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sunglasses, and began to pick up men, starting with a salesman with whom she spent two nights in a sleazy hotel in San Bernardino. She met one of her pickups in front of a San Francisco movie theater showing Red Dust , her latest film with Clark Gable. The man told her she resembled Jean Harlow and ought to go to Hollywood to try out for the job of standin or double. But Harlow could be choosy; when Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM studio, propositioned her, dangling a fur coat as bait, she turned him down. In any case, her attempts to get pregnant failed, and she eventually found out she was sterile.
    The last of Jean’s “three marriages of inconvenience,” as she called them, was to Hal Rosson, a talented and successful cameraman. Rosson resembled Paul Bern and was 16 years older than Jean. The couple happily eloped in 1933, but the marriage lasted only eight months. No one knows why exactly, though it is speculated that Mama Jean and Marino’s interference led to the breakup. The complaints Jean filed for the divorce proceedings were ridiculous; for example, she charged that he was ruining her career by reading in bed until late at night, thus making her sleepy on the set.
    Jean’s final affair was with actor William Powell, probably her one true love.
    Like Bern he was intelligent and sauve, and he too resembled Bern physically.
    Powell was 43 to Jean’s 24, and on the third anniversary of their first date he brought Jean a cake with a card saying, “To my three-year-old from her Daddy.”
    They were probably engaged at the time of Jean’s sudden collapse at the age of
    26. She quickly died of uremic poisoning because Mama Jean was a Christian Scientist and would not allow her to have medical help until it was too late.
    It is believed that at her funeral Powell was the one who placed in her hand a single gardenia, her favorite flower, along with a note that read, “Good night, my dearest darling,” and that the empty plot next to Jean and her mother’s graves is reserved for him.
    QUIRKS: Harlow was the first actress in Hollywood to appear regularly in films without a bra; in fact, she rarely wore any underwear. Years before when a high school teacher reprimanded her for this, the 15-year-old replied, “I can’t breathe when I’m wearing a brassiere.” She also rubbed her nipples with ice to make them stand out for the camera, and dyed her pubic hair platinum to match the hair on her head.
    HER THOUGHTS: “My God, must I always wear a low-cut dress to be important?”
    —A.W.
    The Eye of the Day
    MATA HARI (Aug. 7, 1876–Oct. 15, 1917)
    HER FAME: An exotic dancer famous
    for her sensational nude performances,
    Mata Hari was the toast of Europe in
    the early years of the 20th century. In

1917 she was executed by a French firing
    squad for acting as a German spy during
    WWI. Though her name now connotes
    a treacherous and fascinating female
    spy, it has never been proved that she was
    in fact a double agent.
    HER PERSON: Eighteen-year-old
    Gertrude Margareta Zelle, her convent
    schooling over, answered an Amsterdam newspaper ad supposedly placed
    by an army officer seeking a wife.
    Actually it was a joke set up by one of
    the officer’s friends. Nonetheless, the
    officer, balding 39-year-old Rudolph
    MacLeod, ended up marrying Margareta.
    Mata Hari in costume for her Javanese dance
    For the next two years they lived in Holland, where she bore their son, Norman. When MacLeod was reassigned to the Dutch East Indies, he took his family with him. There Margareta had another child, Jeanne; flirted with young officers and planters (arousing MacLeod’s jealousy); and watched Javanese temple dancers, who inspired her future career. MacLeod drank, was unfaithful, and beat her. At least once he threatened her with a loaded gun.
    One story, probably legendary, states that their son was poisoned by a native soldier incensed over MacLeod’s seduction of his girl friend, the boy’s nurse.
    Margareta later claimed