The Mammoth Book of Hollywood Scandals (19 page)

So was Paul Bern’s death really a suicide as they said at the studio and in the newspapers? Did Jean Harlow know nothing as she had claimed, or did she know more than she ever cared to say? Certainly Bern’s family seemed to think so, though the actress herself always maintained she was completely in the dark. And what about Dorothy Millette? Did she commit suicide because of her grief on hearing the news of Paul’s death, or did she throw herself overboard after murdering him as revenge for marrying Jean Harlow?

This seems to be a likely scenario. After all, he had been there for her through thick and thin, and now this blonde interloper had appeared, threatening everything Millette held dear: her stability; her financial security; and the support of ex-partner Paul Bern. Certainly she had cause in her mind to be furious that her faithful friend had moved on, and over the years there have been many claims that she was most certainly not an innocent victim in the ghastly episode. But despite claims to the contrary, the mystery of Paul Bern’s death has never been fully resolved or proved, and after eighty-plus years it is likely to remain that way. The case is now well and truly closed, and though it was briefly reopened in the 1960s, there is little hope that the matter will ever be fully wrapped up.

Perhaps the final word in this chapter should be from Jean Harlow herself, who just a month after the death of her husband, spoke to columnist Elza Schallert on what she had learnt from the experience of Bern’s death.

“The best any of us can do in life is to try to build a strong foundation on which to stand,” she said. “And then meet life as it comes, as courageously and honestly as possible. If we fall, well it is fate. It is destiny!”

Before Clark Gable whisked actress Carole Lombard off her feet, she had been exceptionally close to crooner Russ Columbo, but the romance ended in tragedy one dark day in September 1934 . . .

Born on 14 January 1908, Russ Columbo was famous to millions of moviegoers and radio listeners as the man whose beautiful voice brought them the likes of “You Call it Madness, But I Call it Love” and “Too Beautiful for Words”. Not only that, but the hugely talented man was also a composer, violinist and actor; his film career saw him work with the likes of Gary Cooper and Lupe Vélez, to name but two.

Good-looking and charming, Russ was linked to various actresses over the years, including Dorothy Dell, who was tragically killed in a car accident just months before Russ’s own death. However, it was his romance with Carole Lombard that caught the media’s attention, and at people began to wonder if, at the age of twenty-six, the velvet-voiced crooner was about to settle down with the “Profane Angel”, as Carole has often been called.

However, neither Carole nor the public would ever find out if the romance would become anything more serious, as their relationship ended under extremely tragic circumstances on 2 September 1934. While his rumoured fiancée was away on a short break to Lake Arrowhead, Russ popped in to visit an old school friend, Lansing V. Brown Jr, at his parents’ home, 584 North Lillian Way.

The pair chatted for a while to Brown’s parents before retiring to the home’s library to look at the firearms collection, which had been bought from an antique store some seven years earlier. One of the items was an old duelling pistol which Brown kept in his desk drawer, and thinking his friend might like to see it, Brown took the gun out and started absentmindedly to fool around with a match in one hand and the firearm in the other.

“We were talking about his next picture and his plans for the future,” Brown later told the inquest. He then went on to say that he had been holding the pistol in his hand and snapping the trigger without paying much attention to what he was actually doing. “I don’t know just how or why I got the match under the hammer. All I know is that there was the explosion,” he said. He also told police that he had no idea there was any powder or bullets in the vintage firearm. “I had never made an examination to see whether they were loaded; they were so old. I had no idea at all they were loaded.”

Unfortunately for both Brown and Columbo, the duelling pistol was indeed loaded and went off without warning. The bullet ricocheted off a mahogany table and entered Columbo’s left eye, causing the singer to slide to the side of his chair, his skull fractured by the piercing bullet. After Brown had composed himself from the shock of the noise, he looked over at his friend, finding him motionless, slumped in the chair. “It was all mighty fast. I thought he was clowning,” he later said.

But clowning he was not, and as soon as Brown realized that, he tried frantically to revive his friend. He was unable to, and by the time his shocked parents arrived in the room, they were horrified at the sight that greeted them.

“When we entered the room my son was bent over his friend, pleading with him to speak,” said Brown’s father, Lansing Sr, during the inquest. An ambulance was immediately called and the singer rushed to the Hollywood Receiving Hospital in a bid to save his life. There was nothing that could be done there, however, so he was then transferred to the Good Samaritan Hospital, where special surgeons hoped they would have more luck.

Here, brain specialist Dr George W. Patterson tried in vain to halt the blood that flowed from Columbo’s head, but found the wound too delicate to operate on. Knowing it was a losing battle, it was not very long before Columbo’s family were called to the hospital. Sally Blane, a one-time rumoured love of Columbo, arrived and, although their relationship was over, she stood in the corridor with his distraught family, none of whom were allowed to see the singer. Finally, a doctor left his room and informed the waiting friends and family that there was only the slightest chance of survival. This was not what they wanted to hear, and their sorrow was clear for all to see.

On the evening of 2 September 1934, Russ Columbo was sadly declared dead. “I’m very surprised he lived so long in view of his condition,” stated Dr Patterson. An X-ray revealed that sure enough, the bullet had entered the brain through the eye and lodged itself in the back of the skull, causing a fracture as it did so.

Carole Lombard’s shocked mother heard the news and immediately telephoned her daughter at Lake Arrowhead. The actress was “shocked beyond words” and rushed to the hospital immediately, though she knew it was too late to say goodbye. The pair had planned to have dinner that evening at her mother’s house, but instead she found herself grieving the loss of her close friend. As she left the hospital, a reporter asked how she felt. Through her tears Carole managed to give a brief comment. “It is impossible to express in words how deeply shocked I am to learn of the tragedy,” she said, before getting into her car.

Later, once the news had sunk in a little, she managed to release a longer statement which was reported around the world:

“His death is a terrible shock to me, as it must be to all his friends and admirers. It is particularly tragic at this time, for I know Russ was destined for the most successful year of his career. He had told me of several offers he had and he was to take up a new radio contract within a few days. Only last Friday night we saw together a preview of his latest picture.”

Carole Lombard never forgot her close friend and it is said that when she married Clark Gable in 1939, he banned all mention of the crooner in their home. Gable believed that before Carole had found love with him, the greatest love of her life had been Russ Columbo, and he could never bring himself to find peace with that idea.

After the death, Russ Columbo’s friend Lansing V. Brown was questioned by police about the incident, and an inquest was held. However, no autopsy was performed and it was very quickly decided that no one was to blame: it was a tragic accident; a misadventure that had resulted in the loss of an emerging star. Brown meanwhile was so choked by the incident that he was in a state of near collapse and ended up handing all his guns to the police with instructions that he never wanted to see them again. Columbo’s family, however, were more than forgiving towards the young man and released a statement to confirm their thoughts: “It was quite obviously an accident – an act of God. The pistol was possibly 100 years old, and its trigger had been snapped hundreds of times without an explosion.” They added that nobody had known it was loaded and that the family could not possibly hold any kind of resentment against Lansing V. Brown. “He is taking the whole thing much harder than any of us,” they said.

However, fans were less able to forgive and forget and a quick look at the online forums and websites dedicated to Russ Columbo reveals that there are certain admirers who even today believe that the singer’s death was never actually an accident. Some have even called for a new investigation to be opened which would reveal once and for all if the bullet still lodged in Columbo’s skull was actually shot from a vintage gun at all. The chance of an autopsy ever being performed is pretty remote, but it remains clear that, without a full investigation, there will always be fans and authors who will refuse to believe the death to be anything other than murder.

There is one final – and extraordinary – twist in the story of Russ Columbo’s death. His mother, Julia (aka Julio) Columbo, had recently suffered a heart attack and was in hospital at the time of her son’s passing. Doctors and family members decided that it was best not to tell her of the tragedy considering the state of her health. The news would be kept quiet for the immediate future, at least until she had regained her strength.

At first they told the enquiring Julia that her son was on location, with the intention of telling her the truth about his death when the time was right. However, it seems that there would never be a good time to tell the weak mother of her child’s death, and unbelievably, for the next ten years the family devised a number of stories to keep Columbo “alive” in his mother’s eyes, including an elaborate series of excuses as to why he could not possibly come to visit her.

It was a mammoth task but they succeeded by sending fake postcards from around the world and playing his records in a bid to fake his radio show. It has even been reported that the family told Julia that Russ and Carole Lombard had married and moved to New York; then postcards were sent from London to make it look as though they were happily on honeymoon together.

When Carole married Clark Gable in 1939, it threatened to blow their cover, but instead of coming clean, the family apparently doctored newspapers and made sure that Julia never saw anything that included a story about Clark and Carole. The ruse was carried on after Carole Lombard’s death in 1942, until Julia’s own passing in 1944.

In 2011, the highly acclaimed film
The Artist
was released. The movie told the fictional tale of George Valentin (played by Jean Dujardin) who finds the idea of making the transition between silent films to talkies absolutely unbearable. The reason for his resistance to the sound test becomes clear when you finally hear his voice and realize that he has a thick accent, completely unsuited to talking pictures. But like all good Hollywood movies, however, the story has a happy ending and by the finale the hero has a new role and a new love.

The film could, of course, be based on all the actors and actresses in Hollywood who found the transition into talkies impossible, but one actor’s story stands out among all others for being similar to that of George Valentin. Karl Dane, who once earned a mammoth $1,500 a week, was a legend, loved by audiences around the country, but like George Valentin, he found his career imploding after the onset of sound. Unlike Valentin, however, there was no hope of a happy ending; it was tragedy all the way for the beloved Karl Dane.

Born in Denmark as Rasmus Karl Therkelsen Gottlieb on 12 October 1886, Karl grew up to work as a machinist before beginning military service and then marrying his girlfriend Carla in 1910. The couple had two children but Dane was not content with staying in his home country and decided to move to the United States in 1916, leaving his family behind in the hope that they would follow him shortly afterwards.

The journey to the States was a long one, but once he had arrived Dane wasted no time in setting up home in New York. However, a job was not easy to come by in the great city, so on hearing that he would have more chance of gaining employment in Nebraska, he moved to Lincoln where he found temporary work as a mechanic. He was happy for a while but working in a garage in Nebraska was not exactly his big dream, so as soon as the job was finished, he returned to New York, where he discovered that he could make $3 a day as a bit player in the film industry.

Dane auditioned for and got many small parts in the movies, and it was not long until he made his first film with Vitagraph Studios, though details of the shoot remain sketchy and his part was eventually cut out. Meanwhile, the long-distance relationship he had with his family back in Denmark had – not surprisingly – broken down, with his wife Carla becoming too ill to travel even if she had wanted to. The pair decided that it was best for them both to go their separate ways and they eventually divorced in 1918.

However, this small hiccup in his private life was not enough to deter Karl from making a living as an actor, and he worked successfully for a time in New York before marrying a young woman by the name of Helen Benson in 1921. Together they headed to the West Coast, but not to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune . . . Instead, they settled in Van Nuys, where Dane surprised friends by deciding to give up the acting business in favour of something more reliable – running a chicken farm. The couple also discovered they were to be parents, and concentrated for the next few months on running their business and readying themselves for the birth of their first child.

Unfortunately their joy was short-lived as complications arose in childbirth, and both Helen and their daughter sadly died. Dane was heartbroken, and after mourning his wife and child, he eventually returned to acting, this time in Hollywood. He also married a telephone operator by the name of Emma Awilda Peabody Sawyer, which was – to say the least – a decision made on impulse and most definitely on the rebound from the loss of Helen.