The Original Blonde

A HUNDRED YEARS AFTER THE BIRTH OF THE BLONDE BOMBSHELL

WE LOOK AT WHY WE ARE FASCINATED BY THESE FAIR-TRESSED SIRENS

M Harlow, who

tflfliA'l would have L/\3(A/L/ celebrated her 100th birth­day this year, was so original a sex god­dess that she invented a whole new style in cinematic seduction. When Harlow burst onto the Hollywood scene in the early 1930s, there had been vamps and sirens and floozies and hussies and slatterns and It girls and nice girls next door. But there had never been a bombshell. As the word implies, being a bombshell meant that you detonated. Harlow was certainly that kind of ordnance. She didn't just appear on-screen, she exploded. Nov­elist Graham Greene wrote, "She toted a breast like a man totes a gun." She was brassy, sassy, no-nonsense, tough, self-possessed, carefree, wildly extro­verted and, of course, buxom. Her hair was the color of platinum, her skin the color of alabaster. Though she was a tiny woman, there was always something outsize about her, a sex­ual too-muchness that made her the perfect antidote to the parsimony of the Great Depression. Other actresses frowned. Harlow always wore a giant smile to signal just how much fun she was having. Inevitably, Harlow's style became a national style. Women per-oxided their hair and painted their lips in a Cupid's bow the way Harlow did so they could not only look like Har­low but attempt to be like Harlow. She was a force untamed.

What made Harlow original wasn't the type of dame she played. Marlene Dietrich once described her as a "tart

with a heart," and her basic persona was the familiar one of a cynical, hard-boiled broad on the outside hiding a sentimental, decent girl on the inside. Her originality was in her attitude—in the way she flaunted herself as her own aesthetic object. Her characters are not only outre, they cultivate that quality. They luxuriate in it. They are highly conscious of the effect it has, especially on men. In some ways it makes Har-low the first postmodernist sex symbol. One part of her, the mental part, was always measuring the other part of her, the physical part. No sex symbol has ever been as brainily self-aware.

That physicality was also like no other actress's before her. If Harlow on­screen seemed to be loose figuratively, a good-time girl who threw herself at men, she was also loose literally. Where her major screen rivals, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and Bette Davis, were all thin, hard, bony and aristocratic, Harlow was soft and uncorseted—the kind of woman a man wanted to squeeze and bury himself in. Her softness was accentuated by the silky gowns she often wore draped lightly over her luscious body so you could see the contours underneath. This wasn't sex by suggestion; this was the real thing. The fact that Harlow never wore a brassiere was almost as much a trademark as her hair. When she moved, she jiggled—not just her ample breasts but her whole being. It was as if, in freeing herself from her undergarments, she had also freed herself from the restraints of her age.

Harlow's (continued on page 181)

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(continued from page 84) flouncy freedom made a lasting impression, one of the most iconic of Hollywood, and it is all the more remarkable when we consider how young she was and how short her career was. She was born Harlean Carpenter in Kansas City, Missouri to an erstwhile-dentist father and an overbearing, social-climbing mother whose family had come into wealth through real estate. The mother, named Jean, had acting aspirations herself. She divorced the dentist and took her daughter to Hollywood. When her career didn't pan out, she slunk back East. It was that summer, while dining at the Sherman House hotel in Chicago between trains, after Jean had picked Harlean up from camp, that they met an ambitious con man named Marino Bello, who was so smitten with Mama Jean that he got a divorce and married her. Mean­while, Jean enrolled Harlean in boarding school in Lake Forest, Illinois, where a class­mate introduced her to a young man whose parents had died in a boating accident, leav­ing him their fortune. The two decided to elope. Harlean was only 16. Both couples then headed back to California.

Despite the fact that she was already fetching, Harlean had no Hollywood ambitions. She was happy to be a teenage housewife. But as the story goes, she was hosting a luncheon for some friends when one of them said she had to leave for an appointment with a casting director at Fox Studios. Harlean offered to drive her, and naturally she caught the casting director's eye. He gave her a letter of introduction to the Central Casting Bureau, which hired extras. Harlean filed it away until another friend dared her to go. She took the dare, signing the register as 'Jean Harlow," her mother's maiden name, and thus began her film career.

It wasn't much of a career at first. She was just an extra, but she was a noticeable extra. Eventually producer Hal Roach signed her to a five-year contract, mainly playing eye candy in two-reel comedies. While working as an extra in a ballroom scene in a fea­ture comedy, she came to the attention of actor James Hall. Hall invited her to shoot a screen test for his next picture, a World War I epic titled Hell's Angels that young millionaire Howard Hughes was produc­ing and directing. Hughes had begun the film as a silent with Norwegian actress Greta Nissen in the female lead, but when he decided to convert it to a talkie, he needed an English-speaking actress to replace her. Hence Harlow's screen test. Hughes gave her the part and a contract.

You could say the rest is history, except it wasn't. Harlow got brutal reviews playing the trampy girlfriend of a British flier in the picture. And though she was certainly an eye magnet, critics ridiculed her acting abili­ties in movie after movie, even as her roles grew. "It is unfortunate that Jean Harlow, whose virtues as an actress are limited to her blonde beauty, has to carry a good share of the picture," said one critic of her perfor­mance in Iron Man. "The acting throughout is interesting, with the exception of Jean

Harlow," opined the New York Times critic of her performance in The Public Enemy. "Miss Harlow, as the society girl, is competent but not much more," wrote another critic of her performance in Platinum Blonde. This was the consensus. Perhaps no other major star had been flagellated by the critics as much as and for as long as Harlow was. It was almost as if they resented her man-taunting routine—or at least the obviousness of it. That may have been because Harlow hadn't evolved into Harlow yet. She hadn't learned how to make that routine her own.

The tide began to turn when MGM, the biggest and most glamorous of studios, pur­chased her contract from Hughes and cast her as a wanton working girl who seduces her rich boss into marrying her in Red-Headed Woman, made under the supervision of production wunderkind Irving Thalberg. Part of the critical reversal may have been the change in hair color so that Harlow couldn't be accused of acting with her perm. But a larger part of it was almost certainly the abandon with which she approached the role—the scale of her performance. Har­low finally gave a performance large enough to match the extremes of her sexy appear­ance. She wasn't acting to type as she had in her earlier pictures; she was creating a new type: a woman with a liberating lust and appetite and a certain degree of cal­culation about how to use them. She was a happy conniver.

The tide turned further when MGM paired her with one of its biggest male stars, Clark Gable, in Red Dust. The two had appeared together in a crime melodrama, The Secret Six, when both were bit players, but stardom liberated them, made them bigger, match­ing Gable's hyperbolic male with Harlow's hyperbolic female. Their screen romance is based not on great professions of love or treacly sentiments but on mutual toughness, on a lack of conventional romance. They are both hard-bitten cynics, people who have been around the block and know the score,

and their relationship is a battle of wills that in some ways helped reinvent the whole idea of love. For them, love isn't lofty. It is both primal and practical—a deal.

These MGM pictures softened the critical whippings Harlow had received, but what catapulted her into the first rank of stars was a discovery she made early on, one that the studios were slow to recognize. Harlow knew she wasn't a great dramatic actress. She real­ized as well that playing gun molls, tramps and hookers was a dead end. More to the point, she understood how ridiculous the exaggerated sexuality she projected was— from the hair to the makeup to the gowns to the lipstick. She realized that the lusty, wisecracking girl she typically played wasn't a tragic figure but a comic one and that she herself was basically a comedienne who appreciated just how much fun (and how funny) sex could be. As Time wrote in 1934, "Instead of becoming Hollywood's number one siren, she has become its number one comedienne." In truth, she was both.

Mae West had already made the same dis­covery about sex and humor, turning herself into a parody of the man-eating woman. The difference between West and Harlow was not only one of degree—Harlow was soft and accessible, while West was like a fortress— but also one of self-consciousness. West was a joke, and her movies were basically occasions for her to make wry, suggestive comments, mutter innuendos and issue ripostes. They are cold because West shows us only one side of herself. Harlow was less a joke than she was jokey. Her movies, though not nec­essarily any funnier than West's, are more human and even occasionally touching because Harlow had that self-regard—that postmodernist ability to stand back and view her own image—that West didn't have. West was all one thing: a sexual omnivore. Har­low was several things at once, not least a body and a brain.

Harlow wasn't just a simple floozy. As she moved more deeply into comedy,

contradictions emerged in her screen per­sona, many of them having sprung from her own life. She was both a sophisticate and an innocent, both cagey and obtuse, both hard-boiled and tenderhearted. All these qualities no doubt contributed to her appeal, since they gave her a breadth few previous sex symbols had. But the biggest of these con­tradictions may have been the one between woman and child. For all intents and pur­poses, Harlow was a child. She was still in her early 20s when she began to achieve stardom, and in some ways she was even younger than her years. Her mother had called her Baby from birth and continued to use the nickname even as Harlow ascended Hollywood's ranks (in fact, everyone in Hol­lywood called her the Baby). She also treated Harlow as if she were a baby, forcing Harlow to live with her and managing her business affairs along with Bello, a sharpie who never saw an angle he didn't want to exploit.

The great irony of America's greatest sex symbol of the time is that she might have preferred her mother's company to that of her husbands and lovers. Mama wrecked Harlow's first marriage to the young heir with whom she had eloped as a teenager, forcing her to get an abortion for fear that a baby would ruin her career. She later forced her daughter to get a divorce. Mama dis­approved of Harlow's second marriage, to MGM producer Paul Bern, a man 21 years Harlow's senior. When Bern died of a gunshot wound—either suicide or murder— Harlow returned to Mama. Mama effectively destroyed Harlow's third marriage too, to cinematographer Harold Rosson, even demanding that he sign a postnuptial agree­ment. Observing the family dynamic when Mama and her husband visited the set as he directed Harlow in Platinum Blonde, Frank Capra said, "I could tell the whole story right there. She was dominated. She wanted her mother, she loved her mother and she wanted to be near her mother." In short, Harlow had a lot of men, but no man could have her. She belonged to Mama alone.

This wasn't just a personal peculiarity. Har­low managed to incorporate her infantilism into her work. On-screen as well as off, she was a beautiful, vivacious, randy woman—but also an emotional child prone to demands, outbursts and tantrums. Her characters kept oscillating between the two. Similarly, her on-screen lovers seemed to be torn between wanting to bed her and wanting to take care of her. That way Harlow covered both bases. And in doing so, just as she led the way in creating the bombshell and the unroman-tic romance, she led the way in creating the child-woman too. Marilyn Monroe (who so admired Harlow that she got Harlow's hair­dresser to dye her locks platinum), Jayne Mansfield, Barbara Nichols, Goldie Hawn and scores of other blondes owed a debt to Harlow as they played the child-woman bit, though most of them did so less tempestu­ously than Harlow did.

But it was a tough image to maintain, this larger-than-life sexual predator who was also something of a babe, and Harlow herself was ambivalent about it. There were times she seemed to encourage the conflation of woman and persona. Like her characters, she had numerous affairs and not always

with the most savory of men. Among her conquests was the notorious gangster Abner "Longy" Zwillman, whom, according to one account, she had met alongside Al Capone. She also bedded director Howard Hawks, writer Thomas Wolfe and boxer Max Baer. Her best and most diligent biographer, David Stenn, says that she suffered from venereal disease, and another biographer claims that she gaily revealed her vagina to reporters to show that her pubic hair had also been dyed platinum, and that once, in despair, she walked the streets, trying to pick up men. She also liked to cozy up with a bottle of Graves gin. And beyond the romances, the alleged promiscuity and the boozing, the mysterious death of her second husband, Paul Bern, dragged her into scan­dal and real-life melodrama and made her seem more like her screen persona.

By the same token, she often lamented that she was constantly being confused for the characters she played and practically begged the studio to give her a role as a good girl for once—a role, as she put it, "in

which I wouldn't have to speak bad English and slink up to 'my man.'" She complained that she spent so much time developing her characters on-screen that she never had time to develop herself. "If I could put on the Harlow personality like a mask while I was working and take it off when the day was done," she said, "that would be heaven. I can't ever be myself." In reality Harlow was well-read and well-spoken and had even written a novel. This was the intellectual Harlow—the brainy screen superego who regarded and sometimes manipulated the Harlow id. All too often, though, the super­ego seemed to be subordinated to that id.

Harlow wasn't the only one protesting her image. The forces of censorship were none too happy with the loose, liberated, sexy, uninhibited Harlow. In 1934, when they successfully pressured the studios to enforce a production code that legislated screen behavior, Harlow was a primary tar­get. She complied—gladly, she said. Part of the makeover was getting rid of her plati­num hair. "I've always hated my hair," she

proclaimed, "not only because it limited me as an actress but because it limited me as a person." Another time she said, "I'm tired of playing second to a head of hair," and the platinum blonde became a "brownette." She was less flouncy too, her great uncorseted wardrobe replaced by dresses that covered more than they exposed. If she had begun her career tumbling out of the era, she was now being held in. It was more than a pro­fessional strategy to appease the censors; it seemed to be a way for Harlow to get back to herself—to rediscover the woman she believed was hidden under the old image.

But try as she might to change it, that image continued to haunt her. It haunted her when she began a long romance with the suave star William Powell, who had recently been divorced from another sexy comedi­enne, Carole Lombard. Harlow confessed she loved Powell, and he, for his part, kept squiring her, but he also refused to marry her, because, he said, Hollywood marriages didn't work. He had Harlow's own record to prove it. Brownette hair and cotton dresses notwithstanding, the bombshell couldn't domesticate herself enough for Powell.

But the image had an even more dire consequence. In the end she may have died because of the expectations with which it burdened her. It was clear while she was making Saratoga with Clark Gable that she was feeling fatigued and out of sorts. She even collapsed on the set. One suspects that had this been fragile Greta Garbo, the studio would have hospitalized her immediately and halted production on the film. But this was Harlow—young, bouncy, bawdy, wild, hard-bitten Jean Harlow. It was difficult to imagine Harlow being out of commission for long. She was too much of a life force for anything to repress her. But that wasn't the only reason she didn't get the proper ministrations. By one account, her personal doctor refused to tend to her because his wife was afraid he might succumb to Har­low's temptations. Instead he sent an older colleague, who misdiagnosed Harlow's con­dition and hydrated her when he should have been administering diuretics. Harlow was in renal failure, possibly the long-delayed result of damage to her kidneys during a bout of scarlet fever in 1925 that was followed by a severe infection. By the time she was transferred to Good Samari­tan Hospital, the prognosis was hopeless. She died the morning of June 7, 1937. She was just 26 years old.

It was a short life and a short career with some fabulous movies. Those are clearly her legacies, but she left another legacy too, a cultural one. It was in how she helped shape romance and sexuality for generations to come. In inventing the blonde bombshell, Harlow practically invented the idea that sexuality could be big, tough, daring and as outlandishly obvious as her whitish hair and slinky gowns. And that it could be very, very funny if you didn't take it too seriously. Harlow's bequest, then, is not just a glam­orous look but a whole sexual sensibility of ticklish joy that is so natural to us now that we assume it must have been that way all along. But it began with Jean Harlow.