JEAN HARLOW’S LAMENT by Kerry Jones
Jean Harlow died the other day,
These are the words I heard her say;
Her mother was sitting at her bedside and cryin’,
“I believe to my soul that my child’s dyin’.”
– Leadbelly
It is shortly after midnight, and June 7, 1937, is a new day and a light rain falls over the South Atlantic as Amelia Earhart leaves Natal, Brazil. Her destination on this leg of the journey is Daka, Senegal. In a few hours she will radio: “Everything is going fine.”
On the same morning in Hollywood, California, everything is not going fine and Jean Harlow – those who know her call her “The Baby” – is on her deathbed. Those who have been to see her in the last few days, people like her lover William Powell, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, and screenwriter Anita Loos, know this. Her kidneys have stopped functioning, a ramification of a long-forgotten dose of scarlet fever. Her head has been shaved. Her body, the body that many men found irresistible (save, perhaps, Paul Bern) and the body that gave many an adolescent boy his first memorable wet dream, has ballooned to twice its normal size.
Two days earlier, when Clark Gable visited and bent to kiss her, the stale, strong, creeping stench of urine wafted up from Harlow’s nose and parted lips, and he had to fight to keep from visibly recoiling. Those beautiful, rosebud lips. So pale! So pale! He will not see her again until the day of her funeral, when her casket is opened following the service so friends and family can say a final goodbye. By then the mortician and MGM makeup artists will have worked their magic and what they all remember as the “real” Harlow will appear one last time, clad in a nightgown she wore in Saratoga. Gable will say of the dying Harlow, “It was ghastly.” Of her corpse: “She was beautiful. It was hard not to believe she was only sleeping.”
Of course, no one will see Jean Harlow as she lies in her crypt decomposing. But ashes to ashes, dust to dust, a fate that waits for us all. The only thing that will not decompose quite so readily is the wig, so carefully designed by her hairdresser that the privileged few who see her corpse forget her head was ever shaved.
Her mother, technically the real Jean Harlow because what rests on the hospital bed is actually Harlean, clutches her daughter’s hand and says, “You hear me. You hear me, can’t you? Stay with me. Stay.”
No, the world’s idea, the world’s creation of, Jean Harlow thinks, because she is tired and, quite frankly, sick to death of her mother, who has been a hovering presence all her life. Jean can, in fact, hear her mother quite well, and she knows that if she is going to die, she is finally going to do something by herself, on her own terms. No one, not anyone, is going to stop her. Because she knows, all too well, that in these twenty-six years of existence, she has done very few things on her own terms. As she feels her life slowly drifting away, she is not about to give her mother any more satisfaction than the woman has already had.
It’s been one goddamned-awful mess, this life, Jean thinks. But not for lack of trying. No, she knows she has to give herself some credit, but she wonders why, for someone who never really asked for much from this life, she was thwarted at every turn. For instance, at this moment, there’s only one thing she really, truly wants to do: finish reading Gone with the Wind. She isn’t some dumb blonde, and she knows David O. Selznick is going to make a movie out of it, and she wants to be Scarlett O’Hara. But still. All she wants to do is finish the book. Something so simple. The simple pleasure of reading. Life won’t even give her that, and she suspects she’ll never know how the book ends. She’s been a good girl for the most part, and she plays by the rules when she can. There’s no skipping ahead when reading a book, so she doesn’t even know the last line, and she might appreciate its irony: “After all, tomorrow is another day.”
She’s scared, she’s suspicious, she thinks she may be at her end, but at this moment on June 7, 1937, she just can’t believe there isn’t going to be another day, not for her. Goddammit, it can’t be the end, it’s not even really summer yet.
She doesn’t even suspect that if she lives, Selznick will never give her the part, anyway. The public wouldn’t buy it. Jean Harlow as Scarlett O’Hara? Oh, come on. Not after that look Marie Dressler gave her character at the end of Dinner at Eight when she said, “You know, I was reading a book the other day. . .” But even now, even at the end, Jean Harlow still believes in second chances, in transformations.
Call her a little naive, a little innocent. A bit blind. It’s okay. You’re right.
At times she had control. Take, for instance, Camp Cha-Ton-Ka during the summer of 1926. She’d hated it there, another stupid whim of her grandfather, who always wished she’d been a boy and never forgave her for it, as though she’d had something to do with destiny, some kind of psychic cosmic control over the universe. She didn’t want to go away to the stupid camp, but what grandfather wanted, grandfather got. So what else was she supposed to do? She was fifteen, and already the nuns at school had her pegged for a future fallen woman. Anyone could see that, you just had to look at the girl. Nothing good could come to a girl who looked like Harlean, no matter how many rosaries or Hail Marys she said.
But I am good, Jean thinks as her mother continues to call her name, to will her back to further earthly existence. I am innocent. Even at the summer camp, even at fifteen. She was so bored, and the tiresome chatter of girls her own age annoyed her. They were all in love with Rudolph Valentino, of course. Oh, wasn’t he just divine? Actually, no – Harlean didn’t think so. She didn’t know much about it, but if she had to place a bet, she suspected he didn’t have the least bit of interest in women. The chatter was also of flappers, of the boys’ camp across the lake, of whether or not to bob hair, of the best place to sneak a cigarette. And more talk of boys. Boys, boys, boys. How cute they were! And none of them had the guts to do anything about it. None of them would even consider it.
Sex. If they talked about it at all, it was in whispers and hushes, as if anyone was around to hear them, to care. They were all bustling toward the same destiny: to lose their virginity on their wedding nights, some of them to men who were also as bewildered as they were. The kissing, the petting – all of that was fine, just so long as you didn’t go too far, didn’t take that fatal leap. Because in the end, every boy wanted a pure girl, easy to get, just put a penny in the gumball machine and out she comes.
Virginity. A tricky commodity. Harlean wasn’t having any of it. She didn’t believe in it. And there was that cute boy at the boys’ camp across the lake, as though the lake itself could act as a giant chastity belt, a watery prophylactic. She had liked him, liked the look of him. He was tall and slender, had wiry arms, sandy blonde hair and blue eyes, and white, straight teeth that he flashed with a slightly uncertain smile that she found both comical and strangely endearing. They, the girls, all had a crush on him, and they all clambered to the beach or shoreline when the boys were out canoeing to catch a glimpse of him and wave. The main mess hall was on the girls’ side of the lake, so every afternoon, under watchful supervision, the boys and the girls had about two hours to intermingle. After a week at camp, Harlean made a mental, decided note: he would be the one.
(You see, there were times when she knew she could get exactly what she wanted, despite everyone around her who would try to make it otherwise. It’s possible to know these things, even at fifteen.)
It happened at the end of the second week, on a Friday afternoon. In that mess hall. They had never even spoken to each other directly, but she made sure to catch his eye every afternoon. As if by instinct, she knew exactly how to do it. She would talk to her friends for a little while, then disengage herself and lean forward on the table and rest her chin on her left hand and just . . . stare. And when someone who looks like Harlean stares at you, in that particular way, you know it. You feel it. And you stare back. And this is exactly what the boy did. She then held him there, almost suspended, for just a few seconds, then shyly smiled and looked away, and she would not look back at him again until the next day.
She performed this little maneuver every afternoon.
This, she would think as she and her friends leisurely strolled through the woods back to their cabins, is what it means to be a tease. The thought thrilled her. Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Not me. Not me!
On that Friday afternoon, she worked things a little differently. She couldn’t wait too long, when the kids started finishing their lunches and getting up from the tables and could go outside and nose around for a while – someone could find you, and it didn’t matter whether it was one of the damn counselors (and most of them, male or female, looked like they hadn’t had any in years) or a big-mouthed kid, they were going To Tell on You. She didn’t need her grandfather getting wind of this or, God forbid, her mother.
In the middle of lunch she stared, and he, of course, stared back, and instead of looking away this time, she slowly looked to one of the four exits from the hall. Only this time she did something differently: she looked back at him, and smiled, and looked to the exit again. She then stood up and said in a low voice to her friends, “Powder room. Be right back.”
They found each other outside the mess hall, and without a word, she took his hand and lead him only a few yards away from the hall to a small, secluded grove of blueberry bushes, where no one could really see them. He seemed startled, and she put a finger to his lips and said, “Shhhhh.” Then she stepped out of her shorts and her underpants, because this was back when she still wore damn underpants, and got down on her knees and pulled his modest swim trunks down. Then she leaned back against the grass and the dirt and the pine needles, and slowly spread her legs.
They made little noise and it hurt a bit but it was all over very quickly, less than five minutes. Afterward, she smiled at him, and when she stood up, there was some blood on the ground, and he gasped and asked if she was all right and she said she was. As they stepped out of the blueberry bushes, she was relieved that no one was around, and she thought, It’s okay, it’s okay. It worked out perfectly. All according to plan!
As she started toward the mess hall, he caught her arm and pulled him toward her and kissed her cheek. But that was too much for broad daylight, she knew, and she pulled away. He looked at her and smiled. “My name is David,” he said.
She smiled and quickly touched his cheek. “That’s a real nice name,” she said, and trotted back to the mess hall with the quick step of a doe, to her friends, to what remained of her lunch.
After that, she would smile at him, and he’d smile back, a little forlornly at times, but she shrugged it off. What of it, really? She hadn’t made any promises, she didn’t want a boyfriend; she was just letting off a little steam, climbing the ropes. She saw no harm. And if he was a little bit hurt, there were plenty of girls to ease the wound.
She is vaguely aware of a slight commotion in the hospital room, and she hears “relieve pressure” and “too risky at this time” and “afraid of hitting the brain and causing permanent damage.” Jean cringes. Oh, just leave me alone, she wants to say, unaware that two doctors are explaining to her mother why they have decided against drilling a small hole into The Baby’s skull.
At times, when the pain dulls, Jean feels as though her body is suddenly lighter, that she might actually be floating high above the bed, floating around the room, and she desperately wants to go higher, to go right out the window and up into the air, high above this rotten hospital and its rotten doctors and nurses, and all the hospital smells and especially the acrid stench of ammonia. I do not need to be purified. She wants to be high above all of it, to reach out and make an attempt to touch a cloud.
But Jean is used to resignation, to settling for second place in terms of what she wants. For instance, later that summer at camp, when she and a few other girls came down with scarlet fever, the last thing she wanted was her mother to be there. And even though the counselors had explained to her mother, over and over, that Harlean was quarantined along with the others, her mother wouldn’t hear of it, and had actually taken a boat and rowed herself across the lake to take care of her daughter. What a production! Later on, her friend Katie Mulvane had said, “Nothin’ by this, but your mother is, well, kinda somethin’ else.”
And she’d never wanted to be an actress, either. Oh, in the end it was all right, she supposes, but why didn’t anybody ever ask her what she wanted? The pain is back and she comes down from the clouds and through the window and back to the bed, because she doesn’t feel lighter anymore. The pain, when it is there, makes her feel awfully heavy, and she is suddenly aware of what that lightness might mean. It means you’re dying, she thinks dimly. It means your number is on the scoreboard, and it’s final innings.
It occurs to her that if this is how it feels to die, it just might be okay. Up, up, and away, she thinks. Not so bad. She opens her eyes and sees, quite clearly, her mother and a nurse and now, her Aunt Jetty. Oh, dear Aunt Jetty. She closes her eyes again. Finally, someone she actually likes in her family is there. But what could this mean?
Again she thinks, Gosh, the things I wanted! The things I still want. I want, I want, I want. She wants to have the strength to curl both her hands into fists and pummel the daylight out of the bed her body was confined to, have a good old-fashioned temper tantrum.
What she’d wanted wasn’t much. It was so simple it was ridiculous. All she really wanted was to be a wife and have gaggle of kids. It had almost happened, with Charlie, her first husband. She’d gotten pregnant, but in the end she’d listened to her mother who told her she was too young and had too many things going for her and in the end she’d allowed the abortion, performed under the illusive guise, “For medical reasons – extreme morning sickness and dehydration. Child detrimental to mother’s health.” So, goodbye child, goodbye Charlie, hello Hollywood.
A brief part in a silent picture was fine. All she had to do was look good. But when everyone realized talkies weren’t just a passing phase, oh good Lord. At the premiere of The Public Enemy, she had sat in the audience and felt her cheeks burn crimson. She was a looker, no denying that, but she was no one’s idea of an actress. Even Jimmy Cagney had tried to help her: “C’mon, kid. You gotta relax and deliver the lines like you’re really sayin’ ‘em.” She’d thought, My God! What does that mean? What am I doing wrong? But Bill Wellman, who was the director, didn’t seem worried at all. “Just do your stuff,” he’d say. Later, she got wind that he’d said to Jimmy, “Look. Who gives a fuck about her acting? She’s candy, and that’s all.”
She’d wanted out then, so badly. Hell’s Angels had been no better, when it was finally released. The critics were not kind, and had no respect for her, but by then it didn’t hurt so much because she was losing respect for herself. She didn’t know what this game called Hollywood was about, or why she was playing.
And then it had happened. It got a little better with Platinum Blonde and Red-Headed Woman, but she still didn’t feel quite right in front of the cameras, yet by then there was Paul Bern, dear Paul, and he had a way about him that made everything seem right. He was unlike any man she’d ever met. There was just comfort and solace, no pawing, no ravaging. She could curl up in his arms and he would stroke her hair, her back, hold her close to him, and she didn’t have to worry about the big bad wolf anymore, because by then the answer to “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” had transformed into, Me! Me! I’m afraid of the big bad wolf! Where’s my fairy godmother? She’ll save me! By then she’d learned the fairy godmother was too busy reading the latest issue of Modern Screen to worry her pretty little old head about poor Jean Harlow.
With Paul, the ultimate goal was not to have her lie back and spread her legs. He’d been a gentleman every step of the way and he wanted her, wanted her to be his wife. If I’d only known then, Jean thinks. She knows now, as the pain subsides and her body feels lighter again, there are no perfect gentlemen in Hollywood. She is starting to lift up out of the bed again toward the window. A perfect gentleman can only mean one thing. You married a man who could never really love you. Not in the way you were meant to be loved, she thinks.
She is high above the bed, almost out the window again. I finally tried that one night, she thinks. I tried and when it didn’t go right, I just didn’t understand. But I still loved him, and would have tried again. Again and again and again.
You see, eventually she had wanted the big bad wolf and had tried to touch a hair on his chinny chin chin, and he recoiled, and she panicked, and the little red-headed woman ran from the mansion-cottage crying, and the big bad wolf had written a note before stripping himself completely naked: “Unfortunately this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out any abject humiliation. I love you. You understand last night was only a comedy.”
Then the big bad wolf got out his gun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. It was a messy scene. Caused a scandal. And to boot, our heroine fell briefly under suspicion of murder. But don’t worry. She was cleared of any wrongdoing. In the end, the public came around, were willing to adore her all over again, and even the critics were starting to believe there was something to this Jean Harlow. Hey, the kid could actually act.
Well, well, well. Who knew?
But she still couldn’t make it right, not with her next marriage, and not with William Powell, the bastard, who gave her a big ring and told her he loved her and wanted to be with her always, always. And in between all the children she had wanted and the abortions she’d had. Where, oh where, in the script was little Harlean, who had never asked for much and had gotten so much in return, except what she really wanted. That was never in any signed contract. It was enough to make her blonde hair swim. All she could see were people around her enjoying their lives, having a good time, and she was feeling so lost and trapped. And she was losing the strength to fight back. What did fighting matter, anyway? She never won.
Talk about fractured fairytales. My goodness.
By the time New Year’s Eve, 1937, came around, she felt as though something was slipping away, even though later that month she had met the president, FDR himself! She was at least able to look back on that day and think, Gee, that was something for a kid like me. But as winter gave way to spring, she had one cold after another, then had to have her wisdom teeth removed, and her mother, always her damn mother, had insisted, contrary to the dentist’s opinion, she have all of them removed at one time. She began to hear whispers about her appearance, about how old she was starting to look, about how much she was drinking.
No one would leave her alone. No one knew when enough was enough. Jean picked up the morning paper one day in March and read about good old Amelia Earhart and her around-the-world flight. For some reason, Jean found herself strangely jealous. “Well, good for her,” she’d snarled, and tossed the paper to the floor. “But I’ve met the president, too, you know. I’ve done a few things, I have, and I’m even younger than she is.”
She said this to no one in particular. There was no one else at the table that morning.
But the thing was, Jean had always admired Earhart, thought the world of her, even though they’d never met, and when Earhart’s plans to fly around the world went kaput for a while later that month because of a ground loop, Jean smiled. She felt cruelly self-satisfied. A strange thing happened a few minutes later. Jean had felt embarrassed. She actually thought about sending a Union Telegram to Earhart to tell her how awfully sorry she was about how everything had turned out, and to buck up. Eventually, she’d make it around the world.
The idea was one of the most ridiculous she’d ever had. I’m thinkin’ like a crazy, dumb broad. What’s wrong with me? Like she’d give two tin nickels about what I think about aviation.
One morning in early April, she got up and went into her private bathroom in the big, stupid, beautiful house her mother had insisted she buy, turned on the lights and casually glanced in the mirror above the sink as she strolled to the toilet.
The thought was quick, fleeting: Now who in the hell is that?
She froze. Then Jean ran to the sink, grabbed it with both hands, and had stared for half an hour at the reflection looking back at her. She ran her hands over the puffy, moony face. She ran her index fingers along the dark circles beneath her eyes. She stood back from the mirror and turned this way and that, let the bloated waistline she was seeing for the first time sink into her consciousness with a cold, dark, sweet kind of horror.
Her knees began to shake terribly, so she put her hands out on either side of herself to protect herself in case it happened too quickly, and allowed herself to sink to the floor. In a few hours, the rest of it, when she allowed herself to look back on the scene, seemed dreamlike: crawling to the bathroom door to lock it, crawling to the shower, turning the shower on as hot as she could stand it, crawling into the shower, backing herself into a corner of the shower – still on the floor, her legs wouldn’t have the strength to hold her upright for a long time that morning, and howling. Oh, how she had cried and howled as the hot water and its force pummeled the shower walls and shielded every terrible, terrible cry.
But Jean was able to pull it together, cut down on the drinking, get to the set of Saratoga. For some reason, though, the feeling of being tired all the time, of just wanting to sleep. That didn’t go away. And she was still bloated, and getting headaches. And the costume people were still whispering about how she looked, how fat and puffy she was, and even Clark Gable was saying some terrible things about her, how he thought she was hitting the sauce too much. But I’m not! she’d wanted to say, but she didn’t think he’d believe her. He’d seemed to have turned on her. Gable, of all people. Gable, who’d never turned away from her naked body as she’d bathed in the rain tank in Red Dust. Take after take that man had stared.
Strangely, they’d never gone to bed, and she had never made the first move nor had he. She often suspected that if she had, it would have happened, even though she wasn’t sure when he’d set his eyes on Carole Lombard.
By the way – just between us, she was right! Poor girl.
She got through as many scenes of Saratoga as she could until it was Saturday, May 29, and finally Jean thought she’d had enough and couldn’t take anymore. She felt so strange, so poorly. Her stomach was hurting so badly she ended up doubling over, and Walter Pidgeon had held her in his arms and told the studio people it might be time to take her to the hospital. Finally it was time to go home.
(And no one thought she wouldn’t come back. Who looks like Jean Harlow and doesn’t come back? Who dies at twenty-six, even in 1937? Not when you look like Jean Harlow. There’s just so much life there. And let’s get rid of the myth. Sure, her mother was a Christian Scientist, but Jean Harlow died in a hospital. She would have done anything to save The Baby. But remember Camp Cha-Ton-Ka? Remember the scarlet fever? She recovered all right, but not her kidneys. No. They were ravaged. She was doomed back in ’26. It wouldn’t have mattered if her mother had rowed across the South Pacific itself. No one could save Harlean. Not in the end.)
She is leaving the bed again, but this time, it’s her final take-off. It is nine a.m. in Hollywood, and the last thing Jean does is look for her beloved Aunt Jetty, but she can’t find her as she rises, and she feels as though the world has abandoned her again, even at what she knows, is certain, is the end. “Hope she didn’t run out on me,” Jean mumbles to no one in particular before she closes her eyes one last time, thankful her words were not particularly addressed to her mother.
She is no longer Jean Harlow as she rises above the bed, but Harlean again, Harlean Carpenter, and because no one will let her go quite so readily, the doctors and the nurses and her mother will try to hold onto her, but in just over two and a half hours, Harlean will be out of the room and out the window, out of the hospital forever and into the clouds where the real dreams exist, and they will not bring her back. She will become anything she wants, and she will become every myth everyone wants, all things are possible for everyone now, and she will rest quietly in her tomb waiting for however long it takes for the sweet prince to kiss her lips and bring her back to life, the life she wanted, and there will be no arguments this time around.
As she rises through the clouds, there is Amelia Earhart cruising gently through the soft rain hovering over the South Pacific, who in a little over a month will not be able to radio, “Everything is going fine” as she searches in vain for Howland Island, and Harlean waves to her excitedly, and says, Goodbye, goodbye! I hope it’s wonderful for you! I know it will be! Goodbye!
For up there, in the safety of the clouds and the whims of the atmosphere, there is nothing to fear but the stuff of dreams themselves which are only dreams, after all, and there is no big bad wolf; no, just an innocent black crow with a gleam in his eye who seems to soar ever higher and higher until he lands comfortably on a silver lining, where he waits, and waits, and waits, to feast on happy endings.
Kerry Jones’s stories have appeared in Sycamore Review, Night Train, Bryant Literary Review, Orchid, Hot Air Quarterly, and The Rambler.