Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood

by Karina Longworth

  Harlow’s friends worried that she would never recover from the shock of her husband’s death, and the implication that his failure as a man that supposedly led to his suicide was a consequence of her failure as a woman. “If she had hated herself before,” St. Johns mused, “what must she have felt then?”

  She did not have much time to process any feelings. A few days later, Harlow was back at MGM, continuing to shoot Red Dust, a film in which she’d famously appear to be bathing naked in a barrel. The scene is the epitome of pre-Code bawdiness, and also an example of how even in this supposedly freer time, the limits on what could be said in plain language in a movie forced filmmakers to, well, code storytelling about female sexuality. Jean played Vantine, who, after running away from some kind of “trouble” (it’s heavily implied that she is or has been a sex worker), ends up on a rubber plantation in French Indochina run by Clark Gable, whose character begins the film openly hating women and frequently complaining about what a nuisance they are. (The ladies shouldn’t feel singled out: he’s also casually abusive and demeaning toward the natives who actually do the work on his plantation.) Gable’s Dennis succumbs to Vantine’s feminine wiles, but then a wealthy, classy couple arrive and Gable, who takes an interest in the wife (Mary Astor) while the husband is sick, becomes embarrassed that Jean is still hanging around. Vantine’s open-air bath seems to be her way of flaunting her sexual daring so as to antagonize her rival and draw Gable’s attention back to her. This scheme backfires: Gable’s reaction to finding Jean all soaped up in the barrel reveals that he finds her shameful and dirty (“You know we drink that water,” he says, with disgust in his voice), hammering home the distinction between Jean Harlow and Mary Astor, whose character Gable has already admiringly described as “decent”—and who is also a married woman whom the virile plantation manager is hoping to corrupt and lure into adultery with him. At the end of the scene, Gable pushes Harlow’s head underwater to punish and humiliate her—but she bounces right back, refusing to allow this man to shame and bury her.

  Though it will take Gable’s character the rest of the film to come around, this dunking and her resilience puts the audience in sympathy with Harlow, whose unwillingness to apologize for the kind of woman she is still resonates today—and which struck her costar as heartbreakingly inspirational on the day the scene was filmed. Watching Harlow play this scene, so soon after her husband died and her own sexual persona was all but labeled as the cause of death, Gable was in tears. “There’s the best gal that ever lived,” he marveled. “Every man on the set,” claimed St. Johns, “was weeping openly.”

  Chapter 8

  The Bombshell Implodes

  Six weeks after Paul Bern’s death, Red Dust was released and became a massive hit. In the middle of the Depression, the movie’s gross tripled what the film had cost to make and earned Jean Harlow the best reviews of her career to date, establishing Harlow and Gable as a gold-minting on-screen team in the process.

  Harlow was at the peak of her stardom, and in 1933 she would make her best film, Bombshell, a satire of a movie star not unlike Harlow. The crux of Bombshell is the love-hate relationship between Harlow’s Lola Burns and her publicist, a savvy snake played by Lee Tracy. The plot covers a couple of days in the life of mega-sex-symbol Lola, who grows tired of being exploited by the men in charge of her career, and milked dry by her army of hangers-on. After a series of misadventures, Lola flees Hollywood for a desert retreat, where she meets a pretentious millionaire (Franchot Tone), who says he has never heard of her. They fall in love, but soon headlines about Lola’s unsavory reputation reach the rich guy, and he calls their engagement off. With the one person who seemed to love Lola for “the right reasons” revealing himself to be as shallow as all the rest, Lola heads back to Hollywood, and does so happily—at least until she realizes that Tone’s character was an actor paid by her publicist to sour Lola on “real life” and get her to come back to work.

  All of this could be played as tragedy, and if the movie consistently empathized with Harlow as though she were a real person, it might be horribly sad instead of often riotously funny. But that was the magic of Harlow: her platinum exterior worked like Teflon, allowing her characters to roll through all kinds of potential humiliations or devastations without leaving a scratch on the glamour girl. In Bombshell, you love her and root for her in every scene, while also laughing at her. By the end of the film, we understand that Hollywood is the only place for a girl like Lola, who exists to give others the pleasure of looking at her and laughing at her—and who, through strategic in-jokes, we are meant to believe is essentially synonymous with Jean Harlow. The real hero of the movie becomes the smarmy publicist who brings her back to where she belonged all along. It’s a particularly layered and sophisticated example of a Hollywood film that ostensibly reveals the horrible inner machinations of the Hollywood system while also slyly shoring up the viewer’s fascination with, and devotion to, the products of that system.

  If made a year later, when the Code began to be more strictly enforced, Bombshell would have had to have been much more coy about its heroine’s sexual reputation, which would have dulled its appeal both as a comedy and as a meta-event about the real Jean Harlow. As it was, the film came along at the exact right moment, helping to establish the rapid-fire style that would become a signature of comedies of the decade. Its highly influential breakneck pacing was a necessity: in order to ensure that a 160-page script could produce a film of about ninety minutes, Victor Fleming directed scenes to play almost twice as quickly as usual. Harlow proved herself not only capable of performing lightning-fast, overlapping dialogue, but she did it without losing a touch of her physical allure. Subsequent screwball comedies would allow women dressed as sex goddesses to step off their pedestals and compete on the same level as men, via banter and one-upmanship and kooky physicality. In this genre, Harlow found her métier.

  Harlow and her team believed that Bombshell was her greatest triumph, and they weren’t wrong. But while Bombshell grossed twice what it cost to make, it wasn’t even Harlow’s biggest hit of that year—Dinner at Eight, in which she had a smaller but indelible part as the floozy wife of a boorish rich guy, had been a mega-blockbuster, ending the year as 1933’s seventh-highest-grossing film.

  In the interim between the releases of these huge hits, Harlow married cameraman Hal Rosson, who had worked on a number of her films, including Red-Headed Woman and Red Dust. The marriage appears to have been arranged by MGM in order to sanitize Harlow’s off-screen persona in the aftermath of the Bern suicide, and amid an affair Harlow was apparently having with boxer Max Baer, who had a wife of his own. Harlow and Rosson were married for about seven months, much of which they spent apart. Three weeks after the wedding, Harlow was rushed to the hospital to have an emergency appendectomy. After two weeks in the hospital, Harlow’s mother insisted that instead of returning to her husband, the Baby should continue her convalescence at her mother’s house. Harlow never moved back in with Rosson. The charade of their marriage legally and publicly ended after a year.

  Moviegoers didn’t know the messy details—indeed, as far as the public was concerned, Harlow had overcome the tragic death of her husband, and she was stronger than ever. Certainly, by the time Bombshell was released in the fall of 1933, Harlow was the biggest female star at MGM, if not in Hollywood on the whole.

  No wonder MGM’s competitors went looking for blond bombshells of their own. In August 1933, weeks after Dinner at Eight opened, fifteen-year-old Ida Lupino arrived in Los Angeles to sign a contract with Paramount, who had seized on the pint-size bleached blonde as a potential British Jean Harlow. She was a little young for a sex goddess, but that could be fixed. As she walked into her first press conference, a publicist whispered in her ear, “Now you are 16.”

  Lupino had been working since she was twelve. The daughter of silent film comic Stanley Lupino and tap dancer Connie, the child had talked her way into her screen debut, a walk-on in one of her fathe
r’s films, and soon thereafter convinced her parents to let her quit school. Her first big movie role, in an Allan Dwan film called Her First Affaire, was that of a nymphet besotted with an older man. Dwan’s film became such a showcase for the budding star that Lupino’s name was billed above the title. She plays a young blond strumpet obsessed with the author of Fires of Impulse, a new romance novel that has given her new ideas about new women. “Marriage is a little old-fashioned, isn’t it?” Lupino’s character asks her young boyfriend. “You approve of convention, of course. A man can be free but a woman must be chained.” Her boyfriend is so annoyed by this spouting of feminist rhetoric that he agrees to introduce her to the author, assuming the bloom will be off the rose once she meets him. Instead she works her way into the author’s household and refuses to leave, much to the bemusement and then concern of his wife. The movie’s ultimate attitude toward the social-order-shaking ideas within it are summed up when a woman of grandmother age mockingly refers to Lupino’s character as a “modern vampire.”

  Of course, there would always be older men who lost their heads over young pretty blondes, and so naturally the “new” Jean Harlow found herself in the crosshairs of Howard Hughes soon after she arrived in Hollywood. There’s a famous photo of the pair taken in Palm Springs: he tieless in a light suit and sunhat, straddling a bicycle, looking annoyed, she in a button-down coat and dark lipstick, hair bleached white, looking like she’s trying to appear much older than her fifteen years. In fact, Ida considered herself to be not just an adult, but a showbiz veteran. Paramount’s first inkling was to cast her in the lead of Alice in Wonderland, but a test proved that she couldn’t play younger than her age. In her first one-on-one newspaper interview in Hollywood, Lupino told columnist Alma Whitaker, “You cannot play naive if you’re not. I never had any childhood.”

  Rather than try to mask her eccentricities, Ida took pride in flaunting them, and flouting convention. She believed herself to be psychic, and when an old boyfriend died shortly after she arrived in America, Ida claimed that his ghost would visit her while she was in bed at night. Hughes threw Lupino a party for her sixteenth birthday, and when he asked her what she wanted as a present, he expected to hear the usual: a bottle of Chanel perfume. Instead she told him she wanted a pair of binoculars. “Binoculars?” Howard said, “What on earth would you want binoculars for?” The Hollywood newcomer responded, “I wanted to look at the stars.”

  At that point, the star in whose image Lupino was being molded was going through a rough time. After Bern’s death, Harlow had started drinking much more heavily, which her mother believed was making her sick. Actually, the drinking may have obscured other health problems, and Mother Jean’s control over her daughter was by no means grounded in a healthy outlook. Jean Harlow Sr. was an intermittent Christian Scientist, but above all a capitalist, concerned with maintaining her daughter’s stardom for as long as possible, no matter the cost. When a film would go into production, under her mother’s supervision Harlow would stick to a strict diet of cottage cheese, corn bread, and black coffee, which surely could have led to anemia, making the already sickness-prone Harlow even weaker. By 1936, Harlow was losing her luminescence. Thanks to ten years of weekly bleaching, if not other health issues, her hair was falling out in clumps. Meanwhile, MGM had to face the fact that with the Hays Office increasingly exerting its power to ban even the implication of anything outside of maritally sanctioned procreative congress, Harlow’s whole devil-may-care attitude toward sexuality needed to be reformed.

  Harlow’s physical changes, including her hair loss, and the sense that her star image had grown stale, compelled the studio to give her a minor makeover. The Platinum Blonde was given wigs in a darker, much more natural hue, and in the press she was rebranded “the Brownette.” Less-than-ultraglamorous and certainly anti-trampy roles followed. The new Harlow was fully on display in Wife Versus Secretary, released in early 1936, in which she played the “realistically” attractive, completely morally upstanding clerical assistant to Clark Gable, who is truly in love with wife Myrna Loy and doesn’t want to cheat on her. Loy’s suspicions build until Harlow gives a speech about how lucky Loy is to be married to a decent guy. A few months later came the excellent romantic roundelay Libeled Lady, in which Harlow played the long-suffering fiancée of Spencer Tracy, while Harlow’s then real-life love, William Powell, wooed rich princess Loy. Earlier in her career, Jean Harlow’s gowns, though skintight enough to make it readily apparent that there was only skin underneath, always seemed to fall open in the right places. In Libeled Lady, it is costar Loy whose bralessness seems brazen, while Harlow is suspiciously fussy-looking, and often covered up in long sleeves and big furs. Comparatively conservative wardrobe aside, the film’s characters still treat her like a dumb blonde until a final scene in which she tells them all off for underestimating her.

  These more mature films reflected where Harlow wanted to be in her personal life. She was deeply in love with William Powell, but Powell, who was divorced from Harlow’s comic-bombshell rival Carole Lombard, didn’t want to get married again, and certainly not to Jean Harlow, whom he seemed unable to distinguish from her screen persona. “You don’t marry someone half of America wants to sleep with,” he said of his girlfriend, whom he’d string along for over three years. Harlow told her pal, gossip columnist Dorothy Manners, that she felt the romance was one-sided. “I’m the one who does all the giving.”

  “Baby, all men do that,” Manners said.

  Harlow responded, “He’s breaking my heart.”

  Harlow asked for Adela Rogers St. Johns’s help in luring Powell to the altar. “He won’t believe me when I tell him I only want him and a home,” Jean told the columnist. But St. Johns refused to intervene.

  “How could I?” She later explained. “He was a wise, intelligent, experienced man of the world. He was over 21. He knew Jean. I couldn’t interfere.”

  IN DECEMBER 1935, IDA Lupino and her parents, Stanley and Connie, threw a party at the Trocadero nightclub in Hollywood to celebrate their good friend, comedienne Thelma Todd, who had known Ida’s father and mother through the vaudeville circuit for years. Known as the “Ice Cream Blonde,” Todd had been suggested for the Harlow role in Hell’s Angels by Marshall Neilan, when he was still on board as that film’s director. She had since appeared in Monkey Business and Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers, and had starred with Zasu Pitts in a series of comedy shorts.

  Pat De Cicco, Howard Hughes’s friend and right-hand man and Todd’s ex-husband, had approached Ida a few days before the party to ask for an invitation. Thelma and Pat had been divorced for more than a year and a half, and though she had won the divorce on charges of cruelty—in fact, she was said to have regretted the marriage almost as soon as the wedding was over, thanks to De Cicco’s uncontrollable temper—Thelma still spoke to her ex. Ida extended the invitation to Pat, and even set a place for him at the dinner, but he didn’t show up—at least, not for dinner: at some point in the evening Ida spotted him elsewhere in the supper club, dancing with another actress.

  Todd would leave the Lupino party at 3 A.M. and would be found dead a few hours later, in her car, parked in the garage downstairs from the popular cafe that she owned on Pacific Coast Highway. Todd had an apartment on the property, as did her business partner and lover, Roland West. Roland West also had a wife.

  The cause of Todd’s death was carbon monoxide poisoning. West articulated a theory that many believed to be plausible: There was an outside door to Todd and West’s apartments that West left unlocked as long as he was awake, but by 2:30, he couldn’t stay up waiting for Todd any longer, so he had locked the door and gone to sleep. Thelma had returned home at 3:30. A little drunk, and not thinking about the fact that she hadn’t brought her key, she had dismissed her chauffeur before she tried the door. Finding it locked, according to West, “she didn’t make any noise or attempt to awaken me. Instead, she must have walked up the hill to the garage in which she kept her car and
becoming cold, started the motor. Thelma was very considerate.”

  Though the coroner initially declared Todd’s death an accidental suicide, an inquest was held. Taking the stand before a grand jury, Ida explained that Thelma had been in high spirits the night of her death, so suicide seemed unlikely. However, Ida noted that Todd had what Ida called a “death complex”—she believed in living life to the fullest, because one could go at any time. Ida also noted that she and Thelma had both been surprised and hurt to see Pat at the Trocadero with another woman.

  The grand jury closed the case without reaching a conclusion—which only left a vacuum for speculation. The most colorful theory regarding Todd’s death, elaborated on in Andy Edmonds’s book Hot Toddy, published in 1989, claims that mobster Lucky Luciano killed or had Todd killed because, though they were having an affair, she had refused to turn her cafe into a gambling den controlled by him. But William Donati, who has authored biographies on Lupino, Luciano, and Todd, could find no evidence that the latter two ever met, and in her book on Todd, Ice Cream Blonde, Michelle Morgan also dismantled the Luciano legend.

  Though no solid evidence has ever been produced to back them up, from the beginning there were whispers that Pat De Cicco, who had boarded a flight for New York the night Todd’s body was found, was somehow involved in his ex-wife’s death. These whispers were still swirling around town years later, when De Cicco was functioning as a “talent scout” for Howard Hughes.

  Less than a year after Todd’s shocking death, Irving Thalberg would die from pneumonia at the age of thirty-seven, and there would be a sense around town that something essential to what Hollywood had been for the last decade or more had died with him. It was, according to columnist Florence Fisher Parry, “the biggest single blow the motion picture industry could possibly have suffered.” MGM shut down for a full day for the funeral. Thalberg had had more to do with Harlow’s continued success than any other man in the industry, but if she attended the funeral, photographs of her there did not circulate widely. Most major newspapers instead ran a photograph of Harlow’s opposite number at MGM, Joan Crawford.