Pop Goes The World
She was born 115 years ago this month in Kansas City, Mo. She was given the name Harlean Carpenter, but growing up she was called Baby. She didn’t learn her real name until she went to school at the age of 5.
When she was 15, she contracted scarlet fever while away at summer camp in Michigan. Two years later she married for the first time. She moved into a home in Beverly Hills with her wealthy young husband and lived the life of a socialite.
When a friend needed a ride to Fox Studios for an audition, she gave her a lift and ended up catching the eye of some studio executives. At first she said she was not interested, but her mother, who had once wanted to be in show business, encouraged her to audition for central casting. She used the pseudonym Jean Harlow, her mother’s first and maiden name.
Her career in motion pictures put an end to her marriage. By 1929 she was divorced, getting bit parts in feature films and bleaching her hair platinum blonde.
At the beginning of the next decade, Harlow was holding her own in movies with stars like Spencer Tracy, James Cagney and Clark Gable. Critics didn’t think much of acting, but at least one pointed out that with what nature gave her to flaunt, she would never starve.
When MGM hired her in 1931, Harlow was given a chance to show the world her comedic side. Depression era audiences flocked to the movies for escape and musicals and comedies were especially popular. MGM made huge profits from Harlow’s films. The studio once bragged that it had more stars that there were in the heavens and none shone quite as brightly as Jean Harlow in the 1930s.
In 1937 after returning from a trip to Washington, D.C., Harlow was set to begin filming “Saratoga” with Clark Gable. Filming was delayed because Harlow developed sepsis following surgery to remove her wisdom teeth. She recovered, but she was still plagued with flu-like symptoms. Her costars began to notice that the radiant Harlow’s pallor had a grayish hue and her normally slim figure appeared bloated. While filming a scene in which her character was suffering from a fever, Gable realized Harlow was actually ill. Her fiance at the time, actor William Powell, was contacted and he drove her home.
Given her youth, her physicians thought that she was suffering from influenza or a diseased gallbladder. One thing was for certain – nothing the doctors did for her was working and she kept getting worse. It wasn’t until she was seen by a physician named Leland Chapman that she received the definitive diagnosis. Harlow was suffering from end stage kidney failure.
On the evening of June 6, 1937, Harlow was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. Shortly after being admitted, she slipped into a coma, from which she never emerged. She died the following day just before noon. Jean Harlow was 26 years old.
For many years Harlow’s mother was held accountable for her daughter’s death by denying her the medical care she needed because she was a Christian Scientist. The truth was that Mother Jean would have done anything to keep her daughter alive. But there was very little that could be done for patients with such advanced kidney disease at the time and most of the care would have been palliative in nature.
Looking at Harlow’s medical history, her kidneys could have begun failing after her bout with scarlet fever when she was a teenager. Some speculated that Harlow’s second husband Paul Bern beat her so severely that he damaged her kidneys but this was never proven. Still others conjectured that Harlow’s condition was congenital and it worsened with time.
It is ironic that Harlow died in the month of March, which is now kidney awareness month. So many advances have been made in the treatment of kidney disease with research yielding promising medications to manage the progression of the disease. In Jean Harlow’s time, dialysis was just a dream and kidney transplants must have seemed like something from a movie about a mad scientist.
Her death must have been a cruel blow to movie fans who were enduring an economic downturn that showed no signs of recovery and who got away from the gloom in darkened theaters watching her bright presence on the screen. Her final film was completed without her by using doubles and dubbing. “Saratoga” was 1937’s highest grossing film.
Harlow was buried in a bronze casket and was dressed in a pink nightgown from her last film. She was interred in a private room in the Great Mausoleum of Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, Calif. Mother Jean joined her in 1958. William Powell had a space reserved for him near her in the mausoleum, but he married three years after Harlow’s death and when he died in 1984, his cremains were buried elsewhere.
The inscription on her crypt is not the name that was given to her at birth, nor her screen name, but the one she was called all her life by the people who loved her: Our Baby.
