`Deadly Illusions’ a repetitious and pretentious book

DEADLY ILLUSIONS, by Samuel Marx and Joyce Vanderveen, New York: Random House, 1990, 271 pages, $19.95.

Once one has plowed through this stolid book, he is likely to mutter “So what?” Samuel Marx, formerly a producer and story editor at the prestigious Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, in collaboration with ballerina Joyce Vanderveen, purports to demonstrate that Paul Bern, a significant producer, was murdered on Labor Day 1932. The powers-that-were at MGM at the time, particularly Louis Mayer and Irving Thalberg, presumably covered up what was a murder by pretending to the media that Bern had committed suicide. In any case, Marx and Vanderveen throw little new light on what is surely passe now. It doesn’t even have the color of the celebrated Evelyn Thaw triangle in which her lover, architect Stanford White, was shot dead by a deranged Harry Thaw.

Bern, evidently a generous, kindly soul, was an important producer at MGM for six years when he “discovered” Jean Harlow. A bit player, Harlow had appeared in such films as Howard Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels” without arousing much interest from the public or critics. But when it came to casting the lead in “Red-Headed Woman,” Bern dedicated himself to convincing his superiors that only Harlow was right for the role of one of those crass, tart-tongued adventuresses that became her touchstone. And evidently he shrewdly guessed her capabilities since she was such a sensation in this film (in which her co-star was Clark Gable) that she became a highly valuable property to the studio for the rest of her brief life (she died of an undisclosed infection at 28).

In the meanwhile, the very young Harlow married Bern. According to Marx, then, in order to protect her from any subsequent scandal that the murder of her husband of two months might trigger, Mayer engineered a cover-up by creating a scenario that made the whole squalid affair seem a suicide motivated by the “fact” that Bern was impotent. After all, what to the public mind could be more delectably sensational than a less-than-virile man married to one of Hollywood’s steamiest actresses? Marx goes to great lengths to prove that Marx was anything but impotent.

What his sleuthing boils down to is the possibility that Bern’s common-law wife, a would-be actress named Dorothy Millett, materialized on the doorstep of Bern’s secluded home in Hollywood one night and plugged him. Presumably she had just emerged from a 10-year coma, had consumed all the stories, lurid and otherwise, about Bern’s marriage and confronted him. When Mayer arrived early the next morning, he contrived to have the naked body so placed that it would seem a bona fide suicide. He even managed a farewell note to Jean in which Bern presumably apologized for his less than successful sexual performances. And Dorothy conveniently threw herself into the Sacramento River from the deck of the Delta King just the day after Bern’s body was found.

The sole justification for this book, little more than claptrap, is that one is introduced to the malignant machinations of Hollywood czars like Mayer, who could usually manipulate the forces of the law and of the press to do their will.

Repetitious and pretentious, the book is not well-written. Grammatical errors (it’s instead of its, for instance) crop up occasionally. Its market is for the intransigently star struck.

Robert H. Newall is a free-lance writer who resides in Hampden.