Harlow and Chuck McGrew
Thought about “Chuck” McGrew and his role in young Harlow’s life after noticing an upcoming date: September 21.
It seems I have a disease called “remembering Jean Harlow milestones on their anniversaries”, so thought I’d put my thoughts on the blog while they’re relevant. They’re too wordy for social media and too brief for much else.
The average Harlow fan is quite familiar with Chuck McGrew II, but I’ve noticed he remains an obscure figure in the eyes of the general public compared to Harlow’s more notable husbands. Pictures of him are scarce outside of books (and often blurry). In fact, while writing this, I found multiple genealogy website profiles for Chuck that had images of wrong men from Bill Powell to Louis B. Mayer.
I mean, I get it—reminds me a little of Marilyn’s husbands. There’s a reason people talk more about Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio than they do Jim Dougherty. Anyway, I digress.
Ninety-five years ago in Harlow History, September 21, 1927: sixteen-year-old Harlean Carpenter marries twenty-year-old heir and fellow Lake Forest alum Charles Fremont McGrew II in Waukegan, Illinois.
The two had been considering marriage for months, and settled on a late-night elopement in the face of opposition from Harlean’s mother. The couple drove around seeking out an awake and willing preacher before finding him in Waukegan, where Jean Carpenter had married Marino Bello that January. (Harlean did not attend).
“Just to give you an idea of the solemnity of our wedding,” Harlean told Louella Parsons later in life, “a radio next door to the justice’s office was blaring St. Louis Blues as we listened to the words that made us man and wife”.
In order to secure a marriage license, Harlean added three years to her age and claimed a birth year of 1908. In 1932, in the wake of sensational Bern publicity, renewed interest in the Harlow marriage saga prompted the Associated Press to print an item that Harlow’s first marriage license proved she was fibbing about her age… the opposite way.
Chuck came into young Harlean’s life like something out of her later movies. Fit, well-dressed, and attractive, he was the apple of many a Lake Forest girl’s eye—and an eligible bachelor with a sizable fortune. His affluent parents drowned in a freak boating accident en route to a private island in 1923, leaving the teenaged boy an orphan with a trust fund.
Harlean’s school chum Jada Leland had introduced her to Chuck in 1926 on a blind double-date; he was the best friend of Jada’s fiancé, Albert. The two hit it off instantly. Chuck’s “wonderful laugh and great disposition” meshed well with Harlean’s natural effervescence, and they enjoyed the added bonus of having things in common. Both came from difficult family backgrounds: while Harlean still had both her parents, she did not speak to her father and was suffocated by her mother.
“They really related to each other,” Chuck’s daughter Margo told Harlow biographer David Stenn, “they were both only children, and they were both lonely.”
“We were in love with the excitement and the swiftness of our romance,” said Harlean later to Louella Parsons, “we were in love with night club music and the glamour of each other.”
And that they were: within two months of their wedding, Chuck turned twenty-one and received the initial installment of his inheritance; $200,000, which equals a whopping $3,404,264 in 2022 dollars.
The young millionaire dabbled in the same vices as his peers at the height of pre-Depression grandeur—alcohol and partying. His sudden and for the most part, unrestricted, access to thousands of dollars only abetted his hedonistic habits. As soon as Christmas, 1927, Chuck was losing himself in days-long drunken benders.
Before long, young Harlean was imbued with similar habits, though she was far from able to keep up with her husband. For awhile, the high-rolling youngsters lived an unsustainable all-play, no-work lifestyle. They soon left the Midwest in search of better weather (and distance from Jean’s mother), ending up at 618 No. Linden Drive in Beverly Hills. Harlean was no stranger to Los Angeles, having lived there just three years prior.
“Jean and Chuck would go out in the evening to the Cocoanut Grove or some of the other smart dining and dancing places, while I had to go home and go to bed,” recalled Harlean’s best friend Bobbe Brown later on, illustrating how different their lives were.
Chuck and Harlean might have been big partiers, but they shared more intellectual hobbies, as well. Chuck knew his wife was a “very intelligent, deeply sensitive girl” as his son Robert told David Stenn, and the lovers frequented nearby Griffith Park, using it as an outdoor retreat for picnics and conversation.
Here, Chuck took a series of intimate photographs of Harlean; not intimate in the way her later Griffith Park photos are, but these pre-fame portraits are simple glimpses of the seventeen-year-old’s life, devoid of pretense or glamour.
The disintegration of the McGrew marriage is a longer story that can be saved for another day. Obviously, the two were entirely too young, and wanted completely different lifestyles—Harlean was now embarking on a movie career, and a sullen McGrew viewed his wife’s lark as an extension of her mother’s unbreakable hold on her. During a trip to San Francisco taken after Harlean signed her Hal Roach contract, Chuck tore apart their hotel room in anger. The later abortion of their child further distanced Harlean from Chuck (it is unknown if he knew). Their union was not built to last.
I don’t entirely subscribe to the notion that Harlean was nothing but the hapless, weak-willed victim of her mother’s wiles, and that her acting career was forced upon her, therefore ending her chance at marriage and children. While her mother’s interference certainly helped break up her marriage to Chuck, it’s not that cut and dried.
I think that viewpoint takes agency away from a determined and astute performer, and promotes a misogynistic sugarcoating of the Jean Harlow legend that is just as harmful as the Shulman libel. While I am in no way arguing the level of influence Jean Bello exerted over her daughter, boiling the entirety of Jean Harlow’s indelible screen success down to “obeying mommy’s wishes” is nothing short of disrespectful. Any interview you read with Jean Harlow registers a clear gumption and a desire to learn and succeed.
Once again, I digress. I’m calling it here before I trail off any further. Harlean and Chuck’s marriage was cute in the “puppy love” sense, but the romanticization of their marriage is beyond me. A man could not have saved her from her mother. Given Harlean’s family life, in addition to Chuck’s drunkenness and occasional physical abuse, I’m not inclined to think they would have lived happily after ever—after all, she was still a child when she married him, and her relationship with her mother still would have caused problems, film career or not. Other Harlow fans are welcome to peddle that sob story, but you won’t find it here.
Sources
Brown, B., & Sharon, M. (1935, January). “Jean as I Know Her”. Screenland.
Jean Really 24. (1932, September 7). Quad-City Times.
Parsons, L. O. (1937). Jean Harlow’s Life Story. Dell Publishing Co.
Rooney, D., & Vieira, M. A. (2011). Harlow In Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928-1937. Angel City Press.
Stenn, D. (1993). Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow(1st ed.). Doubleday.