Wedding photo of Jean Harlow, Paul Bern and friends
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 stand-in 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 1917 she was executed by a French firing 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. 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.
Mata Hari in costume for her Javanese dance
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 ow
ner 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.
She was arrested by the French in February, 1917. Some say she greeted the arresting officers naked on a couch in her hotel room. This is no more true than the rumor that she took milk baths while Parisian children starved or that she danced nude in her cell at Saint-Lazare Prison.
The file on her was 6 in. thick, but the evidence was inconclusive. A tube of “secret ink” in her possession turned out to be oxycyanide of mercury, which she injected into herself after making love as a birth-control method. Her aged lover Maître Clunet defended her at her trial, and another lover, Jules Cambon of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, testified in her behalf. A third lover, old and amiable General Messimy, sent a letter written by his wife which asked that the general be excused from testifying since he didn’t know the defendant. At that, Mata Hari laughed, “Ah! He never knew me! Oh, well. He has a nerve!” The jury laughed with her, but humor did not save her from her awful sentence—death by a firing squad.
The nun who came to fetch her on the day of her execution chastised her for showing too much leg while putting on her stockings in front of the prison doctor. She was dressed to the teeth. On the way out of prison, she was asked whether she was pregnant (according to French law, a pregnant woman could not be executed). This question arose, some say, from a last-ditch attempt by Clunet to save her by claiming to be the father of her unborn child.
She was shot at the polygon of Vincennes, at her own request without a blindfold. It is not true that she pulled open her coat to reveal her naked body, so astounding the firing squad that not one man could squeeze a trigger. Nor did a playboy aviator boyfriend strafe the field. Nor did another lover—inspired by the plot of the opera Tosca—bribe the firing squad to use blanks, put her in a ventilated coffin, and bury her in a shallow grave so that he could spirit her away. The truth? No one claimed her body, so it was contributed to a medical school for dissection. Was she guilty? That’s still a question.
LOVE AND SEX LIFE: Though she accepted money for sex, she was so infatuated by “the uniform” that she often slept with soldiers for nothing. She may have hated most men, in spite of the fact that she exploited their sexual urges in order to support herself.
Judging by her letters signed “your loving little wife,” she was intimate with MacLeod before their marriage. Her long string of later lovers included innumerable military men of several nationalities; the crown prince of Germany; the head of a dirigible company; the president of the Dutch council; and two boys, 17 and 18 respectively, when she was close to 40. Her price, when sex was a business deal, was $7,500 a night, or so she claimed. Upon occasion Mata Hari turned a candidate down—an American munitions salesman with bad table manners, for example.
Her first important lover was Lt. Alfred Kiepert, a rich, married landowner in the German Hussars, who set her up in an apartment in 1906. About a year later they parted, and she returned to Paris with the story she had been on a hunting trip in Egypt and India. In 1914 they were back together again. A newspaper snidely reported: “When Mata Hari, the beautiful dancer, said good-bye to the rich estate owner Kiepert, who lives just outside Berlin, she took along a few hundred thousand as a farewell present. Whether the shine of the money has worn off or whether it is love that brought her back to her former friend, during the last few days they could be seen, apparently happy and closely intimate, in a private dining room of a fashionable restaurant in town.”
In 1910 she lived in the French region of Touraine as the mistress of Xavier Rousseau, a stockbroker. He spent weekends with her at their hideaway, the Château de la Dorée, where once she rode a horse up and down the outer staircase. After they split up, he became a champagne salesman. His wife claimed that Mata Hari had ruined him.
After Rousseau came Édouard Willen van der Capellen—rich, married, and a colonel in the Dutch Hussars. But her passion reached full flower with her Russian captain, Vadime de Massloff, whom she visited in 1916 in Vittel, a French resort in the military zone. He was recuperating from a wound; she may have been spying. When she was arrested, several photographs of De Massloff were found in her hotel room. Written on the back of one was: “Vittel, 1916. In memory of some of the most beautiful days of my life, spent with my Vadime, whom I love above everything.” When jailed, she wrote a pathetic letter to an interrogator begging for news of De Massloff. Yet De Massloff claimed their relationship had been a minor affair.
HER THOUGHTS: “I never could dance well. People came to see me because I was the first who dared to show myself naked to the public.” To an interrogator, while she was jailed: “I love officers. I have loved them all my life. I prefer to be the mistress of a poor officer than a rich banker. It is my greatest pleasure to sleep with them without having to think of money. And moreover I like to make comparisons between the various nationalities…. I have said yes to them with all my heart. They left thoroughly satisfied, without ever having mentioned the war, and neither did I ask them anything that was indiscreet. I’ve only kept on seeing De Massloff because I adore him.”
—A.E.
The Prince of Playboys
PRINCE ALY KHAN (June 13, 1911-May 12, 1960)
HIS FAME: Aly Khan was once heir apparent to Aga Khan III of India, but his international pursuit of fast cars, horses, and beautiful women cost him the post of imam—spiritual leader to over 20 million Muslims of the Ismaili sect—which had been held by his father.
HIS PERSON: Born in Italy and reared in Europe, Prince Aly Suleiman Khan inherited a fortune and learned early how to enjoy it. In 1929, after the death of his mother, Aly threw himself into high-society London, where he had been sent to study law. The short and swarthy teenager stood out among the pale gentry, and his exotic looks, boundless energy, and skill at racing cars and horses won him fame and the adoration of that year’s debutantes. He went on to compete in European auto races and hunt on African safaris, all the while managing his horse-breeding farms and villas in
Ireland, France, Switzerland, and Venezuela. The Allies found his daring and his fluency in English, French, and Arabic invaluable during WWII, awarding him the Croix de Guerre and the U.S. Bronze Star for his work in intelligence. Though some consider his most outstanding conquest to be Rita Hayworth, whom he married in 1949, he earned great respect as Pakistan’s delegate to the U.N., where he served from 1958 until his death in a car accident two years later.
Aly Khan with Rita Hayworth
LOVE LIFE: Two skills from race-car driving and army service stood him well in his career as a lover: speed and logistics. With houses all over the world, he had only to capture a woman’s attention and he could woo her wherever he wished. His blitzkrieg involved the “eyes-across-the-crowded-room” approach: staring intently at the chosen prey until he had her attention. Then he wangled an introduction, following it up with dozens of roses, constant phone calls, and attention to his victim’s every whim and desire. The international celebrity hostess Elsa Maxwell wrote that Aly made a woman “feel no other person exists for him. He talks to her with breathless excitement…. He dances with her slowly and rapturously, as though it is the last time he will ever hold her in his arms…. When he tells a woman he loves her, he sincerely means it at the moment. The trouble is that a moment passes so quickly.” Even a married woman could carry on an affair rather discreetly with the prince, who always traveled with a crowd of people and kept everyone guessing who, among the current crew, was the chosen one. A bewildered member of Parliament, Mr. Loel Guinness, told a divorce court in 1936 that he had left a happily married woman, his beautiful blond wife, Joan, with such a retinue, and returned from a business trip to find she wanted a divorce to marry Aly Khan. Joan was Aly’s first wife and she gave him two sons, Karim (who became the fourth imam when Aly’s father died in 1957) and Amyn.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 4