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A Hollywood Cover-up
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19035 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1991 |
1,889 Words |
| Author
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Russ Braley
Russ Braley was a U.S. Navy mine disposal officer in the
Mediterranean and Pacific theaters in World War II. For
twenty years he was a foreign correspondent for the New York
Daily News. He is the author of Bad News: the Foreign Policy
of the New York Times (Regnery Gateway, 1984). |
DEADLY ILLUSIONS
Jean Harlow and the Murder of Paul Bern
Samuel Marx and Joyce Vanderveen
New York: Random House, 1990
271 pp., $19.95
During the sultry early hours of Labor Day, September 5, 1932, Hollywood producer Paul Bern had a glass of champagne by the small pool of his isolated home in Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills and took a swim. After daylight came, servants found him naked on his bedroom floor, shot in the right temple, his .38 pistol in his hand under his body.
His young bride of two months, the spectacular new star Jean Harlow, was in seclusion at her mother's home, where she was reported to have spent the night. Bern apparently had left her a despairing suicide note. The press went ape over the "Bern Mystery Death."
That morning MGM story editor Samuel Marx (this book's author) was awakened by a telephone call from screenwriter Alfred Cohn, who said, "Your friend Paul Bern has been found dead up at his home. Don't tell anybody where you heard it." Cohn had been tipped by the studio police chief, Whitey Hendry.
Marx dressed and drove to Bern's home, getting there at 9:30 A.M., before the police. MGM chief Louis B. Mayer had been there and gone, and his partner, Irving Thalberg, was questioning Bern's gardener, Clifton Davis. John Carmichael, Bern's butler, had fainted on seeing the body.
Marx found the scene eerie, with no wife and no police there. A neighbor he knew told him that a veiled woman had arrived by car late the night before, a crucial detail that Marx kept to himself. He thought he could guess who she had been. Marx believed that Bern had killed himself because he had known when he married Harlow that the woman might destroy the budding star's career.
This is, of course, a movie script ready for shooting, complete with dialogue and strategically planted Hollywood touches. How could it be otherwise, considering Marx's decades as story editor for MGM and other Hollywood studios? Essentially a personal memoir of tragedy in the early days of talking pictures, this story is also a famous murder mystery retold with a suspense ending.
Marx in
...
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