Naturally, I’m known for my horribly cheesy post titles, so that’s how we’ll start out today’s Harlow History post. Let’s get crackin’:
This day in Harlow History, April 2, 1933: at the tail end of her mourning period following the death of Paul Bern, Jean Harlow attends a Hollywood party at director Woody Van Dyke’s home to celebrate the end of a long and grueling seventeen month production on his Alaskan epic, Eskimo (1933). (Woody and Jean both worked at MGM, but he would go on to direct her in only one film, 1937’s Personal Property).
Other luminaries in attendance included Anna May Wong, Johnny Weissmuller, Eskimo star (and writer of the book it was based on) Peter Freuchen, and columnist Grace Kingsley, all of whom Harlow was photographed with.
Harlow showed up to the event wearing one of her favorite ensembles from this time period, a black and white Jean Patou number done in crepe. (She did a photoshoot wearing this creation a few months earlier in November, which I wrote about here.)
The most interesting part of this function, however, involves Peter Freuchen, the imposing Arctic explorer whose travel memoirs Eskimo was based on.
At some point in the night, after the inevitable involvement of (illegal) alcohol, a harmless, friendly moment between Freuchen and Harlow almost became more scandalous fodder for her already brittle reputation.
Freuchen’s account has a slightly different chain of events each time I’ve found it in print—but the version from his own 1954 memoir, Vagrant Viking, is more detailed and likely the most accurate.
According to Freuchen, he and Harlow had quickly become “great friends” after meeting that night, and at some point, a guest began talking about weight lifting in front of the two—subsequently, Freuchen, a staggering 6’6”, wanted to show off his strength. “I lifted her (Harlow) on straight arms high above my head and carried her around the room. I was wildly applauded, and I put her down carefully, so I thought. Unfortunately a photographer who was present got a shot of the scene without my knowing it. He disappeared before I could do anything about it, but I was soon to hear more of this choice snapshot.”
Another version of this story related to film historian Richard Griffith, which appears in Harlow in Hollywood, has Harlow teasing Freuchen about “not being as strong as he looks” as the catalyst for carrying her around; either way, when the resulting snapshot was revealed to be… revealing, heads nearly rolled.
The next morning, clueless about the photo, Freuchen found a note telling him he needed to meet with studio head Louis B. Mayer immediately. When he arrived, he found the executive sitting at his desk on the brink of tears, a collection of racy upskirt photos of Harlow in Freuchen’s arms in front of him. “They were certainly revealing,” Freuchen wrote.
Discrepancies in the two stories have the photographer either gifting the negatives to MGM out of the kindness in his heart, or Mayer personally paying him $5,000 to avoid the shots going to press. Apologies were made, and Harlow herself was called into Mayer’s lair right after.
The two versions of this story diverge again; either Harlow was waiting outside to speak with Mayer right after Freuchen, or he visited her on the set she was working on and told her about the damage.
Either way, Harlow was resolved to take care of the situation and expressed faux contrition to her boss, who went into one of his infamous crying fits to manipulate her; in retaliation, she cried back at him louder. “Jean realized that attack was the best defense and threw a fit of hysterics until he promised to forget the incident,” Freuchen wrote, but there was one caveat; Mayer kept the lucrative negatives and stashed them in his personal safe. “Now he’s got me for life,” lamented Harlow.
In the version of the story where the negatives were bought by Mayer, Harlow went as far as to reimburse him with a $5,000 check and intended to keep the negatives in return; but when she reached for them, Mayer snatched them away for safekeeping. However it happened, the scandal was evaded completely and didn’t come to light until Peter Freuchen himself wrote about it twenty odd years later. One ponders the unlikely possibility of the negatives still existing—realistically, they were probably destroyed at some point, but it’s fun to imagine them sitting either unrecognized or forgotten about in somebody’s collection or garage. Here’s the two different versions of today’s story as they appeared in Vagrant Viking and Harlow in Hollywood; both are hilarious, and the real scenario is likely a mixture of them:
A lesson to be learned: if you’re a famous movie star wearing a dress, don’t get picked up by a guy a foot and a half taller than you. If you must, make sure there’s no cameras.
Harlow Heaven 