A teenage Jean Harlow vamps in a publicity photoshoot for Hell’s Angels (1930). Portraits created by New York’s White Studio, circa late 1929.
“When I was given the role of the girl in Hell’s Angels and signed a five-year contract with Howard Hughes, I thought that I was the luckiest girl in the world. Dozen of girls had been tested for the one feminine role. And from all those girls I had been selected. It seemed too good to be true. I knew that, if I made good in the part, it would mean fame overnight. It is hard to describe my feelings. I was so frightened and excited and bewildered that I didn’t know what I felt.”
“Since they had discovered me, Jimmy and Ben took a brotherly interest in helping me to succeed. They knew, without being told, that I was frantic with the fear that I would fail. So, before each scene, the two boys took me to a quiet corner and rehearsed the speeches and actions with me. I don’t know what I should have done without them.”
“We finished the picture in January 1930 and the world premiere was scheduled for the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood in May. Gradually the months passed and the night of nights arrived, the premiere of Hell’s Angels. It is impossible to describe my emotions on that night. I don’t remember even seeing the picture that night. I sat through the entire affair in a cold perspiration, trying to realize that that girl on the screen was really I. Somehow, even now, I always think of the Jean Harlow in the pictures as an entirely different person. I look at her with the coldly critical eye of a stranger. I haven’t even seen two or three of the pictures in which she played after Hell’s Angels. I dislike those films and the girl in them so much that I couldn’t bear to sit in a theatre — or even in a projection room and look at them.” — Jean Harlow in The Authentic Story of My Life, October 1934.
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