In 1932, Paul Bern, one of Metro-Goldwyn Mayer’s top producers, was found shot to death in his Beverly Hills home just two months after marrying Jean Harlow, motion pictures’ newest, most beautiful and most glamorous superstar.
Samuel Marx was the MGM story editor at the time. He knew both Bern and Harlow intimately. In fact, along with Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer, he was one of the first people at the house that morning — even before the police. The scene gave every indication that it was a suicide. There was a bizarre note apparently addressed to Jean Harlow, who was said to have spent the night at her mother’s house.
The studio’s version that Bern had taken his own life because he was impotent was accepted at face value. Even a staged inquest supported such a conclusion.
But after years of investigation — discovering lost grand jury files and interviewing people who knew Bem, Harlow and the inner workings of MGM — Samuel Marx and Joyce Vanderveen have reconstructed this absorbing account of how Paul Bem really met his death. It involves a powerful-studio determined not to let scandal destroy its most important new property, a district attorney who could look the other way, and the secret life of a man who thought he had buried his past forever.
With an extraordinary cast of characters that ranges from Mayer himself to E Scott Fitzgerald, Deadly Illusions rips the lid off the studio cover-up with compelling evidence that Bem was murdered — and why.