In the first two decades of the 20th century, Hollywood was colonized. Large companies usually headed by single driven individuals bought up enormous properties and built studios that were like small cities. In these cities, for the next 50 years, studios single-handedly churned out massive quantities of films for consumption. They took care of everything from the time the script had to be written to the release and exhibition of the finished product.

Their control wasn’t limited to production alone. What was fascinating was how much control they exerted upon the lives of their actors, especially the stars. Since they brought the crowd in, the stars were a valuable commodity, commodity which they happened to own. The studio bosses controlled their image in the public eye with a vice-like grip, so while what they did on screen was a performance, the bigger performance was how the studio projected their real lives on to the public consciousness to ensure the continuing viability of their commodity. Not surprisingly, the women got the worst of it.

This was an industry that fetishized youth and beauty over everything else. The manner in which the studio treated its female stars is endlessly fascinating not just because of its rampant sexism, misogyny and hypocrisy but also because some of these stories are far more poignant and affecting than any film they ever put up on screen. One such story is that of Jean Harlow.

Jean Harlow worked for only nine years between 1928 and 1937. She appeared in some of the biggest moneymakers of the time and was without a doubt the biggest female movie star of the 1930s. She was known as the ‘Platinum Blonde’ because of her light blonde hair, and she became the ‘sex symbol’ by which all other sex symbols would be judged. She was what the thousands of women who landed up in Los Angeles every year aspired to be, a big-time superstar with the world at her feet. She was a success story. Therefore, when the public found out that she had died at the age of 26 on June 7th, 1937 of complications from kidney failure, their first reaction was that of shock.

And then began the myth-making that is so common when big stars die young. The afterlife of Jean Harlow as an emblem of incandescent youth cut tragically short continued for decades. In a perverse sort of way, she and others like her had escaped what everyone who had ever been a star feared – age and the looming threat of rejection and irrelevance.

Yet nothing in how the public saw her when she was alive or how her memory was used after she was dead had much to do with the truth about Jean Harlow, whose real name was Harleen Carpenter. Harleen probably never much wanted to be a movie star even though her mother (whose name was Jean Harlow) struggled for a long while to get into the industry. She was always strikingly good-looking and her friends from school remembered that from a very young age, Harleen would turn heads wherever she went.

She got married at a really young age in 1927 to Charles McGrew and probably never wanted to do anything other than throw lavish parties and have fun. Fate intervened when she was waiting for a friend’s audition to get over in the lot of Fox Studios and caught the eye of some of the executives.

Her career took off when she was cast as the female lead in the passion project of Howard Hughes, the maverick millionaire from Texas, who was steadily pumping all his money into his world war aviation epic, Hell’s Angels. He had poured in an astronomical sum of money into the film and started a major publicity blitz to promote it. And that is where Harlow’s persona was created. Hughes had taken full advantage of all the freedom Hollywood had in the depiction of women (before the Hay’s Code stopped all that) to portray Harlow as nothing more than a walking talking sexual object. She was made to wear clothes that accentuated her physical attributes, and she knew how to smoulder on screen while maintaining a kind of kittenish playfulness. She was dubbed the ‘Platinum Blonde’, which really wasn’t her natural hair colour. In fact, to maintain that her hairdressers would for years use a combination of all kinds of chemicals which would now be considered dangerous to bleach her hair. This would have a disastrous result later.

Hell’s Angels was the first blockbuster hit in the history of cinema and it made Harlow a huge star. She however had been typecast. Even though she later moved to MGM, no one had any real idea how to use her except as a source of titillation for the men in the audience. Her popularity grew even though the critics repeatedly lambasted her acting. In fact, the poorer the reviews got, the higher her popularity rose among the people. It had an unfortunate side-effect.

There was no question of separating performance from the performer in old Hollywood. Everyone who met her couldn’t see beyond her screen persona. Her marriage to McGrew was long over but she never really found love again. No one wanted to marry a woman who was the object of men’s lascivious fantasies all across the country.

Eventually, she got tired of being treated as an object who only existed for the gratification of the men around her. Her popularity was at an all-time high in 1932 when she married Paul Bern. It is possible that she married him because unlike every man she met, he didn’t seem interested in her physicality at all. He was a somber man, but Harlow loved him because he was kind to her and he was the only one who thought that she had it in her to be a good actress. Bern was a tortured man, and his self-loathing had led him to attempt suicide once before. When Harlow was away filming Red Dust with Clark Gable, he shot himself in the head. He left behind a suicide note –

Dearest dear,
Unfortunately this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and wipe out my abject humiliation. I love you.
Paul
And then there was a P.S - You understand that last night was only a comedy.

Harlow was inconsolable. She went back to shooting Red Dust within a week, but she was traumatized by the event. Meanwhile, her films continued to be enormous hits. She was the undisputed queen of the box office. Furthermore, she was slowly beginning to find favour with the critics as well. Bombshell was one of the first screwball comedies of Hollywood, a genre marked by actors exchanging witty banter at breakneck speed, their lines often overlapping each other. Harlow showed a natural talent for it, and took to this style immediately.

While it would appear that she had left Bern’s suicide behind, Harlow’s personal life was nevertheless a shambles. She had started drinking heavily after Bern’s death. She had unsuccessful affairs and another unsuccessful marriage. Her MGM bosses asked her to marry Harold Rosson to deflect attention away from her affairs. She left him within a year. Meanwhile, Harlow had fallen in love with William Powell, a prominent leading man of the time, who strung her along. He had no intention of marrying her, telling his friends that no one in his right mind would ever marry a girl like Jean Harlow. Harlow was distraught and was said to have said that Powell is “breaking my heart!”

This was not all. Sometime in 1933 she began to fall ill and had an emergency appendectomy, and her mother this time insisted that she move in back with her to recover. Jean Harlow Sr. wasn’t exactly being maternal in her concern. She was worried that if ‘Baby’ (as she used to call her) didn’t get her act together, the money would stop rolling in. When she saw that her daughter’s face had swollen up, and her stomach looked distended, she decided that it was time for her to go on a diet. These were actually tell-tale signs of something terribly wrong, and on top of that she was given nothing more than a bit of cottage cheese, some shredded carrot, and a slice of pineapple every day.

She began to lose her looks quickly, as she continued to look wan and swollen. She was always very tired and her hair which had been subjected to chemicals for years was beginning to rapidly fall out. The studios tried desperately to cover this up by casting her against type in Libelled Lady. The other actress in the film, Myrna Loy, was now the centre of attention, while Harlow wore long dresses with full sleeves to hide her bloated figure.

Things finally came to a head when she had to have all four of her wisdom teeth removed. Her mother, in order to not waste time which according to her was better utilized making movies, got a hack dentist to remove all of them at once. It didn’t go well. She contracted painful infections in her mouth, and while filming Saratoga, had to constantly have her mouth drained of fluid. Her health broke down and she fell ill with what everyone thought was a bad case of the flu.

It wasn’t. Her kidneys were beginning to fail, and to make matters worse, her first doctor misdiagnosed it as gallbladder problems. The medicines he gave made it worse. When Clark Gable came to visit, he was shocked to see that she was unrecognizable, and that there was a rotten smell coming off her.

In these last days, (even though a second doctor correctly diagnosed the problem) Jean Harlow lost the will to carry on. We read in David Stenn’s biography Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow that when a friend who had come to visit told her that she will be back on her feet in no time, she simply said “I don’t want to!” On June 7th, 1937, she died in a hospital from complications due to kidney failure.

Jean Harlow’s short life was largely an unhappy one, even though in those few years she had achieved a kind of superstardom rarely repeated even in those heady days when the studios reigned in Hollywood. Considering the glamour and aura that still surrounds the stars from that era, her life suggests that there was always something Faustian about that deal. Hollywood was the dream-making factory, but it knew how to keep its nightmares well hidden from plain sight.