STACK #156 Oct 2017

EXTRAS FEATURE

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“Chateau Marmont lovers?” Clark Gable and Jean Harlow

HISTORY The of

CHATEAU MARMONT 8221 Sunset Boulevard

to divorce him in May 1934 and moved out of the Marmont. Tragically, three years later, Jean Harlow would die of kidney failure during the filming of Saratoga  (1937), in which she co-starred with Gable. She was just 26 years old.  Saratoga was completed using a body double for Harlow. With the advent of sound the Hollywood studio heads soon discovered that, just as certain silent movie stars failed in talking pictures, a vast amount of the industry’s The Marmont's resident manager passed no comment when actor Clark Gable began calling on Jean Harlow during the day scenario writers could not write dialogue. Consequently, the studios recruited playwrights, popular novelists and media journalists to write words for movie actors to speak. A young man arrived at the Chateau Marmont in early 1934 with virtually no money and little knowledge of English. His name was Samuel (Billy) Wilder, an Austrian Jew who had fled Germany following the rise of the Third Reich. He had written numerous film/ play scripts for the German cinema/theatre and had been promised a writing job with Columbia Pictures. Wilder took the Marmont’s smallest, least expensive room at $75 per month (he later used it as a model for the apartment where Fred MacMurray’s character lived in the noir movie Double Indemnity, which Wilder wrote and directed in 1944). For a time he shared it with another refugee from Nazi Germany, the actor Peter Lorre, until he found that Lorre suffered from a debilitating drug addiction.

Part 2

I n September 1932 MGM film producer, Paul Bern, was found dead in his Beverly Hills home just two months after marrying Jean Harlow, the original “Platinum Blonde”. He had been shot. At the time, Harlow was the most beautiful and glamorous superstar in motion pictures. Following a tip-off from Bern’s butler/chauffeur, MGM moguls, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, were the first on the scene. When the police arrived some time later, the position of Bern’s body and gun suggested that his death had been the result of suicide. This was supported when a bizarre note, allegedly written by Bern, was found addressed to Harlow, who apparently had spent the night at her mother’s house. The studio’s version that

continued to abound around the movie capital. Whilst still officially on honeymoon, Rosson left the Marmont each day at dawn for the MGM studios and would not return until late in the evening. Harlow, who was in between pictures – having just finished her latest film prior to the marriage – stayed in her suite. The Marmont’s resident manager, Ann Little, always a paragon of discretion, passed no comment when actor Clark Gable began calling on Jean Harlow during the day. The amount of time that Harlow and Gable spent together at the Chateau Marmont led insiders to believe that the two stars were much more than just close friends. Indeed, her marriage to Rosson was short-lived when she announced plans

Bern had taken his own life because he was impotent was accepted at face value. But rumours of a murder covered up by the studio to protect their most important star from scandal became rife throughout Hollywood. Several months later, Harlow, without any prior announcement, married top MGM cinematographer Harold Rosson and the couple moved into Suite 38C at the Chateau Marmont. It was, however, a sham marriage arranged by Mayer in an attempt to quell the scandalous rumours of Bern’s death, which

Harold Rosson and Jean Harlow in the garden of Chateau Marmont with Harlow’s parents

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