"Dearest Dear: Unfortunately, this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humiliation. You understand that last night was only a comedy. Paul."
"Paul" was Paul Bern, 42-year-old associate producer at Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, which in recent years has produced more big successes than any other company. Hollywood knew and admired Bern as the No. 1 assistant of Production Chief Irving Thalberg. "Dearest Dear" was Paul Bern's wife, Jean Harlow, 21-year-old film actress (Hell's Angels, Red Headed Woman), whose marriage to Bern last July was the most surprising, most gala, most romanticized wedding of Hollywood's summer. When the note was found last week near Bern's unclothed body, in the bedroom where he had killed himself, Hollywood was faced with a tragedy as bizarre and inscrutable as any in its bizarre and scandalous history.
What Hollywood knew about Paul Bern made his suicide last week even more amazing than his marriage to Jean Harlow who, daughter of a Kansas City dentist, was christened Harlean Carpenter; married at 16 to a young Chicago broker named Charles Freemont McGrew II, divorced three years later after he had accused her of posing nude for photographers; and ballyhooed into a $1,250-a-week star when Producer Howard Hughes decided that her silvery blonde hair and peculiarly voluptuous physique might be even more profitable elements in his $4,000,000 Hell's Angels than burning airplanes and balloons.
Hollywood knew Paul Bern as an adroit and skilful cinema craftsman. Associate producers generally are not credited for their work, but he was considered largely responsible for MGM's Grand Hotel. Paul Bern came to the U. S. from Germany when he was nine. Educated in Manhattan public schools, he studied further at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, became a theatrical director, went to Hollywood to write scenarios. His work on The Marriage Circle, The Christian, The Dove caused him to be made an executive. In a community founded upon the assumption that to be blatant is to be successful, Paul Bern was a curious exception. He lived quietly in a house secluded from the rest of Hollywood in Benedict Canyon. He was noted not for his affaires with film actresses but for platonic friendships, apparently based on hypersensitive sympathy for the misfortunes of unhappy celebrities. When Barbara La Marr was dying, she summoned Paul Bern to her sickroom. Mabel Normand did the same thing. He became known, jocosely, as "the little confessor of Hollywood." Platonic friendships are even more suspect in Hollywood than elsewhere. Nevertheless Paul Bern's reputation as a kindly, disinterested bachelor was such that even chit-chat writers, who had been attentive to Jean Harlow, saw no possibilities in her three-year acquaintance with Bern.