The Legacy of Jean Harlow: the original Platinum Blonde was born 110 years ago
Born on March 3rd, 1911, this adorable Piscean blonde has blessed the American silver screen ever since, and still fascinates movie buffs and filmmakers even more than 80 years after her passing
When it comes to blonde bombshells in film, we can automatically think of the most iconic of them all: Marilyn Monroe. I am a huge fan of Marilyn (who also deserves a post of her own soon), and of so many other icons inspired by her. However, not only Marilyn, but a whole generation who lived during the 1930s was influenced by Jean Harlow. Monroe never hid the fact that she sought inspiration from Harlow’s trademarks: the sexiness, the strong screen personality, the comedic timing on cue and, certainly, the famous bleached hair — platinum blonde. Marilyn was a moviegoer herself when she was still plain Norma Jeane, and while watching Harlow, Gable, Davis, Crawford, Garbo and other stars of that golden era, she was sure that she wanted to be a movie star too. Harlean Harlow Carpenter, on the other hand, had been much more pressed by her mother to become one — “Jean Harlow”.
Years later in the 1950s, already famous, Marilyn Monroe would be offered an awful script for an upcoming biopic on Jean Harlow’s life. Of course it was a dream of hers to play her lifelong idol on the screen. But she was mortified with the vulgar script and said “I hope they don’t do that to me after I’m gone”. Sadly, they did, and worse later on. Marilyn died in 1962 and three years later, in 1965, two forgettable biographical films on Harlow’s life would be released: both were titled Harlow, one released by Magna Corporation in May starring Carol Lynley; the other in June that same year by Paramount Pictures starring Carroll Baker. Mama Jean was played by Ginger Rogers in the former and by Angela Lansbury in the latter. Both were commercial and critical flops.
Harlow was a Midwest girl. Born on March 3rd, 1911 in Kansas City, Missouri, her parents were Mont Clair Carpenter, a dentist from a working-class background, and Jean Poe Carpenter (née Harlow), daughter of a wealthy real estate broker, Skip Harlow. Jean Carpenter got married still underage and was not happy in the marriage, arranged by her father Skip, and grew resentful. Even so Mother Jean and Mont Clair remained together for some years in a Kansas City house owned by Skip Harlow.
While her mother grew tired and unhappy with her personal life, Harlean was blossoming into a lovely young girl. Her deep-set eyes were green and her natural hair color was ash blonde. Her lifelong nickname would be “The Baby”, even during her Hollywood years at MGM — such a recurrent nickname among her relatives that Harlean only learned in school when she was five that her real name was not really “Baby”.
Harlean loved her parents, but she had a closer relationship to her mother, who was extremily protective. So Harlean grew up (like in a bell jar) adoring her mother, but not in a healthy way. Mama Jean, as Harlow’s mother would be remembered by all, put in Harlean’s mind that she — her mother — was responsible for everything in her life, so following this idea Harlean “owed” everything to her mother; it seems like she always felt in debt to Mama Jean in a certain way, having the constant need to please her mother, to show her endless gratitude and respect. And Mama Jean would often refer to her daughter in interviews and so as “all mine”, as if her daughter were not a person, but rather a possession.
Harlean was at finishing school when her mother filled for divorce, which was finalized in September 1922. Bored and restless, Mother Jean had just one thing in mind: going to Hollywood in order to become a movie star. Decided to move for good, off she went with her daughter to Hollywood. It was 1923 when Jean Carpenter, a 34-year-old at the time, was told that she was too old to begin a movie career. She was crushed, but not for too long: Jean Carpenter decided from that day on that she would make her daughter a movie star. Mama Jean would use her daughter to fulfill her own dreams of fame and stardom, the classic “stage mother” melodrama often portrayed in movies, books and theatre (most famously in Gypsy as a musical).
Harlean was then enrolled at the Hollywood School for Girls and studied there until she was dropped out in 1925 at age 14. She was a sensation: kind, sweet, friendly, and ravishingly beautiful, almost ethereal. There she would meet many future Hollywood big names: Joel McCrea, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Irene Mayer Selznick. Her mother’s finances however were going downhill and Skip Harlow gave an ultimatum: mother and daughter should return to Kansas City, otherwise Jean would be out of his will. Back to Missouri they went.
It was during this time that Harlean, at age 15, became ill with scarlet fever at a summer camp. After her sudden death years later, many people have believed that her serious scarlet fever incident made her organism weaker and more vulnerable, causing her declining health at an early age.
But love knocked on the family door. By this time Harlean had started attending a new school in Lake Forest, Illinois. It was near Chicago, a convenient location for Mama Jean because her new love interest lived there: Marino Bello, an Italian con man with gangster connections. Meanwhile, Harlean got acquainted with Charles “Chuck” McGrew, an heir to a large fortune. After some time dating, Harlean and McGrew got married in 1927. That same year her mother Jean and Marino Bello were also married — however, Harlean was not present at the ceremony. She was not very fond of Bello, but later learned to get along with him (and after fame learned to give him money to keep him quiet and distant) since he was her dear mother’s husband.
Trying to distance Harlean from her controlling mother and after just receiving part of his inheritance, Chuck McGrew moved with his wife to Los Angeles, settling in Beverly Hills. Soon Harlean became a rich socialite in the California jet-set. Both Harlean and Chuck were young and rather reckless — they did not work and they drank a lot during this time. Eventually Mama Jean and Bello moved to Los Angeles as well, which only made things worse for the young couple.
One day Harlean drove a friend of hers, Rosalie Roy, to Fox Studios for an appointment. Rosalie was an aspiring actress and was trying for a movie career. While waiting for her friend, Harlean was spotted and approached by Fox executives. Much to their disappointment, she had no interest in a movie career whatsoever. Even after her initial refusal, studio offers and letters of introduction were popping up. Her friend Rosalie Roy bet that Harlean would not have the nerve to go in for an audition. She was not willing to lose a bet, and Mama Jean saw this as a lifetime opportunity. Finally Harlean went to Central Casting and signed in under her mother’s maiden name: Jean Harlow. Little did she know at that time that she was soon going to rise to fame. The rest is history…
The skyrocket success was not overnight. At first Jean Harlow (let’s call her now by her screen name) rejected the first roles she was offered to play. After much pressure of her mother, Harlow accepted her first role in movies: an extra in Honor Bound (1928) for $7 dollars a day plus a box lunch — the regular amount for an extra at the time. Then later she got $10 dollars per day and small parts in movies such as Moran of the Marines and a Charley Chase lost film called Chasing Husbands, both released in 1928. At the end of the same year, Jean signed a five-year contract with Hal Roach Studios for $100 per week. The next year, in 1929, she had small roles in three Laurel and Hardy movies, which gave her more credit and visibility: Double Whoopee, Liberty and Bacon Grabbers (she was credited as a costar in the latter). But soon after these jobs Harlow considered quitting showbusiness, claiming that “it was breaking up her marriage”. Hal Roach, the studio boss, got mad and just tore up her contract.
“To me, love has always meant friendship.”
Jean Harlow
Indeed Chuck McGrew was not happy about being married to a new starlet. Plus Mother Jean’s constant presence and toxic influence on her daughter were simply unbearable for him to cope with. Jean and Chuck began to fight often. In the end, between her husband and her career/mother, Harlow chose the latter. In June 1929 the couple split and Harlow moved into her mother’s home. She continued working as an extra until her first speaking part in a Clara Bow picture called The Saturday Night Kid. She had no problems with the transition to sound of that time, since she had no big parts before and was still unknown by most of the public.
Harlow and McGrew divorced in 1929. The marriage did not last, but Harlow’s career was another story. Later that year the actress was noticed by the production of a new movie, produced and directed by Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angels (some people say it was Ben Lyon who spotted Harlow, while another account gives head cameraman Arthur Landau as the responsible for suggesting Harlow to Hughes). Anyhow, Hughes was desperated to find a replacement for Greta Nissen, a Norwegian-American actress with an undesirable accent for the female leading role. Harlow screen-tested and was given the part, signing a five-year, $100-per-week contract.
The film premiered on May 27, 1930 — a night to be remembered. Most of the Hollywood stars and filmmakers attended the event. Here below are Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes and singer Gwen Stefani as Harlow in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (a 2004 biopic on Hughes), reenacting that famous movie night.
Although the 1930 movie nowadays might be considered dated and the plot/dialogues sort of lousy, Hell’s Angels was praised by Hughes’ efforts to make a movie now considered a landmark of early sound and color use, against all the odds. The aircraft action sequences continue to mesmerize new audiences, despite its age and outdated style. Director Stanley Kubrick considered the film one of his favorite films that influenced his career.
“When I was making a personal appearance, I’d always sneak in the back of the house to watch the zeppelin airplane attack. I never failed to get a tremendous thrill out of it. I probably saw that scene hundreds of times.”, said Harlow later on the film
The movie was a smashing hit, the highest-grossing film of 1930. Following this first major appearance of her career, Jean Harlow became not only the talk of the town, but an international star all of a sudden. Even though she was praised by the public, most of the critics were not amused and never lost an opportunity to look down on her performances. To say that she was breathtaking and owned a tremendous sex appeal would be an understatement. However, for a long time Harlow was not considered a good actress, an opinion shared even by the actress herself. After all, she never had the intention to become an actress in the first place. Before Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Diana Dors, Mamie Van Doren and others, Jean Harlow was considered the blonde sex-symbol of her time, and unfortunately, a “dumb blonde” altogether. And in spite of her relative success with Hell’s Angels, afterwards she was cast as an uncredited extra in Chaplin’s City Lights, but her appearance did not make the final cut. Until her next big part, she would keep playing mediocre roles and making random personal appearances.
Despite her rising popularity, she was not being taken seriously as an actress, often mocked by critics. Howard Hughes sent her to uncountable personal appearances to promote Hell’s Angels in an attempt to bolster her career, much to Harlow’s dislike since she dreaded public appearances and did not know what to do and how to act in front of an audience (mostly filled with men who could only pay attention to her body). Besides, Hughes was not really using Harlow for any new movie of his studio, frequently loaning her out to other studios. During this time (1930–1931) she gained more attention appearing in: The Secret Six, with Wallace Beery and Clark Gable (with whom she would be paired frequently); Iron Man, with Lew Ayres and Robert Armstrong; and the iconic gangster film The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney. In this film Harlow played Gwen Allen, a woman with self-confessed weakness for bad men. During those years Jean was continuously typecast as the man-eater (much to her dislike). All these above-mentioned films were released in 1931.
Silent star Louise Brooks was the original choice for the role of Gwen Allen and according to her biographer Barry Paris, that particular film could have saved her free-falling career, but Brooks ended up refusing the role because “she hated making pictures and she simply hated Hollywood”. Louise would still make some B pictures until she quit Hollywood for good and sank into oblivion for many years — decades later her work would finally be rediscovered and praised as it deserves (stay tuned for a Louise Brooks post here on my Medium page coming soon ^^)
During Hell’s Angels production, Harlow had met MGM executive Paul Bern, who would become her next husband — and the most emblematic one. Before that, she had briefly dated the notorious mob boss Abner Zwillman, who bought her a jeweled bracelet, a red Cadillac, and even got her a two-picture deal at Columbia Pictures. And that would not be her only relation to the underworld of the mobbing scene: Harlow was godmother of Millicent Siegel, daughter of mobster Benjamin Bugsy Siegel.
The two pictures at Columbia were Platinum Blonde (1931) and Three Wise Girls (1932). The former capitalized on Harlow’s famous platinum hair color — it was directed by Frank Capra, who would later get acclaimed for his masterpieces It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and so many others. Platinum Blonde is not one of Capra’s most remarkable films, but platinum blonde Jean Harlow was indeed, and the nickname stuck with her afterwards. Not only her curves were getting famous, but her platinum hair became so popular that many women across the country and throughout tried to match her color, resulting in many frustrated women with damaged hair and almost bald. Series of contests named “Platinum Blonde” across the nation offered a $10,000 prize to anyone who could match Harlow’s shade — no one could. Her hair color was reportedly achieved with a weekly application of ammonia, Clorox bleach and Lux soap flakes. This heavy process would then weaken Harlow’s natural ash-blonde hair and sometimes almost made her lose her hair.
Besides her famous hair color, she often played the wisecrack type in elegant comedies or dramas. She was directed by Frank Capra, Clarence Brown, George Cukor, Tay Garnett, Victor Fleming, Jack Conway, W. S. Van Dyke and other acclaimed directors. Her usual movie wardrobe consisted of fur coats and satin gowns (usually white) — though in real life she could be seen wearing more casual clothes, like comfy blouses and slacks. Her skinny eyebrows were frequently arched to the extreme and sometimes painted high upon her forehead. On the matter of sex on screen, she was a pioneer. She never wore underwear and always slept in the nude (at least that’s what people believe to be true). In movies her nipples were often visible underneath her gowns — she did not use brassieres and she used to put ice on her nipples in order to appear sexier. And to mantain her silhouette, she had to stick to a strict diet mostly consisted of vegetables and salads.
“Men like me because I don’t wear a brassiere. Women like me because I don’t look like a girl who would steal a husband. At least not for long.”
But it would be Paul Bern the responsible for consolidating her movie career. Howard Hughes simply did not know how to manage his star, therefore in 1932 he arranged with Bern to borrow Harlow for MGM’s The Beast of the City. Her acting was still a little wooden but in spite of critics’ depreciation and lousy performances, her popularity was enlarging to a great extent, packing every theatre where she appeared during a tour to promote the movie, in such a way that the tour had to be extended. Paul Bern saw Harlow’s full potential as a star, and more than that, started a love affair with her.
It took a while, but he was able to convince his reluctant close friend Irving Thalberg, production head of MGM, to sign Harlow in. Louis B. Mayer was reluctant too at first, for he thought MGM was a place for “elegant ladies”, something he thought that she was not. But after all he could not ignore her box office appeal. Jean received the news of her new life at Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios on her 21st birthday, March 3, 1932: her contract with Howard Hughes was bought by MGM for $30,000. She would join the studio on April 20, finally starring her first serious role: Red-Headed Woman, directed by Jack Conway with a screenplay by Anita Loos (and uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald) — based on a novel of same name by Katharine Brush. It was the first time she could be seen as something close to an actress, playing an amoral character full of lust and self-interest, not moralized or punished for her behavior, after all it was the Pre-Code era and until 1934 this kind of plot was still possible to be made. A must-see!
Harlow was “The Baby” of the lot (except for Clark Gable, her close friend, who would call her “Sis”). Everybody just loved her. She was neither self-centered nor self-conscious, and treated everyone equally, from famous colleagues to the backstage crew. She was certainly dedicated to her craft and worked hard during each film, even though she practically parachuted over Hollywood and had to learn slowly by each day how to act in a movie scene and according to the star system. She dreamed about having a husband, children and quit Hollywood one day, but until that day came she would try her best to be a fine actress and honor the public who made her rich and famous buying tickets and worshipping her. Or maybe she worked that hard to become a star (something that she never wanted for herself really) only to fulfill her abusive mother’s delusional dreams and aspirations.
“I was not a born actress. No one knows it better than I. If I had any latent talent, I have had to work hard, listen carefully, do things over and over and then over again in order to bring it out.”
It was a typical routine in those days: almost like a worker in an industry, an actor had to wake up at dawn and then work until dusk, sometimes till late night or even on weekends and holidays. They could get nice salaries, have nice clothes and live in big houses, but they used to work like slaves for the studios, plus they were forced to accept poor scripts (only years later actors such as Bette Davis and especially Olivia de Havilland, among others, would fight in court against the system for better working conditions, and Olivia eventually won — the De Havilland law reduced the power of the studios over the freedom of the performers).
For women it could be harsher: they spent many hours just at the make-up/hair department being dolled up for their daily scenes. After the studios hours, the actor was supposed to spend his/her few evening hours memorizing the next day’s lines — and still manage to have a family and a social life!
Myrna Loy, Harlow’s friend and co-worker at MGM, once said that it was impossible for many Hollywood players to party all the time or have scandalous sex lives as told by numerous biographers or gossips, “because we simply hadn’t time for it” (paraphrasing her, from her memoir Being and Becoming).
Following her fame, Jean Harlow got huge amounts of fan mail through her years of stardom. Sad to say, it is now acknowledged that Mama Jean signed 99% of the autograph requests through the mail on Jean’s behalf.
Anita Page, another MGM star, had a fun anecdote with Harlow: during production of Red-Headed Woman, Jean had to use a red wig. Page passed Harlow without acknowledging her because of the wig. Harlow cried, thinking she had been snubbed, but then burst out laughing after realizing Anita just had not recognized her because of the red wig. “That shows you how sensitive she was. She was a lovely person in so many ways”, Page remembered.
Being a Pisces, this is no surprise. Harlow was a dreamy, sensitive soul. However, her moon was in Aries, which gave her boldness, audacity and guts, so she could play tough when she thought it necessary. In addition to that, a strong Capricorn influence in her birth chart gave her a sense of determination, hard-work, and a down-to-earth nature. Her ascendant, i.e. her professional and social persona, was Libra: charming, stylish, gregarious, but somewhat indecisive, always in search for a balance in life. She could be famous, glamourous and all that, but at heart she was simple and modest; like many women of her time, she dreamed of getting married and having kids. Jean wanted to love and be loved more than anything else, but most men loved her in the wrong way, and she was too dependent on Mama Jean emotionally. She had her beloved mother around her all the time, but this presence at a certain point would prove to be annoying not only to her friends and lovers, but to Harlow herself.
Unfortunately, Jean was never brought up to stand up for herself, to speak up or to think differently from her mother. That fact would lead her private life into trouble. She had a fierce temper, but did not know how to manage her emotional confusion without drinking or other ways of escaping from reality. Yet, her personal issues were not the only problem. Her life itself was like a Warner Brothers’ old gangster movie.
It was 1932 and there was a lot going on in Harlow’s life. She was a sensation, her movies were very successful and on July 2 she married MGM producer Paul Bern, after some time dating. Little did she know that the marriage would last even less than the courtship.
Bern had brought Harlow to MGM, changing her career. Because he really believed in her talent and helped her achieve success in motion pictures. It is truth that Bern and Harlow were a really odd couple, but they both believed then that they could make each other happy. She was grateful for everything he had done for her professionally, and probably saw in him some kind of father figure (after her parents’ divorce, she never had a strong male presence during her coming-of-age). But unbeknownst to her, Paul was sexually impotent and saw Jean as a way to overcome his own personal frustrations. Word is that the marriage was never consummated.
On September 5, 1932, just a few weeks after their wedding, Paul Bern was mysteriously found dead naked in the bathroom of the couple’s suite. Harlow had spent the night out at her mother’s place (a common routine). He had been shot in the back of his head, but even so, it was declared as “suicide”. How so? Nobody will ever know exactly the chronology and actual events of that day. But what is believed to be truth is that after Bern’s dead body being discovered by the butler, they did not call the police first. MGM executives were called first (yes, a common proceeding back in the studio era, for stars and studios could not take a risk of having careers ruined). Then MGM people got there and re-arranged the murder scene to look like a suicide, so Harlow would not be seen as a possible murderer. But of course Harlow had nothing to do with it. What is now considered to be closer to the truth is that Paul Bern had a common-law wife (Dorothy Millette) and this woman, declared mentally unstable, went to LA and allegedly shot him to death. The next day she jumped into a river in San Francisco and drowned.
Many people, still to this day, blame Harlow for Paul Bern’s death, implying that she was a sort of golddigger who took advantage of him. Applesauce! First of all, he was a tormented soul. Secondly, their relationship was more platonic than anything else; she had been seen just as a gold mine by her mother, her stepfather and Howard Hughes; as a sexy dumb blonde by critics and audiences. It was Paul Bern who truly saw talent and personal potential in her, more than her own family and bosses.
Despite her silence, deep inside she was crushed, horrified, a basket case. But to preserve her career and her private life, she never made any kind of public statement and remained silent until her own death five years later. To the police and in front of the grand jury, she just said she “knew nothing”. What she did know remains a mystery.
“Dearest Dear,
Unfortuately [sic] this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humiliation, I Love [sic] you.
Paul
You understand that last night was only a comedy”
The “suicide” note found at the crime scene
One favorite Old Hollywood gossip says that on a particular night before his death Paul Bern showed off naked to Harlow in their bedroom. Being both man and wife, nothing new under the sun. But more than that: he was actually wearing a jockstrap with a large realistic dildo, much to Jean’s amusement — she howled with laughter. That supposed event could be the “comedy” mentioned in Paul’s note. Although a very funny anecdote, it is most likely nonsense. Nowadays this note allegedly written by Bern is considered either from a personal diary of his and used as stand-alone note or simply faked altogether by one of the MGM execs.
Oddly enough, both Jean and Paul were not happy with the house they were living in. She loathed the place, while he thought about renovating it drastically. Premonition, perhaps? We’ll never know. After Paul’s death, Jean moved right away. Ambitious Mama Jean was building a big mansion in Holmby Hills for herself then (with the huge amount of money Jean was making at the time, of course).
It is said that the house that Bern and Harlow briefly shared together is haunted. It is located at 9820 Easton Dr. in Beverly Hills 90210. The home has had a number of deaths happen on the lot, with following Bern’s mysterious death, two people drowned in the swimming pool and later, two former tenants of the house (famous actress Sharon Tate and hairdresser Jay Sebring) were a victim of the Manson Murders.
Harlow was filming Red Dust at that time and MGM feared that she would be unable to finish the picture. The studio heads called Tallulah Bankhead to take her place, but the controversial actress refused. Tallulah was appalled by the offer and wrote in her autobiography Tallulah: “To damn the radiant Jean for the misfortune of another would be one of the shabbiest acts of all time. I told Mr. Mayer as much.” Ten days after her husband’s death, Harlow returned to the set.
After all, the Paul Bern scandal did not destroy Jean Harlow’s career, not even a bit. She became more popular than ever among moviegoers. Red Dust was a smashing hit, and many years later, in 1953, MGM would remake it with a new name: Mogambo, again starring Clark Gable, but then along with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly.
MGM saw the appealing chemistry between Harlow and Gable, pairing them in four more movies afterwards: Hold Your Man, China Seas, Wife vs. Secretary and Saratoga, her last film.
Around 1933–1934 Jean Harlow started to write a book. Some people believe she found time during a salary strike from MGM at the time, dissatisfied with her roles at the studio. Perhaps looking to show the public a different image of herself, or to try something different and more intellectual. Totally apart from her “dumb blonde” movie fame, in real life Jean was quite smart and an avid bookworm, frequentlly seen reading between takes. Supposedly one day the actress woke up with the whole story in her mind: it would be set during the Great Depression (whose effects were still felt in early 1933), more precisely before and after the 1929 crash. Harlow describes through the book the opulent living of 1920s Hollywood wealthy elite before and after the historical economical recession, focusing on the main couple: Peter and Judy Lansdowne (with some resemblances to her relationship with Paul Bern). Because of a horse accident, millionaire Peter Lansdowne becomes blind and later on loses all his fortune because of the stock market crash. Then Judy has the make a living for both of them working as a nude model. The novel title is explained when Judy convinces her blind husband that day is night and night is day for him not to know anything about her nude model job. English writer and humourist Cassandra Parkin reviewed the novel on her blog as part of a series called “Adventures in Trash”. (Lol despite the title, she has a few interesting points on Harlow’s novel).
“Because blind people don’t have Circadian rhythms, or hearing, or the ability to sense changes in temperature, or brains, or anything at all really, and are basically just useless lumps of animated carbon sitting around eating and taking up space until they die.” [about the fact that it takes a long time until Peter discovers that Julie lied to him about the day-for-night thing]
“However ridiculous this book is, it’s also charming — in the way writing often is when it’s written in a breathless rush and without any thought for what anyone will make of it”.
“There are lots of things I love about this fantastically odd novel, but one of my favourite things has got to be the quirky little glimpses it gives into the time it comes from”.
Today is Tonight would stay shelved until its posthumous release in 1965 by both Grove Press and Dell Publishing. Some people tend to think that the book was ghostwritten. Nevertheless press coverage stated that screenwriter Carey Wilson assisted Harlow with the book. The manuscript was finished before Jean’s death, and in her lifetime her stepfather Marino Bello tried to sell the manuscript to some studios, intending to produce a movie based on it, but MGM refused to permit Harlow to use her services as an artist without the studio permission. After Harlow’s death, Mama Jean sold the film rights to Metro and retained the publication rights. Alas, no movie was ever made and only after Mama Jean’s death in 1958 that the rights were inherited by Harlow’s friend Ruth Luise Hamp, who decided to publish it finally in 1965. At long last, Jean Harlow’s novel saw the light of day.
She spent the night of April 6, 1933 — the day when Prohibition was set to expire at midnight — at the Los Angeles Brewing Co. with fellow movie star Walter Huston. A maker of “near-beer” and denatured alcohol (the alcohol was subtracted from the full-strength beer the company continued to brew during Prohibition, but could not legally market), the company was ready to immediately supply the Los Angeles area’s demand for beer. At 12:01 a.m. on April 7, when the sale and consumption of intoxicating beverages was once again legal in the United States, Huston gave a short speech and Harlow broke a bottle of beer over the first truck lined up and ready to deliver its now-legal load of liquid refreshment, thus christening the reborn brewery. The trucks rolled out, many staffed with armed guards riding shotgun lest the thirsty multitude get too frisky along the delivery routes. When the night was over, the brewery had done over $250,000 in business (approximately $5,000,000 in 2020 dollars) and had collected a stack of cash 18 inches high. Harlow has stayed the night, partying with brewery employees. [source: Imdb.com]
After Bern’s death, Jean Harlow began an affair with boxer Max Baer. He was separeted from his wife Dorothy Dunbar, but Dunbar threatened Baer with divorce proceedings naming Harlow as a co-respondent for adultery. MGM did not want another scandal after the Paul Bern story. So the studio arranged a marriage between Harlow and cinematographer Harold Rosson. They were friends and went along with the plan without much worries. Eight months later, they quietly got divorced. She was not a gay* divorcee. But her next affair would be one to remember: her MGM fellow William Powell.
- Gay meaning “glad, jolly”, archaic meaning of the word — and also a musical starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers*
Following the “all-star” formula of Grand Hotel, the MGM comedy-drama hit was directed by George Cukor, based on a stage play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, featuring acting legends such as Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, brothers John and Lionel Barrymore, Billie Burke, among others. Jean got along with all of her co-stars, except Wallace Beery. They had previously worked together in Beast of the City and developed a mutual dislike for each other. Harlow found him “gruff and boorish”, while Beery did not think Harlow was a good actress and treated her rudely.
“It was whispered behind more than one hand that Jean Harlow, Metro’s much-advertised platinum menace, was picked for parts that called for more allure than art. And in Dinner at Eight, she had to throw a bomb in the works by proving that she is a first-rate actress! Her performance as the wife of the hard-boiled, self-made politician played by Wallace Beery belongs in that limited category of things which may with reason be called rare. The plain truth is, she all but ran off with the show!” Marie Dressler on Harlow’s talent [from her autobiography]
Jean was in awe of Marie’s talents and praised the generosity of the veteran actress. “Being in the same cast with Marie was a break for me,” said Harlow. “She’s one trouper I’d never try to steal a scene from. It’d be like trying to carry Italy against Mussolini.” According to Harlow at that time, the scenes were shot as close to chronological order was possible, “so we could all feel the dramatic power of the climactic scenes.”
In the screwball comedy Bombshell, Harlow played a rebellious film star who has a hard time handling a pressuring studio, a pushy press agent (funny and talented Lee Tracy) and a family of hangers-on (just like Harlow’s real family was). This flick is great fun — gotta love the film’s crazy, histrionic tone, and the metalanguage all over it. Although the movie has been said to be based on 1920s “It Girl” Clara Bow — who also had a hard time dealing with fame explotation — one could say that the story also matched Jean Harlow’s own life. Like Lola, the fictional star of the movie, Harlow grew up in a Georgian home with white interiors, had nine large dogs and her family exploited her celebrity. In any case, the movie was directed by Victor Fleming (of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz fame thereafter), and Fleming was once engaged to Clara Bow, which makes the inspiration on Clara’s life possible.
From 1934 until late 1950s, following the infamous Hays Code (formally The Motion Picture Production Code), Hollywood movies suffered from censorship problems in the name of “decency”. Therefore the approach to controversial topics such as sex and adultery should be veiled, almost non-existent, leaving it up to the producers, directors and screenwriters to find ways to fool the Hays Code. Trying to soften Harlow’s image, Born to Be Kissed was renamed as The Girl from Missouri and turned out to be a light romantic comedy.
Then China Seas was released the following year, 1935, with Harlow again teamed with Clark Gable and now opposite new leading lady Rosalind Russell (before her comedic success in His Girl’s Friday). This romantic adventure on a ship is complete nonsense but fun, some sort of a follow-up to Red Dust. Needless to say, Harlow plays the wisecrack tramp while Russell is the “decent” stiff lady.
“I loved Jean”, said Rosalind Russell in her autobiography Life is a Banquet. Harlow and Russell became friends in the short time they knew each other. Roz said that she was not close to other leading ladies at MGM, but she was close to Jean. They made China Seas and Reckless together in 1935. Rosalind was often called upon to get Jean out of trouble, like dragging her out of bars, as her friend was drinking heavily. “She [Harlow] was a sad girl, driven by her mother, madly in love with a man who wouldn’t marry her, and she spent the last nine months of her life drinking too much”, the actress described. Of course, Roz was devastated when Harlow died.
The plot of Reckless was close to home. It was loosely based on the scandal of the 1931 marriage between torch singer Libby Holman and tobacco heir Zachary Smith Reynolds, killed by a gunshot wound to the head, just like Paul Bern had died years earlier. Her director was Victor Fleming again. And again it seemed like Harlow was playing herself in some sequences, especially when she faces an audience of hecklers at the end of the picture and delivers a monologue opening her heart about herself and her dead husband. Unfortunately her songs in the film were dubbed by vocalist Virginia Verrill.
Powell and Harlow were quite something together, but they were careful and discreet in public. Whereas Jean was still a fresh young star, Powell (who had started acting during the Silent Era), was already a well-established leading man, usually playing the suave, witty leading man of many successful comedies, the most famous example being the comedy-mystery The Thin Man — initially a B movie, it was such an outstanding hit that it had five sequences. Myrna Loy played Powell’s wife in a total of 13 movies, including the whole Thin Man series, and was considered “the perfect wife” by moviegoers and critics, though in real life she reportedly said that she couldn’t fry an egg and considered herself far from perfect. Anyway, she was as witty and classy as Nora Charles was in the movies.
[Loy’s impressions after meeting Harlow] “I thought, My God, I’ve never seen such beautiful skin. That creamy complexion and platinum hair really knocked you out. She was being very careful and shy, since this was her first time out in public with Bill. Jean was beautiful, but far from the raucous sexpot of her films” (Being and Becoming, 124).
One memorable moment of them together was during After the Thin Man shooting in San Francisco. The three were staying at a hotel while in town and discovered that the best suite had been reserved for Myrna and Bill, because the management assumed they were really married. The hotel was booked and only the fancy suite and a small hall bedroom were available. In the end Powell, ever the gentleman, let the two ladies stay in the suite and slept in the smaller room. “There’s nothing for you to do,” Jean said, “We’ll just have to put Bill downstairs.” Myrna Loy remembers:
That mix-up brought me one of my most cherished friendships. You would have thought Jean and I were in boarding school, we had so much fun. We’d stay up half the night talking and sipping gin, sometimes laughing, sometimes discussing more serious things…
Jean was always very cheerful, full of fun, but she also happened to be a sensitive woman with a great deal of self-respect. All that other stuff — that was all put on. She wasn’t like that at all. She just happened to be a good actress who created a lively characterization that exuded sex appeal (143).
[about Harlow’s feelings towards Powell] “… a total childlike love, full of the exuberance and wonder that characterized her. She wanted marriage but he was afraid to marry her. He loved her, but he’d been married twice [once to Carole Lombard]… and both marriages had gone bust.”
Bill truly loved Jean, but his resistance to marry her made her deeply sad and unhappy. He had already been married to Carole Lombard and was not willing to remarry after the divorce, though he and Lombard remained friends afterward and there were no hard feelings between them. There was finally a chance for her to be happy and truly loved by someone, Harlow probably thought to herself; but Bill seemed not to take herself seriously, and kept postponing the wedding plans. He knew she was smart and loving, but he could also make fun of her or make criticism at her expense, depreciating her. He was a confident Leo, loyal and caring, but sardonic on and off camera. Jean, on the other hand, was never self-confident. Carole Lombard, his ex, was a much stronger woman, who knew what she wanted, whereas Jean was overly eager to please her beloved ones. Heartbroken and frustrated, Jean started to drink often and heavily. To top it all, Jean was finally getting sick and tired of her pushy mother, always trying to control all her steps in movies and personal life. In the end Jean’s relationship with her mother began to wane. They were not so close anymore towards the end of Jean’s life, especially during her last months. Birthdays and special occasions would go by and Harlow would prefer to be alone rather than socialize. Mama Jean would write notes to her, but they would remain unanswered.
Shorty after their meeting, Myrna and Jean co-starred in Wife vs. Secretary, with Clark Gable and young James Stewart in a supporting role. Stewart remembered later:
“Clarence Brown, the director, wasn’t too pleased by the way I did the smooching. He made us repeat the scene about half a dozen times … I botched it up on purpose. That Jean Harlow sure was a good kisser. I realized that until then, I had never been really kissed.”
While the popularity of her MGM colleagues Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Norma Shearer declined considerably, Harlow’s star continued to rise, making huge profits at the box office even during the middle of the Depression, which is something really impressive. Perhaps her own charisma, unaffected acting and down-to-earth persona appealed moviegoers, especially the ordinary majority of poor workers who could relate more to her. She was voted one of the strongest names when the subject was tickets sales, being considered one of the biggest stars in the US at the time.
Harlow’s screen persona was now changing considerably. Because of the Hays Code, it was convenient for the studio to give a break to her sex symbol status. And for Jean herself it was a great opportunity to get more realistic roles, so she could stop trying to be sexy all the time and focus on acting for a change. Her hair became darker, and her roles less glamourous, more dramatic.
Jean was a staunch Democrat. In January 1937 (some months before her passing), she visited President Franklin D. Roosevelt on his birthday at a dinner party thrown at the White House, to take part in fundraising activities with the event, later known as the March of Dimes (a nonprofit organization that works to improve the health of mothers and babies). The trip to Washington D.C. was tough for Harlow, and she got the flu. Later she recovered in time to attend the Academy Awards ceremony with her beau William Powell. She was never nominated for an Oscar, by the way. To this day, comedies are not seen as “Oscar worthy” by most critics and juries. Back in 1936 Oscars, Harlow was so sick that her friend Carole Lombard (Powell’s ex-wife) had to help her to the powder room to recover and reapply her make-up.
Then filming for Saratoga, which would be her final film, was scheduled to begin in March 1937. However, Harlow had to be hospitalized due to a sepsis she had developed after a multiple wisdom teeth extraction. Almost two months later, she recovered, and on April 22 the film shooting began. She also appeared on the cover of Life magazine in early May. She was the very first motion picture actress ever to grace the cover of Life.
On May 20, during the filming, the actress began to complain of illness. Her symptoms were fatigue, nausea, fluid retention and abdominal pain, but the studio doctor did not consider her condition to be serious, believing that it was a case of cholecystitis (inflammation of the gallbladder) and influenza. The doctor, however, was not aware that Jean had been ill the previous year with severe sunburn and (again) influenza. Her friends were noticing that something was not okay. Co-star Una Merkel noticed Harlow’s weight gain, gray pallor and fatigue.
Initially MGM and Harlow’s family were not concerned about her health. Her previous illnesses had delayed the shooting of three of her last movies, so at first nobody gave much thought to a recurring illness. Sadly, things were getting worse.
On May 29, Harlow was filming a scene in which her character in Saratoga had a fever. She was clearly sicker than her character and asked Clark Gable to get her back to her dressing room — “I feel terrible”, she said. Then William Powell was called in order to escort her back home. He was filming Double Wedding with his pal Myrna Loy by then, so he left his film set to take care of Jean.
The following day, her condition had not improved, Powell discovered after checking on her. A doctor was promptly called. It was announced on June 2 that she was again suffering from influenza. Her doctor diagnosed her with an inflamed gallbladder. Mother Harlow told MGM that her daughter was feeling better and she was expected to return to the movie set by Monday, June 7, 1937 — ironically, the day of her death.
“Harlow seriously ill”, “Harlow recovers from illness crisis”. Headlines were contradictory and uncertain. Nobody really seemed to know what was going on. Clark Gable remarked later that when he visited Harlow, she was visibly bloated and he smelled urine on her breath when he kissed her. They were both signs of kidney failure. He was heartbroken to see her like that. The end was near…
At a certain point toward the end of her life, she finished a handwritten note signing simply as “ME”. Not as Jean Harlow, nor simply Jean, nor Baby, nor Harlean (her given name). She loved Bill Powell but he never seemed to make up his mind about officializing their relationship. In the end she seemed to feel so tired, depressed and empty that she simply had no idea about who she was anyway. To her, in her deathbed, it seemed that there was no meaning in anything and nothing to fight for. Moreover, she stopped to care about anything at all. When she fell ill, she did not fight back, she was just giving up. At age 26, she had tragically lost the will to live.
A second opinion from another doctor recognized that Jean was not suffering from an inflamed gallbladder. She was in the final stages of kidney failure. On June 6, she could not see Powell clearly and could not tell how many fingers he was holding up in front of her. That evening she was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in LA, where she slipped into a coma. The next day, June 7, 1937, at 11:37 A.M., she was pronounced dead at age 26. The given cause of death was cerebral edema, a complication of kidney failure. Uremia, acute nephritis and respiration infection were also mentioned in her death certificate.
“Jean Harlow died. Grand girl”, wrote Spencer Tracy in his diary.
Apparently, her drinking habits affected her health and eventually damaged her renal system. In addition to it, the scarlet fever she had developed during her teens affected her body system badly, in such a way that Jean Harlow’s health would eventually decline anyway. We have to keep in mind that the medicine of the time was far behind in many aspects, hence it could be possible for her to be cured nowadays after a precise, accurate diagnosis — something she did not have in her lifetime.
William Powell was absolutely devastated. Mother Jean collapsed and could barely walk (though many would say it was all an act and she could not stop thinking about her daughter’s estate). Actually the whole nation was in mourning. On the day of her death, studio execs requested a moment of silence in The Baby’s honor. Hollywood legend claims that not a single word was spoken in the studio’s commissary for hours. Everybody was just stunned with grief. It was possible to hear a pin drop.
Louis B. Mayer, the head of the studio and a well-known conservative bigot, always saw Harlow as a “tramp” that happened to give millions to the studio, in his opinion far from the usual far-fetched glamour of other MGM female stars. Despite that, he planned a lavish and extravagant funeral in her honor, contradicting Harlow’s oft-expressed wishes for a “simple, unpretentious send-off”. Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald sang at her funeral.
“We weren’t just workers on her set,” said one crewmember, “we were real to her. If you were sick, she was the first one to notice. The first one to send flowers.” Harlow saw her colleagues as friends, always caring for them. She even fought against injustice inside the studio, going on salary strikes and giving ultimatums to studio bosses, such as “Either they [movie crew] get a coffee break or I don’t work”, MGM fellow Mickey Rooney later described it.
Oddly enough, spaces in the room at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale beside Harlow’s were reserved not only for her mother but for William Powell as well, even though he was not oficially married to Harlow and three years later married actress Diana Lewis, to whom he remained loyal until his death. However, it took three difficult years for him to recover from Jean’s death (he even fought cancer in the same year of her death, but recovered well). Needless to say, William Powell was not buried in that crypt at Forest Lawn and one of its graves remains empty. After his death in 1984, Powell was cremated and his ashes buried in Desert Memorial Park, in Cathedral City, California.
“It was horrible, an awful blow; I loved Jean deeply. I felt a sickening mixture of grief, guilt, and frustration because I hadn’t been able to do what might have saved her: get her away from her mother for an examination [Jean and her mother were Christian Scientists]. With proper treatment, the cerebral edema that killed her would never have developed in a twenty-six-year-old girl.” remembered Myrna Loy.
For decades a rumor circulated about Mama Jean’s being responsible for Harlow’s death because she was a Christian Scientist and refused to call a doctor or any medical service for her daughter — or that Jean, a Christian Scientist herself, refused to see a doctor or so. Actually Jean was assisted by doctors and nurses at home and later went to the hospital, where she eventually passed away. Her mother had many flaws indeed, but she never did any physical harm to Jean.
Saratoga ended up being MGM’s most successful film of 1937, released less than two months after Jean Harlow’s death, on July 23. The studio planned to replace Harlow with another actress, either Jean Arthur or Virginia Bruce, but after public objections the film was finished using stand-ins. Mary Dees, the main double for close-ups, is seen only facing away from the camera. Geraldine Dvorak was used for long shots and Paula Winslowe for dubbing Harlow’s lines. In the end many scenes were rewritten without Harlow’s character.
EPILOGE: THE LEGACY, REFLECTIONS AND POP CULTURE
“Her technique was the gangster’s technique — she toted a breast like a man totes a gun.”
Graham Greene
She was immortalized not only on film, but also in music, painting and much more. Her hair was gold, “Harlow gold”, Kim Carnes sang in the hit song Bette Davis eyes in the 80s. And Jean Harlow is one of the many stars Madonna mentions in her iconic 1990 song Vogue — “Harlow, Jean, Picture of a beauty queen”. Blues musician Lead Belly wrote the song “Jean Harlow” while in prison upon hearing about her death in 1937. Also in 1937 French composer Charles Koechlin wrote the piece Épitaphe de Jean Harlow (opus 164). And in 1977, forty years later, the R&B singer Charlene song “I’ve Never Been to Me” mentioned Harlow in the lyric: “I moved like Harlow in Monte Carlo and showed ’em what I got”.
After her death, still in 1937, the artist Tino Costa painted a portrait of her and named it Farewell to Earth, commissioned by Mama Jean. However at some point the oil painting got lost, only to be discovered in 2016 in an attic of a house in the mid-west of United States. The painting was probably inherited by a Harlow relative but would stay forgotten in an attic for decades. Finally, with proper care, Farewell to Earth was sold at an auction that same year.
Yes, one could say she was a girl who had everything. But nobody needs everything — like Marilyn, she was loved by most people in her heyday, but in the end she walked alone. To this day she is still a victim of misogyny and prejudice, like many other women before and after. A voluptuous woman outside, but still a helpless child inside. More than having a gorgeous body, she had a soul, though some people are still unable to see it. Her mother may have loved her, but in such a toxic manner that turned out to shatter both of their lives. One could also say that Mama Jean ruined her daughter’s life. She had her fair share of blame all right, but in the end she was just a mother who lost her baby girl, and decades later died all alone, pathetically existing in oblivion, mumbling to herself until her last day longing for “her baby”.
In conclusion, I believe Jean was beautiful inside and out and had a good soul. She was not a parody of herself. Fame never changed her down-to-earth way of life; people who knew her best always described her as fun, smart, kind, gentle and giving, even fierce sometimes, though at the same time she was shy, highly sensitive, dependent and somewhat childish in her private life. Many thought she actually looked like a child without her make-up on. However, we have to remember Jean was so young, had everything at an early age and then was gone too soon — once more a “too much, too soon” Hollywood story.
She was fragile but at the same time she was strong enough to stand up to the studio and defend her friends from MGM’s tyranny; she worked hard to become a better actress through her comet-like career. Still very young, she was able to overcome numerous disappointments, hard times and tragedies. Some would argue that she has no classics in her filmograph, which is partly true in a way… She was more famous for being famous and probably one of the first “celebrities” from Hollywood, like years later Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor would be. But still, in only nine years she left her mark. She was a pioneer in many ways, even if not conscious of that: not only for her hair color, but especially for bringing feminine sexiness to the mostly sexless movie screen of the time, in a way no actress had done until then, and many actress — women, in general — would be inspired by her later on. She was not afraid of being herself. While most stars tried to live up to their movie personas, she wanted mostly to be apart from the bombshell mania. On one hand, her mother insisted to make her a star, and the star system helped create the star. On the other hand, she was an original and natural. She had the same power that Garbo and Marilyn had: the camera loved her, and so do movie audiences to this day. She resented the tramp roles she was used to getting, but later she proved that she could act and play more serious roles. Maybe she could have achieved much more as an actress, and certainly as a person… Anyhow, what she really wanted in the first place was to be in love and be happy. Her life was short but she tried to live it to the fullest.
One day, we hope all women will be treated decently and respectfully, not having to struggle so much as Harlow did in her time to feel validated by the people around her.
Her final days and many moments of her life were sad indeed, but they were not her end, nor did they define her. Like a child, she enjoyed life in her own way and believed in love, in a simple life out of Hollywood and apart from superficiality. She is still with us in spirit, very much alive on the silver screen and in our hearts. Afterlife, she certainly rediscovered her true self, without having to be Jean Harlow or meet expectations of others.
Jean Harlow. Gone but never forgotten. I hope this piece of writing has been able to make justice to her and able to prevent her legacy from fading away.
I hope her spirit found peace elsewhere; the peace she could not find on Earth. I believe she did find it in the end and now rests in peace.
Blessings and much love,
Always —
Pedro Dantas
September 2021
The main source of this text was David Stenn’s biography Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, which is highly recommended to anyone who is interested in Jean Harlow’s life and career, Classic Hollywood stuff, the first half of Twentieth Century, or biographies in general. Some other Hollywood stars who knew Jean personally added a lot to my research with bits and pieces about Jean from their biography books, such as Myrna Loy (Being and Becoming), Marie Dressler (My Own Story), Tallulah Bankhead (Tallulah, my autobiography), Rosalind Russell (Life is a Banquet) and Mary Astor (My Story; A Life on Film). I mentioned Barry Paris’ biography on Louise Brooks as well.
I would also like to thank Harlow Heaven, Comet Over Hollywood, Phyllis Loves Classic Movies, Collecting Classic Hollywood and TheRetroSet — I found some nice curiosities and rare shots of Jean on these blogs/websites :)
Thank you for reading! :-)
