by Anne Girard
Harlean couldn’t help but laugh. Jimmy was becoming a real friend. At this moment, for Ben and Jimmy’s belief in her alone, she was stubbornly determined to succeed in her role. If Whale thought he could chase her from this picture with his browbeating, then he had another think coming.
By late afternoon, she ached to be home and surrender herself to a hot bath, and drink a cocktail, yet Whale insisted there was another scene to shoot. He was not allowing anyone to leave until it was finished. It was another love scene, and his mood had turned even more foul with the lateness of the hour.
Harlean and Ben shot the scene once, twice, then three times.
“You are an absolute disaster! I have no earthly idea why Hughes hired you!” Whale seethed, toppling his director’s chair and clutching his head in dramatic fashion.
Emotionally drained, and more than a little confused, Harlean could fight the valiant press of tears no longer. He had been badgering her continually all day. Now, anger and frustration took her over entirely and she held her hands out to him in an open plea as tears slid down her cheeks.
“Tell me then! Tell me exactly how you want me to do it, Mr. Whale!”
“My dear girl, I can tell you how to be an actress, but I cannot tell you how to be a woman!” he cruelly sniped in front of the still-assembled cast and crew.
Harlean was so horrified that she couldn’t think of what to say that wouldn’t involve such a vulgar retort that it would likely cost her this job. She forced herself not to respond. Arrogant prig! He had underestimated her. Everyone had.
“We are finished here.” He snapped his fingers in dismissal. “I cannot stand the sight of you anymore for one day.”
Back home, her dress shoes, dress and all the pretense of the day cast off, her fought-for composure dissolved the moment her mother hugged her. Harlean burst into tears, collapsed into her mother’s arms and openly wept.
“You can do this, Baby! I know you can,” Jean soothed as she gently stroked her daughter’s hair. “Don’t let them knock you out. You have the strength I never had to survive this. All of my hopes and dreams, and yours, too, rest in this role!”
Her mother’s words, and the passionate way she spoke them, were a balm on Harlean’s weary spirit. She brushed back her tears and sniffled.
“I’m just so drained, Mommie. Not telling that bastard where he can shove his precious attitude is exhausting.”
“I can only imagine.”
“Everyone expects so much of me.”
“Then expect it of yourself, too. We’ve come too far to go backward now. We want this. You want this for yourself!”
“He is just so frustrating that it makes me angry.”
“Then use that anger, Baby. Channel it into Helen. She’s a strong girl. Be her.”
That advice bolstered her determination more than anyone else’s could because she believed, with a daughter’s devotion, her mother was her greatest champion. Harlean did want this, and she wanted to make the character come alive. She began to see that she and Helen really weren’t so different. Helen found it easy to seduce two men just as it was for Harlean to entice Roy, and even Jimmy, all the while still desperately loving Chuck. It was circumstance—decisions of the moment.
But even so, Helen had a vulnerable sweet core. They both did.
She knew then that she could breathe life into Helen, and tomorrow she was about to do just that.
Chapter Nineteen
“Dazzle ’em!”
Howard Hughes’s dramatic mantra was the thing he imparted to the cast and crew every time he left the set. It gradually began to pervade the attitude of everyone involved in Hell’s Angels. They all knew that this young, upstart Texan had invested a fortune and that he fully meant to make the film a hit, no matter the cost. To that end, the sky was the limit and it was exciting to them all to imagine what he had in mind to promote it.
But after viewing the dailies, Whale, and now Hughes, too, were unhappy with Harlean’s performance. Whale cruelly declared that she was the problem and she could well threaten the success of the entire picture.
As the first scene for the day was being set up, she didn’t hear her agent, Arthur Landau, approach her for how lost she was in the novel she was reading. She jumped when she realized he was looming over her. She snapped the book shut when she saw by his expression that whatever news he had come to deliver, it wasn’t good.
“Hughes is going to try to direct you today and see if that helps things,” he told her.
“Mr. Hughes wants to do it himself?” she gasped. She could feel the panic settling in.
Hughes was so tall, handsome and so damnably mysterious-looking—always slipping onto the set in his expensive suits, then lingering in the shadows, never smiling—that the prospect of rehearsing a love scene with him seemed quite horrifying.
“He feels that they’ve got to get this right.”
“But Mr. Hughes isn’t an actor!”
“Neither are you, yet. Not an experienced one anyway,” he countered. “Think of that personal kind of attention as him doing you a favor to get you where we all want you to be.”
It felt to her like there was so much against her all of the time as she tried to make something of this career—something that would make the loss of Chuck worth the price she had already paid. The feeling was made particularly worse now when her light blue eyes were bloodshot and painful from the eighteen-hour days she had endured standing beneath hot lights. Nothing helped to soothe or lighten them. Reading beneath the softened light of soundstage corners was one thing, but the harsh glare was excruciating.
To make matters worse, none of the rest of the cast was equally plagued. It set her apart from everyone else even further, and she did not believe it was in a positive way. The studio doctor had diagnosed her with a condition called “klieg eyes” where the membrane covering her eyes had actually been burned. But Harlean was absolutely determined not to complain or let it deter her. She had come too far to let that happen. If Howard Hughes wanted to run her lines with her, then dammit, she would do it and she would learn how to make Helen better.
She planned to surprise everyone with just how determined she could be.
Hughes came onto the set with Lincoln Quarberg, the publicity director, just after nine o’clock. She heard Hughes had been playing with the aerial combat scenes for weeks and he was frustrated with those, as well. His mood did not seem greatly improved by needing to be here today to work directly with her. His scowl was quite pronounced beneath his slick, dark hair. As tall and slim as Hughes, Quarberg had a prominent forehead and a mop of curly hair that reminded Harlean of the top of a chrysanthemum. Between scenes, the two men stood at a distance, looking at her and conferring.
“Easy, kid, don’t panic now,” Arthur said. “They’re only talking.”
“Talking about me.”
“Here’s the concept—we need a gimmick to make you into a star,” Quarberg announced as the duo approached her. “You need a tagline. Clara Bow is the ‘It Girl,’ and Mary Pickford, well of course she is ‘America’s Sweetheart.’”
“Lincoln has come up with quite a few of those gems here,” said Hughes as he studied Harlean.
“Okay then, I started with, ‘The Passion Girl.’ That took me to, ‘The Joy Girl’...”
“Both awful,” Hughes grumbled as he shook his head.
“From there I decided to highlight your most obvious feature, so I came up with, ‘Blonde Landslide’ then ‘Blonde Sunshine’...”
Oliver Hardy would have approved of that one, she thought with affection.
Harlean watched Hughes roll his eyes. “Get to the point, Lincoln.”
The publicist straightened his spine, cleared his throat and paused for a beat, as if it was to be an announcement of some magnitude. He held up
his hands like a banner, something already in lights. “‘Platinum Blonde,’” he announced with an eager smile. “It ties your hair in with something expensive and classic. We’re gonna sell your sex appeal until the public doesn’t know what hit ’em!”
Harlean disliked it enormously and instantly. It didn’t sound at all like the catchy taglines given to Bow or Pickford.
“Yep, that’s the one,” Hughes decreed, but he did so with neither smile nor excitement.
“We’re going to make every girl in America want to look like Jean Harlow. I’m telling you, when this gets rolling, people aren’t going to care that you can’t act worth a damn,” Quarberg added with enough enthusiasm in his voice for both men.
“This will be the start of a blitz, a full media campaign that’s gonna send Jean Harlow straight to stardom and, if I have my way, Hell’s Angels is gonna be a smash hit before it ever even hits theaters,” said Hughes.
Harlean’s eyes still burned and her mind was spinning.
In spite of the challenges, success suddenly felt nearer because of the commitment Hughes and his company were making to her. If she had to be exploited initially in order for people to take notice of her, then she would keep her head high and accept that as one of the many steps toward fame. And no matter what Hughes or Whale—or anyone else for that matter—thought, by damn, she was going to show the world that she could act!
“All right—little miss Platinum Blonde, shall we take it from the top?” Hughes asked her and, in that moment, he seemed slightly less irritated than he had been when they first had come onto the set. Maybe she had a chance to convince him yet that she was good enough to play Helen. At least—at last—this felt like a start.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Ready when you are.”
* * *
In spite of the excitement over her Platinum Blonde appellation, and demand for Jean Harlow throughout the industry they expected it to generate, after shooting on Hell’s Angels finally wrapped there were no other projects Hughes would approve of for her. Once again Harlean began to worry about all the bills needing to be paid. The paltry $150 a week income, and with the divorce still tied up with attorneys, barely paid the rent and bought groceries. It certainly didn’t cover her mother’s extravagant shopping trips that Jean Bello firmly declared she had earned for helping her daughter come this far.
Harlean eventually felt forced to surrender her pride and attack head-on the distasteful business of pleading with Howard Hughes. She urged him to loan her out to another studio while the film was in postproduction, and she felt the sting of it more sharply when he stubbornly refused to do it. She was property, his property, he declared and he kept that stance until suddenly, one day, when he summoned her back to his bungalow office.
There, he gruffly grunted that he had changed his mind.
The right-hand man to the powerful Irving Thalberg at MGM wanted her to come in and interview for a picture they were doing at their studio out in Culver City.
Hughes told her to see someone named Paul Bern.
* * *
Harlean wore a sedate white-and-navy-blue nautical-style dress and white low-heeled Mary Janes. She had dressed intentionally, hoping to tamp down the sexually charged image that the publicity machine at Caddo was actively creating. Quarberg’s team had been so good at it that she had begun receiving fan mail at the studio even though the movie premiere was months away.
After her experiences with Whale and Hughes, Harlean was more wary than ever of ill-tempered studio executives. The idea that this man, Paul Bern, had most likely seen one of her sexualized publicity photos made her even more hesitant as she was shown into his large office. While she still believed that she needed her looks in order to stand out from the crowd, she did not want it to be the only thing people saw in her.
Legs crossed, handbag gripped tightly and held on her lap, she sat across from him at his desk and tried not to make her hesitation obvious. Unlike Howard Hughes’s cluttered office, Bern’s was sleek and impressive. A burl-wood desk, commanding leather chair and a wall of leather-bound books made it distinctive.
Bern himself, however, was a surprisingly diminutive, curious-looking man in a pin-striped suit and stiff purple necktie. He was twice Harlean’s age, at least, with a receding chin, bulging dark eyes, and a patchy mustache. But his smile, as he introduced himself, was so sincere that it took her completely aback.
He gazed at her with kindness and genuine human interest, to which she was wholly unaccustomed—particularly in Hollywood.
“Tell me about yourself, Miss Harlow,” he said as he began the interview.
He leaned forward over his desk. In the sunlight through the window behind him, his eyes reminded her of melted chocolate, and he had the longest black eyelashes she had ever seen. They really were such extraordinarily kind eyes.
“Well, I’ve had a few walk-on roles, nothing much to speak of until Mr. Hughes found me. I was in a couple of shorts with Laurel and Hardy last year, and I had a scene with Clara Bow in one of her pictures, but I’m just an extra.”
He steepled his fingers. “I meant, tell me about you. Where are you from? After all, no one is really from Hollywood,” he said with a patient smile.
“I’m from Missouri.”
“Which accounts for the lovely natural quality about you. Most ingenues come to my office dressed to the nines and wearing so much makeup that it appears to have been applied by trowel.”
“I wasn’t honestly sure what sort of interview this was meant to be, Mr. Bern, and I’ve suffered an eye injury lately that prevents me from wearing eyelashes or mascara anyway.”
“Ah, so I see. Your eyes, lovely though they are, look quite painful at the moment.”
“Excruciating, if you wanna know the truth.”
“Oh, always, Miss Harlow. I don’t make time for anything but the truth. May I offer you a cup of coffee? I was just about to order one for myself and I hate to drink alone.”
Her smile widened at the way he had said it. He seemed to have an attractively understated sense of humor which somewhat balanced out his lack of physical appeal.
“All right, then. Thanks, Mr. Bern.”
“I’d really rather you call me Paul. A man does what he can to hold on to the vestiges of youth.”
Harlean laughed as he picked up his telephone receiver and ordered two coffees from his secretary in the next room.
“So, do you have any hobbies? What do you like to do in your spare time?”
He had propped his chin in his hand and was leaning on his elbow, appearing to actually be interested in her response.
“I’m really quite dull, I’m afraid. I’m a bookworm. People make fun of me, saying I’ve always got my nose in something.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Is that a fact? What do you like to read?”
“Oh, everything. Poetry, history, and I love how novels let me escape...and the classics, too. I just finally finished reading The Odyssey last night which certainly took me a while.”
“You read Homer?”
She sat back at the tone in his voice. “That surprises you?”
“Perhaps it shouldn’t, but it does. My own volume of The Iliad is as worn, and well loved, as a child’s blanket.”
He was becoming an increasingly interesting man to her. Not at all what she had guessed when she was shown into his office moments before. He had such a natural way about himself that she felt herself begin to relax just a bit. She certainly felt less defensive about being seen for only her looks with him.
“And I’m trying to write a novel,” she found herself revealing.
The only other people who knew about that were Chuck and Rosalie.
“The story is still really only in my mind so far, but I like the idea of creating characters. There’s a feeling of magic in th
at.”
His smile broadened. “You really are quite an extraordinary being, Miss Harlow,” he said as the secretary brought the two cups of coffee, placed them on the desk and left again. “Since honesty is my policy, I’m going to tell you that the role I called you in to speak about isn’t right for you. It’s a period piece, and it’s clear to me now that you are meant for different challenges in the industry. For one thing, I see that you could shine in a comedy.”
That was what she secretly wanted to do but he was the first important person to recognize it in her, or to confirm that she might have a chance with it. The acknowledgment, coupled with his sincerity, struck her. He was speaking with her as if she were something far more than a sexual commodity to be marketed and sold.
As she tried to decide how to respond, Bern stood. “Rest assured, I will be looking for the right vehicle for you. It may take some time, but it’s a hobby of mine once I have a vision for someone. I’ve done all right by Joan Crawford, so far,” he said.
Crawford was certainly an actress on her way up. Harlean had seen her picture Our Dancing Daughters last year. Photographs of her recent wedding to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. had been in all the magazines and newspapers since that had made her stepdaughter to Mary Pickford, and there was great gossip about how the two actresses got along.
“Miss Crawford is a star.”
“As you will be soon enough. I’ll see to that.”
“But I work for Mr. Hughes.”
“For now,” he said as he came around the desk and extended his hand. “As it happens, I have a bit of pull in this town myself. I’ll be in touch, Miss Harlow,” he said politely as he walked her to the door. “And take care of those eyes. They’re really quite beautiful.”
* * *
After she left the studio, Harlean went home to find her mother on the telephone, speaking in that sweet, breathy voice she used when she wished to impress a man. Harlean knew the tone well since Jean had used it on a number of men before she had met her current husband.
