Monday Glamour Starter --- Jean Harlow --- Part One
Jean Harlow scares me when she shouts, and she shouts a lot. People have said Red-Headed Woman is a funny movie. I'm not one of them. To my mind, it’s the Fatal Attraction of the thirties. Harlow yells in Wallace Beery’s face throughout Dinner At Eight, and cheats on him besides with poor Edmund Lowe, whom she also berates. She’s up more decibels in Bombshell, and later stalks Gable in China Seas. When she crashes Spencer Tracy’s Libeled Lady office in her wedding gown, he and we are reaching for the earmuffs. None of this enhances her sex goddess standing in my mind, and though tastes vary, I wouldn’t recommend her to guys with low thresholds for assertive women. The fact she was anything but this sort offscreen adds to her legacy’s paradox, but how many actresses can boast of a husband allegedly committing suicide because he couldn’t satisfy her? The platinum hook cleared peroxide bottles off many a pharmacy counter, but when did a star hopeful last employ this gimmick? Mamie Van Doren, perhaps? If anything, it distances us from Harlow today. There’s something ghostly about that chalk white hair, with a pallor suggesting imminent collapse. Is it just our advantage in hindsight knowing how tragically things would turn out? Harlow had the misfortune of coming up during those final plague years before modern medicine developed treatments so easily applied to her maladies today. But for the absence of antibiotics, dialysis, and transplants, she might still be with us, a venerable icon of Hollywood’s Golden Age at ninety-five. I realize I’m out of the mainstream in thinking Harlow’s early work was her best. Andrew Sarris talks about inept line readings and an unconvincing British accent in Hell’s Angels. For my money, this is where she fully justifies the sex label. Her delivery is certainly no worse, and maybe a little better, than a lot of those celebrated names from early talkers, but who at Metro encouraged her to crank up the volume once she got there? Her neophyte performances are more relaxed and appealing to these tired old eyes.


You’d never think she came from money, but Jean rode many a pony cart in her youth, and was the apple of a privileged family’s eye. She contracted scarlet fever at summer camp when she was fifteen and that essentially sealed her fate, as kidney disease initiated a deadly ten-year plan that would go undiagnosed until its progress was way beyond reversal. The last days of silents found her adorning extra ranks, with the occasional rewarding bit. One look at Double Whoopee in 1929 and you knew she was going places. Clara Bow recognized the new line of It even as her own was approaching decline. Harlow’s merely background in The Saturday Night Kid, but commanded attention on those primitive sound stages, even if transition movies weren’t yet equipped to best exploit her. The Hell’s Angels momentum seemed likely to stall for those uncertain years Howard Hughes had her contract. Imagine a sensational debut followed by months of forced idleness. Hughes had neither the time to develop her, nor the inclination to let others do so. Profitable (for H.H.) loan-outs put her in two Metro law-and-order pics, The Secret Six and Beast Of The City. Both these are red meat thrillers, particularly the second, and that hair photographed strikingly. Too bad for Harlow, as the barbaric ritual necessary to maintain the unnatural look poisoned her scalp with horrific combinations of peroxide, ammonia, Clorox, and Lux flakes, these applied during weekly torture sessions at the hands of inaptly named "beauticians." Again I’m at odds with Sarris about another of her loaners, Columbia’s Platinum Blonde. If this is a stiff and stilted performance, then he and I must have been watching different movies. Frank Capra knew how to package her sex lure --- we’d most of us succumb as readily as leading man Robert Williams does here (a subdued Lee Tracy type --- how tragic he died so young). Hughes finally sold her to Metro, opening doors for the studied merchandising she’d needed all along. If you watch her first starring vehicle, Red-Headed Woman, from her character’s point-of-view, it’s a pre-code sex romp worthy of that outlaw reputation, but looking at it through Chester Morris’ beleaguered eyes, the thing plays like Olivier’s Carrie ordeal, with Jean’s shrieking harpy as opposed to Jennifer Jones’ softer temptation. Writer Anita Loos must have felt those men had it coming, because they sure bear the brunt of Harlow’s malevolent gold-digging here.




The suicide of second husband Paul Bern was either the worst calamity, or the best break, she ever got, depending on one’s personal/professional viewpoint. Marrying this guy, even for the career boost it promised, was adjudged sheer lunacy by those who knew both parties, as Bern was one of those still water run deep types. In his case, the water got plenty murky when it came down to secret common-law wives and a seemingly non-existent libido. Clear enough as to what Harlow expected of him, but what in the deuce did he want with her? The ultimate trophy bride, perhaps, but Bern appeared to have no intention of consummating the union, and insider talk was rampant. The studio build-up was well in progress anyway, so she needn’t have bothered. David Stenn’s definitive biography says the former "wife" crashed the gates one night and confronted the couple. The scandal that promised left Bern no alternative but to press a gun to his temple, Harlow downstairs all the while. A note he left fit nicely with a Byzantine cover story Metro publicists cooked up during the several hours they ruminated over the bloody corpse before calling police. Jean would be packaged as the unknowing siren for whom this impotent parody of manhood crashed upon the rocks over that terrible wrong he’d done her (his cryptic note having also ignited public imagination by referring to the previous night's events as only a comedy). Anxious days followed, but Harlow’s public stood fast, her standing actually enhanced in the aftermath. A pre-code peak was achieved with her next, Red Dust, one of a handful of titles best able to convey for modern audiences what the fuss among us Forbidden Hollywood devotees is all about.




Harlow’s ascendancy to stardom was firmly acknowledged by the Bombshell title casting and her character's identification as biggest name on the fictional Monarch lot. It took a player with real stature to be assigned a plum like this --- Harlow had indeed arrived. A tendency to brass things over the top begins to reveal itself here. Bombshell is less funny than frantic, and though Harlow’s effective at the lower registers, she’s too often drawn into rat-a-tat competition with seasoned co-stars Lee Tracy and Pat O’ Brien. When it comes to this kind of accelerated dialogue, she’s just not in their league. I hadn't mentioned the dominating hell-spawn of a mother that bled Jean white as her fabled hair. Mama Jean was universally despised among Harlow husbands, both actual and intended. Several marriages went on the shoals as a direct result of her meddling. Maniacally possessive, she was herself possessed by a gigolo scoundrel who curried favor with gangland overlords and introduced Jean into bad company. In this, the daughter’s judgment was no less impaired than the mother’s, as witness a romance of some duration with one Abner Zwillman, a mob confederate of notorious "Bugsy" Siegel. Prizefighter Max Baer was another conquest. His wife was all set to name Jean as co-respondent in her divorce action, until Metro got busy and arranged for Jean to propose marriage to a shocked and delighted Harold Rosson, her favorite studio cameraman. Hal must have thought he’d fallen into that proverbial field of four-leaf clovers, but their marriage lasted not even a year. Pretty cynical arrangement, and it would appear she was, at least on this occasion, less a passive victim than a willing participant in such studio machinations. Drat such nuance when we’re casting our rose-tinted romances of celluloid, but Harlow, like anyone in the business, did what it took to remain on top. She’d not be half so interesting otherwise. Whatever the compromises, Harlow didn’t have coming what happened to her within a few short years. Of all the exits any star ever took, this had to be one of the roughest.

Photo Captions

Jean Harlow with Laurel and Hardy in Double Whoopee
With Clara Bow and Jean Arthur in The Saturday Night Kid
In the Two-Color Technicolor sequence from Hell's Angels
With Edward Woods and James Cagney in The Public Enemy
With Warren Hymer and Spencer Tracy in Goldie
Color-Tinted Portrait Courtesy Tom Maroudas of Dream Pin-Ups
With Anita Loos on the set of Red-Headed Woman
With husband Paul Bern
Lobby Card from Platinum Blonde
MGM Publicity Photo
With Lee Tracy in Bombshell