Word: harlows
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...HARLOW by Irving Shulman. 408 pages. Bernard Geis...
...Jean Harlow, first sex goddess of the talkies, had a life that epitomized Thomas Hobbes's phrase for the life of the "natural" man: poor, nasty, brutish and short. Her mother was domineering and obsessed with sex; her stepfather was a sponging promoter of fake gold mines. Jean's second husband, Producer Paul Bern, shot himself two months after the wedding. She could not act, but her platinum hair, husky voice, and refusal to wear a brassiere were enough to gross millions at the box office for Howard Hughes and Louis B. Mayer. She died...
...scarlet detail of Harlow's careening career, including much that was never hinted at in the gossip columns and some that is clearly imaginary, is revealed for the prurient-minded in this "intimate biography" by Irving Shulman (The Amboy Dukes). Shulman includes facts that Harlow's doctors evidently did not have-some not even her hairdresser could know for sure. He asserts that Harlow had bouts of nymphomania. He says that Paul Bern was impotent and a sadist whose beatings caused Harlow kidney injuries -which ultimately killed her because Jean's mother, a Christian Scientist, refused...
...only seemingly sympathetic person in this thoroughly unpleasant book is Harlow's agent, Arthur Landau, who appears as the tormented girl's friend, confidant, moneylender, sometime savior and sole defender. Don't be fooled. Landau, now 76 and living in Hollywood, is the one who spilled all the dirt to Author Shulman. What they didn't know between them, they improvised...
Hubley's hubris is evident both in the theme ("To find man's place in the universe") and in the treatment of his latest film. Adapted from a fairly erudite essay published in 1958 by Astronomer Harlow Shapley, Of Stars and Men is constructed like a philosophical treatise. In a prologue, Hubley celebrates man's capacity to know-and to know that he knows. In five principal chapters (Space, Time, Matter, Energy, Life), he expounds the physical universe as man has come to know it. And in an epilogue, he imagines where man stands in the novum...