Jean Harlow

flashback

Vanity Fair, January 1935

Sixty years ago, Howard Hughes launched Jean Harlow in Hell's Angels, creating the world's first blonde bombshell—a cameraman christened the Harlow halo "platinum"—and triggering a nationwide run on peroxide. In her short career (here the beauty on the beast is just twenty-three), Harlow embodied allAmerican sex. Depression audiences adored her wisecracking hard-knocks tart in Red Dust and Dinner at Eight, although she was really from a well-todo family and spoke finishing-school French. Offscreen, Harlow was the original troubled sex goddess. (Coincidentally, both she and Monroe made their last films with Gable.) "No matter what I do," she lamented, "I always end up on page one." She played with New Jersey Godfather Longie Zwillman and was godmother to Bugsy Siegel's daughter, and the headline suicide of her allegedly impotent second husband, MGM's Paul Bern, remains one of Hollywood's darker mysteries. When she died of uremic poisoning at twenty-six, she was engaged to "Thin Man" William Powell.