“I like to wake up each morning feeling a new man.”
Born Harlean Harlow Carpenter, Jean Harlow, sex symbol of the early 1930s, was known as the “Blonde Bombshell” and the “Platinum Blonde.” “Discovered” by Fox executives while waiting for a friend at the lot, Harlow claimed to have no initial interest in show business. Soon enough, she was encouraged (forced) by her mother, a failed actress herself, and landed bit parts in several Hal Roach shorts, including three with Laurel and Hardy. Word spread that she never wore underwear and iced her nipples before scenes. She was quickly signed by the breast-obsessed Howard Hughes to a five-year, $100-a-week contract to star in Hell’s Angels (1930). The following year, Harlow became a superstar after playing opposite Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy and Clark Gable in The Secret Six (the first of a half-dozen movies they’d make together). In 1932 her contract with Hughes was bought out by MGM for $30,000. Pilloried as a terrible actress in her earliest films, Harlow revealed more natural talent for comedy as her career progressed, becoming one of the studio’s biggest stars. Her marriage to MGM producer Paul Bern ended in scandal when Bern was found dead in their house, killed by a gunshot wound to the head. Officials ruled it a suicide. Harlow briefly remarried and was later romantically linked to actor William Powell. She died unexpectedly, from complications of kidney failure, at age twenty-six. Her look and style later became the template for Marilyn Monroe and countless other blonde bombshells, and it remains so even today.
HOWARD HUGHES’S PUBLICITY TEAM described her hair as “platinum blonde.” It was term they had coined. Jean Harlow would always insist it was her natural hair color. Others would insist it was bleached, a harsh mixture of Clorox, ammonia, and the cleaning detergent Lux Flakes. But the truth was, the truth didn’t matter—the Blonde Bombshell was that beautiful.
Which brings us to the night of April 7, 1933. A few minutes until midnight and a few minutes until, at long last, the end of Prohibition. Outside the Eastside Brewery just east of the Los Angeles River, traffic was at a standstill. A crowd of hundreds surrounded the building. A convoy of trucks waited, fully stocked with bottles and kegs of soon-to-be-legal beer, ready to roll out as soon as the clock struck twelve. And there at the center of it all was none other than the Blonde Bombshell herself, Jean Harlow. A beer spokesmodel for the ages, resplendent in her low-cut evening gown—never mind that in truth she drank gin.
Graves Gin, to be exact, that was Harlow’s brand. Like so many of her contemporaries, she drank gin largely because she thought you could not smell it on her breath. Given her capacity for a bottle a day and, if the stories are true, her predilection for flashing her breasts at dinner parties, it’s hard to believe Harlow’s breath would be the giveaway. No matter, as long as her mother—the famously controlling Jean Poe Carpenter—didn’t find out. To this end, Harlow would go to some lengths to keep her drinking secret. She hid her booze at her friend Dorothy Manners’s house. When calling her cousin Don Roberson, another drinking companion (they might use the word enabler now), she would announce herself as “Mrs. Graves.” It was code that meant Harlow would soon be swinging by his house in her Cadillac, a bottle of Graves in hand.
Like so many of her contemporaries, she drank gin largely because she thought you could not smell it on her breath. Given her capacity for a bottle a day and, if the stories are true, her predilection for flashing her breasts at dinner parties, it’s hard to believe Harlow’s breath would be the giveaway.
But now here Harlow was on the night of the repeal, this most public occasion, standing outside a brewery. Did Mother Jean, as Harlow’s mother was known (Harlow herself was nicknamed “the Baby”), not count beer as alcohol? Was the Blonde Bombshell, despite her alliengence to gin, so much the beer drinkers’ fantasy that the Eastside Brewing Company could find no subsitute?
Again, the truth didn’t matter. You see, despite her fame and glamour, Harlow had developed a reputation as that rarest of celebrities: one who was both unpretentious and unspoiled. Production crews loved her, and not just because you could see straight through her dress when the lighting was right. Between takes, she routinely shot dice and smoked cigarettes with the stagehands. She was self-deprecating and self-aware—the perfect match, in fact, for a working-class beer company.
As midnight drew closer, signs bearing the brewery’s slogan, “Put Eastside Inside,” waved in the air. Actor Walter Huston held court, delivering a speech to the eager crowd. No one cared what he said; nearly eighty years later, the only detail anyone recalls is that Jean Harlow, her platinum hair shining in the moonlight, smashed a full bottle of beer on the first truck off the lot. Then she spent the rest of the night partying with the rowdy blue-collar crowd. The Brewery made a quarter of a million dollars that night.
AFTER HIS TRIUMPHANT FORAY into the restaurant business with Vendome, Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson felt that the burgeoning nightlife scene should be next. To that end, in mid-1934, he acquired the space recently vacated by La Boheme—an operation plagued by gambling and liquor violations—and reopened it as Café Trocadero. Originally drawn to the building’s spacious cellar (he had a large cache of rare libations in need of storage), Wilkerson hired famed designer Harold Grieve to remake the interior in the style of a French café, then persuaded agent Myron Selznick to host an invitation-only grand opening. Attendees included Bing Crosby, Dorothy Parker, William Wellman, Samuel Goldwyn, Fred Astaire, William Powell, Jean Harlow, and Myrna Loy, among others. The party, you’ll be not so shocked to discover, was breathlessly reported in the Hollywood Reporter the following day.
The Troc, as it was commonly known, opened to the general public a few nights later with a formal dinner. From that very night, it was universally considered the jewel of the Strip and the industry’s latest see-and-be-seen destination. Its exclusivity—and patrons’ potential for a mention in the Reporter—assured that the club was always packed with crowds of the highest caliber. The Troc was David O. Selznick’s first choice as a location for the 1937 version of A Star Is Born. When Darryl Zanuck celebrated the birth of his son, he threw a stag party at the Troc, with a guest list that included Louis B. Mayer, Wallace Beery, Sid Grauman, Irving Thalberg, Hal Roach, Harry Cohn, and Irving Berlin.
The bar itself was polished copper, serving drinks like the French 75, T.N.T., and the Vendome Special Sling (perhaps a carryover from Wilkerson’s first outing). Sunday nights became audition night, where aspiring entertainers were given the chance to perform in front of the giants of Hollywood. It was a huge success, not only because of the talent on display, but because L.A.’s Blue Laws forbade dancing on Sunday (so why not watch the amateurs?). Still, the Troc’s popularity would be short-lived. By 1938, Wilkerson had sold the Trocadero, once again revealing that his attention span for nonpublishing ventures was terminally short. The reins were briefly handed to Felix Young (who later opened Mocambo), but a dispute with the building’s landlord drove him away. As the Strip continued to develop through the 1940s, newer, flashier options—including Wilkerson’s next endeavor, Ciro’s—ultimately rendered the Troc obsolete. In 1947 its doors closed for good.
MOST HOTSPOTS EVENTUALLY COOL, and today not much remains of the Café Trocadero other than gossip bites lost in faded newsprint. But since the Troc was started by a newsman, the Hollywood Reporter’s Billy Wilkerson, maybe that’s at least something. Regarding cocktails, one account in a 1936 issue of Screen Guide mentions that “Another daisy is the ‘Vendome Special Sling’ ($1.00) in which the bartender makes magic out of ginger beer, cherry brandy, gin, and lime juice.” It’s unclear exactly what the proportions were, or how to conjure up the magic of the Troc’s heyday. But after a drink at the Brown Derby’s Bamboo Room followed by dinner and dancing at the Grove, you would surely press on to the Troc for one more, always one more—maybe a Vendome Special Sling.
Meet the most unlikely costars in the history of film (at least until the Sylvester Stallone/Dolly Parton epic Rhinestone): teetotaling yapper Mae West and alcoholic grump W. C. Fields. Universal Studios, having done big box office on the unlikely pairing of Marlene Dietrich and Jimmy Stewart—in a western, no less (Destry Rides Again)—had arranged this similar marriage on a whim.
By 1939 the Hays Code had effectively emasculated West’s career. Not that she didn’t make movies, but the flirtation and innuendo and balls that had distinguished her early work no longer passed muster with the increasingly prudish Hays office. Fields, meanwhile, had spent a decade building and burning bridges at a pace resembling that of Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai. And although his track record at turning profits had meant forgiveness, his drinking had become so bad that studios were now afraid to take the chance.
West didn’t want to take the chance either. She knew what a disaster he’d become, and she was affiliated with the Moral Re-Armament Movement, a cousin of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then again, she was only getting Z-movie offers now, and here was a studio movie with a legit cast, a funny concept, and a real budget. She had to accept. On one condition: If Fields ever showed up drunk, he was to be removed from the set immediately. And so My Little Chickadee sprung to life. Though it would be a painful birthing.
According to biographer Simon Louvish, both Fields and West turned in scripts to Universal for consideration, only to have the studio turn around and hire a third writer, Grover Jones. The straightforward Western that Jones churned out insulted Fields so badly that he proposed a satirical rewrite entitled: Corn With the Wind, a Cinema ‘Epic-Ac’ of Long Ago. Based on the novel … idea that movie audiences have the minds of 12-year-olds. Universal then informed Fields he didn’t have right of script approval, and that if he refused to get with the program they would be happy to sue him beyond his salary of $100,000.
At this point, Fields turned to West in hopes of finding an ally. He was so desperate not to shoot the Jones script that he agreed to throw his support fully behind hers. West turned in another draft, which Universal put in motion and which formed the basis of the shooting script. My Little Chickadee went into production. An uneasy peace.
Though it’s generally believed that Fields did not so much as even think of going on the wagon, he did keep it simple. Martinis at breakfast, an afternoon drink, perhaps the occasional swig of “pineapple juice” from his canteen. Only once was there any rupture: when Fields stumbled in, having neither shaved, showered, nor stopped drinking since he left the previous day. West said he needed to leave and sober up, and he did. The rest of the film was finished without incident. And though critics were fairly hard on the film, My Little Chickadee turned out to be big box office, and for Universal, Fields’s highest grossing.
So why, for the rest of her life, did Mae West make it a nonnegotiable condition of interviews that there be “no mention of W. C. Fields” or the film? Why did she refuse to meet Fields’s grandson thirty years later on a radio show? Because at some point, Fields, either through his own machinations or the studio’s, had magically regained a cowriting credit—with his name right alongside hers.
