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true.
    One thing her biographers do agree on is that she had her first sexual experience at 16. Partly in order to escape from a girls’ boarding school in Illinois, she eloped with 21-year-old Charles McGrew, the son of a wealthy investment broker. She lied about her age and succeeded in getting married, but the newlyweds’ families separated the young bride and groom almost immediately. They probably never saw each other again, and a divorce was obtained in 1929. Jean remembered her first act of love as “messy” and not very satisfying.
    She had no other lovers until she married her second husband, Paul Bern, in 1932. This was a highly unusual and much-gossiped-about courtship.
    Bern was a small, mustachioed, almost weasely-looking man twice her age—
    an odd choice for a woman who had her pick of the great Hollywood leading men. Most likely she was seeking a father figure and enjoyed the fact that Bern appeared to be interested in her mind rather than her body. He was suave, intellectual, and gentlemanly. He was also Irving Thalberg’s assistant at MGM, and was called Hollywood’s “little father confessor” because he loved to listen to other people’s problems. Before he married Jean, he had had an unusual arrangement with another girl. He had set the girl up in a Hollywood flat and visited her every afternoon. The girl would disrobe and lie naked on the bed while he read poetry to her. Then they would have tea and he would leave.
    But the mystery of the Harlow-Bern liaison has still not been solved. The most famous story of the fateful wedding night and following weeks is this: After a happy wedding, the couple went to their home to consummate the union. Several hours later Jean’s agent, Arthur Landau, received a tearful phone call from his distraught client. He picked her up outside the house, and she revealed that a drunken Bern had beaten her with a cane, leaving long, ugly welts all over her snowy body. He had also bitten her thighs so savagely that they bled. Jean spent the remainder of her wedding night with the Landaus. Entering the house the next morning, Landau found Bern nude and weeping. He said to Landau, “Every man I know gets an erection just by talking about her. Arthur, didn’t I have the right to think Jean could help me at least that much?” Apparently Bern had the penis and testicles of an infant boy and was completely impotent. (A variation on the story was told by Jean’s maid, who quoted Bern as saying, “The Baby’s still a virgin.”) Whatever happened was not good, but they kept up appearances for the sake of Jean’s career. Finally, one night two months after the wedding Bern gained entry into Jean’s usually locked bedroom. He strode in wearing an enormous dildo, with huge testicles and a bulb which shot water out of the end of the artificial penis. Jean burst into hysterical laughter, and Bern pranced around the room sporting the giant phallus until the two of them removed it and flushed it down the toilet.
    The next evening, probably while Jean was out (the sequence of events is fuzzy), the butler discovered Bern’s naked body sprawled before a full-length mirror. It was drenched in his wife’s favorite perfume, Mitsouko.
    Bern had shot himself in the head with a .38 caliber pistol. The note he left gave the press a field day. It read: “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. I love you. Paul. You understand that last night was only a comedy.”
    Three days later the body of a blond was found in the Sacramento River.
    The suicide was Dorothy Milette, who had claimed to be Bern’s common-law wife before Jean had married him.
    A distraught Jean turned to promiscuity—as self-punishment, to find out what sex was all about, and because she suddenly wanted to have a baby. She cut her hair very short (studio heads were furious when they found out), wore a black wig and