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Jean Harlow

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Jean Harlow portrait for Dinner at Eight.  This is an original photo.

Today is the 77th anniversary of Jean’s tragic death at 26.  It’s painful to think what Harlow would have done if she had had the chance to live a complete life, knowing that she never got to have one.  Still, when I allow myself to speculate, I like to picture a happy ending for her.  She most likely had another good decade of top stardom before her, but she was never overly enamored with the life of a movie star, so I like to think that when her popularity started to fade she would have stepped gracefully out of the spotlight instead of trying to hang on to stardom by her fingernails.  This doesn’t seem so farfetched when you realize the 1940s saw Alice Faye and Deanna Durbin leave motion pictures while they were still very popular.  She often talked about becoming a writer, so maybe she could have turned to that.  And found the right man and had a family like she always wanted.

I’ve made myself sad thinking about the things that never got to happen for her, so I’ll stop there.

Although there is a lot of sadness around Jean’s legacy, film fans can still be grateful that she lived at all, and that her existence was captured and preserved on film.  She had something that can never be replicated and will never die.

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Photoplay, April 1938

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Jean Harlow goes straight to the source of 1933’s Dinner at Eight

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Cover for a book of paper dolls, c. 1930’s.

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Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, and Constance Bennett make an appearance in Mickey’s Gala Premier (1933)

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Jean Harlow on the set

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Jean Harlow c. 1935

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Screenland, May 1934

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Jean Harlow and Clark Gable with the gang

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A Harlow Halloween story — The great Jean Harlow believed in premonitions, or at least, that’s what fans were told. After her death in 1937, newspapers began to report that she had a premonition that she would die as soon as she became too ill to work.  Looking back in the newspaper archives, I discovered that she discussed a premonition that happened early in her career.  The following comes from an article, “Ghosts and Goblins are Coming,” by Lee Frank in 1935:  Jean Harlow, the motion-picture actress, says that she always has a premonition of what is going to happen. “I can’t explain it,” she says, “it’s like the calm before the storm. I experience a peculiar tightening of my nerves before any special event; I become very calm, instead of becoming excited. "I had a strange dream which revolved about a dreadful tragedy. I wish it could have saved a friend of mine. "One day in Hollywood young Sonny Selwyn called me and said that his father, Arch Selwyn, was coming from New York; he wanted to know if I would ride to the station with him the next morning to meet his father. He had planned to go to the station with his uncle, Edgar Selwyn, but he said that, if I would go, he would go with me. I said I would go. "That night I had a strange dream. I don’t remember just what it was, but I know I awoke with a definite feeling that I must not ride to the station. "Sonny stopped at the house in his car. He was angry when I said I would not go with him. It sounded too silly to tell the boy not to go to meet a train. He drove away. "Fifteen minutes later he had an accident and was killed."  ++++++++++++++++++++ The incident she refers to happened in 1930. Sonny Selwyn, nineteen years old son of Archibald Selwyn, was involved in a bad car accident near Universal Studios, and was rushed to a hospital where he later passed away.

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Allegedly haunted: 1353 Club View Drive, Los Angeles, CA, 90024 When discussing Hollywood’s haunted folklore, the ghost of Jean Harlow and the house she allegedly haunts always comes up as a popular topic. The problem is, very few books that cover the subject actually list the exact address. The following is a description of the haunted Jean Harlow house that paranormal investigator and popularauthor Hans Holzer first published in “Haunted Hollywood,” Bobbs-Merrill; First Edition (1974): “The house in question is a handsome white stucco one-family house set back somewhat from a quiet residential street in Westwood, a section of Los Angeles near the University, generally considered quiet and upper middle class…It is a two-story building with an elegant staircase winding from the rear of the ground floor to the upper story. The downstairs portion contains a rather large oblong living room which leads into a dining room. There are a kitchen and bathroom adjacent to that area and a stairway leading to the upper floor. Upstairs are two bedrooms and a bathroom.” Though Holzer never lists the actual address, most paranormal researchers (myself included) believe that the house Holzer described is located at 1353 Club View Drive. However, I have found an account or two online where the address is believed to be 214 South Beverly Glen, another former Harlow home.  Still there are other resources that confuse Holzer’s report with yet another allegedly haunted address. In “Haunted Places: the National Directory: Ghostly Abodes, Sacred Sites, UFO Landings and Other Supernatural Locations,” Penguin (Non-Classics) (October 1, 1996), author Dennis William Hauck takes the alleged paranormal happenings at Club View Drive and attributes them to the house that Harlow’s husband, Paul Bern, committed suicide inside back in 1932. The Paul Bern suicide house is located at 9820 Easton Drive (and deserves its own separate report). In “Ghost Stories of Hollywood,” Lone Pine Publishing (September 1, 2000), author Barbara Kent more-or-less copies Huacks’ inaccurate information in yet another ghost story rehash.  So…finding the right house gets confusing to say the least. In my mind, Holzer should have published the address. It would have saved a lot of second- guessing. Just for grins, here is an accounting of Harlow’s homes: 618 N. Linden Dr. , Beverly Hills—Harlow lived at the address from 1928 to 1929. 300 N. Maple Dr.—Harlow, her mother and Marino Bello lived at the address in late 1929.  152 Peck Dr. – Harlow, her mother and Marino Bello briefly lived at the address in 1931 shortly before her big hike in salary negotiated by a mobster boyfriend, Longy Zwillman. 1353 Club View Dr. – Harlow and family’s home after stardom. This was also the site where Jean married MGM producer Paul Bern on July 2, 1932. Allegedly, when Bern committed suicide, Harlow was at this address and remained at the house immediately following the aftermath. There is even one story that Harlow had attempted suicide, but was stopped before taking too many pills. 9820 Easton Dr. — Paul Bern and Jean Harlow lived here following their wedding and up until Bern’s suicide inside the house on September 5, 1932.  214 S. Beverly Glen Blvd. — Once described as “The Whitest House in Hollywood.”  512 N. Palm Dr., Beverly Hills — Harlow’s residence at the time of her own death. ++++++++++++++++++++++ According to Holzer, the owners of 1353 Club View Drive experienced the following paranormal phenomena: On one occasion, the dogs barked and growled as they charged upstairs toward the master bedroom only to search around the room without finding anything. A disembodied female voice once whispered, “Please help me.” An apparition, resembling cigarette smoke, was chased by the family dogs. On one occasion, the bed jerked a few times while the couple slept. Both were awakened. Oven light in the kitchen repeatedly turned on.  A shapeless form was once seen floating near the ceiling of the dining room. Disembodied female gut-wrenching sobs were heard by two family members in the living room near the mail box slit. Frequent cold spots (and unexplainable breezes) in the living room, kitchen and upstairs bedroom when no windows were opened. Light footsteps going up and down the stairs. Strong scent of perfume in another upstairs bedroom (not the master). One report of the sound of a party coming from inside a closet in one of the upstairs bedrooms (not the master). An unusual dream shared by members of the household, which eventually led to the discovery of a faulty electric switch near a bathtub. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ With all that in mind — The homeowner’s factual account of Jean Harlow’s death (as recounted by Holzer) was inaccurate. Harlow died of kidney failure brought on by disease, not the aftermath of a past beating by Paul Bern. Also, Harlow died in a hospital and medical treatment was not withheld due to her mother’s Christian Science beliefs.  So, there you have it. Is the place haunted? Who knows for sure when facts get garbled and re-told one too many times. ~ Craig Owens

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"What does the future hold in store for this most gorgeous of all movie blondes, whose private life has been scarcely less colorful than her rise to stardom on the silver screen? Only the future can answer that, though the past may give a grim hint of a star-crossed life doomed to be darkened by unhappiness and tragedy."

— taken from newspaper columnist Dan Thomas’ article, “Jean Harlow — A Love Tragedy — Suicide of Second Husband Adds Chapter to Life Role of Girl Star of the Movies,” dated September 8, 1932.

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