiten. Until we get to the top. 

Or his knees give out and we both come to our end. 

From over his shoulder he barks at me. You got that fucking thing ready ‘case I fall? I hear the worry in his gravel voice. But there’s something else. I recognize it. I’ve heard it before. But I can’t figure out where.

Because I lose my thoughts in a good-looking woman coming down as we go up. Her sweet face turns pure hate as she sees the dirty old lowlife I’m aiding. She leans towards him as they cross. Finger pointed in full rage. Vas te faire foutre! Conard!

I like her style. 

A friend of yours? I ask as the escalator carries us away. But he chooses to ignore me. Everyday trifles or bigger worries I don’t care. Because the end of the ride is approaching fast. He snaps at me again asking if I’m ready. Unsure of who he chose to help. 

I shout false confidence.

A cold sweat runs down my brow. 

Fear of death in overdrive. 

His back falls forward in slow motion. There’s still time to drop the chair. Sidestep the slob as he goes careening by. Disappear into the clamor. But I was raised better. So instead of giving up and facing murder charges I brace my arms and legs. Then whisper 1 more pep talk before I probably die. 

You can do this you fucking pussy.

He hits the seat. Him the chair and I we all groan under the strain. But I manage to hold my ground. Every muscle in my body tight. My lower back about to burst. The last of what I think I have. A final shove up over the lip. The chair jumps. He starts yelling. 

Take it easy man! What are you fucking stupid?

Aha! That’s it. Where I’ve heard his voice. Seen his greasy hair. Out front the corner store. The door to the metro. Harassing everyone. Especially the fine looking women. And I’m certain he fits the description of a man who called my wife a whore when she declined his offer to fuck her in the ass. 

So without saying a word I start pushing. Faster and faster and faster. I veer our course towards the gate beside the turnstiles. A hip-level plexiglass door. The old creep is on to me and drops his feet like brakes because he can see his future coming. But we don’t even slow down. He yelps 1 final call for mercy. 

Nothing can stop us now.

His knees hit with a bang. He groans like a dying beast. The gate opens like a gunshot. The latch breaking off and hitting the ground is the greatest joke I’ve ever heard. I’m laughing like a madman. Name a better time than revenge and I’ll call you a liar.

I give him another push with everything I’ve got. Let go. He rolls away at top speed yelling words I’ve been called 1000’s of times so they don’t hurt. People all around stare in shock. Never guessing I made a promise to the woman I love and all they witnessed was me keeping it. 

Choosing Water 

The first time I went in a boat, I was about four years old. It was in Maine. I was in a tiny sunfish and I was terrified, afraid of falling out and drowning, but my aunt held my hand as the boat bobbed near the shore. With her touch I knew everything would be alright. At that time, the water was a source of fear, because even then I understood its tremendous power to take life. At home, there was a brook where I pretended to fish and watched the rushing water drag fallen leaves through its current, twisting them up in its own churn.

Years later, I attended college along the Connecticut River. We were required to take physical education classes, so I threw caution to the wind and enrolled in whitewater kayaking. I marvel at how unafraid I was of the rushing river and the rocks I could be dashed against, the sharp surfaces that could break my bones. I was keen to absorb the instructor’s directions about how to right the single-person kayak if it capsized, but instead of being scared that I’d be trapped under the boat, I was exhilarated that I could maneuver inside of it, shape its direction, change its path. The water was alive and so was I and together we could move objects. 

Soon after, during my junior year abroad in Glasgow, Scotland, I eschewed an umbrella, leaning into the rain that fell every day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for fifteen minutes, absorbing it like a refreshment even. Again, I felt the reminder of being alive as the drops of rain caught in my hair and fell into my eyes. The rain changed something, even if slightly, about how I moved through the streets, making things different than they would be if it never existed.  

More than a decade later in NYC, I developed a habit of swimming laps at the local YMCA. In the water, like nowhere else, my mind could be soothed but invigorated: all the detritus clearing out, leaving nothing but taut, logical thoughts like the numbers I counted to myself as I went up and down the lanes, methodically, rhythmically, weightlessly. In the pool, it seemed I could swim forever without tiring. During the pandemic, the pool closed temporarily and I lost access to the liberating sensation of doing laps, the repetitive invitation of the movement. 

Movement, and the freedom it offers, has always been important to me. As a toddler, I would spend time in a playpen. When my mother discovered I didn’t like to stay inside it, always asking to be taken out of it, she came up with an innovative solution: she cut a hole in it so I would know that I had the freedom to leave whenever I wanted. With this adaptation, she says, I was content to stay inside the playpen for hours. 

When I stayed in the psychiatric hospital in my thirties, movement was tightly restricted. The unit was locked and, for the majority of our stay, we weren’t allowed to leave its confines. Visitors came to us at specified hours through the locked doors. Getting too close to the doors was a violation that would result in confiscation of your street clothes, which would be replaced with flimsy hospital apparel. One evening, I took all my roommate’s velvety dresses from the hangers where they were carefully arranged and piled them on the floor next to the window, in what I thought was preparation for tying them together to climb down the side of the building and escape. My efforts were interrupted – with no one to open the window to offer me the knowledge I could leave should I wish to, which, according to the logic of my early childhood, might itself have been enough to convince me to remain inside where I belonged. 

Close to the end of my three months’ stay, we were allowed to take short, supervised walks outside. But on our journeys beyond locked doors, there were no bodies of water to promenade alongside and no rain fell overhead. Cold, immobile concrete surrounded us as we squinted in the sun, unaccustomed to its brightness. Inside the unit in art therapy, I painted a beach bucket, full of hermit crabs, set before a background of sand and waves. 

Making choices has always been difficult for me, but like water, they are vehicles of power.  My neighborhood in New York City is along the East River and, in 2020, I could visit the nearby riverside park. A fence separated me from the water itself, the life-giving source. Still, during those lonely pandemic days before the vaccine, visiting the waterfront helped give me a kind of peace I could not find elsewhere. Every choice that I made seemed full of the possibility of life or death. I could get sneezed on at the laundromat, so I started using drop-off service. Someone could cough on me at the deli or grocery store, so I began ordering my groceries online. Meeting men in person could result in a painful death, so I held phone and Zoom dates. 

The pandemic took away my chance to go to the ocean in 2020, so when I returned there in 2021, I was ecstatic to bop up and down in the waves, letting my long hair drag through the water. At my favorite beach, I reminisced about my girlhood, spending hours in the tide pools, watching the paths in the sand that showed where snails had crawled.

Most of our bodies are made of water and perhaps that is why I feel so at home in it. Every summer since I was ten – thirty years now excluding the year the pandemic stole – I have visited my godmother in Maine and spent time at the ocean. It could be that this consistency is also what makes water feel like home, like a natural place to return to again and again.

Water is an instrumental part of the story of Jesus, from his baptism in the Jordan River to his turning water into wine to his preaching on the shores of the sea. And for me, water is the grandeur of God, the vast wonder of the universe, the amazing properties of a substance that is life-giving, the molecules that hold my body up.

But water can also take life – and that is perhaps what instills respect and fear. My father, nearly 75, almost drowned as a young man and for this reason he won’t jump off the diving board of the pool in his backyard, not even wearing a life vest. Every summer he says this is the year he will and every summer the life vest remains hanging in the pool room, unused. 

While my mother may have given me the opportunity to make a decision when she cut the playpen during my toddler days, sometimes my parents have feared the choices I’ve made. During a study abroad program in Argentina, I planned to go to Patagonia with two friends over spring break. My parents were concerned about the safety of the planes we’d be flying in – imagining them crashing –  and warned me that they did not approve of my decision. I remember being on the other side of the equator from them and hearing the anxiety in their voices, as they tried unsuccessfully to dissuade me from the adventure. 

On that trip, we experienced amazing horse rides with legitimate gauchos and clear natural lakes on the Camino de Siete Lagos or Path of Seven Lakes. The water was bluer than anything I’d ever seen. It was as if my parents’ worries had sunk to the bottoms of the pristine lakes, forgotten, unheeded. What replaced them were vistas of clarity and beauty that I remember decades later.

As a child I believed I’d be a famous writer and live by the sea in Maine. That hasn’t come to be, not yet, but when I think of the dream, it’s mostly the ocean that I see, taste, and hear. Once I rode the Staten Island Ferry in my thirties for fun with a friend, there and back, not bothering to leave the ferry terminal when we arrived, simply turning around to board the boat. The ride, moving along the water, was the experience we were after. 

Given the opportunity, I’ll always choose the water.

Jason Kelst was a composer who died in obscurity in 1983. He was fifty at the time. He spent his days working behind the counter at an Optimo smoke shop in a small town’s downtown, selling cigars and comic books to the area’s residents. He maintained few ties with the area’s residents. He lived in a small apartment two doors down from the smoke shop and rarely ate out or went to bars. He attended no religious institution, had no romantic connections that anyone knows of, and was in fact the perfect model of a recluse. He worked for years at the smoke shop and dropped dead of a heart attack one evening after finishing his shift and locking up.

Kelst, it seemed, had planned for this. One wondered if he had known that his life was nearing his end, through a racing pulse or a shortness of breath or simply an awareness that his time was slipping away.

Though he had little in the way of an extended family, he had made a will that checked out on all legal grounds. His frugality had paid off: he left a not insubstantial sum to a local nonprofit’s scholarship program. Even now, decades later, it continues to operate. His possessions were largely destined for thrift stores or the local dump: they were thoroughly unspectacular, durable and functional but not at all memorable or in fashion.

And then there were the scores.

It was here that a little digging needed to be done: Jason Kelst, it transpired, had in his younger days attended a music conservatory with another then-young composer named Davis. Though they had been close for several years, their paths diverged shortly after they left the conservatory. Kelst had become a recluse; Davis, the year before Kelst’s death, had received the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Jason Kelst had willed his life’s work, volumes upon volumes of sheet music and home recordings, to his old friend Davis Steinhardt. There was some question as to whether Davis would actually accept the donation, or if Kelst’s executor would be faced with the difficult decision of what to do with an unwanted oeuvre. The executor never had to wrestle with that question, however: upon her first request to Davis, Davis acquiesced immediately and was more than helpful in determining a means by which Kelst’s music might be transported across the country to Davis’s domicile.

In retrospect, it might have been better for all involved had Davis declined the work and Kelst’s executor consigned it all to a fire.

Davis was a gloriously media-savvy personality: he gave interviews regularly, he toggled between large-scale commissions and more commercially viable work, and he frequently collaborated with everyone from avant-garde jazz musicians to up-and-coming rock acts who enjoyed dropping his name as an influence so as to make themselves look more highbrow. So it wasn’t a surprise that a certain cluster of journalists and critics in his orbit soon learned of the life’s work of Jason Kelst. “What are those papers over there?” someone would inevitably ask. “Oh, those? Yes, those. Those,” Davis would say, “are the work of my dear old friend Jason Kelst, who passed away earlier this year.”

An obscure and unknown composer, held in great esteem by perhaps the most critically and commercially successful composer of his generation? It’s no surprise that an abundance of critics picked up the scent of a story here and were prepared to follow it wherever it led.

As yet, though, the journalists tracking Kelst’s work had little to go on. Kelst was forthcoming about one thing: he’d had little time to make a dent in the accumulated work of decades of solitary work from his old friend. He certainly recalled compositions of Kelst’s that had resonated with him when they’d both been in their twenties, and the handful of scores he’d leafed through most definitely showed great skill and an abundance of complexity. But the full scope of Kelst’s music — that would take years to fully appreciate.

Many of the journalists who’d had something sparked by the arrival of Kelst’s work filed this information away for later use. A handful of them kept at it: Davis would announce a new symphony or a new piece for string quartet or a film score. He would sit down for the usual press rigamarole, and would see a familiar face before him, a journalist who’d been asking him questions for a good slice of his career. And inevitably, at the end of the interview, the journalist would pause and, like an archetypal dogged detective, would have one more question. “Did anything new happen,” they’d ask, “with those compositions you’d inherited?” And Davis would shake his head ruefully. “Soon,” he’d say. “I’ll get to it soon.”

And in truth, I believe he intended to. But the business by which he made his own living kept interfering, and for good reason. The years passed and the papers comprising the collected works of Jason Kelst still sat in one corner of his office, and Davis awoke alone one morning and realized that he was no longer young, or perhaps even middle-aged, and felt pangs of guilt at the prospect that Jason Kelst’s work might vanish if he was not a capable steward of it.

In those days Davis was the composer-in-residence at a well-off university, and as such had the benefit of some student labor if he required it. And it struck him that he should have asked for this before. He summoned a promising young music student and set her to work organizing and documenting the works of Jason Kelst. Once it was done, perhaps some recordings could be made. Perhaps his old classmate’s name would begin to show up on concert programs around the world.

Karen Plinth was her name: a sharply-minded young woman who shared Davis’s enthusiasm for helping to usher a previously-unknown composer’s work to the wider world. And so she spent days at a time digging through the work Kelst had left behind. Much of, she thought, was brilliant. She left notes on each piece as she finished it: loose commentary, points of comparison, what sort of ensemble it had been written for. She endeavored to be as comprehensive as she could: this was, after all, someone’s legacy.

Karen Plinth continued this process over the course of a semester. Near the end of it, she sat with Davis and spent a day reviewing all that she’d discovered. He felt enthusiastic about her discoveries, but noticed that there was something reserved in her voice, the sort of tone that balanced wonder with something more abject.

They’d gone through nearly everything, and finally Davis noticed one folder sitting off by itself. “And what’s that?” he asked Plinth, gesturing quietly in its direction.

Here Karen Plinth sighed — not from exasperation, but in the manner of someone forced to read out the fine print declaiming that one’s prize is less glorious than it had been previously been believed.

“That,” she said, “is Etude #31.”

“All right,” said Davis. “And why is it all by itself over there?”

“Well,” said Karen Plinth. “I’ve been looking at this for the last few days, and I’m not sure if playing it is humanly possible.”

Davis asked her for the sheet music, and she handed it to him. He looked it over. It began rationally enough, in a style and manner akin to a restrained Charles Ives. But as he followed along, he realized two things almost at once: first, that Karen was correct and this would be nearly impossible to play; and second, that if it ever could be played it would be a tremendously beautiful musical work.

The rest of the filing and organization of Kelst’s music went relatively smoothly. And in the end, Davis’s instincts were accurate: the story of Kelst’s compositions was indeed catnip for a few journalists of his acquaintance. One of them in particular, a well-liked journalist named Iris Jort, took a particular fascination in Kelst’s work, spending several days at the informal archive that Davis and Plinth had established. Iris had trailed as a concert pianist for much of her youth, until finally she realized that a career in classical music would not be ideal, and so instead opted to pursue a lucrative career in arts journalism.

The feature she wrote on the life and work of Jason Kelst was published that autumn in The New Yorker and instantly put Kelst’s name on the map — a small map, admittedly, but one nonetheless. The university at which Davis taught offered to become the formal and permanent home of Kelst’s papers. Several respected orchestras announced plans to program some of Kelst’s works in the coming years, and a respected conductor signed a contract to record three of Kelst’s compositions.

Etude #31 remained in obscurity in a file folder in the university’s archive. It had come up in the conversations that Davis and Plinth had had for the New Yorker article, but that aspect of his work had not made it to the final version of the piece. Iris had written a short paragraph about it, but it was eventually cut by her editor, who felt that it read like a digression more than anything that might be of interest to the readership. “Every composer has their trifles,” he scribbled in the margins. This was true, but most composers’ trifles were not lethal.

Jason Kelst’s posthumous reputation remained golden for almost twenty years. Kelst’s work became an integral part of the repertoire of many a regional and national ensemble. A performance of one of his string quartets bewitched a Chicago audience under the stars at Millennium Park, and the Prospect Park Bandshell was treated to a dance performance set to a minor but charming work for dance orchestra. The off-beat details of his personal life had also not escaped the public notice,  and an Oscarbait biopic picked up a handful of critical awards for its cast.

The generation that had been born as Kelst’s music circulated the nation began coming of age. As they did so, Kelst’s work became the topic of several graduate-level theses, and a handful of prestigious private schools offered courses in Kelst’s body of work.

Cue Leon Paul, 23 years of age, and of a similar rigorous bent to Karen Plinth, his predecessor in the study of Jason Kelst. Leon Paul decided to visit the Kelst archives and explore the composer’s works that had not received wide fanfare, no pun intended. He requested access, and was granted it. He applied for grants and was given them. This would be his PhD thesis: The Unheard Kelst. Upon hearing of that, an aging Davis chuckled. “It was all unheard. All of it!” he muttered to no one in particular, made a note to email this wry observation to Karen Plinth, then promptly lost the note.

Etude #31 did not look like a weapon. It did not look like a torture device or a haunted object or a relic used for some barbaric purpose. When Leon Paul slid it out of the file folder, it did not whisper to him in an arcane language or trigger a migraine or give him a nosebleed. It looked like any other musical work. That, perhaps, was the trouble. Had someone scrawled “RUN” at the top of it where other works featured the tempo, things might never have gone so wrong.