The Jean Harlow Bombshell

by Mollie Cox Bryan

  I’m heartbroken. Please advise about the arrangements. Let’s chat about the book soon.

  Natalie”

  Let’s chat about the book soon? What was there to chat about unless they wanted me to finish the book?

  From her editor:

  “Dear Charlotte,

  I’m so sorry to hear about this. We’ll be in touch soon.

  Lucille Everheart”

  Reading between the lines, I assumed the project was still a go and started to click on my work files, but then Justine’s voice rang in my mind: “Not one word until there’s money in the bank.” Her number one rule. She was such a mercenary. She’d write about anyone, anything, as long as she’d get paid for it. “Don’t ever work for free,” she’d told me on countless occasions.

  “Okay,” I said out loud. “I’ll wait.”

  But in the meantime, the Jean Harlow twin haunted me. She wasn’t a part of the Jean Harlow project. But she kept turning up. Did she know Justine? Who the hell was she? I typed “Jean Harlow look-alike” into Google and got nothing of any relevance at all. Only one Jean Harlow impersonator for hire, who didn’t even resemble the real deal. A blonde wig and a slinky gown wasn’t going to do it. Sorry, folks.

  The woman I’d seen twice was disturbingly twin-like. Sure, I hadn’t gotten a close-up view, but the second time was better than the first. The shape of her cheeks was exactly that of Harlow’s. Plump and doll-like. She was much taller than Harlow. Jean was a tiny woman, standing at five feet one inch.

  Imagine being born resembling Jean Harlow. What would you do with that gift?

  My phone beeped. It was Kate.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey yourself. Where are you?”

  “Justine’s place.”

  Silence. Then, “You’re crazy. You know that? What if someone catches you?”

  I gazed around at the office where I sat: the chandelier, the books, the deep wood panels and floor-to-ceiling windows with the lovely, delicate stained-glass rose. “It would be so worth it.”

  Eight

  Justine’s last wishes were not ordinary. This didn’t surprise me.

  But the opulence of the Club Circe, where her memorial and wake were being held, was more than surprising. It was shocking. I’d read about these private women’s clubs in the city, of course, but never imagined I’d be inside one.

  “Jesus,” I breathed.

  “He’s not going to help you now, honey,” Kate said, sliding her arm through mine.

  We were at least thirty minutes early and the place was already packed. I searched for Den or any of his ilk—but true to his word, I couldn’t spot him. “I’ll be like a fly on the wall,” he’d said. Den. So hot. A little over three weeks left until my bet with Kate is over. But who’s counting?

  A huge, softly lit but sparkling chandelier hung from the center of the grand foyer. A circular pattern with, I assume, the goddess Circe was on the floor—mosaic tiles, pink and gray. Two sets of red-carpeted stairs curled upward and led to a central upstairs space.

  “Which way do we go?” Kate asked.

  “Let’s follow the crowd.”

  Although the room was full of people, the ambiance was quiet, hushed, reverent, as if we were in a cathedral. Someone blew their nose. Another person sniffed. A nervous laugh erupted.

  Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a woman dressed in a tuxedo approached me. “Charlotte Donovan?”

  I nodded.

  “Right this way, please,” she said, waving her well-manicured fingers donned with at least two sparkling green gems, which I think were emeralds.

  She led us down a black-and-pink-tiled hallway flanked with ornately framed paintings of women I probably should have recognized. Historically important women. Powerful women. A whiff of a floral fragrance caught my nose. Then I smelled leather. Old leather. If these walls could talk, they’d speak about the secrets of generations of wealthy, educated, powerful women.

  “You are to be seated in front,” she said, with a slight British accent I hadn’t noticed earlier.

  My heart raced. Why? Why had I agreed to this? Why did it have to be this way?

  I glanced at Kate, who smiled and nodded. “You’ve got this.”

  Not only had I agreed to finish the Jean Harlow book, but I’d also conceded to a very public announcement about it—during her memorial service. “Part of the deal,” Justine’s editor, Lucille, had said. “It’s the only way to go.” The publisher would pay me the rest of Justine’s advance for me to finish writing the biography.

  I sucked in air. Justine had faith in me. I wasn’t going to let her down. As uncomfortable as the public aspect of this made me, I was up to the challenge of finishing the book. I wanted to finish it. Unfinished business was not going to fly—it would pick at my more than slightly OCD nature. But why did they insist on making this announcement at Justine’s service?

  Kate and I took our seats. While others were being seated, I tried to take it all in without gawking at all the celebrities. I searched the crowd for a man with a scar and a pointy chin—the man who’d killed Justine by dropping poison into her tea. Would he dare show his face here? How stupid would that be?

  “Most criminals are not that bright,” Den had said to me. “A lot of them would just get off on being at the funeral of someone they killed. In fact, many of them do.”

  At least, that’s what the police were banking on. The place was full of undercover cops—along with celebrities, movie producers, publishers. Justine was respected and admired in film and publishing circles. Unless you’d gotten in her way or were a competitor.

  From where I sat in the front of the room, it was almost impossible to be nonchalant in trying to spot the suspect, which required cranking my head around and making it obvious. I tried to play it cool, but Brad Pitt had just walked in, sending little ripples of excitement through me. I blinked nervously, and he disappeared into the crowd behind me.

  “Pitt’s alone. Do you think I have a chance?” Kate joked.

  Judith Turner, Justine’s cousin, and her entourage came through the door and sat in the front seats at the other side of the aisle. She didn’t even glance my way.

  Susan Strohmeyer, Justine’s lawyer, had informed me that Judith couldn’t make it to the reading of the will, so that event had been postponed until the next day. We still had no idea who’d inherited Justine’s wealth or which of the many charitable organizations she’d helped would receive it. But we’d find out soon enough.

  I glanced up at the stained-glass dome ceiling—once again, a goddess depicted in the sparkling, vibrant colors. The surrounding walls were papered in velvet. Velvet walls, for God’s sake.

  My pulse raced as the place quieted. A woman took the small stage and cleared her throat. Sweat pricked at my forehead. I just wanted to get out of there. The stately room suddenly closed in on me.

  Kate reached over and grabbed my hand. “It’s going to be okay,” she whispered. “All you have to do is stand up when they call your name.”

  Tell that to my quivering knees.

  I had no idea what the woman said—or who she was. Justine Turner this, Justine Turner that. It all became blurry and hard to focus on. And then my heart nearly jumped out of my chest when I heard my name. Kate poked at me. I stood.

  “Charlotte Donovan, Justine’s assistant of almost twelve years, will be finishing the Jean Harlow biography,” Natalie Vega announced.

  I started to sit down, but then her voice prompted me not to.

  “Turn around, Charlotte. Let them see you.”

  Oh for fuck’s sake.

  I turned and nodded. I glanced over the crowd. A redhead wearing a black hat with a net over her face caught my eye. I blinked. The face of Jean Harlow was beneath that net.

  Crazy. Brad Pitt. Meryl Streep. Billy Joel. My eyes swept ov
er the celebrity-filled crowd. But in the center of the sea of faces was this redhead, with the face of Jean Harlow covered by a black net hanging from a hat. Was I hallucinating?

  I swayed. My knees jelled. Kate stood and gently helped me sit down.

  “Are you okay? It looks like you saw a ghost,” she whispered.

  I nodded. My mouth was dry. I couldn’t find the words to tell her, I think I just saw a red-haired version of Jean Harlow.

  At the depth of my Lyme disease, I’d suffered wild, fevered hallucinations. I wondered if this could be my reaction to all the stress. Losing Justine. Sneaking around to stay in her apartment. Trying to help the police find her killer. Now the biography was on my plate, with a pressing deadline. I considered walking away from it all, but I desperately needed the money.

  True to Justine’s wishes, the service was quick. She was not a religious woman, nor even spiritual. She wanted no “celebration of life” nostalgic overviews. Just a few words were spoken by the president of Club Circe. I had already cried myself to sleep missing her, but several people who were there were sobbing and sniffing. Justine would be missed.

  This part of the service was over, and now the reception in a ballroom in the club would begin. I couldn’t stay. A profound, dark weariness crept over me. I wouldn’t care if Clark Gable himself rose from the grave to escort me. I needed to get back. I needed a bed. Or a chaise longue, as it were.

  “I need to get going,” I said to Kate as the crowd began dispersing and filing out of the room, presumably making their way to the ballroom.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said.

  “But—”

  “No buts about it. You’re paler than I’ve ever seen you. Have you been keeping up with your meds?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s just the stress of the day, I think.”

  As we walked out of the room, a man with an oddly shaped beard caught my eye. Something about his gaze freaked me out. It was a kind of glare, tempered by an attempt at civility. Those beady eyes reached out to me. He was vaguely familiar. But my mind was a muddle.

  Kate pulled me along until we escaped the swanky, old-school woman’s club.

  We took up residence in the café across the street from Justine’s place, with Kate insisting I eat before I lie down. As we sat there, I forced myself to eat even though I was queasy. I glanced out of the window as a throng of people passed by, and as a bit of an opening between head and bodies occurred, like the parting of the sea, the redhead from the funeral appeared across the street.

  I grabbed Kate. “Look at her.”

  Kate followed my finger.

  She was standing near the L’Ombragé. Sobbing.

  “Who is she?”

  “I have no idea. She was at the funeral. Look at her face,” I said.

  Kate stood and leaned further into the window. “I can’t see her face. Just red hair.”

  But the redhead slipped into a cab and pulled off, leaving both Kate and me in a state of perplexed disbelief.

  “Are you certain that was the same woman?”

  I nodded. “Yes, and she looks exactly like Jean Harlow.”

  “Not that again, Charlotte,” Kate said.

  Nine

  W ading through my emails had become a nightmare. Overnight, the explosion of interest in Jean Harlow—and in me—had reached strange proportions.

  I scanned down the list. One at a time. One at a time.

  There was an email from a psychic who claimed she had a connection with Jean and had a message for me. Oh boy. Delete. There was another message, from a dressmaker in Hollywood, who wanted my measurements because she could see me in a Jean Harlow-like silky gown. Not on your life, honey.

  There was a reminder about Justine’s will reading later in the day. Thank you.

  I opened an email from a collector who wanted to meet with me.

  “Dear Ms. Donovan,

  Please accept my condolences on the loss of Justine Turner. It is a great loss, to be certain. I’ve been in contact with her about Jean Harlow’s sapphire ring, which I believe she was planning to sell to me. Forgive my impertinence, as she has just passed away, but these things tend to slip off if we don’t secure them. Might we meet to discuss terms?

  Yours Truly,

  Chad Walters”

  I could take care of this right away. I wrote him back with the only factual information I had about Jean Harlow’s ring: it had not been seen since her death. The ring’s significance was that it had been given to her by the great love of her life, William Powell. But it was gone. The most viable theory was that she was buried with it on her finger.

  Walters emailed me back immediately, as if he’d been sitting there waiting for my response.

  “I’d like to take you to lunch to discuss, as I’m aware that Justine had the ring.”

  As if I’d meet a complete stranger to chat about a nearly mythical ring. If Justine had the ring, I was sure I would have known about it. It would have been a great coupe for her and she would not have kept quiet about it. What was this man about?

  The ring in question was a 150-carat cabochon sapphire engagement ring from Powell, according to the Natural Sapphire Company, one of my sources. For all the interest in the ring, the star sapphire itself was not gem quality. William Powell was cheap, and despite its size, the ring he gave Harlow wasn’t expensive. I’d read an interview with Jean Harlow’s jeweler. When she showed him the ring, he examined it and thought, “This is nothing.”

  Justine and I had examined Jean Harlow’s probate records, and it wasn’t listed in the contents, even though other valuable pieces of jewelry were.

  The only thing adding value to the ring was that it had belonged to Harlow, which would be difficult to prove. If it were found, and a person could prove that it had belonged to her, the ring would, perhaps, be priceless.

  I didn’t respond to the man’s email and moved on to the next. Most of them were junk. But there was an email from Maude, the psychologist we worked with, telling me I should call her. I’d inquired about a particular aspect of Harlow’s personality I found intriguing: her work ethic.

  I dialed. Greetings were exchanged, along with remembrances of Justine.

  “Do you think her work ethic came from her Midwestern roots?” I asked.

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Maude said.

  “But she did have a work ethic, despite having grown up in a kind of upper-class family,” I said.

  “Yes, of course,” Maude said. “Which was odd enough in itself, I suppose. But Jean Harlow was a very complicated woman.”

  I snorted. “Okay. I’ll bite. What was complicated about her?”

  “Children of divorce, even today, have the same feelings of worthlessness. Back then, it was highly unlikely that she knew any other children whose parents had divorced.” Maude paused, then exhaled into the phone. I imagined her puffing on a cigarette. “She didn’t feel good enough. She overcompensated with her over-the-top nice personality and her workaholic tendencies. That’s her psychological profile in a nutshell.”

  I felt a twinge of something—a sliver of inspiration reached out to me then. Something recognizable. A way into my subject.

  “And the sex?” I said. But I knew what she was going to say, didn’t I?

  “Who knows how much sex the woman actually had? I mean, Jesus Christ, does it always have to be about the sex?” Maude exhaled again. “But let’s say she had a higher than average sex drive. She was married at the age of seventeen. Once again, all of it fits into the unworthy feelings she had. It was exacerbated by the culture, of course. I mean yes, she starred in some films during the pre-code era, but the code attitude permeated the culture. You know, good girls didn’t have sex, and if they did, they certainly didn’t enjoy it.”

  That goddamn code. The Hays Code that gave us a plethora of
forced happy endings and anesthetized movies. All for the sake of “decency.”

  “So was Jean Harlow a sexy vamp?” Maude went on. “Maybe. But more likely she was a normal woman with normal desires and had been branded as a vamp just because of her roles and her appearance. Which was outrageously sexy.”

  “What about the no underwear thing?” I asked. “That would lead me to believe that she wanted to lure men in.”

  “Of course she did. Don’t we all?” Maude said and laughed. “I think it was simply that she didn’t like it. So she didn’t wear it. Other people placed their own meaning on it. She wasn’t the first actress to go without underwear, I assure you.”

  No, that was true. Norma Shearer often didn’t wear undergarments. It was never made a big deal of. I wondered why.

  Shearer had been gorgeous and ten times a better actress than Harlow ever was. But you never even heard of her these days—unless you were a student of film. Yet Jean Harlow had become a cultural icon. Time was a tricky prankster.

  “I’ve got to go in a few minutes. Is there anything else?” Maude said.

  I thought a moment. “Well, this is going to seem like an odd question.”

  “My specialty,” she said and laughed. She had a generous, rolling laugh.

  “What kind of person would want to be a Jean Harlow imitator?”

  “Now that is an odd question,” she said. “What’s even odder is Justine asked me the same thing a few days before she died.”

  My heart nearly stopped.

  “What I told her was that I think there’s a part of all of us that would like to be Jean Harlow, or at least resemble her. But for someone walking around pretending to be Jean Harlow? That could mean any number of personality disorders, as well as an extreme form of psychosis,” she said.

  Her words sent my pulse racing. Justine might have known about the woman who seemed to be hovering around me like an unwelcome ghost.

  “Did Justine say she knew someone like this?” I managed to say.

  “No, she didn’t say.” Maude hesitated. “But I had the feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me. I worked with Justine for years; I knew the woman very well. She was going off on a tangent about a Jean Harlow look-alike. Justine Turner did not do tangents. You know that.”