Books: Better Left Unsaid

HARLOW by Irving Shulman. 408 pages. Bernard Geis. $5.95.

Jean Harlow, first sex goddess of the talkies, had a life that epitomized Thomas Hobbes’s phrase for the life of the “natural” man: poor, nasty, brutish and short. Her mother was domineering and obsessed with sex; her stepfather was a sponging promoter of fake gold mines. Jean’s second husband, Producer Paul Bern, shot himself two months after the wedding. She could not act, but her platinum hair, husky voice, and refusal to wear a brassiere were enough to gross millions at the box office for Howard Hughes and Louis B. Mayer. She died in 1937, age 26, of a kidney infection, leaving less than $30,000.

Now all the scarlet detail of Harlow’s careening career, including much that was never hinted at in the gossip columns and some that is clearly imaginary, is revealed for the prurient-minded in this “intimate biography” by Irving Shulman (The Amboy Dukes). Shulman includes facts that Harlow’s doctors evidently did not have—some not even her hairdresser could know for sure. He asserts that Harlow had bouts of nymphomania. He says that Paul Bern was impotent and a sadist whose beatings caused Harlow kidney injuries —which ultimately killed her because Jean’s mother, a Christian Scientist, refused to allow the star to be treated in time.

The only seemingly sympathetic person in this thoroughly unpleasant book is Harlow’s agent, Arthur Landau, who appears as the tormented girl’s friend, confidant, moneylender, sometime savior and sole defender. Don’t be fooled. Landau, now 76 and living in Hollywood, is the one who spilled all the dirt to Author Shulman. What they didn’t know between them, they improvised.