A Match Made in Heaven: Anita and Jean Harlow

Anita had two distinct chapters in her career as a writer for the movies.  During the first, she revolutionized intertitles for the silent screen and became a celebrity scenario writer. For the second, she returned to Hollywood to write for the talkies, this time writing for Irving Thalberg at MGM.

I’m currently preparing a paper for a conference on Hollywood before the Code (more on that soon), which has me focusing on the second of these two chapters and the actress Anita wrote for most consistently during this period, Jean Harlow.

There were two actresses in particular who obsessed censors during the early sound period.

The first was Mae West, who had written and starred in a Broadway play titled Sex. There you go, prudes! West came to Hollywood to work for Paramount and starred in the pre-Code classics I’m No Angel and She Done Him Wrong.

The second was Harlow, a star singled out by censors for both her figure and her habit of playing women intent on crossing from the wrong side of the tracks by any means necessary.

A as a blonde who was subject to moralizing scrutiny, Jean Harlow was the perfect actress for Anita Loos, who had made a name for herself writing about women who were underestimated by a prudish and hypocritical upper class, most famously in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925).

In her research on early censorship the scholar Mary Desjardins found that during the “crackdown on fan magazines” by studios trying to protect their good name, “articles about Mae West and Jean Harlow were the most referenced.”

Fan magazine letters from readers express displeasure with the sexy actress and the bad, unrepentant women she plays, even as her star was rising. For example, in a 1931 issue of Photoplay, a Mrs. C. Fitter of Brooklyn writes to complain: “Jean Harlow has spoiled two perfectly good pictures for me by her nakedness. How does she pass the censors? No decent woman, if she portrays a wanton, needs such an exposure of skin as Jean Harlow presents.”

In October of the same year, a funnier fan wrote with her opinion on states of celebrity dress: “Connie Bennett and Lil Tashman are the best dressed women of the screen, in my opinion. Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer vie for honors as the best undressed.” –Mrs. E. Campbell, Troy, Ohio.

Even the generally Harlow-sympathetic “Close-ups and Long-shots” column comments on Harlow’s perpetual state of undress: James Quirk asks “Please! Please! Mr. Producers. Can’t we see Jean Harlow as anything but a gangster’s sweetheart or a slithering seductress? And wouldn’t her parts get over just as well if she wore a few more clothes? She always looks like a picture from one of those phony ‘art’ magazines that are barred from the newsstands in some cities” (28).

The sense that Harlow signified sex in a simple one-to-one correspondence is clear in more official documents as well. In a February 20th 1936 letter from Joseph Breen to Harry Zehner regarding the re-issue of Iron Man, Breen finds the film ineligible for certification noting “the great number of scenes throughout the picture in which Miss Harlow’s breasts are indecently exposed.” The letter’s enumeration of scandalous scenes and general ruling on Miss Harlow’s indecent breasts, is, of course, reminiscent of Loos’ most famous censor, the fictional Henry Spoffard, the wealthy dullard-hypocrite who marries Lorelei Lee at the end of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Harlow and Loos had five films together, Red-Headed Woman (1932), Hold Your Man (1933), The Girl from Missouri (1934), Riffraff (1935), and Saratoga (1937). Saratoga is Harlow’s last film—she’d die during the filming.

Of the films on which they partnered, their first is the real standout. For two women strongly associated with bleached hair—Anita through Lorelei Lee and Jean through her own famous locks—the title was an unusual one: Red-Headed Woman.

But Anita, Jean, and the titular redhead Lil made an excellent trio. A gold-digging redhead who played dumb or defenseless as the occasion demanded, Lil was an ideal vehicle for both Anita and Jean’s talents: a pretty woman as Trojan horse.

Smuggled inside were smarts, determination, and a hunger that the men who opened the gates never saw coming.

In addition to the obvious fun they had writing and acting in the film, the duo also enjoyed a publicity campaign that played on their better known associations with platinum hair. In a publicity photo for the film, Harlow, with her iconic platinum hair dyed for the role smiles out at the camera. In her hands, Jean holds a book, the title is Loos’s bestseller, but the word blondes has been scratched out and replaced with “redheads.”  The brunette Anita stands behind Harlow poised to brain the actress with a raised bottle of champagne.

Despite the attention she garnered in her lifetime, I think Harlow is overlooked today. In 1937 she died at the tragically young age of 26, just three years after the Code had come into full effect. She tends to be overshadowed by West as the pre-Code actress and Monroe as the tragic dead blonde. But, for a moment, she received dialogue that showed off her comedic chops and challenged those who might write her off as just another sexy starlet.

Here's a sample of dialogue from a scene between Lil (Harlow) and her pal Sally, played by Una Merkel:

Lil: There we were, like an uncensored movie, when in waltzes Mrs. William Legender, Jr…and catches us right in the old family parlor.

Sally: Oh, you dirty little home wrecker. Well, what do you think that’s gonna get you?

Lil: Listen, Sally, I made up my mind a long time ago. I'm not gonna spend my life on the wrong side of the rail road tracks.

Sally: I hope you don't get hit by a train while you're crossing over.

Sally needn’t have worried. Loos took good care of her bad girls. Check out Red-Headed Woman and see if you don’t agree.