Jean Harlow: she just wanted to be happy (16 photos)

Somehow it so happened that Marilyn Monroe is considered to be the queen of platinum blondes in Hollywood. But she was not the first... Moreover, it was this woman who became an inspiration for Monroe. The woman who shouldn't have become an actress.





On March 3, 1911, a girl, Harleen Harlow Carpenter, was born in Kansas City. The baby's father was a successful dentist, and her mother was from the family of a wealthy stock broker. Simply put, the family did not suffer from lack of money and they lived in a huge family house.

At the age of five, Harleen suffered from meningitis, which affected her entire future life - she became fragile and susceptible to various diseases. On top of that, at the age of 14 the girl also suffered from scarlet fever. In the family the girl was called only Kroshka and only Kroshka. She learned that her name was Harleen only at the age of five, when she went to school.



During adolescence

When Kroshka was 11 years old, her parents divorced. Baby's mother, Jean Po (Harlow's maiden name), picked up her daughter and immediately set off to conquer Hollywood. She herself once dreamed of becoming an actress, but it didn’t work out for her. And she decided that it was her Baby who would fulfill her mother’s dream. In general, she always planned to make her daughter an actress, and for this, from almost three years old, she lightened her hair with a mixture of ammonia and detergents. The mother molded her daughter into what she needed, and the meek and depressed girl did not particularly resist. The separation of Baby and her mother did not occur until the very end of her life.





Photo with mother

At the age of 16, Tiny, who had practically no will of her own, married 20-year-old Charles McGrew. He was the first to try to distance Tiny a little from her controlling mother. Mother, of course, was not happy with such a hasty marriage of her daughter, but what can you do, since there is such love. Charles went with his young wife to Los Angeles and there she was able to attend her first auditions. Tiny signed up under her mother's name, Jean Harlow. And so a new Hollywood star was born.



The mother, meanwhile, did not leave her daughter at any stage. It was she who later answered most of the letters from fans and signed photographs for her daughter. Jean fanatically adored her mother, who inspired her that Tiny owed everything to her mother, and especially with her career as an actress. Harlow constantly talked about her mother, constantly showered her with gratitude, and her mother in an interview called Jean “my everything,” as if her daughter was her property, and not a separate person.



With Mother

Jean made her debut in 1928, after going to a casting call on a bet. Her roles were very small, and she agreed to the very first one under pressure from her mother. These were such insignificant episodes that her name was not even always included in the credits.

A year later, Harlow divorced Charles (due to the constant presence of a toxic and intrusive mother in the young people’s lives) and soon met a director named Howard Hughes. He wanted to film an already dubbed version of Hell's Angels, and so, in 1930, Jean Harlow became a star.



"She wanted to be a rebel on her own, but she didn't have the courage to go against her mother" - one of Jean's friends

Of course, in those days, no one was interested in what Harlow thought, how he lived and how he felt. She became not just a beautiful and sexy blonde, but also a “silly cute blonde.” Critics have repeatedly criticized Harlow's image. Hughes tried several times to get her to perform in public to drum up interest in the films, but Jean did not like crowds and did not understand how to deal with an audience of mostly men staring at her breasts and thighs. And she was very intelligent and between takes you could usually find her with a book in her hands.



Several films a year and almost all of them were successful - “Goldie”, “Iron Man”, “Platinum Blonde” - people rushed to the cinemas. People admired the blonde on the screen, Hughes increased his capital, and Harlow... She started an affair with producer Paul Byrne.

Howard, by the way, opened “Platinum Blonde” clubs all over America in honor of his wife, and also promised a reward of 10 thousand dollars to the hairdresser who could create dye the same shade as Harlow’s hair. But no one warned that Jean had practically no hair left from years of using ammonia, making it brittle and weak. Her hair was bleached twice a week and the actress suffered from severe migraines because of this.



Paul Byrne and Jean

Byrne approached MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) to buy Jean's contract from Hughes. Jean calmly continued filming, Paul hurried to propose to his platinum blonde, and on July 2, 1932, the couple got married.

And it seems like this is it: those same credits against the backdrop of a happy kissing couple. But on September 5, Paul Bern shot himself, leaving a rather strange suicide note:



“Darling. Unfortunately, this is the only way I can undo all the bad things I’ve done to you and erase the traces of my terrible humiliation. You yourself understand, last night was nothing more than a comedy. I love you. Paul.”

The police who arrived at the scene questioned Jean and the young widow said that she did not notice anything strange and could not imagine why her husband could do this to himself. On the evening of the tragedy, after dinner she went to spend the night with her mother. There were rumors about a certain Dorothy Miller, who was allegedly kept by Paul, but everything remained unclear. And during the autopsy of the body, it allegedly turned out that Bern had some kind of injury that prevented him from leading a full sex life. The official version of suicide is the impotence of 42-year-old Bern, which Jean sharply denied. It was Bern who was the only one who saw in his wife not a stupid Hollywood blonde and a gold mine, but a person, a woman, and the death of her husband simply crushed her. She remained silent about him until the end of her days and never expressed an opinion about the reason for Paul's suicide.

She returned to filming 10 days after the funeral.



And a series of scandals began in the life of Little Harlow. Interest in her soared even more due to the scandalousness. Having started a relationship with married boxer Max Baer, ​​she found herself under the threat of the boxer's divorce proceedings, because his wife was, to put it mildly, dissatisfied with both her and her husband. MGM management immediately made a fictitious marriage to the company's full-time cameraman. This marriage lasted 8 months, and then they quietly divorced.

Films with the actress continued to be released, and “Slandered” and “Susie” were nominated for an Oscar. Jean, after all the troubles that befell her, began to drink, unable to cope with the suppressed anger at her mother, with the fact that the actress could not think or say anything with which she did not agree.



"She didn't want to be famous. She wanted to be happy." Clark Gable

Despite all the ups and downs, they loved her. She was generally very friendly with Clark Gable, they starred in four films together and he always supported her. Despite the profession imposed on her by her mother, she honestly tried to improve her acting and gave 100% on the set. She worked to, firstly, finally become a star, so that her beloved tyrant mother would be happy, and secondly, to save money and finally leave Hollywood. The baby wanted to finally find her family happiness, have children... Yes, just to be loved honestly, and not as a beautiful picture, an accessory, or whatever else men, MGM (dictating to her who she could marry), perceived her. lovers and her own mother, prying into everything Harlow does. The girl gave away her unrealized motherhood to pets. And alcohol... Harlow drank a lot for the last year of her life.



Jean with his mother. 1934

Little Jean had not been in good health since childhood, and when at the beginning of 1937 she fell ill with the common flu, it greatly weakened her body. It weakened so much that serious kidney problems began.

And not only with them. Due to the removal of her wisdom teeth, she developed sepsis. Harlow was able to recover only after two months. And she immediately appeared on the cover of Life, becoming the first actress to appear there.



In the summer of the same year, during the filming of the film Saratoga, Jean was taken to the hospital straight from the set.

Prior to this, Harlow had been complaining of nausea, fatigue, and abdominal pain for several months. She became puffy, her skin turned gray and no amount of makeup could hide it. But neither MGM nor her mother paid any attention to the actress’s condition, but on June 2, the doctor diagnosed her with gallbladder inflammation. At this time, the mother sang in the ears of MGM that her daughter was about to return to the set. He will be back on June 7th. Clark Gable said that when he visited his girlfriend in the hospital, he noticed that she was even more “bloated” and that her breath smelled of urine. Both of these factors indicated kidney failure. Gable could hardly restrain himself, but he was truly morally killed by the condition of one of the most beautiful and kind actresses in Hollywood.



"The old axiom says that the more we put into life, the more we get out of it. I have experienced great misfortune, even bitter tragedy. But I believe that the future will be much kinder. Almost everything equalizes in the long run. I hope to find philosophical peace happiness that will lead to complete satisfaction. I don’t believe that I’m asking too much of life to hope for that, do I?” Jean Harlow

Jean Harlow stopped struggling. She no longer wanted anything, she had nothing to live for. Her last man treated her meanly, betraying her feelings. Jean was devastated and did not even want to try to cope with the disease. After an autopsy by an independent doctor, it was clear that Jean had kidney failure and died of cerebral edema. It's all here: from scarlet fever suffered in her late teens to alcohol, which she has been abusing lately. The medicine of those years was significantly different from today’s, and most likely, Jean could have been saved in our time.

It's a sad irony, but Harlow died on June 7th. On the day that her mother named, saying that it was then that her Baby would return to work.



MGM management, even after death, could not hear their millionth star. Jean always said that she wanted a very ordinary funeral, without pomp and crowds. But the film studio turned them into some kind of sad circus and pathos.

And one of the studio employees later said:

"We weren't just people on her set," said one crew member, "we were real people to her. If you were sick, she was the first to notice. The first to send flowers. Harlow considered her co-stars friends and always cared about them. She even fought against injustice within the studio, organizing wage strikes and giving ultimatums to studio bosses, such as: “Either they [the crew] get a coffee break or I won’t work.”