Nine

W ading through my emails had become a nightmare. Overnight, the explosion of interest in Jean Harlow—and in me—had reached strange proportions.

I scanned down the list. One at a time. One at a time.

There was an email from a psychic who claimed she had a connection with Jean and had a message for me. Oh boy. Delete. There was another message, from a dressmaker in Hollywood, who wanted my measurements because she could see me in a Jean Harlow-like silky gown. Not on your life, honey.

There was a reminder about Justine’s will reading later in the day. Thank you.

I opened an email from a collector who wanted to meet with me.

“Dear Ms. Donovan,

Please accept my condolences on the loss of Justine Turner. It is a great loss, to be certain. I’ve been in contact with her about Jean Harlow’s sapphire ring, which I believe she was planning to sell to me. Forgive my impertinence, as she has just passed away, but these things tend to slip off if we don’t secure them. Might we meet to discuss terms?

Yours Truly,

Chad Walters”

I could take care of this right away. I wrote him back with the only factual information I had about Jean Harlow’s ring: it had not been seen since her death. The ring’s significance was that it had been given to her by the great love of her life, William Powell. But it was gone. The most viable theory was that she was buried with it on her finger.

Walters emailed me back immediately, as if he’d been sitting there waiting for my response.

“I’d like to take you to lunch to discuss, as I’m aware that Justine had the ring.”

As if I’d meet a complete stranger to chat about a nearly mythical ring. If Justine had the ring, I was sure I would have known about it. It would have been a great coupe for her and she would not have kept quiet about it. What was this man about?

The ring in question was a 150-carat cabochon sapphire engagement ring from Powell, according to the Natural Sapphire Company, one of my sources. For all the interest in the ring, the star sapphire itself was not gem quality. William Powell was cheap, and despite its size, the ring he gave Harlow wasn’t expensive. I’d read an interview with Jean Harlow’s jeweler. When she showed him the ring, he examined it and thought, “This is nothing.”

Justine and I had examined Jean Harlow’s probate records, and it wasn’t listed in the contents, even though other valuable pieces of jewelry were.

The only thing adding value to the ring was that it had belonged to Harlow, which would be difficult to prove. If it were found, and a person could prove that it had belonged to her, the ring would, perhaps, be priceless.

I didn’t respond to the man’s email and moved on to the next. Most of them were junk. But there was an email from Maude, the psychologist we worked with, telling me I should call her. I’d inquired about a particular aspect of Harlow’s personality I found intriguing: her work ethic.

I dialed. Greetings were exchanged, along with remembrances of Justine.

“Do you think her work ethic came from her Midwestern roots?” I asked.

“It’s not as simple as that,” Maude said.

“But she did have a work ethic, despite having grown up in a kind of upper-class family,” I said.

“Yes, of course,” Maude said. “Which was odd enough in itself, I suppose. But Jean Harlow was a very complicated woman.”

I snorted. “Okay. I’ll bite. What was complicated about her?”

“Children of divorce, even today, have the same feelings of worthlessness. Back then, it was highly unlikely that she knew any other children whose parents had divorced.” Maude paused, then exhaled into the phone. I imagined her puffing on a cigarette. “She didn’t feel good enough. She overcompensated with her over-the-top nice personality and her workaholic tendencies. That’s her psychological profile in a nutshell.”

I felt a twinge of something—a sliver of inspiration reached out to me then. Something recognizable. A way into my subject.

“And the sex?” I said. But I knew what she was going to say, didn’t I?

“Who knows how much sex the woman actually had? I mean, Jesus Christ, does it always have to be about the sex?” Maude exhaled again. “But let’s say she had a higher than average sex drive. She was married at the age of seventeen. Once again, all of it fits into the unworthy feelings she had. It was exacerbated by the culture, of course. I mean yes, she starred in some films during the pre-code era, but the code attitude permeated the culture. You know, good girls didn’t have sex, and if they did, they certainly didn’t enjoy it.”

That goddamn code. The Hays Code that gave us a plethora of forced happy endings and anesthetized movies. All for the sake of “decency.”

“So was Jean Harlow a sexy vamp?” Maude went on. “Maybe. But more likely she was a normal woman with normal desires and had been branded as a vamp just because of her roles and her appearance. Which was outrageously sexy.”

“What about the no underwear thing?” I asked. “That would lead me to believe that she wanted to lure men in.”

“Of course she did. Don’t we all?” Maude said and laughed. “I think it was simply that she didn’t like it. So she didn’t wear it. Other people placed their own meaning on it. She wasn’t the first actress to go without underwear, I assure you.”

No, that was true. Norma Shearer often didn’t wear undergarments. It was never made a big deal of. I wondered why.

Shearer had been gorgeous and ten times a better actress than Harlow ever was. But you never even heard of her these days—unless you were a student of film. Yet Jean Harlow had become a cultural icon. Time was a tricky prankster.

“I’ve got to go in a few minutes. Is there anything else?” Maude said.

I thought a moment. “Well, this is going to seem like an odd question.”

“My specialty,” she said and laughed. She had a generous, rolling laugh.

“What kind of person would want to be a Jean Harlow imitator?”

“Now that is an odd question,” she said. “What’s even odder is Justine asked me the same thing a few days before she died.”

My heart nearly stopped.

“What I told her was that I think there’s a part of all of us that would like to be Jean Harlow, or at least resemble her. But for someone walking around pretending to be Jean Harlow? That could mean any number of personality disorders, as well as an extreme form of psychosis,” she said.

Her words sent my pulse racing. Justine might have known about the woman who seemed to be hovering around me like an unwelcome ghost.

“Did Justine say she knew someone like this?” I managed to say.

“No, she didn’t say.” Maude hesitated. “But I had the feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me. I worked with Justine for years; I knew the woman very well. She was going off on a tangent about a Jean Harlow look-alike. Justine Turner did not do tangents. You know that.”

I grunted. “Yes,” I said.

“Look, what’s going on? Why are you asking about the Jean Harlow look-alike? Do you mind my asking?”

I filled her in about the woman I’d been seeing on the street—and then again briefly, I was sure of it, at Justine’s wake.

There was a silence on the end of the phone. “Listen, doll, I’m late for my next appointment. Let me think all of this over and get back to you. I might have something for you to chew on.”

We said our goodbyes.

What would make someone want to be another person? Where did the impulse to slip inside someone else’s skin come from? Did this woman have something to hide? Surely not. You wouldn’t become Jean Harlow if you wanted to slip into the shadows. You became Jean Harlow if you wanted attention—and plenty of it. I didn’t need a PhD in psychology to figure that out.

Or had this person just been born resembling her?

I was getting off track. This person had nothing to do with the biography. I needed words on the page about Jean Harlow, not about some impersonator running around the city.

I tapped out some notes from my conversation with Maude, then checked over my email again.

“I insist on seeing you about the ring,” Chad Walters emailed me again.

I was fueled with coffee and gleaned he wasn’t going to give up until we met. Besides, if he knew anything about the ring that I didn’t know, I’d pry it out of him. I wrote him back, giving him the address for the café across the street. I also needed to get it through to him: Justine did not have Jean Harlow’s ring.