Jean Harlow a Feminist!
To start: long time, no see. To put it lightly, I’ve been through the wringer a lot over the past year—health difficulties, death, and heavy work schedules aside, I had to set aside time to rest, grieve, and work on other un-Harlow-related projects that I’ve been tackling headlong. Days really aren’t as long as they should be, and I’ve neglected the blog a bit as a result. Now that you’ve read my exculpatory preface excusing inactivity, let’s move on.
In the fall of 1935, the NEA (Newspaper Enterprise Association) published an unsigned interview with Harlow on the set of Riffraff in its syndicated papers. One of those papers was the Kenosha Evening News, which ran the article on November 4 under the headline “Jean Harlow a Feminist! Actress Tells of Things She’d Do if She’d Been a Man”. Amazingly, I’ve never seen this interview anywhere else in print, not even in the Riffraff pressbook, which instead includes an item lauding Harlow for her perseverance in working twelve hour shifts on set (which no one foresaw soon being in poor taste).
As per usual, I tend to take a grain of salt with newspaper fluff, especially unsigned articles, as the omnipresent publicity department’s invisible hand was always at work as a puppeteer. While this interview absolutely reads like something Harlow authentically espoused, it’s important to take into consideration just how much influence studios and publicists had over their charges. Their curation, unfortunately, blurs or otherwise embellishes the truth and makes nuance in the modern onlooker an absolute necessity. It also tends to lend credence to misogynist delusions that famous film women such as Harlow couldn’t have said anything clever at all, as they didn’t need to, and had plenty of copywriters to fall back on.
Take this verbatim passage from David Stenn’s Bombshell, for example:
That she was a smart woman who “played dumb” did not seem possible. At another Hollywood party, a witty remark by Harlow led a listener to wonder aloud, “Who did you hear say that?” Harlow bowed her head. “My God,” she muttered, “Must I always wear a low-cut dress to be important?”
In the following, a twenty-four year old Harlow imagines her life had she been born the opposite gender, and one detects a hint of frustration at not being taken seriously.
“If I were a man…”
Jean Harlow, virtually the keynote of femininity according to Hollywood standards, started to speak. “If I were a man, and maybe I should have been, I’d first go out and do all the things I want to do anyway–but can’t because I’m a girl. I’d go to a football game alone. I would go hunting and fishing in the mountains every time I could get away from work for a few days. I’d get on a tramp steamer and really see the world as I’d like to see it.”
The actress, clad in a plain blue striped cotton dress that she wears in the prison sequence of “Riffraff”, stretched out on the white lounge in her luxurious studio dressing room. There was something incongruous about the whole picture. That dress just didn’t belong in such surroundings. Yet the atmosphere fitted Jean perfectly.
“I’m sure I never would have been an actor,” she remarked, continuing her musing. “To be perfectly honest, I probably would have gone in for newspaper work or medical science. I don’t like to talk about my newspaper ambitions to writers, because I’m afraid they’ll think I’m just handing out a line. But it’s a fact. I think that profession is the only one having the thrills and romance that make pictures so fascinating.”
“As far as girls are concerned, I don’t think I’d have a bit of preference as to type. I wouldn’t care whether my choice were a blond, brunet, or had green hair. Naturally I would want her to be attractive. All men like that in a girl. But the main thing I would look got would be a girl who was perfectly honest with herself and me. And I wouldn’t stand jealous outbursts for a minute.”
A ringing telephone interrupted, and her maid relayed to Miss Harlow the message that she would be wanted on the set in 15 minutes.
“You see,” Jean declared, “when it comes to work there is definitely a double standard. Girls who have to earn their own living and support families carry the same burdens that men do. But outside of working hours we can’t do the things men do. There isn’t any reason in the world–except that it just isn’t done.”
And with that parting remark, she threw a coat over her shoulders and started for the set where a score of men were earning good wages because Jean Harlow has to earn a living.”
It’s both thought-provoking and lamentable that certain things Harlow felt uncomfortable doing nearly ninety years ago, such as going out solo, are still risky for the average woman in 2023. Yet, Harlow’s passionate description of exploring the world as a man—”really seeing it” how she’d like to see it—belies a simple deep-seated craving for independence and personal satisfaction that was unattainable in her mother’s orbit. The notion that she would have been in the paper business or medical science seems less about gender, even in the thirties, and more about regretting the lack of control over her own interests and career.
It’s worth noting that Harlow’s mother Jean Bello was either in the midst of a quick, acrimonious divorce from husband Marino Bello or had just been granted one at the time of this interview. Bello’s mysterious connections to Mexican gold mines—which he was using a quarter of Harlow’s salary to invest in—compelled William Powell, Harlow’s beau, to emulate his Thin Man screen persona and investigate. Powell’s private detective found there were no mines, but a mistress. Harlow’s mother promptly filed for divorce and was granted one after a fifteen minute hearing on September 26, 1935. Harlow, in the midst of working on Riffraff, did not attend.
The fall of 1935 saw the twenty-four year old gaining nascent financial independence for the first time, freed by her mother’s divorce and taught by the prudent Powell how to save and grow her money. This doesn’t, however, erase the palatial white estate that Harlow’s mother and stepfather built and furnished with her money, or the purported 25 pairs of unused spats Marino Bello splurged on and forgot about that were named in the divorce suit.
Harlow’s comments on girls who “earn their own living and support families” convey a hint of her resentment. After the divorce, it wouldn’t be long before Harlow disobeyed her mother and sold the Beverly Glen mansion, despite the former’s insistence on staying put. Harlow sold the house to producer Nat Levine and his wife on May 11, 1936, downsizing considerably to a two-story Spanish on Palm Drive.
Though hindered by a disabling meekness and lack of self-confidence, one of Harlow’s most innate desires was carefree independence, in fiery opposition to the saccharine mother-daughter bond being sold to the public. Harlow was exceptional at grinning and bearing it–though, privately, Rosalind Russell and maid Blanche Williams were witness to the throes of her internal struggle, relating the platinum blonde’s naive search for fortitude at the bottom of a bottle and the drunken conniptions, directed only at her mother, that followed.
The free-spirited tone of this interview does bring the theme of Riffraff to mind, and is a gentle reminder that there was still a publicity department at play, especially surrounding Harlow’s ongoing upscale rebrand to “brownette”. While the recent events in her life more than likely render these comments sincere, they also fit the bill for Riffraff publicity.
Fundamentally, this article stands out not only due to Harlow’s forward views on female enlightenment, but for the deeper subtleties within her convictions that allow us to glimpse the inside of her mind. It also, as always, elicits an acute sense of poignancy and regret at what Harlow could have achieved had she lived. Roy Brown sings of being “young and in his prime” and a “brand new twenty-five” in his 1948 song, “Mighty Mighty Man”, the lyrics of which further put Harlow’s untimely death at twenty-six into perspective. The mid-twenties are a time of rapid personal development and stabilization as one grows into adulthood, a transformation Harlow was in the midst of undergoing.
While I don’t have a crystal ball and don’t have a clear future forecast of what Harlow’s life would have looked like, I’d like to imagine this new freedom she was barely beginning to explore would have continued to bloom and led her to personal fulfillment. That’s one thing that always bugs me about her short lifespan–while, yeah, it sucks that we didn’t get to see her in more movies and are consequently devoid of middle-aged sixties helmet-hair candids, I simply find it frustrating that this kindhearted individual who brought happiness to countless people was unable to experience the full breadth of enjoyment in her life.
It’s really no wonder that Jean Harlow, the very image of sexual liberation in pre-Code Hollywood, would be a feminist–if the slacks didn’t tell you first.