David Parker’s Reviews > Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow > Status Update

I wasn’t born an actress. Events made me one.
She literally learned on the job, mutating from wooden sexpot to sublime comic, to serious actress.
Elton John’s ‘Norma Jean’ could have easily been written about her.

15 year-old Harlan Carpenter caught scarlet fever at camp Chaton-ka,in the summer of 1926, that was followed by glomerulonephritis, a post streptococcal kidney infection that had induced high blood pressure hypertension and nephritis. Her kidneys had degenerated steadily ever since.

After 42 movies, 3 marriages, 2 abortions, scandals, alcoholism, gonorrhea, and heartbreak, Harlow had lived too hard for a twenty-six-year-old.
At least acute nephritis would take her off the treadmill.

Bride at sixteen, a bit player at seventeen, a star at eighteen, a divorce at nineteen a mobster’s mistress at twenty, then a bride again at twenty-one (and a widow two months later), Harlow sought solace in liquor.