The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (5 page)

JEAN HARLOW (Mar. 3, 1911–June 7, 1937)

HER FAME:
The reigning sex queen of

the 1930s, Jean Harlow played comedic

movie roles in which she was the platinum-blond floozy with a heart of gold,

a “combination good kid and slut.”

Among her best-known films are
Hell’s

Angels
,
Dinner at Eight
,
Public Enemy
,
Bombshell
, and
Red Dust
.

HER PERSON:
Jean was born Harlean

Carpenter in Kansas City, Mo. Her

mother divorced her dentist husband

and two years later married Marino

Bello, an Italian-American of uncertain

profession with shady gangster connections. Marino and “Mama Jean,” as she

Wedding photo of Jean Harlow, Paul Bern and friends
was called, managed Jean’s career and

leeched large sums of money from her. The family moved to Hollywood when Jean was a teenager, and her first important part was in
Hell’s Angels
, a fabulously expensive Howard Hughes production. Hughes coined the term

“platinum blond” for Harlow (her almost white hair was to become her greatest trademark) and had his costumer design the lowest-cut evening gown ever photographed for the screen. Jean, wearing very little to begin with, caused a sensation when she uttered the immortal line “Do you mind if I slip into something more comfortable?” The next step was to superstardom, although Mama Jean, Marino, and Jean’s friends still called her by her childhood nickname: “the Baby.”

SEX AND LOVE LIFE:
Stories about her amorous life range from one extreme to another: that Harlow was sex-crazed and promiscuous; that Harlow hated sex; that Harlow was a normal, healthy girl who just had bad luck with men. Probably a little of each is true.

One thing her biographers do agree on is that she had her first sexual experience at 16. Partly in order to escape from a girls’ boarding school in Illinois, she eloped with 21-year-old Charles McGrew, the son of a wealthy investment broker. She lied about her age and succeeded in getting married, but the newlyweds’ families separated the young bride and groom almost immediately. They probably never saw each other again, and a divorce was obtained in 1929. Jean remembered her first act of love as “messy” and not very satisfying.

She had no other lovers until she married her second husband, Paul Bern, in 1932. This was a highly unusual and much-gossiped-about courtship.

Bern was a small, mustachioed, almost weasely-looking man twice her age—

an odd choice for a woman who had her pick of the great Hollywood leading men. Most likely she was seeking a father figure and enjoyed the fact that Bern appeared to be interested in her mind rather than her body. He was suave, intellectual, and gentlemanly. He was also Irving Thalberg’s assistant at MGM, and was called Hollywood’s “little father confessor” because he loved to listen to other people’s problems. Before he married Jean, he had had an unusual arrangement with another girl. He had set the girl up in a Hollywood flat and visited her every afternoon. The girl would disrobe and lie naked on the bed while he read poetry to her. Then they would have tea and he would leave.

But the mystery of the Harlow-Bern liaison has still not been solved. The most famous story of the fateful wedding night and following weeks is this: After a happy wedding, the couple went to their home to consummate the union. Several hours later Jean’s agent, Arthur Landau, received a tearful phone call from his distraught client. He picked her up outside the house, and she revealed that a drunken Bern had beaten her with a cane, leaving long, ugly welts all over her snowy body. He had also bitten her thighs so savagely that they bled. Jean spent the remainder of her wedding night with the Landaus. Entering the house the next morning, Landau found Bern nude and weeping. He said to Landau, “Every man I know gets an erection just by talking about her. Arthur, didn’t I have the right to think Jean could help me at least that much?” Apparently Bern had the penis and testicles of an infant boy and was completely impotent. (A variation on the story was told by Jean’s maid, who quoted Bern as saying, “The Baby’s still a virgin.”) Whatever happened was not good, but they kept up appearances for the sake of Jean’s career. Finally, one night two months after the wedding Bern gained entry into Jean’s usually locked bedroom. He strode in wearing an enormous dildo, with huge testicles and a bulb which shot water out of the end of the artificial penis. Jean burst into hysterical laughter, and Bern pranced around the room sporting the giant phallus until the two of them removed it and flushed it down the toilet.

The next evening, probably while Jean was out (the sequence of events is fuzzy), the butler discovered Bern’s naked body sprawled before a full-length mirror. It was drenched in his wife’s favorite perfume, Mitsouko.

Bern had shot himself in the head with a .38 caliber pistol. The note he left gave the press a field day. It read: “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. You understand that last night was only a comedy.”

Three days later the body of a blond was found in the Sacramento River.

The suicide was Dorothy Milette, who had claimed to be Bern’s common-law wife before Jean had married him.

A distraught Jean turned to promiscuity—as self-punishment, to find out what sex was all about, and because she suddenly wanted to have a baby. She cut her hair very short (studio heads were furious when they found out), wore a black wig and sunglasses, and began to pick up men, starting with a salesman with whom she spent two nights in a sleazy hotel in San Bernardino. She met one of her pickups in front of a San Francisco movie theater showing
Red
Dust
, her latest film with Clark Gable. The man told her she resembled Jean Harlow and ought to go to Hollywood to try out for the job of standin or double. But Harlow could be choosy; when Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM studio, propositioned her, dangling a fur coat as bait, she turned him down. In any case, her attempts to get pregnant failed, and she eventually found out she was sterile.

The last of Jean’s “three marriages of inconvenience,” as she called them, was to Hal Rosson, a talented and successful cameraman. Rosson resembled Paul Bern and was 16 years older than Jean. The couple happily eloped in 1933, but the marriage lasted only eight months. No one knows why exactly, though it is speculated that Mama Jean and Marino’s interference led to the breakup. The complaints Jean filed for the divorce proceedings were ridiculous; for example, she charged that he was ruining her career by reading in bed until late at night, thus making her sleepy on the set.

Jean’s final affair was with actor William Powell, probably her one true love.

Like Bern he was intelligent and sauve, and he too resembled Bern physically.

Powell was 43 to Jean’s 24, and on the third anniversary of their first date he brought Jean a cake with a card saying, “To my three-year-old from her Daddy.”

They were probably engaged at the time of Jean’s sudden collapse at the age of

26. She quickly died of uremic poisoning because Mama Jean was a Christian Scientist and would not allow her to have medical help until it was too late.

It is believed that at her funeral Powell was the one who placed in her hand a single gardenia, her favorite flower, along with a note that read, “Good night, my dearest darling,” and that the empty plot next to Jean and her mother’s graves is reserved for him.

QUIRKS:
Harlow was the first actress in Hollywood to appear regularly in films without a bra; in fact, she rarely wore any underwear. Years before when a high school teacher reprimanded her for this, the 15-year-old replied, “I can’t breathe when I’m wearing a brassiere.” She also rubbed her nipples with ice to make them stand out for the camera, and dyed her pubic hair platinum to match the hair on her head.

HER THOUGHTS:
“My God, must I always wear a low-cut dress to be important?”

—A.W.

The Eye of the Day

MATA HARI (Aug. 7, 1876–Oct. 15, 1917)

HER FAME:
An exotic dancer famous

for her sensational nude performances,

Mata Hari was the toast of Europe in

the early years of the 20th century. In

squad for acting as a German spy during

WWI. Though her name now connotes

a treacherous and fascinating female

spy, it has never been proved that she was

in fact a double agent.

HER PERSON:
Eighteen-year-old

Gertrude Margareta Zelle, her convent

schooling over, answered an Amsterdam newspaper ad supposedly placed

by an army officer seeking a wife.

Actually it was a joke set up by one of

the officer’s friends. Nonetheless, the

officer, balding 39-year-old Rudolph

MacLeod, ended up marrying Margareta.

Mata Hari in costume for her Javanese dance

For the next two years they lived in Holland, where she bore their son, Norman. When MacLeod was reassigned to the Dutch East Indies, he took his family with him. There Margareta had another child, Jeanne; flirted with young officers and planters (arousing MacLeod’s jealousy); and watched Javanese temple dancers, who inspired her future career. MacLeod drank, was unfaithful, and beat her. At least once he threatened her with a loaded gun.

One story, probably legendary, states that their son was poisoned by a native soldier incensed over MacLeod’s seduction of his girl friend, the boy’s nurse.

Margareta later claimed that she strangled the poisoner—with her bare hands, of course.

The MacLeods returned to Holland and separated, and by 1904 Margareta was in Paris, without husband or child. “I thought that all women who ran away from their husbands went to Paris,” she said.

At her debut as a dancer, she met Émile Étienne Guimet, the owner of an Oriental art museum, where she soon gave an electrifying performance of Oriental dances, dressed in jeweled bra and see-through draperies in a setting of palms, bronze statues, and garlanded columns. Theater critic Édouard Lepage described her appearance in the hyperbole typical of the times: “supple like the unrolled serpent which is hypnotized by the snake charmer’s flute.

Her flexible body at times becomes one with the undulating flames, to stiffen suddenly in the middle of her contortions … with a brutal gesture, Mata Hari rips off her jewels … throws away the ornaments that cover her breasts. And, naked, her body seems to lengthen way up into the shadows! … she beats the air with her shattered arms, whips the imperturbable night with her long heavy hair.” (Some sources say that she never danced completely nude, but always concealed her breasts, which had been bitten and thus permanently disfigured by MacLeod.) By then, she had become Mata Hari (Malay for “eye of the day,” the sun), complete with story—that she was the child of a 14-year-old Indian temple dancer who had died giving birth; raised by temple priests who taught her dances sacred to the Hindu god Siva; danced nude for the first time at the age of 13 before the altar of a Hindu temple. She looked the part—tall, dark, strong-featured, with velvety eyes. Her career skyrocketed and she became a sensation in most of the major capitals of Europe. And she was a scandal; the directress of one of her performances went so far as to force her to wear a piece of red flannel, diaper-fashion, at her crotch.

The spy plot, true or not, began on the day WWI was declared and she rode through the streets of Berlin with a police official. It was all high drama: the bottles of invisible ink given her by the Germans (she threw them into a canal, she said); her German code number, H 21; her seduction of high German officials (for money, love, or secrets?); her agreement to spy for the French for the million francs she needed to impress the father of the love of her life, Vadime de Massloff, a Russian captain; her grandiose plans for manipulating noblemen through jealousy, greed, and lust; the French spies tailing her in Madrid, one disguised as an old man on a bicycle, and so on.