By Stephanie Dickinson
HARLOW & THE CITY OF ANGELS
los angeles, ‘34
Harlow & the City of Angels
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Mother Jean told Hollywood gossip columnists she never let her daughter wake up without finding her sitting by the bed waiting for her eyes to open. “I started when she was a tiny infant and I have never let anything interfere with my kissing her good morning as soon as she opened her eyes. Sometimes I sit for an hour watching her in her sleep.”
—David Stenn in Bombshell
Los Angeles sits, watching, in that green slow way swamps have. Behind her blonde hair (tinted the same as mine) and complexion that color has died in, there’s marshy bog, iron and stone. Her earth sends out tremors, uproots trees. Beware, stay locked in sleep, hidden, knowing that if the City of Angels hears you blink you’re gone, drawn inside her. She is whispering. Tell the world how much you love me. How you strip naked for me. I, you, me, them, it. Feel the cold inside the heat, the chill stiffening you into railroad ties. Trembling baby, hush, the dry ice boxcar built this city. Eve’s Oranges. Teeth chattering. Wearing her pink kimono, Los Angeles waves in the maid, who serves her a pink grapefruit with maraschino cherry dotting its navel. She reads me a script about tall green corn where pretty girls grow, where the corn kernels turn to stars after dark. The girls lie on mattresses of milkweed because there is nothing better than milkweed sleep.
She demands you bring her water in the chalice of your breastbone. The City of Angels opens its mouth for the rain, not a drop from the sky on this island between desert and mountain. All the angels are fallen, flies sweeping their feelers over a grove of orange peels. Making love, she speaks Spanish; dying, she speaks priest. Beverly Hills is a bean field where the pillows of silent film stars speak. The fig orchards of Hollywood give up their fruiting, while inside the Cathedral of St. Vibiana, Mary’s immaculate womb blesses the future. To steal your past is what Los Angeles demands. At the edge of your childhood, the sun throws itself over the path, last night’s murder, something freshly dead ripped to blue-gold entrails.
RED-HEADED WOMAN
Harlow & the Studio
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The battle to become, and remain, ‘box office’ was considerable, and actresses were understandably fearful about the physical effects that pregnancy, and childbirth, could have on bodies that were enlarged several times life-size on screen. It is believed that Jean Harlow underwent two abortions, including one during her relationship with William Powell that she aborted with much reluctance.
—David Stenn in Bombshell
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Klieg lights illuminate the pale birch and fluttering silver leaves of my body. I work the tiny lines beside my mouth and my tongue goes feeling over my teeth. I tremble and it excites the camera. I massage my breasts, letting the pressure grow. They tell me I am a careless steward of my gifts. I am more than my hair’s nutmeg scent, the milk and honey of my fucking, but less than the vanishing sun of studio money. At home in the nude I lie down as the crickets come on in a swoon, a choir of thorax and feeler, miniature chariots of song knotted in ancient kerchiefs. Louis Mayer insists I have to get rid of it, while it is still an it. I am stuffing myself with peach pickles and custard when I bolt up from the bed. Kneeling over the commode, I vomit. I rest against the cold rim of the bathtub. My sick smells of sour raw marigolds. Miss Harlow. Mr. Mayer is on the phone.
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Moonlight shines in like names too frail for daylight. Eustace and Philomane and Ottilie. I’ve been chasing assonance in my dreams. Astrid. Like a swarm of stars. Aimeé. Maybe we would have named our baby after a flower. Dahlia or Camellia or Lotus. Like lilies shimmed over the water and trees one behind the other until you lose your own breath. I sleep, such a deep, strange sleep. Gardenia reek. Like nothing in the world has happened to me. Not even the black-water abortion. Miss Harlow, I’m here, a nurse says, her two fingers pressing my wrist. She’ll tell her grandkids, for all Harlow’s silkiness her hands were ditch-digger hard as if a blonde bombshell’s work was gut-out rough.
THE LOVE PARADE
Harlow & the Hayseed
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The Platinum Bombshell went to work on her own body, the sex shrine of a nation. She hacked her hair into a boyish bob, darkened her brows and lashes, took a black wig and simple hat, coat, and dress from the studio’s wardrobe and went by train to San Bernadino. There she permitted herself to be picked up by a salesman, down on his luck.
—Irving Shulman, Jean Harlow: An Intimate Biography
In the endlessly desolate Saturday night of Dunn’s Diner I pick the booth blue with cigarette smoke. Shoulder nudged to the waxy mirror that coats the wall, I hide in plain sight. My platinum white-blonde hair hidden by a wide-brimmed fedora is leashed, I am a cheetah crouching, my yellow eye, shut in behind dark glasses. I’m here to eat (livers and hearts, viscera) away from Mother Jean who forbids me meat and sweets. I taste what’s on the fork, not the tines themselves. There’s a gravedigger’s strike on. Have you ever slept in a cemetery? Try it. I am licking my spoon when a pair of blue eyes in jeans passes by. “You’re not a bad-looking thing,” he says, sliding into the booth. “I’m Johnny, from Nebraska.” He’s sitting in the hot rain of my glance.
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In his room we sip anise blood from a cut (bootlegged brandy), then he keeps pouring shots, opening his jugular for the rot-gut apple vodka. He smiles that smile that never leaves his lips, white and quiet, without guile. What’s behind it? A warm bath and hot towels or ravens in a darkening barn? The haste with which I left Los Angeles and picked up an out-of-state hayseed speaks volumes. He tells me he sees the fields in my eyes, the green corn he keeps grinning at. The blond hair on his back stands in the lamplight. Sweat beads on his temple, runs down his cheek, trickling over his ear. His arms made iron by farming. “You could get into the better whorehouses,” he says. “You’ve got skin like cornsilk. Where did you learn to take your prey?” The bed gets up from all fours and walks out the door.
THE PUBLIC ENEMY
Harlow in the Floating World
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Marino Bello. A shady, thoroughly unpleasant individual, insanely jealous of anyone who came within a mile of his stepdaughter. It is virtually certain that he sexually abused her, or at least threatened and made lewd advances towards her.
—Irving Shulman, Jean Harlow: An Intimate Biography
The dressing room with the stranded smell of blue hydrangea. So much flower breath. I clutch the script and read, smearing my fingerprints in deep. Greedy, eating his weight in snails. His charcoal suit and diamond tie-tack don’t make him pretty. His thin fingers rest on my shoulders. “God, Marino, is it money you want?” God probably wasn’t listening to anyone who ran off and eloped at age 16, he’s thinking. Indeed, He’d loosed a flood on this city, a Babylon of iniquity. One needs a boat. Sister Mary Sheila held the pointer and rolled down a map, but instead of a country a skeleton blossomed. Femur, fibula, tibia, clavicle, pelvis, the nun sang out, then stopped beside me. What’s this, Harlean? She tapped my wrist. My eyelids flickered. I nodded, half asleep. She cracked her pointer over my arm and hand, raised it, and brought it down again. The blood I staunched with my mouth bubbled warm and salty; funny that blood could taste good. My stepfather studies himself in my mirror, his head rocking from side to side as if it were a priceless object d’ art to be admired. The jacket he asked me to buy for him is the softest, most expensive brown suede—the skin bled off the back of a gentle calf. He peels the foil from his Havana cigar. “I’ve ordered a yacht. I’ll need the first payment in a check.” I owe him thousands, he counters, when I refuse. He claims he manages me. I know he’s waiting for me to give in, and I can hear his thoughts in my pores. Black mushrooms imported from Hong Kong. Fat bowls of them. I try to be polite, picking at sliced almonds and water chestnuts. Marino smuggles powdered shark’s tooth. An aphrodisiac. Fool if he believes I’m his obedient stepdaughter. I’m one of those strange rivers that flow north. I sleep on a pillow of stone.
TODAY IS TONIGHT
Harlow & the Men-of-War
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On June 6, 1937, 6:30 p.m., Harlow was admitted to Good Samaritan Hospital and taken to Room 826. Her nephritic swelling was a shock. Her face looked like Fatty Arbuckle. Placed in an oxygen tent, Harlow passed an agonizing night. By dawn her skull began to swell. They had shaved her head. Her aunt went in to grasp Harlow’s hand in the oxygen tent. “She said, ‘I love you,’ and in all that horrible suffering winked at me.” At 11:38 that morning, she shuddered once and died.
—David Stenn in Bombshell
I float out lying in the waves. Strings of pink and purple taffy undulate in the water, like jewelry floating and shimmering, the sun sparking each strand of sea hair. I turn onto my stomach and reach out to pick it up, the sequins and long tresses, the tentacles whipping my waist, wrapping themselves around my body. Nothing could be done and she was in intense, horrible pain. Stinging me in its embrace, no lover has clutched me tighter. Daddy pulls the stinging off me, the fringed purple-spotted jelly full of eyes and balls of fat. He carries me in his arms to the shore. The lifeguards have no mouths. Please hold me very lightly. My stomach is just killing me. Another door opens and closes. Can it be lunchtime? Please, let’s just eat our cottage cheese. I feel too awful to talk. My stomach is being squashed. I’m a five-year-old in a burgundy dress with a velvet sash and a cancan. My birthday party. I’ve blown up a balloon, and when it pops pieces fly to the back of my throat. The instant I can’t breathe. How far away the people around the tall strawberry shortcake are. My feet no longer touch the earth. I am dissolving into bits of silk ribbon. Mummy grabs me by the ankles and holds me upside down until I cough the balloon out. We carry our poles down the beach, the moon is up, salt wind tangles my hair. Daddy and Mummy are together again and each holds one of my hands in the rock of their fist. I am safe. Exposed by the light, bending over with a knife, a fish lies cut on the sand. The moon picks over the quivering pieces. Baby, that’s you. Look how you shine, like starlight.
THE BEAST IN THE CITY
Harlow Enters Legend
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There it is. Take it.
—William Mulholland, engineer, at Los Angeles Aqueduct opening
Talk to me about how in LA the mirror screams red birds and drinks from a lover’s mouth. I am your blonde trying to pull my wing from your clenched fist. Tell me fate dresses in a jaguar’s skin to parade Sunset Boulevard where your car idles like breeze in
the palm trees, and makes the air drowsy. I am your flask in the cabana. LA knows my mother dates a gigolo, their kisses choked with poolside gnarled oak. Tell them you envision my iced nipples rising before dawn for their casting call and the sidewalks left
behind from Coldwater Canyon to the Biltmore buckle and give up. Tell me if Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, the first celluloid Eves, ever sweated like extras and went begging for close-ups. LA keeps it quiet about its Dust Bowl migrants waved off by cop
shotguns, and then going vice hunting in Old Chinatown. Opium dens. Coolies. Explain the crib girls kidnapped from Shanghai and caged for ten men a day, their legs soon pocked by bouquets of syphilis. Tell me who isn’t still drinking like a fisherman in the
realm of abandoned dogs. Sure, LA is listening and letting the songstress melt in its mouth like berry cream. A record man wears his suit and cufflinks to (sit-down) dinner and barrels through his food. The City of Angels has him right here. What did you do?
Cross your fans? Your acts aren’t man or woman enough, the city opines. Their skin’s too dark. LA wants a black singer who looks white. Why is LA showing off teenage Joan Crawford acting in the porn flick Velvet Lips then charging her $50,000 to buy back the prints?
Talk about LA’s welcoming Errol Flynn, Captain Blood, and his 15 year-old bride. Chaplin, the Little Tramp, the grandfather marrying a 16-year-old girl. Clara Bow, who slept with every newly arrived cowboy fished from Texas, any roper who could bust a
bronco and speak the language of wooly daisies from the Old West backlot. Who cares if LA is restless as white afternoon, breath smoldering on the MGM set. LA’s swimming pools are filled with high noon’s cooking stickiness—loot and liquor wafting.
Love in Hollywood’s a one-week stagger. Talk to me about how you ride the water’s dust, how you’ve broken the bank gambling. LA, tell me your dreams. Dawn comes pressed to the throat. Run. It’s unlucky, an omen, to be caught by the cane-blue sun.
Stephanie Dickinson, an Iowa native, lives in New York City. Her novel Half Girl and novella Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her feminist noir Love Highway. Her other books include Port Authority Orchids, Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, The Emily Fables and Flashlight Girls Run. Her work has been reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories from the South, and 2016 New Stories from the Midwest. Girl Behind the Door: A Memoir of Delirium and Dementia has recently been released. She identifies as a gunshot survivor and is heartened by the Never Again student-led movement.
