Platinum Girl

This is the paperback of the first fully detailed biography of "The Blonde Bombshell" the talkies' first major sex symbol. In 1930, after the public had seen Jean Harlow in Howard Hughes's "Hell's Angels", the nation's beauty parlours were jammed with women demanding to be transformed into "platinum blondes" (the phrase was coined by a studio press agent as if hair alone could make a star. Born in Missouri in 1911, the daughter of a dentist, Harlow (nee Harlean Carpenter) was a bride at sixteen, divorcee at eighteen, a wife again at 22, and widow within a few months of the wedding - her husband, a top MGM executive, having committed suicide (his note hinted) from despair over his impotence. Despite scandal, Harlow's career, driven by her irresistible sparkle, glamour and sensuality, continued to skyrocket. She married for the third time in 1933, was divorced a year later, became engaged to her sometime co-star William Powell, but died suddenly of uremic poisoning in 1937, aged 26. In this biography Eve Golden explores the woman behind the legends and the scandals. The world evoked here is at once glamorous, nostalgic, poignant, and tragic.
Golden's deeply researched narrative of her subject's shockingly brief life is illustrated with rare film stills, posters and exclusive photographs from family archives.