Cinema: Death in Hollywood

“Dearest Dear: Unfortunately, this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humiliation. You understand that last night was only a comedy. Paul.”

“Paul” was Paul Bern, 42-year-old associate producer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which in recent years has produced more big successes than any other company. Hollywood knew and admired Bern as the No. 1 assistant of Production Chief Irving Thalberg. “Dearest Dear” was Paul Bern’s wife, Jean Harlow, 21-year-old film actress (Hell’s Angels, Red Headed Woman), whose marriage to Bern last July was the most surprising, most gala, most romanticized wedding of Hollywood’s summer. When the note was found last week near Bern’s unclothed body, in the bedroom where he had killed himself, Hollywood was faced with a tragedy as bizarre and inscrutable as any in its bizarre and scandalous history.

What Hollywood knew about Paul Bern made his suicide last week even more amazing than his marriage to Jean Harlow who, daughter of a Kansas City dentist, was christened Harlean Carpenter; married at 16 to a young Chicago broker named Charles Freemont McGrew II, divorced three years later after he had accused her of posing nude for photographers; and ballyhooed into a $1,250-a-week star when Producer Howard Hughes decided that her silvery blonde hair and peculiarly voluptuous physique might be even more profitable elements in his $4,000,000 Hell’s Angels than burning airplanes and balloons.

Hollywood knew Paul Bern as an adroit and skilful cinema craftsman. Associate producers generally are not credited for their work, but he was considered largely responsible for MGM’s Grand Hotel. Paul Bern came to the U. S. from Germany when he was nine. Educated in Manhattan public schools, he studied further at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, became a theatrical director, went to Hollywood to write scenarios. His work on The Marriage Circle, The Christian, The Dove caused him to be made an executive. In a community founded upon the assumption that to be blatant is to be successful, Paul Bern was a curious exception. He lived quietly in a house secluded from the rest of Hollywood in Benedict Canyon. He was noted not for his affaires with film actresses but for platonic friendships, apparently based on hypersensitive sympathy for the misfortunes of unhappy celebrities. When Barbara La Marr was dying, she summoned Paul Bern to her sickroom. Mabel Normand did the same thing. He became known, jocosely, as “the little confessor of Hollywood.” Platonic friendships are even more suspect in Hollywood than elsewhere. Nevertheless Paul Bern’s reputation as a kindly, disinterested bachelor was such that even chit-chat writers, who had been attentive to Jean Harlow, saw no possibilities in her three-year acquaintance with Bern.

Routine police investigation was fruitful of few essential facts. At the home of her mother and stepfather (a Chicago hotelman named Marino Bello whom sleek Mrs. Carpenter had married after a divorce from her first husband), Jean Harlow told detectives that she and Bern had dinner at home the night he shot himself. Afterward she had gone to spend the night at her mother’s house because her stepfather was going fishing and her mother wanted company. Bern was expected to follow, but instead he telephoned to say that his headache was worse and he preferred to stay home. For several days the strongest evidence of suicide-motive was his personal physician’s statement that the autopsy showed Paul Bern had suffered “a physical handi cap that would have prevented a happy marriage.” At the Plaza Hotel in San Francisco last week there was a guest named Dorothy Millette. She had registered there early last May. Before that she had lived for 15 years at Manhattan’s literary Hotel Algonquin where she was known as Mrs. Paul Bern. She had received $250 a month from Bern. On the day following Bern’s suicide Dorothy Millette left the Plaza Hotel, boarded the river-steamer Delta King for Sacramento. When the ship ar rived Dorothy Millette was not on board. Her cabin was empty. Her coat and shoes were on deck. Near them was a bag which might have concealed a bathing suit. Police busied themselves with dragging the river. . . . Few days later San Francisco police found another bag, left behind by Miss Millette. It contained friendly letters from Paul Bern and his secretary, wishing her a pleasant visit in San Francisco and arranging for her supply of funds. Into the Hollywood mystery was injected the new question : Was Paul Bern ever married to Dorothy Millette? And was his marriage to Jean Harlow therefore bigamous? A New York lawyer said he had a will made out by Paul Bern in favor of Mrs. Dorothy Bern. An insurance broker said that ten years ago “Bern told me of his wife who was then … an inmate of an institution for the insane in New York State.” Paul Bern’s brother Henry, who flew from Newark to Hollywood to attend the inquest, declared that Miss Millette had been a sanitarium patient. His sister, Mrs. William Marcus, said Paul lived with Miss Millette. “brought her into the family as his wife,” but never married her. Fat-faced Brother Henry revealed that the real name of the Bern family, changed when Paul began his theatrical career, was Levy.

Grief-stricken Jean Harlow had cause to wonder whether her career in cinema would be destroyed. But without Jean Harlow, work on her new film could not proceed for long. A week after Paul Bern’s death, she made herself up as a “siren,” went to work in Red Dust, an Indo-Chinese film.

At Paul Bern’s funeral, conducted in Grace Chapel by Rabbi Edgar Magnin, was a $25,000 display of flowers estimated by the undertaker to be the greatest display in Hollywood history. Nosing about outside the chapel was a crowd of 2,000. Inside were a score of Hollywood celebrities. Excerpts from the eulogy delivered by Cinemactor Conrad Nagel: “This can’t be the end. His gentle spirit is still with us. We bid you godspeed, Paul Bern, on your journey to a better place and we say here in your own words and in all reverence: ‘We’ll be seeing you.'”