Jean Harlow Part II

Powell did help Jean with her business affairs, primarily her increasingly troubled finances. He also discovered Bello was embezzling money that he was supposedly putting away for Jean's future. Mother Jean divorced Bello when she learned what he had done. Now she only had "The Baby".

By this time, Jean and the censor-wary studio were ready for an image change. To make her look less brazen, and to save her scalp, Jean's hair was dyed a shade called "brownette". She debuted her new look in Riffraff. The movie wasn't good and the audience wasn't ready for such a big image change.

Jean soon recovered her popularity, and won acceptance for her new look, with Wife vs. Secretary. In her role as Clark Gable's secretary, she came closest to the person she was in real life. This time, the audience liked her. It was the first time a major star had successfully made an image change.

After completing Personal Property in January 1937, Jean traveled to Washington D.C. for President Roosevelt's birthday celebration. She attended twenty-two functions in two days, all while suffering a bad cold.

On the train ride back, Jean's cold turned into the flu. Her complexion turned gray and she was extremely bloated. She was too ill to even acknowledge the well-wishers who dropped by to check on her.

When Jean returned to Hollywood, she began work on Saratoga, once again starring opposite her friend Clark Gable. Her complexion was still chalky, she constantly sweated, and she was also becoming alarmingly bloated. One day, she collapsed mid-scene in Walter Pidgeon's arms, complaining about stomach pain. She went home to relax.

At home, contrary to rumor, Mother Jean provided the best medical attention she could find. When it became obvious that she needed more intensive care, Jean was quickly admitted to the hospital.

As she became increasingly more bloated, Jean was placed in an oxygen tent. When Powell saw her, he burst into guilty tears and ran from the room. Jean was dying and she didn't fight it; if she couldn't marry Powell, she didn't want to live.

Jean Harlow died the morning of June 6, 1937 from Uremia, a toxic result of kidney failure. When she had suffered scarlet fever as a child at summer camp, her kidneys had been permanently damaged. The disease had been slowly progressing for years.

A screenwriter later said, "The day the Baby died, there wasn't one sound in the

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