94 years ago today in Harlow History, September 5, 1932: The body of Jean Harlow’s second husband, MGM producer Paul Bern, is found inside their shared Easton Drive home. Butler John Carmichael made the grim discovery in the dressing room of the master bedroom; the situation would then be irreversibly tampered with by the Studio, who did not send for police for several hours. As a result, conspiracies and purported “final” or “complete” explanations abound. There aren’t and won’t be any.
The facts of the matter remain that Bern was a verifiably disturbed individual with a hidden common law wife named Dorothy Millette, just as disturbed, who was actively materializing at the time Bern remarried to Harlow. Whether you believe Millette killed Bern or not is up to you, but I tend to believe the coroner’s perception that his fatal gunshot wound was self-inflicted, as it lends credence to various observations of a moody Bern carrying around a gun. This is just my opinion, though, and I won’t try to change yours. I can only offer the literature, such as David Stenn’s Bombshell (the very best on this) for you to read and analyze.
I don’t like to parade the Bern situation out for likes or views as I cannot imagine being a twenty-one year old woman with widowhood on her plate, especially when her marriage was already widely seen as opportunistic to begin with. This candid magazine photo says more about what Harlow valued in Bern than money or status: an environment to be herself in, without the studio “warpaint”.
Their relationship has been much theorized on and otherwise exploited, and I don’t care to add to that. Some things deserve to be private, and Harlow knew this: she never spoke of this situation to anyone in her personal life.
Harlow Heaven 