Paul Bern: the mysterious death of Jean Harlow’s husband
Hollywood is a seedy industry full of untrustworthy people, so it’s sadly no surprise that it has long been a bed of suspicious deaths shrouded in mystery.
With that being said, it’s often the case that these strange circumstances aren’t always as mysterious as they’re made out to be. Hollywood loves drama, so it’s hardly unexpected that when rumours start to float around, they are often backed by very little evidence, which certainly was the case when Paul Bern, the MGM producer husband of Jean Harlow, was found dead in 1932.
They’d only been married a few months, but he was found with a gunshot to the head in his mansion, officially pronounced dead by suicide at 42; however, speculations started to emerge when it was discovered that his common-law wife, Dorothy Millette, had also committed suicide just two days later.
There was soon a rumour circulating that Millette was responsible for Bern’s death, although the facts to support such a bold claim were quite stunted. Going back to when Bern and Millette got together in 1911 (strangely, the year that Harlow was born), which was for about nine years until Millette was reportedly sent to a sanatorium, and while they eventually separated, Bern still cared for his former partner financially by setting up a trust fund for her.
It appears that they remained close, because it was said that she visited him on the night that he died, although there is no official confirmation of this. All we know for definite is that on September 5th, 1932, he was found dead, and it was two hours after the discovery of his body by his butler that the police were called. Unbelievably, MGM were called first, with a few higher-ups apparently coming to the house to tamper with some evidence before alerting the authorities of Bern’s death.
Finally, on September 14th, Millette’s body was found; she had jumped from a Delta King riverboat, which raised questions of whether she had killed her former lover and then killed herself, or had she jumped because she was stricken with grief, or was she simply left with no money now that Bern was dead and it was Harlow and not her who was in his will, which would make her a destitute.
It seems likely that Bern did kill himself, which aligns with his experience of depression, but according to producer Samuel Marx, Louis B Mayer wanted Bern’s reason for suicide to be stated as related to supposed impotence. MGM were obsessed with protecting Harlow from too much scandal, so their reported tampering with evidence appears to have been done in an attempt to keep up appearances.
Bern did leave a suicide note which 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”, thereby bringing forth doubts about whether he was feeling guilt-ridden over an affair he may have been having.
There are so many unanswered questions when it comes to the case of his death, which was made all the more scandalous by the imminent death of Millette, whom he had never divorced. Marx thinks that Millette did it, but the evidence doesn’t really hold up, and what seems more likely is that the pair’s mental health issues were major contributing factors to their deaths, with issues of infidelity and financial hardship probably adding to the mix.
Harlow would die only a few years later, but in those years after Bern’s death, her career continued to thrive, so if MGM were responsible for tampering with evidence in the hopes of protecting Harlow’s status, I guess it worked, showing how the industry is certainly a strange and tragic place.
