Platinum Doll

by Anne Girard

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Harlean, Jean and Marino were invited to dinner across the street at Lee Duncan’s house often during May and June, and Rinty and Oscar quickly became the best of friends. On those occasions, as Duncan barbecued and Marino usually mixed the cocktails, the two canines would romp and tussle around Duncan’s backyard to everyone’s delight. Paul was regularly with them now that Harlean’s engagement to him had officially been announced to the press. Today was no exception.

  They still hadn’t been intimate but she assumed he was waiting for the wedding night—and the old-fashioned gesture charmed her. Paul was kind and gentle with her, and so wise, she felt as if all she wanted to do most of the time was to curl up at his feet and let him educate her about the world, as he saw it. She knew there was so much to learn from him.

  She still wasn’t in love with Paul. What Harlean felt was nothing at all like the turbulent passion she’d had with Chuck, but she did love him, and it would be a good marriage. Yes, she was certain of that. She sat on his lap now, an arm slung behind his neck, as Ivor took two freshly made gin and tonics from Marino, then handed one to Harlean and one to Rosalie. Harlean had another certifiable box office hit on her hands with her latest picture, The Beast of the City, and so they all felt like celebrating. They waited now for Jean to return from a meeting they’d had with Irving Thalberg at MGM.

  Harlean still reveled in the review Time magazine had given her, stating that her performance was “a shiny refinement of Clara Bow.”

  Jean came out into the backyard with Blanche who had accompanied her just then and she accepted a kiss on the cheek from Marino, who was at the bar. Then she descended the few steps onto Duncan’s patio, along with Irene Mayer and her husband, David O. Selznick. Irene and Paul had long been dear friends and now she and Harlean were, too, which was an odd turn of events, she thought, but not unwelcome. This was a gathering of all the people Harlean loved best in the world, and those who supported her daily—her group.

  As Harlean stood, Irene went straight to her and they embraced. “Congratulations on your engagement, kiddo,” she said as she kissed each of Harlean’s cheeks in the French manner. “I really had no idea you two were serious, to be honest, but it’s great that you’ll finally tie down this lifelong bachelor.”

  Harlean knew they were an unlikely couple, with their age difference, among other things, but all of that could not have mattered less to her.

  “Thanks, Irene,” she said with a genuine smile as David also gave her a congratulatory hug. “We’re really happy about it.”

  When Harlean looked at her, she saw that her mother, in white turban and fur, even in the warmth of summer, was holding an envelope and she was beaming.

  “What’ve you got there, Jean?” Paul asked.

  “It’s for the Baby, straight from Mr. Thalberg’s desk.”

  Harlean knew, intellectually, that she shouldn’t worry at happy moments like these, yet sometimes her nerves still got the best of her. She’d had more than her share of negative reviews and bad news in sealed missives.

  “Well, open it already!” Rosalie exclaimed with an eager smile.

  “Can’t it wait till after we eat? I’m afraid whatever it is might ruin my appetite.”

  Paul pressed a kiss onto her cheek. “You can handle it. Let’s read it together.”

  Empowered, yet again, by his steadfast belief in her, Harlean slid her thumb beneath the seal as Oscar and Rinty romped through the grass before them.

  Paul looked over her shoulder as Harlean read aloud sincere words of praise and surprise for what she was capable of as an actress. It ended with an offer of congratulations on her “truly excellent performance” and was signed, not formally, but simply, Irving.

  Stunned, she glanced back up and scanned the faces of everyone who was gathered now around her. He loved her in The Beast of the City, and not just for her looks but for her acting. It was everything she had struggled and hoped for so long to attain, all now in one neatly written note from one of the most powerful young men in Hollywood.

  “Did you put Mr. Thalberg up to this?” she asked Paul as her brows knitted into a small frown.

  “No one ever puts Irv up to anything. He is his own man. It’s a compliment, and a big one. You need to take it that way.”

  “Oh, Baby, that’s just marvelous,” her mother exclaimed, joining her two hands prayerfully beneath her chin, and Harlean saw that she had tears in her eyes. “See? I knew all along that this would happen if we just stayed the course.”

  Bobbe and Kay arrived then, rounding out the group of friends Harlean enjoyed being with the most these days. They came together down onto the patio, in casual shorts, sneakers and polo shirts, and each accepted a drink from Marino who stood in front of a table full of gin, tonic water and glasses. Bobbe was holding a stack of publicity photos in her other arm.

  “Good luck getting back across the street after dinner,” Kay said. “It’s crawling with newsmen and photographers now that you two have announced your engagement.”

  “What’ve you got there?” Harlean asked her.

  “Just a few photos, special ones the studio wants you to personalize.”

  “Leave those for me, Bobbe. I’ll autograph them for her later,” Jean directed. “I’ll sign as the Baby.”

  “But, Mrs. Bello—”

  Jean held up her hand. “We’re one and the same, the Baby and I. I know what she means to say, and besides she’s got a wedding to plan and a new picture to get ready for. She can’t be bothered with trivial things.”

  “Thanks, Mommie,” Harlean said as she blew her mother a kiss across the patio. “And thanks to all of you! Now, anyone else ready to eat? I’m starved!”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Brown Derby was bustling by noon when Harlean and Kay arrived for a last-minute bite of lunch. Even though it was September, the summer tourist crowd now in 1933 had yet to fade. Harlean’s eager new chauffeur, Herbert Lewis, in black cap and livery, dashed around to the passenger side and opened her door as Kay got out the other side on her own. Harlean sighed at the size of the crowd gathered outside before them. She hesitated for a moment before they walked toward the front door. Kay hadn’t had time to make a reservation, so this was bound to take forever with so many people waiting ahead of them.

  Harlean pulled the fur collar of her long, belted camel-hair sweater up closer to her throat just as the crowd outside parted, allowing them to pass. Whispers rose up around them. Harlean realized then that these were not patrons but rather fans eager for a glimpse and perhaps an autograph from one of the Hollywood celebrities who regularly dined there during the noonday rush. Coming here would always remind her of Rosalie and that first lunch.

  “It’s her, that’s Jean Harlow!” a girl excitedly squealed as magazines began to flutter around her like autumn leaves, and pens were held aloft. “Ask her! Go on, ask her!”

  “Miss Harlow, please!” another bid her as she shoved the latest issue of Hollywood magazine at her. She was on so many magazine covers now but seeing them was still a thrill to her.

  As Harlean complied and offered up a sweet smile, the click of a camera punctuated the moment, then another, and the bright flash of bulbs followed.

  “We love you, Jean!” The eager cry moved through the crowd as Harlean offered back the autographed magazine and pen and then continued on inside the restaurant.

  “Miss Harlow,” said the maître d’ with a huge smile and a deferential nod. “How lovely to see you.”

  To her surprise, Harlean recognized him immediately as the man calling himself Francois, the struggling actor who once had given Rosalie such a challenge here. That had been the day before her entire life had changed forever, she remembered.

  A wave of nostalgia hit her as the maître d’ took two menus f
rom the top of the host stand. “Right this way, Miss Harlow. Our best table in the house is right over here.”

  How silly, she thought, that she’d been concerned about her lack of a reservation. Some part of her would always feel like Harlean Carpenter, the uncertain girl from Missouri, even though she was now one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

  She was still learning how to accept the fact that she had arrived.

  As she bit back a proud smile for how far she had come, and slid into the booth, Gary Cooper passed by the table and nodded to her. Across the aisle, Thelma Todd looked up from a plate of salad, recognized her and offered up a friendly wave. For a moment, Harlean nearly turned around to see if there was someone famous behind her.

  “So then it’s settled, is it? You’re definitely doing another picture with Clark Gable?” Kay asked as she perused the menu, now unfazed by the attention Jean Harlow garnered.

  Kay herself looked the part of an actress today, strikingly attractive and in a steel-blue dress and pearls.

  “Yep, we sign the contracts tomorrow.”

  “I’m so happy for you that it all worked out. You two are sensational together on film.”

  “We understand each other, I suppose. And it’s wonderful, finally, not to be hired just for my looks, or because they want me to play a tramp, but because they actually think I can act.”

  “You sure have earned your stripes,” Kay laughed. “I don’t think anyone could disagree with that.”

  * * *

  After another series of interviews and another photo shoot that afternoon, Harlean returned home exhausted. She climbed the stairs toward her bedroom, eager for some time to herself, and a chance to lose herself in the novel she was reading, before another full day tomorrow. Her days were long now but she found them equally wonderful.

  At the moment, she felt as if she were on top of the world. Fragile though that place was, forever susceptible to a tumble at the slightest provocation, she was trying to revel in her hard-won success and, most of all, never, even for an instant, to take this incredible ride for granted.

  Jean’s bedroom light was on so she popped her head in the door to say hello.

  “Well, you’re late this evening,” said her mother who was arranged on her bed like a magnificent blonde queen bee, covered by a pink satin spread, a white fur coverlet, and propped behind with satin pillows.

  She closed the magazine she was reading as Harlean climbed onto the bed and curled up beside her like a little girl. “Tonight was great.”

  “So how was your day?” Jean smiled as she asked and began to tenderly stroke her daughter’s hair.

  “The morning was absolutely wild. We went to the Brown Derby for lunch. You should’ve seen the way people cheered.”

  “I’m sure you’re used to that by now.”

  “I don’t know, maybe it was just that place. I haven’t been there in a while, and you remember what happened the first time I went there with Rosalie.”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “I signed autographs outside afterward today for almost an hour.”

  “Surely you’re joking. Your schedule was planned down to the minute!”

  “Well, people wait for me these days,” Harlean said softly, but her voice had an edge of steel to it now. “No one gives me a hard time anymore.”

  “Except me,” her mother said knowingly.

  “Except you,” Harlean concurred.

  “You’ll need your rest tonight, my darling. Have you forgotten the big ceremony tomorrow?”

  Harlean knew there could be no bigger ceremony in her mother’s eyes. Of course she hadn’t forgotten. It had become the pinnacle of success—the defining event in any star’s career. This one would be as much for Jean Harlow Bello as it was for the second Jean Harlow. They had been on this journey together from the start, seen it together and shared the same fantasy long ago of what it might be like.

  “Of course I haven’t forgotten. I’m putting my prints in cement at Grauman’s.”

  “Yes, you are.” Jean smiled. “Right there along with Clara Bow, Mary Pickford and the rest of the greats.”

  “You knew it would happen one day, didn’t you?”

  “I never had a single moment of doubt, Baby.”

  There was silence that fell between them then, a communion of sorts, for how far they had come together. There was still no one in the world whose company Harlean valued more, nor whom she depended upon more greatly.

  “Remember that day we saw Pola Negri there at Grauman’s when I was just a girl?” Harlean sighed.

  “How could I forget? No one could get near her, but she tossed kisses to the crowd.”

  “I met her once not long ago.”

  “Did you?” Her mother’s sedate tone was filled with equal parts surprise and envy.

  “We bumped into one another on the dance floor at the Cocoanut Grove.”

  “You never told me,” Jean said as Harlean nestled against her mother’s chest.

  Theirs was such a complex relationship, over which lay a blanket of anger and hurt for her mother’s many and intense manipulations along the way. Harlean was not a fool, nor was she blind to any of that. Yet underneath, at the core, was still and always would be a great devotion between mother and child. Families were complex things. Her feelings for her father, for Aunt Jetty...each relationship was different, deep, fragile. She knew now that all love was complex—sometimes not easily explainable, like the feelings she would always carry for Chuck as they went forward with their own lives.

  “We were supposed to have lunch.”

  “No!” her mother said with an incredulous gasp.

  “She promised to phone, but I heard she went to England not long afterward. Her career really wasn’t doing very well by then.”

  Jean’s eyes sparkled with love and triumph as she looked down at her daughter nestled beside her just as she had done since Harlean was a child. “As one star fades, another ascends. That’s the way it is in Hollywood,” she said. “One day, a little girl somewhere will probably see you in the movies, like you saw Pola Negri, and you will change her future. And so it will go.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” she added, reaching over and taking three copper pennies from her nightstand. She handed them to her daughter. “Tomorrow, press these into the cement along with your prints, for Mommie, would you?”

  “Pennies for good luck,” Harlean said. “That’s certainly what you’ve brought me all these years.”

  “What we brought each other. Then it will be like I am immortalized right along with you.”

  * * *

  “Jean! Jean! Miss Harlow, over here!”

  The flash of the cameras was blinding. She looked into the excited crowd and felt her heart flutter. In response, Harlean gave them her prettiest Harlow smile which brought a rousing chorus of cheers. It wasn’t old, this would never get old. She had worked too hard, and come too far, to ever take any moment like this for granted. It was a thrill.

  Sacrifice, disappointment and loss, all of it had taken its toll and it had cost her everything she had emotionally just to arrive at this place—the top of her game. The road had been a long one—but she’d made it!

  Harlean glanced down at the wet square of cement waiting for her, and in that moment she thought to herself, This truly is amazing! Against her elegant black silk dress she held a distinctive white orchid spray. She had insisted on that particular accent. “Touch has a memory. O say, love, say...” Pennies were to honor the one person who had been key to her success, orchids were for the other.

  “Are you ready, Jean?” Sid Grauman asked as he stood beside her.

  “I think I’ve been waiting for this moment all of my life,” she replied with a beaming smile as she leaned forward then and carefully pressed her han
ds into the cold cement, to the roar of the crowd behind her.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from MADAME PICASSO by Anne Girard.

  Author Note

  Seventy-nine years after her tragic and untimely death at the age of twenty-six, Jean Harlow’s legacy endures, nurtured and lovingly cared for by her noted biographers, as well as in the hearts of her legions of devoted fans. I was well aware of that important legacy before I wrote a single word, and therefore of my responsibility to tell this story with the utmost care and respect.

  While Harlow remains an icon, what fascinated me more than her image was the true story of the smart, tenderhearted and spirited teenager beneath the famous platinum blond hair. As I began my research, I wondered: Of the thousands of young girls who found their way to Hollywood in 1928, exactly what elements went into separating her and making her into such a legend? For me, beyond that undeniable “sparkle” of hers, a portion of the answer was her relationship to two people; rivals, combatants, yet both essential for her rise to fame. Most obvious was the first Jean Harlow and her fanatical, lifelong devotion to “the Baby.” But the other relationship drew me more. While Chuck McGrew is largely eclipsed in the annals of history by her subsequent husbands, Paul Bern and Hal Rosson, then later by her great love affair with William Powell, and even her famous friendship with Clark Gable, it was Chuck and Harlean’s story by which I was fascinated; that young, fragile, tumultuous and doomed love story. Yet was it not that very same tumult, which seemed so intolerable, I wondered, that was, in part, a source of her strength to rise above and triumph? If her marriage had succeeded, would the world have the legend of Jean Harlow today?

  It seemed the more desperately Chuck tried to hold on to her, the more he pressed her toward her inevitable destiny. For that, perhaps he is owed some small debt of gratitude, and a sense of understanding for the losing battle he waged. Years after their divorce, she is said to have spoken tenderly of Chuck, even tearfully, wondering what her life would have been like if she had remained his wife. As I completed Platinum Doll I found myself wondering that, as well.