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"Christ"; Bed Reader. When Howard Hughes sold Jean Harlow to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, it helped to ripen her friendship with Paul Bern, one of MGM's ablest associate producers. Handsome, slender, melancholy, brilliant and distinguished by his profound sympathy for other people's troubles, Paul Bern was called by his friends "a motion picture Christ." The phrase had no wide currency until Labor Day, 1932—the day, two months after his marriage to Jean Harlow, that Paul Bern was found naked in his bathroom, face down and dead, with a bullet in his brain. His friends might have assumed that Jean Harlow had caused Bern's suicide had not his common-law wife brought herself to their attention two days later by jumping off a boat in the Sacramento River. This made it possible for Jean Harlow to forget her sorrow in the pursuit of her career. She did so well that a year later she married once more, this time to a jolly cameraman named Harold Rosson. The spirit of camaraderie which had sprung up between Photographer Rosson and Actress Harlow on the set was instrumental in making the termination of their brief alliance a happy contrast to the one that had preceded it. They were divorced in 1934, because Photographer Rosson annoyed the epitome of U. S. sex appeal by reading when he went to bed.
Off Stage. In private life, Jean Harlow still lives with her mother and the mysterious Marino Bello, now the owner of some mines to which he is usually just going or from which he has just returned. Besides playing golf, Jean Harlow likes swimming which she does every day in her own pool and a parlor game called "Murder Mystery" in which whoever is "it" mentally constructs a crime which the other players try to solve by asking questions in turn. Because a smudge of dust is as visible on her hair as a thumbprint on white paper, she visits her hairdresser once a day for a shampoo. She dresses quickly, uses few cosmetics because they irritate her skin. In the large Bello house at Bel Air many of the rooms are white, as are Jean Harlow's bathing suits and most of the fantastic clothes designed for her by MGM's Costumer Adrian, who is well aware of the fact that fine feathers make fine fans at the box office. When not working, Jean Harlow dresses like a majority of Hollywood actresses, in slacks and blouse. In place of the Bello limousine, she now arrives at the studio for work in a Cadillac V 12, tastefully hung with Hollywood Fire Department signs.
Since the collapse of her marriage with Hal Rosson, Jean Harlow has been involved in neither romance nor scandal. Currently, her most frequent escort is Actor William Powell, who ferried her about the lot in his car when she was making China Seas. She enjoys giving away money which she does on an incredibly large scale. She has a habit of speaking of herself in the third person which seems to confirm her mother's impression that the cinema star, Jean Harlow, is their joint creation. Mrs. Bello still stage-manages the Harlow menage.