Read Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture Online
Authors: Rachel Kramer Bussel
from birth and continued to use the nickname even as Harlow ascended Hollywood’s ranks (in fact, everyone in Hollywood called her the Baby). She also treated Harlow as if she were a baby, forcing Harlow to live with her and managing her business affairs along with Bello, a sharpie who never saw an angle he didn’t want to exploit.
The great irony of America’s greatest sex symbol of the time is that she might have preferred her mother’s company to that of her husbands and lovers. Mama wrecked Harlow’s first marriage to the young heir with whom she had eloped as a teenager, forcing her to get an abortion for fear that a baby would ruin her career. She later forced her daughter to get a divorce. Mama disapproved of Harlow’s second marriage, to MGM producer Paul Bern, a man twenty-one years Harlow’s senior. When Bern died of a gunshot wound—either suicide or murder—Harlow returned to Mama. Mama effectively destroyed Harlow’s third marriage too, to cinematographer Harold Rosson, even demanding that he sign a postnuptial agreement. Observing the family dynamic when Mama and her husband visited the set as he directed Harlow in
Platinum Blonde,
Frank Capra said, “I could tell the whole story right there. She was dominated. She wanted her mother, she loved her mother and she wanted to be near her mother.” In short, Harlow had a lot of men, but no man could have her. She belonged to Mama alone.
This wasn’t just a personal peculiarity. Harlow managed to incorporate her infantilism into her work. On-screen as well as off, she was a beautiful, vivacious, randy woman—but also an emotional child prone to demands, outbursts and tantrums. Her characters kept oscillating between the two. Similarly, her on-screen lovers seemed to be torn between wanting to bed her and wanting to take care of her. That way Harlow covered
both bases. And in doing so, just as she led the way in creating the bombshell and the unromantic romance, she led the way in creating the child-woman too. Marilyn Monroe (who so admired Harlow that she got Harlow’s hairdresser to dye her locks platinum), Jayne Mansfield, Barbara Nichols, Goldie Hawn and scores of other blondes owed a debt to Harlow as they played the child-woman bit, though most of them did so less tempestu- ously than Harlow did.
But it was a tough image to maintain, this larger-than-life sexual predator who was also something of a babe, and Harlow herself was ambivalent about it. There were times she seemed to encourage the conflation of woman and persona. Like her char- acters, she had numerous affairs and not always with the most savory of men. Among her conquests was the notorious gangster Abner “Longy” Zwillman, whom, according to one account, she had met alongside Al Capone. She also bedded director Howard Hawks, writer Thomas Wolfe and boxer Max Baer. Her best and most diligent biographer, David Stenn, says that she suffered from venereal disease, and another biographer claims that she gaily revealed her vagina to reporters to show that her pubic hair had also been dyed platinum, and that once, in despair, she walked the streets, trying to pick up men. She also liked to cozy up with a bottle of Graves gin. And beyond the romances, the alleged promiscuity and the boozing, the mysterious death of her second husband, Paul Bern, dragged her into scandal and real- life melodrama and made her seem more like her screen persona. By the same token, she often lamented that she was constantly being confused for the characters she played and practically begged the studio to give her a role as a good girl for once—a role, as she put it, “in which I wouldn’t have to speak bad English and slink up to ‘my man.’” She complained that she spent so much
time developing her characters on-screen that she never had time to develop herself. “If I could put on the Harlow personality like a mask while I was working and take it off when the day was done,” she said, “that would be heaven. I can’t ever be myself.” In reality Harlow was well-read and well-spoken and had even written a novel. This was the intellectual Harlow—the brainy screen superego who regarded and sometimes manipulated the Harlow id. All too often, though, the superego seemed to be subordinated to that id.
Harlow wasn’t the only one protesting her image. The forces of censorship were none too happy with the loose, liberated, sexy, uninhibited Harlow. In 1934, when they successfully pressured the studios to enforce a production code that legislated screen behavior, Harlow was a primary target. She complied—gladly, she said. Part of the makeover was getting rid of her platinum hair. “I’ve always hated my hair,” she proclaimed, “not only because it limited me as an actress but because it limited me as a person.” Another time she said, “I’m tired of playing second to a head of hair,” and the platinum blonde became a “brownette.” She was less flouncy too, her great uncorseted wardrobe replaced by dresses that covered more than they exposed. If she had begun her career tumbling out of the era, she was now being held in. It was more than a professional strategy to appease the censors; it seemed to be a way for Harlow to get back to herself—to redis- cover the woman she believed was hidden under the old image. But try as she might to change it, that image continued to haunt her. It haunted her when she began a long romance with the suave star William Powell, who had recently been divorced from another sexy comedienne, Carole Lombard. Harlow confessed she loved Powell, and he, for his part, kept squiring her, but he also refused to marry her, because, he said, Hollywood marriages
didn’t work. He had Harlow’s own record to prove it. Brownette hair and cotton dresses notwithstanding, the bombshell couldn’t domesticate herself enough for Powell.
But the image had an even more dire consequence. In the end she may have died because of the expectations with which it burdened her. It was clear while she was making
Saratoga
with Clark Gable that she was feeling fatigued and out of sorts. She even collapsed on the set. One suspects that had this been fragile Greta Garbo, the studio would have hospitalized her immedi- ately and halted production on the film. But this was Harlow— young, bouncy, bawdy, wild, hard-bitten Jean Harlow. It was difficult to imagine Harlow being out of commission for long. She was too much of a life force for anything to repress her. But that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t get the proper ministra- tions. By one account, her personal doctor refused to tend to her because his wife was afraid he might succumb to Harlow’s temp- tations. Instead he sent an older colleague, who misdiagnosed Harlow’s condition and hydrated her when he should have been administering diuretics. Harlow was in renal failure, possibly the long-delayed result of damage to her kidneys during a bout of scarlet fever in 1925 that was followed by a severe infection. By the time she was transferred to Good Samaritan Hospital, the prognosis was hopeless. She died the morning of June 7, 1937. She was just twenty-six years old.
It was a short life and a short career with some fabulous movies. Those are clearly her legacies, but she left another legacy too, a cultural one. It was in how she helped shape romance and sexuality for generations to come. In inventing the blonde bombshell, Harlow practically invented the idea that sexuality could be big, tough, daring and as outlandishly obvious as her whitish hair and slinky gowns. And that it could be very, very
funny if you didn’t take it too seriously. Harlow’s bequest, then, is not just a glamorous look but a whole sexual sensibility of tick- lish joy that is so natural to us now that we assume it must have been that way all along. But it began with Jean Harlow.
rob boston
is senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington, DC. He also serves as assistant editor of AU’s monthly magazine
Church & State
. Boston joined the Americans United staff in 1987 and is the author of three books on church-state relations.
seth fIscher
’s
writing has appeared on The Rumpus, Pank, Guernica, Monkeybicycle, Gertrude and elsewhere. He also teaches at Antioch University Los Angeles and Writing Work- shops Los Angeles. His in-progress essay collection is called
How To Grow Up Gracefully
.
neal Gabler
is an author, scholar and teacher. He has won two
Los Angeles Times
Book Prizes (for
An Empire of Their Own
and
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination)
, and his biography of Walter Winchell,
Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity,
was named the book of the year by
Time
Magazine.
nIcholas Garnett
(nicholasgarnett.com) received his MFA in creative writing from Florida International University (FIU). He teaches creative writing at FIU, the Center for Literature and Theatre at Miami Dade College, and is the nonfiction editor of the literary journal
Sliver of Stone
. He lives and writes in Miami Beach, Florida.
MelIssa GIra Grant
(postwhoreamerica.com) is an inde- pendent journalist and blogger. She’s written for AlterNet, Wired. com, Slate,
The Guardian, Glamour,
the
New York Observer
’s Be- tabeat, Truthout, TheNation.com, Jezebel, and the award-win- ning
$pread
magazine, among others. Her work has previously appeared in
Best Sex Writing.
tions of science, spirituality and culture. His blog is connerhabib. wordpress.com and his twitter is @ConnerHabib.
krIsten hInMan
covered crime, politics, education and many other subjects for Village Voice Media from 2004 to 2011. She edits political coverage for
Bloomberg Businessweek
magazine.
andy Isaacson
(andyisaacson.net) is a freelance writer and photographer. His work has appeared in
The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired
and NewYorker.com.
Jonathan allen letheM
(born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel,
Gun, with Occasional Music
, was published in 1994. In 1999, Le- them published
Motherless Brooklyn
, a National Book Critics Circle Award–winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published
The Fortress of Solitude
, which became a
New York Times
Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
alex MorrIs
is a Contributing Editor at
New York
magazine. She has also written for
Rolling Stone, Glamour
and
Details
, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Jon PressIck
is a sex writer, editor, organizer and gadabout. He contributes to Met Another Frog (metanotherfrog.com), and ed- ited their recent book
Asses to Asses, Bust to Bust
. He is focusing on his blog Sex In Words (sex-in-words.blogspot.ca), writing erotica and curating the Toronto Erotica Writers and Readers Group.
dustry, electronic dance music to Los Angeles gang culture. He’s been on staff at the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Philadelphia Inquirer, Ciudad
magazine and
LA Weekly
, where he writes news.
lorI selke
lives in Oakland, California. She has been writing about sex for nearly twenty years and her work has appeared in
Everything You Know About Sex is Wrong
as well as at SexIs.com and the Good Vibrations Magazine “Sexy Mama” blog. Her col- lection of (mostly) dyke sex stories,
Lost Girls and Others,
is avail- able from Renaissance eBooks.
JulIa serano
(
juliaserano.com)
is a writer, performer, and au- thor of
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
(Seal Press, 2007). Her writings have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and have been used as teaching materials in gender and sexuality studies courses across North America.
rachel swan
was a staff writer at the
East Bay Express
. She is a reformed Luddite and an incorrigible flirt.
MadIson younG
’s
work includes documenting our sexual culture in her feminist erotic films and serving as the Artistic Director of the forward-thinking nonprofit arts organization, Femina Potens Art Gallery. Her writings have been published in
The Ultimate Guide to Kink; Baby Remember My Name; Rope, Bondage, and Power
and
In Soumises
. Her memoir “Daddy” will be available in fall 2013 through Barnacle Books Publishing.
rachel kraMer bussel
(rachelkramerbussel.com) is a New York–based author, editor and blogger. She has edited over forty books of erotica, including
Anything for You; Suite Encoun- ters; Going Down; Irresistible; Gotta Have It; Obsessed; Women in Lust; Surrender; Orgasmic; Cheeky Spanking Stories; Bottoms Up; Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica; Fast Girls; Smooth; Passion; The Mile High Club; Do Not Disturb; Going Down; Tasting Him; Tasting Her; Please, Sir; Please, Ma’am; He’s on Top; She’s on Top; Caught Looking; Hide and Seek; Crossdressing; Rubber Sex,
and is
Best Sex Writing
series editor
.
Her anthologies have won 8 IPPY (Independent Publisher) Awards, and
Surrender
won the National Leather As- sociation Samois Anthology Award. Her work has been published in over one hundred anthologies, including
Best American Erotica 2004
and
2006.
She wrote the popular “Lusty Lady” column for the
Village Voice.