Shedunit

By Otto Friedrich

DEADLY ILLUSIONS by Samuel Marx and Joyce Vanderveen

Random House; 271 pages; $19.95

Old-time Hollywood sometimes seems to have almost as many closeted skeletons as the Kremlin. Consider now the luxuriant scandal surrounding Paul Bern, an MGM producer who was found shot to death in 1932 shortly after his marriage to his prize star, Jean Harlow. A suicide note apologized for "the frightful wrong I have done you." MGM boss Louis B. Mayer tried to protect Harlow by spreading the word that Bern had been impotent and killed himself in shame. After a minimal investigation, the coroner's jury declared that Bern had committed suicide with "motive undetermined." End of scenario.

Samuel Marx, who was story editor at MGM at the time, thought otherwise. Bern had told him that he once lived in New York City with an actress named Dorothy Millette. She had mysteriously fallen into a coma, and Bern had placed her in an institution. Ten years later, she had just as mysteriously recovered and come to California to resume their common-law marriage.

Despite his professional credentials, Marx is not much of a writer. He uses phrases like "the burning glare of sensational publicity" and "most ravishing of all those glittering luminaries." But in unraveling the famous Bern mystery, he is something more interesting: a witness. Tipped off by a friend, Marx got to Bern's house on the morning his body was found, hours before anyone called the police. He discovered MGM production chief Irving Thalberg already there, interrogating the servants and learned that Mayer had even earlier come and gone. He heard that some woman had visited Bern the night before (Harlow was away) and that there had been sounds of quarreling. ^ All this led Marx to believe Bern had committed suicide because Millette was threatening to expose him as a bigamist.

A few years ago, when Marx was discussing this case with a former Dutch ballerina named Joyce Vanderveen, she challenged his theory as implausible, and the two of them decided to investigate further. They discovered that Millette, who was found drowned shortly after Bern's death, suffered not from a coma but from acute schizophrenia. But nothing shook the finding of suicide until Marx met a minor comedian who had been a drinking pal of retired MGM security chief Whitey Hendry's. Hendry, shortly before his death, told this pal that he had accompanied Mayer to Bern's house that first morning, and it was obvious that Bern had been murdered. Mayer was terrified of scandal. So Hendry volunteered to plant the gun in Bern's hand, and the two of them concocted the fake suicide note. A few days after hearing this bit of evidence suggesting that Bern was murdered by Millette, Marx telephoned Hendry's pal to check a few details and found that he too had just died. Cut to the closing credits.