Jean Harlow and Paul Bern's Death ..Still a Mystery

Paul Bern's suiciide note reads:" Dearest dear, unfortunately, this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humiliation."

"I love you, Paul."

With the Post Script:" You understand that last night was only a comedy." The meaning of the note and particularly the post script were never revealed by Jean Harlow even though it was obvious that she understood the message.

Jean with Paul Bern As you can see here Jean is starting to look ill and older than her 26 years

"Two years in the spotlight if you make it - and when that's over you're nothing but a has-been for the rest of your life"
These words could have been written for the flickering 'stars' of fickle 21st-century celebrity culture, a warning for all the wannabe Jades, Parises and Jordans attracted to the world of easy-come, easy-go fame.
It comes as a surprise, then, to learn that they were spoken 75 years ago - and by one of fame's greatest ever victims, the Hollywood sex goddess Jean Harlow.The original 'blonde bombshell', with peroxide platinum locks and a sassy face that sent men wild and women racing to their hairstylist to copy her look, is barely remembered now. Not one of the three dozen films she starred in would figure in even the most arcane cinema buff's top 100 list.

Yet there was an era when she fought for pole position on the world stage with legendary divas such as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Tallulah Bankhead, and outsparked them all for sheer nerve and sexiness. As a turn-on, she even 'out It-ed' the 'It-girl' herself, her silent-screen contemporary Clara Bow.A reviewer of one of her early films spotted exactly what 'it' was and that Harlow, as she wafted across the screen in a skimpy dress, had plenty of it. Her obvious lack of acting ability was immaterial, he decided. What mattered was that she had 'the most sensuous figure' seen in front of a camera for a long time. She was probably destined always to play the role of a man-eating trollop, he added, 'but nobody ever starved possessing what she's got.'

Her talent may have been tiny, but she made up for it with masses of front - in every sense. Brassy and brazen, she married early and often, consorted with gangsters, boxers, band-leaders and bisexuals and never, she maintained, ever wore panties or a bra, on or off screen. She was leched over by some of Hollywood's most famous producers - and hounded continually for her morals by affronted anti-indecency campaigners, who dubbed her 'the filthiest woman ever to have set foot in Hollywood'.

And at the age of 26, she was indeed a has-been, but in a different way from the prophecy she herself had mouthed when playing the part of yet another good-time girl in one of her films. There would be no being a nobody 'for the rest of your life' for Jean Harlow. She was dead. But what a life in the fast lane it had been - as a newly published biography of her reveals. Today's It-girls look shy and retiring by comparison, candles in the wind compared with Harlow's stupendous bonfire.

She epitomised the dark side of the Hollywood Babylon legend. Her mother was controlling to the point of madness and her stepfather a gun-toting pervert who climbed up ladders to spy on his naked, sleeping stepdaughter. She herself was often drunk, debauched and drawn to middle-aged men who let her down in bed and beat her black and blue, instead of giving her the love she craved. Not knowing any of this but transfixed and shocked by her daring presence on screen, the public adored her.

Her heyday was, as now, a time of economic recession. On the very day she signed her first film contract in October 1929, Wall Street crashed and America and the world slipped into recession and then depression. But, even as the dole queues lengthened, the soup kitchens multiplied and poverty stalked millions of lives, the antics of Hollywood's finest never faltered. The secrets of Tinseltown's immorality were concealed - and few of its inhabitants had more secrets worth concealing than Harlow.

She had been born, surprisingly, on the posh side of the tracks, in a mansion in Kansas City, with a well-off father and an ambitious but nutty mother who never called her by any name except Baby, even when she was a grown woman.'Mama Jean' had wanted to make it in Hollywood herself but was too old, and all her desire for fame was pitched on to her daughter. Mama even offered herself on the casting couch for the pleasure of randy directors and producers to pave the way for Baby. Not that Baby was a child any more after losing her virginity when just 14.

At 16, she was married, to a local rich boy, but it wouldn't last. Mother was propelling her into the lower reaches of Hollywood. There, the teenager's blue eyes, pouting lips and well-formed figure landed her various bit parts. In one of these, she was a well-heeled woman climbing out of a taxi and walking into a plush hotel. The doorman - played by Stan Laurel - was supposed to slam the taxi door shut, catching her ankle-length dress and ripping it off so she enters the hotel in just her slip. The gag was funny enough. But what was sensational was the revelation that Jean was a knicker-free zone. As the dress fell away, the powerful studio lights pierced through the slip and, to the delight of the crew, exposed the fact that it was not just the hair on her head that was bleached peroxide silver. She was never shy about proving the point and would often give reporters a quick flash to show that she was, as she put it, 'the same colour all over'. To some special fans, she sent a cut-off silver curl or two as a keepsake.

Crude though all this was, it was just the sort of thing that hypocritical Thirties Hollywood - all squeaky clean on the outside but grubby inside - loved. She built on this daring reputation by taking any opportunity to let her untethered breasts tumble out from her blouse, and enhanced their appearance by iceing her nipples so that they stood out prominently.

Throughout her soon-burgeoning career, she was infamous for stripping off on set in front of everyone. Other stars would slip behind a screen but, to wolf whistles, she shed every stitch in full view before calling for her dresser to bring out her working clothes. None of this ever emerged on screen as such, of course. It wouldn't have been allowed. But her sluttishness was soon her trademark and it brought in millions of box-office dollars for her unscrupulous studio bosses. (She herself did less well financially. She was consistently underpaid compared with other big stars.)

Her in-your-face sexuality was matched by a mouth that also took no prisoners. One-liners spewed out of her in an unforgettable snarl, sprinkled liberally with four-letter curses. But for all the tough-girl image she presented, she was a wreck underneath and exploited by almost everyone she ever came into contact with. The men in her life were almost without exception vile to her. The worst was her stepfather, Marino Bello, a Sicilian with gangster connections who used her as a meal-ticket and beat up both her and her mother. He pestered her for sex, milked her for money and, whenever she tried to escape from his clutches, he kept her in line by threatening to make public pornographic photographs of her from her teens.

Her second husband was MGM producer Paul Bern, who was twice her age, and by reputation a nice man. 'He likes me for my mind,' she told a disbelieving Press. 'He isn't pawing me all the time.'
But it turned out on the honeymoon that he wasn't pawing her because he couldn't. The word was that he had a genital abnormality and was a hermaphrodite -(The more accepted version was that his genitals were underdeveloped and small as a child's and he could not have intercourse). Jean was apparently unaware of his condition before the wedding. In his frustration, he would lash out brutally with his fists and, on their wedding night, beat Jean about the body and across the back with a walking stick.

Just two months later, Bern was dead, a bullet in his head, apparently by his own hand (there was a suicide note, seen above). The studio sent in its boys ahead of the police to clean up the scene and minimize the scandal, but they couldn't stop the rumour mill. What reason did he have to kill himself? Could it have been murder? Or was he ashamed of his deception of Jean? She remained very tight-lipped on the subject through all her remaining years.
Witnesses reported a mystery woman driving away from the house shortly before the body was found. Harlow was everyone's number one suspect for a while, though no action was ever taken against her. Biographer David Bret believes the odds are that Bern's death was indeed murder, not suicide, but he thinks Harlow was not the killer.

There were others in the frame - Bello, for one, whose control over his cash-cow stepdaughter was jeopardized by her marriage; or Bern's first wife, who nobody knew even existed but who turned up with a grievance just before his death. Harlow's response to the loss of husband number two was to go completely off the rails. The Hollywood star went out on the prowl, looking for sex. Dressed in tart's clothes, she kerb-crawled the red-light districts, offering to pay men to sleep with her.

A year after Bern's death, she married again - another older, balding middle-aged man. She gave an interview explaining that: 'He's no Apollo, but if you love a person the physical means nothing.' When she saw the words in print she was appalled at the implication. It was tantamount to admitting that the sex siren - the image on which her entire career was built - was not interested in sex.

There were more men, more unfulfilling affairs. She shared her bed with a handsome writer - but found she was sharing him too with his male lover, the beefcake actor and her co-star, Clark Gable. World heavyweight champion boxer Max Baer bedded her within hours of them meeting and then went back to his wife.
One of the few men to treat her decently was actor William Powell, or 'Poppy', as she called him, a nickname that spoke volumes about their relationship.
In the end, though, it was not a man who let her down and caused her death. Instead, it was her mother. Mama Jean was a member of the Christian Scientist sect, a believer in divine healing of human ailments. She opposed hospital treatment of any sort and insisted the same should go for Baby (though, oddly, she seems to have turned a blind eye to her daughter's three abortions).

But Jean was constantly prone to illness. Her eyes were wrecked by strong studio lights, forcing her into dark glasses. The peroxide she doused her scalp in shredded her hair. Bouts of flu and pneumonia laid her low. She had appendicitis and badly impacted wisdom teeth. But then a worse condition emerged - her internal organs were showing signs of serious wear.
It could have been the large amounts of gin she was downing that were to blame, and they certainly wouldn't have helped. It was also thought that the peroxide from her hair was working its way through her system. But author David Bret's view is that the beating she had taken from Bern's walking stick in 1932 had left permanent, long-term damage.
She was getting more and more back pain - ascribed by the doctors at the studio to a muscle strain from playing too much golf. Her general health was also going downhill.

In the spring of 1937, shortly after her 26th birthday, she arrived on the set of her latest film looking distinctly unwell. She was bloated, had piled on weight, was suffering from the shakes and having the occasional blackout. Her hair was also falling out. She managed to get through the next few weeks of shooting until, in one of the final scenes, the script called for Gable, her leading man, to pick her up. She went limp in his arms.

A doctor was called and smelled not gin on her breath as everyone expected but urine. It was a sign of a gall-bladder infection. But her mother refused the medical advice to take her to hospital. Mama Jean took her Baby home to rest and to be prayed over, and she took the phone off the hook so that no one could interfere and change her mind. Days later, when nothing had been heard from the Harlow household, an anxious Gable led a squad of studio heavies to force their way in. When they got to Jean's bedroom, they found her semi-conscious on the bed, extremely bloated and in great pain. The stench of urine from her breath was now overpowering.

Over Mama Jean's protests, a doctor was called and said immediate surgery was needed. But Mama Jean refused point blank and screamed blue murder at two nurses who were summoned to look after the patient. Another two days went by - now Jean was in real trouble. Mama Jean told the Press camped on her doorstep that her daughter was fine, but in reality her face was swollen, she could not swallow properly and her kidneys were starting to fail. Unless her gall-bladder was removed at once, she was going to die.

But still the deranged Mama Jean would not budge. Her daughter, she screamed, was faking the illness just to make a fool out of her religious beliefs, and to force the studio into giving her a pay rise. All would be well, she shrieked, if a quartet of Christian Science believers she had sent for sat at her bedside reading from the Bible. In the end it was William Powell who broke the deadlock. The lover she called 'Poppy' arrived with an ambulance and rescued the sick girl. In hospital, she was given blood transfusions and placed in an oxygen tent to recover enough strength for an operation. Mama Jean and Powell sat with her through the night, glaring at each other across the sickbed.

But it was too late. The next morning, she slipped into a coma, her lungs filled with fluid, and she slipped peacefully away. There is no doubt in Bret's mind that if the doctors had been allowed to do their job from the start, Jean Harlow, dead at 26, would have made old bones.
Like the best Hollywood legends, she lived fast and died young. But it is hard to resist the conclusion that she was a victim. So many people - most notably her mother - had tried to live their lives through hers, to manipulate and control her, all in the pursuit of fame. In the end, sadly, it was the death of her.