Has Scarlett Johansson or any hyphenate with her kind of power and popularity ever explored the possibility of producing or directing a feature (or maybe an six-episode miniseries) about influential TV journalist and former actress Lisa Howard? Somebody should look into this.
Howard (aka Dorothy Jean Guggenheim, 4.24.26 to 7.4.65) “was an American journalist, writer, and television news anchor who previously had a career as an off-Broadway and soap opera actress. In the early 1960s, she became ABC News’s first woman reporter, and was the first woman to have her own national network television news show.”
Howard developed a relationship, possibly of a sexual nature, with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, whom she interviewed on camera. The scuttlebutt says she may have also done the slip-and-slide with…let’s not go there.
Howard’s network career went south when she became closely involved in Kenneth Keating‘s U.S. Senate election in 1964 New York. (He lost to Bobby Kennedy.) The following year she killed herself (fact) with an overdose of pain killers, possibly prompted by and then having suffered a miscarriage and depression but who knows?
I know that Julia Ormond portrayed Howard in Part 1 of Steven Soderbergh‘s Che (’08), but I don’t even remember seeing her in that two-part film. Not a word or a shot. And I’ve watched Che three times, once in Cannes 17 years ago and twice with the Criterion Bluray.
In a seven-year-old Politico article, Peter Kornbluh reports that Howard “set up a meeting between UN diplomat William Attwood and Cuba’s UN representative Carlos Lechuga on 9.23.63, at her Upper East Side New York apartment, under the cover of a cocktail party. With Howard’s support, “the Kennedy White House was organizing a secret meeting with an emissary of Fidel Castro in November 1963 at the United Nations — a plan that was aborted when Kennedy died on 11.22.63.”
Oh, I get it — progressive industry women don’t to make a Howard film because a pillow-talk espionage saga is seen in some quarters as demeaning, and committing suicide in ’65 makes for a glum, defeatist ending.
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