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- Verified Buyer
Half a star. This struck me as a parody of a trashy novel, As if Shulman said, let's see how bad this can be and still make a buck. Not worth wasting your time. It has no continuity. He meanders off on boring essays, I suppose this is to pad the thin story. Further, the absurd usage of derogatory terms towards women, gays and almost every other group labels this book a tired dinasour that should be buried......This book should have been put in the fiction section because Shulman never talked to anyone who actually knew Jean Harlow except for her agent who was complicit in this farce. Harlow's 87 year old father sued the publisher for 3 million dollars but they settled out of court for a lesser sum because of his advanced age......This book trashes the memory of one of Hollywoods most beloved stars and is not worthy of consideration.All my life I've been a fan to Jean Harlow.Her own personal life was heart breaking enough,and she didn't need someone to put in trash.I think her very personal life was nobody's business.I have always enjoyed reading biographies and I think I will thoroughly enjoy reading this book also. It looks like a good read.Belongs in the fiction section of the library. Only bought it for the pictures.very pleasedIf you like a good trashy Hollywood novel, this is for you. If you're looking for a biography, look else where.This biography came out in the 60s, and was one of the first sleazy "tell all" books about a famous film star, although Harlow had died nearly 30 years before. It was also the basis (sort of) for the Carroll Baker "Harlow" film, just as sleazy in its own way. The fuel behind the bio was Arthur Landau, Harlow's long time agent, who basically sold the story to Hollywood pedestrian writer Irving Shulman, who had previously penned novelizations such as that for the film "West Side Story." Even at the time, although the book was a huge bestseller, many of Harlow's contemporaries came out and spoke against the book, how inaccurate it was, and how even it it were alleged to contain true stories, there was just no way Landau would have or could have known anything.One famous example is that even if Harlow told Landau everything, there is no way she could repeat what happened between her mother and stepfather in a hotel room when she was a child and wasn't even present at the time. Some of the people who met Landau on an afternoon talk show and challenged him included Anita Loos, who knew Harlow and wrote the screenplays to some of her best films, including "Red Headed Woman," "Hold Your Man," and "Saratoga," the film she was making at the time of her sudden death.Unfortunately, the myths this book propagated have remained active even though most have been debunked. It is not true, for example, that Harlow was a promiscuous alcoholic, that her career was in decline when she died, or that her mother (the most notorious of the myths) withheld medical treatment from her when she was ill as a result of her Christian Science beliefs.Harlow's life was colorful enough that her story doesn't need to be sensationalized. Read "Platinum Girl" or one of the other more current biographies which will give you a sense of the actual girl that everyone called "Baby" at MGM, who was almost universally loved by her peers as well as her audience, and avoid this depressing, sordid take on her life. If it was accurate, that'd be one thing, but thanks to Anita Loos and others of Harlow's contemporaries, as well as her more reputable biographers, we know that this "Harlow" has nothing to do with the real Jean.
