Harlow biography readable, meticulously researched

BOMBSHELL: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, by David Stenn, Doubleday, 370 pages, $22.50.

When Jean Harlow, the “blonde bombshell,” was introduced to the widow of England’s Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, Margot Asquith, the former persisted in pronoucing the “t” in her first name. “My dear,” retorted Asquith icily, “the `t’ is silent, as in Harlow.” Whether apocryphal or no, the incident tended to point up the image of the “dumb blonde” that was fostered in so many of her films. An attitude, indeed, that David Stenn in his “Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow” almost stridently strives to refute. According to him, Harlow was an intelligent, professional actress, a view much at odds with her public persona.

His biogreaphy reads like an attenuated obituary, for it is largely concerned with the enigmatic details of her death and the events that led to it. Hollywood from the beginning was the goal of countless young women who wanted to share in its glitter. Many of those who made it eventually turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with what was frequently a shaky equilibrium. Not a few ended in suicide. The long list of alcoholics include Mary Astor, Vivien Leigh, Tallulah Bankhead, Jean Simmons, Frances Farmer. And of course there was the untimely death of Harlow’s “successor” Marilyn Monroe, a pathetic creature who, no more than Harlow herself, really never knew who she was. The cost of fame in films was, in many instances, phenomenal and inestimable.

Harlow was only 26 when she died of what were evidently uremic

complications. Her fiercely possessive mother, “Mother Jean,” oscillated between the services of Christian Science practitioners and qualified physicians. By the time her daughter, who apparently had no will to live, was admitted to Hollywood’s Good Samaritan Hospital, her psychologically and physically mangled body was beyond repair. According to Stenn, she had come to loathe her mother, the prototype of the stage mother.

Stenn stresses Harlow’s unfulfilled desire to be a wife and mother, an unattainable objective owing largely to her mother’s fierce propulsion of her daughter into a career and to her own inability to adapt to what she considered normalcy. After three failed marriages, innumerable affairs and at least one abortion, Harlow was so psychically muddled that she had no identifiable persona.

This facet of her life is not what her doting public saw, for to them she was — with her platinum tresses, alabaster complexion and svelte figure — glamour personified. In her 42 films, ranging from those in which she was only an extra to those in which she was the indisputable star, she portrayed, according to Stenn, the antithesis of what she really was. She was cast repeatedly as a glitzy, tough, often hare-brained creature who elbowed her way to success. Unlike Carole Lombard, to whom her lover, William Powell (Lombard’s mate for a time), compared her (unfavorably), Harlow was not made of the stuff that could survive the slings and arrows of Hollywood. That Powell denigrated her and ultimately refused to marry her after three years of a poignant affair was certainly one of the elements that eroded her will to live and drove her to the bottle.

Perhaps Harlow is best remembered for her work in “Dinner at Eight.” In its most memorable scene, Kitty Packard — a brittle Harlow who munches bonbons in bed — remarks to Carlotta Vance (Marie Dressler) that she has been reading a book “all about civilization or something, a nutty kind of book” in which the author opines “that machinery is going to take the place of EVERY profession.” As Dressler eyes her young colleague from head to toe, she replies succinctly, “Well, my dear, that’s something YOU need never worry about.”

Readable and meticulously researched with full appendices, “Bombshell” will appeal to those of us who grew up when Harlow was one of Hollywood’s most marketable commodities. At the least it should lay to rest all the spurious speculations on what caused her untimely death — and largely on the self-destructive course that led to it.

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