By Love Reclaimed: Jean Harlow Returns to Clear Her Husband’S Name

By Adrian Finkelstein and Valerie Franich

In July 1932, MGM producer and notorious nice guy Paul Bern marries the love of his life, screen icon Jean Harlow. Two months later, he is found shot to death in their Benedict Canyon home, the victim of a Hollywood cover-up that eventually portrays him in the media as a sick, impotent wife-beater.

Modern day intuitive Valerie Franich and renowned psychiatrist Adrian Finkelstein partner together in order to dispel Hollywood lore and share the true story of Harlow and Bern. Through the use of hypnotic regressions and extensive research, Franich and Finkelstein offer a glimpse into the life of the young ingnue as she makes her way in Hollywood, falls in love with the older Bern, and becomes the innocent prey of MGM boss Louis Mayer who fixes the evidence to make her beloved husbands death look like a suicide. As Harlow returns to reclaim her husbands good name and stellar reputation, she reminds everyone that love is indeed eternal.

By Love Reclaimed shares an enlightening and heartwarming look at reincarnation and the Hollywood scene during the 1930s while shedding a new light on an old mystery.

Winner of The Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Fall 2012

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475928891

Adrian Finkelstein

Adrian Finkelstein, MD, is a graduate of the prestigious Menninger School of Psychiatry and a former professor at Chicago Medical School, Chicago Rush Medical School, and UCLA. He is the author of several books and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and the BBC. He practices holistic medicine and psychiatry in Malibu, California. Valerie Franich, MEd, earned a bachelor’s degree in mental health psychology and mainstream and special education from Western Washington University and a master’s degree from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has more than twenty years of experience as an intuitive educator and disability advocate. She lives in the Seattle, Washington, area.

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Contents

Note to the Reader

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter One Deaf to the Past

Chapter Two Piecing the Past Together

Chapter Three Bern, Powell, Gable, and the Hollywood Gang

Chapter Four The Doctor as the Subject

Chapter Five Jean and Paul

Chapter Six The Death and Resurrection of Paul Bern

Chapter Seven The Reckoning

Afterword

To my parents and all my family with love. And in recognition of my father, my friend, for encouraging my fascination as a young boy with Hollywood stars and in particular with Jean Harlow.

—Adrian Finkelstein

Malibu, California

To my family and friends for teaching me of the endearing love of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

—Valerie Franich

Seattle, Washington

Note to the Reader

Every effort has been made to locate and secure the permission of copyright holders when making use of copyrighted materials beyond the scope of fair use under the law of copyright. However, despite our best efforts, we were unable to determine the copyright status of a limited number of over-fifty-year-old images and considered others to belong to the public domain. We invite the copyright holders of such images to contact the publisher so that proper credit can be afforded in future printings.

Preface

I’m a physician, a psychiatrist, psychoanalytically trained at the world-prestigious Menninger School of Psychiatry in Topeka, Kansas. About four decades ago, I began experimenting with hypnosis. I was a medical student at the time, and I was impressed by Dr. Dan Medina’s hypnotic induction. Dr. Medina, a psychologist at Tel Hashomer Hospital near Tel Aviv, Israel, had been quite successful in hypnotically treating patients afflicted with bronchial asthma and other psychosomatic conditions. Intrigued with hypnosis, I once asked Dr. Medina to hypnotize me so that I might experience it. I felt a sort of magical, immensely enjoyable sensation descend upon me.

Shortly thereafter, I went back to the Department of Internal Medicine at the Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem and continued the lengthy and strenuous task of observing my numerous patients. I felt they could benefit from hypnosis. At the time, they were being treated by other therapeutic means, some of which brought no significant success and others of which ended in failure. The programming bias in medical school had distracted me for a long time from being open-minded, and I needed to probe for the truth on my own. Eventually, I got my hands on The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. I read it and reread it avidly. It gave me a better understanding of the relationship between dreams and symptoms, whether they were emotional or physical. Dream symbolism fascinated me. I could see so convincingly, through Freud’s interpretation of dreams, the interrelationship between mind and body.

The time came when I was torn between two choices in specialization: internal medicine or psychiatry. The latter prevailed. After graduating from Hadassah Medical School, I decided to train in psychiatry in the United States, where this specialty was more widely accepted than it was in Israel. Though I was married with a child at the time, I embraced the long hours and hard training required by this specialization, finally graduating from the Menninger School of Psychiatry. I acquired a great foundation of psychoanalytic skills from my professors. I was privileged to be taught and supervised by some of the world’s most prominent psychoanalysts at the time. All this training brought me closer to my conception of the true causes of many baffling illnesses. I used dream analysis and hypnosis to establish the influence of mind over matter and wrote articles on the subject. My studies were recognized by many of my colleagues, and this encouraged me to continue my research, but something was still missing in this psychosomatic approach.

After arriving in Chicago, I accepted the directorship of the Outpatient Psychiatric Department at Mount Sinai Medical Center. I was soon to realize, however, that my training was insufficient to help a large number of my patients. What was really required, I thought, was an empathic, humanitarian approach, and a few years later I decided to go into private practice, which allowed further self-exploration. As I was still infatuated with psychoanalytic theory, I undertook personal analysis for about seven hundred hours with a training analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Chicago. This training, perhaps more than any other, helped me become more sensitive to my patients’ problems. I became more observant and tolerant and certainly less critical of both my patients and the medical students I was teaching. This analysis consisted in great part of reclaiming my natural self. That experience made me keenly aware of the influences of psychological conflicts in our lives. It took years of practice until I finally acknowledged that even backed by such a powerful approach as psychoanalysis, I could not accomplish what I wanted—to really heal people of deep-seated psychological maladies.

As the years went by, I continued to use hypnosis. At times I combined it with cognitive-behavioral therapy as well as psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The pressure to conform to more accepted methods increased as most of my colleagues in psychiatry ended up using somatic approaches to treat psychiatric ailments. Soon, however, I started seriously questioning what I had learned throughout those long years of study in medicine and psychiatry. I believe sincerely that psychoanalysis is a wonderful tool for many people, but it is a lengthy therapy involving great financial sacrifice, and there is the very great possibility that one may not find out the underlying cause of entrenched behavior.

I realized that there was a great deal more to hypnosis than I had previously thought. I discovered that certain habits like smoking, nervous tics, a lack of self-confidence, minor psychosomatic ills, and the like can be removed through hypnosis. This realization came to me through many painful experiences; I began to feel that all the time, money, and energy I had invested in other systems of treatment were in many cases futile.

One day in 1977, while making notes about one of my dreams, I experienced a strange, almost eerie revelation. I felt as though I were in a state between sleep and waking and that I was a middle-aged doctor or healer, unmarried, but with a good heart. I knew that I liked to help my patients. My father was a carpenter. In this state, I could see him most clearly. It was revealed to me that I had an impressive emotional experience at the time of my death (from a form of cancer). I could see a bright glowing light, and I sensed myself leaving my body. Then everything went blank. I opened my eyes and found it difficult to believe what I had experienced. Almost immediately it occurred to me that this must have been a past-life recall. Over a period of several months, I regressed myself through self-hypnosis and was able to identify a total of twenty-five past lives, seventeen of them as a male in different nonmedical or nonhealing occupations and eight as a healer, or medical doctor. Two of these were as a female.

I continued my research into past lives for about three years. After conducting several hundred regressions on my patients, I finally understood that to scientifically prove the validity of any other life besides the present one, I had to gather personal data to be carefully examined for future verification. Therefore, I performed one hundred cases of past-life regression under hypnosis with an emphasis on facts that could stand the test of genealogical research and techniques for matching present and past lives. This included biometric data—the anatomic parts of the body, such as hands, feet, body type, and facial architecture—followed by FBI-like charts of several bone-dimension ratios, handwriting, voice recognition, iris recognition, and DNA identification. When possible, I quantified personality traits and looked for coincidences or synchronicities among past and present lives.

Researching the literature on reincarnation and its origin was important, as it showed that there is nothing new under the sun, and it supported my reincarnation research and therapy work. Life after death has been universally accepted in the Orient; philosophers and religious teachers seldom felt the need to prove this belief. Hindu and Buddhist writings are never quite the same, but their mutual agreement on rebirth clearly communicates a central theme of eternal growth. They avow that in a boundless universe there should be innumerable possibilities for growth, wisdom, self-realization, and attainment of higher levels of consciousness. Many contemporary thinkers believe in reincarnation, from Hegel to Benjamin Franklin, who is quoted as saying, I look upon death to be as necessary to the constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning and, Finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist. William Wordsworth expressed it more poetically, Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting. And cometh from afar.

As I reviewed literary accounts of reincarnation, it occurred to me that convincing proof of this fact to the scientific community and the public at large could greatly benefit a troubled and suffering humanity. It appeared self-evident that past-life trauma persists to trouble people’s present lives. I devised a therapy that facilitates remembering and emotionally integrating troubling experiences under hypnosis or in another altered state, offering a possible alternative when psychiatric medicine proves unable to heal a patient. From the year 1977 on, my research and therapy including reincarnation evolved into a novel approach to medicine and life in general. This alienated many of my colleagues, who subscribed to the idea that the mind can be fixed physically, like a broken bone. The mind over matter principle was secondary to them. Positing the survival of the soul after the body dies seemed very alien and unscientific to most of them. Therefore, those in the medical establishment initially criticized me. Later on, alternative, complementary, and integrative approaches to medicine became more widely accepted by the medical community due to public pressure.

Between 1980 and 1990, after I performed thousands of past-life regressions on my patients, generally making use of hypnosis to enhance recollections of past-lifetime memories with mostly positive results, I came to find the orthodox constraints of the hospitals and universities I attended as an assistant professor too much to bear. I felt forced to move my family from the conservative Midwestern city of Chicago to the more permissive atmosphere of Los Angeles. Here I was accepted as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and was on staff of Cedars Sinai Medical Center, its biggest affiliate for psychiatry. After a year, we bought a modest house in Malibu, up on the hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was serene, warm, sunny—the location exactly as I envisioned while still in the wintry frozen tundra of Chicago at its worst.

In 1980 by myself and 1989 and 1992 with my wife, Shulah, I visited the Philippines to study folk healing practices. I learned a lot there that was never taught in medical school, such as about miraculous healing through energy work. Every time I returned to the States, I felt enriched by my experiences. My holistic practice back home was given a broader perspective. All disciplines seem to come harmoniously together, complementing each other in the main objective of healing the body, the mind, the emotions, and the spirit, restoring their interactive balance. Thus, my major task became assisting my patients to overcome imposed blocks and barriers at all levels of social interaction, which entrapped them from one lifetime to another. Naturally, hypnotic past-life regression became my main investigative tool in uncovering such blocks and removing them.

From 1990 to 1998, I continued to practice psychiatry with this orientation, and the results were very encouraging. I conducted numerous seminars and workshops on past-life regression and spiritual healing, combining the psychiatric with what textbooks recognized as parapsychology. Namely, parapsychology is defined as the branch of psychology that studies psychic phenomena and life after death.

There is a misconception by the uninformed public in the Western world that all people claiming to be reincarnated imagine themselves to be famous people like Napoleon and Cleopatra. That is far from the truth. In my research and my therapeutic experience with some five thousand cases, most people were just ordinary people in their past lives. In this life they would come to me with problems, such as depression and anxiety, or stress-generated physical states, including psychosomatic conditions like asthma, ulcers, hypertension, headaches, and all kinds of pain without a sufficient reason or explanation. They responded for the most part very well to my novel approach; in most cases, using past-life regression to identify the origin of an emotional block and having patients let go of this block, shifting their vital energy into constructive directions according to their life purpose, proved effective.

But this does not mean that past-life celebrities don’t reincarnate and have similar conditions. They do reincarnate like anyone else and suffer like any other person, and they can be healed by the same approach. However, it’s easier to prove these celebrities’ identities through scientific research as there is more specific information in the public record about their lives and legacies. And, like my patients, many of them report having the same déjà vu, flashbacks, and nightmares.

Before 1998, I encountered only a few cases of famous people reincarnated among my patients, but the time frames were too distant and data was too scarce to give them enough credence. However, in 1998, something fateful happened that shifted my career as a doctor into high gear and changed the course of my life. In October of that year, when I had been practicing past-life regression therapy as a psychiatrist for more than two decades, I was contacted by Sherrie Lea Laird, a professional singer in Toronto, Canada, who reported repeated flashbacks and dreams of a past life as Marilyn Monroe.

After seven and a half years of research on Sherrie Lea Laird, the mounting evidence supported her claim. The undeniable physical similarities—bone structure, voice patterns, handwriting analysis—coupled with the astonishing memories that surfaced during her regressions, convinced me of her authenticity. Her claim was from the beginning that of a troubled psyche seeking relief, not notoriety. Indeed, it was a courageous outing by Sherrie Lea, an up-and-coming pop star who risked her own career to tell the truth about being the reincarnation of the famous actress. Her testimony possibly solved Marilyn Monroe mysteries that have gone unanswered for decades—including a revelation about how Marilyn really died and her relationship with JFK. Through past-life regression sessions, Sherrie Lea answered questions as Marilyn Monroe, helping to solve those mysteries.

Such a time-consuming research project at this stage in my life journey stressed my relationships with family and friends alike, but their continued support in spite of these difficulties was invaluable. In 2005, I started writing a book, and the stream of communications between Sherrie and me eased off. Now Sherrie was standing alone, and the idea of suicide was no longer on her mind as it had been in the beginning of our work together. She seemed to have purged her past-life emotional blocks, the Marilyn demons. The process of her integration into my long experience would undoubtedly require months and even years of work. But I felt strongly that Sherrie now had the distance and the necessary tools to muster her past-life trauma and get on with her life. Naturally, like childhood abuse, one never overcomes past-life trauma; one learns to create a distance between the traumatic experience and the self in order to deal constructively with painful and confusing emotions and thus rule them, rather than being ruled by them—it is a matter of developing control over one’s life. That is why she was advised by me to seek therapy with a local psychiatrist in Toronto, Canada, because our work, as agreed from the very start, had not been therapy or a doctor-patient relationship, but research that assisted her to self-heal by remembering her past-life problems and recognizing their blocks, letting go of them, and integrating new workable and positive solutions to them in her current life. Therefore she effected her own self-healing, but needed long-term therapy with a psychiatrist in her geographical area in order to maintain and advance her improvement. I’m licensed to practice as a physician and psychiatrist only in the United States.

I finished writing a book, Marilyn Monroe Returns: The Healing of a Soul, and found a publisher. The book was launched in June 2006, which stirred up an array of diverse reactions and challenges for both me and my research subject. I could only hope that the process of our mutual healing prepared us, as it were, to put it all in perspective and not let it run us. But I can unequivocally state, after more than three decades of past-life regression work, that Sherrie Lea Laird is the probable reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. Scientifically speaking, she is the most probable reincarnation of the famous actress; an FBI-like facial-recognition test by Harvard scientist Paul Von Ward confirmed that Sherrie Lea Laird and Marilyn Monroe are two lifetimes with one personality and one face. In other words, Sherrie could pass facial-recognition screening as Marilyn Monroe at any security gate in the world. And the odds of this happening by chance are more than one in a million.

But most important is the healing process of her soul, which seems to have taken place. It also means that this sensational case will open people, and especially those in the healing arts, to the invaluable healing offered by past-life regression therapy. All of us not only bring our personality traits—even our facial similarities and other biometric traits—into this life and continue to address our character deficits and enhance our positive characteristics but also renew relationships with past-life friends and family and work out the karmic patterns created by past interaction. Fortunately, most of us aren’t dealing with the kind of trauma that Sherrie brought with her into this life but rather with the everyday human problems that people have faced in all eras of history.

While I was a passive observer and dutiful researcher during the years of my work with Sherrie Lea Laird, I was hardly prepared for the revelations soon to come from my next big case. I might preface what is to follow by saying that I have personally explored more than twenty-five of my past lives, but often—as Edgar Cayce found with those coming to him for past-life readings—only those past lives surface whose issues are being worked on in the present. People recall what they need to deal with at a given period in their lives. Later, when other issues arise, different past lives come forward.

It was sometime in April 2008 when a mental health professional with a master’s degree in education from Seattle, Washington, by the name of Valerie Franich wrote me an e-mail saying that she wondered whether it was possible that she could be the reincarnation of Jean Harlow, the famous Hollywood bombshell of the 1930s. Harlow was born fifteen years before Marilyn Monroe and was her idol, the one she looked up to and tried to emulate. But the Hollywood media of her time reported that in spite of Marilyn’s efforts and sex appeal, she was not a second Jean Harlow. While Harlow was the epitome of the Hollywood sex symbol, she was an unambitious young woman who was pushed into the spotlight by an overbearing mother and whose nonchalant attitude about movies and acting only added to her sex appeal. Marilyn Monroe was very anxious and ambitious to succeed, often using people to achieve her goals. She worked very hard at her public sex-goddess image, which came naturally to Harlow, and both died very young—Harlow at twenty-six from kidney failure and Monroe at thirty-six by suicide.

Valerie had never wanted to consult with any past-life regressionist, but a friend directed her attention to my website. While she was impressed with my thirty years of research in parapsychology, which entailed the study of possible past lives including that of Marilyn Monroe, what caught her attention among my publications was a screenplay that I had written many years back and titled Search for Love.

Apparently, it evoked in her some deep-seated memory. There was also something about my photo that was familiar, and so she decided to send me an e-mail about her intuitive sense that she may have been Jean Harlow in a past life. I noted that she wasn’t making an outright claim, which was reassuring. I thought this could be due to her scientific background, but I later learned it was an aspect of her nonchalant and unpretentious personality. I was about to leave Los Angeles to travel to France and Spain for reincarnation research. Therefore, I didn’t pay much attention to Valerie’s curiosity about her possible Jean Harlow connection and only e-mailed her back saying I’d contact her when I returned from Paris, which I did three weeks later.

At that point we embarked on a project to scientifically investigate the possibility that she might be the reincarnation of Jean Harlow. This all began with her eerie recollections of specific houses and locations in Beverly Hills when she visited there in the 1980s. She also told of a childhood experience of feeling that she was going to die while being treated in an oxygen tent for an ear infection, although the infection was not that serious. She later discovered that Harlow had died in an oxygen tent.

Compared to Sherrie Laird’s intense flashbacks and the near-possession of her Marilyn persona at times, this was slight indeed. So I proceeded with caution—as I always do with famous-life recalls. What was interesting and unusual here was that Valerie wasn’t plagued by the kind of trauma that drives most people to psychiatrists and/or past-life regressionists. In fact, as it later turned out, the underlying impetus was reclaiming the reputation of a wrongly accused and defamed husband from a past life. I have seen this pattern, where souls come back to rectify a past injustice, but when it clearly involves a famous crime, one’s interest is piqued.

I traveled to Seattle on two occasions, on June 13 and 14, and then August 15 and 16 of 2009, to conduct many hours of hypnotic past-life regressions on Valerie, all videotaped and later transcribed. At the end of one hypnotic past-life regression in August, while still in a somnambulistic trance and without any prompting, she called me by another name, that of her husband from the 1930s.

She said, You are Paul Bern!

I replied, No, I’m Adrian Finkelstein!

But she persisted, You are Paul Bern!

I felt somewhat irritated, but I didn’t overreact and firmly replied, No, I am Adrian Finkelstein! She didn’t relent and repeated her claim a few more times. For obvious professional reasons, I was shocked and completely rejected the idea as ridiculous. As a matter of fact, I was so shocked that I didn’t realize the videotape had ended, and I didn’t replace it in time to record the most striking revelation of these regressions. (Later, in a dual past-life regression by another experienced hypnotist, this fact was confirmed on tape.)

For the next two months, I researched this case as if it were any other case of reincarnation, gathering data from facial biometric comparisons, personality traits, and flashbacks and dreams that were triggered during this time. I also gained confirmation from Ahtun-Re, the ancient Egyptian spirit channeled by the famed trans-channeler Kevin Ryerson. I then began thinking about the possibility that I might after all be the reincarnation of the notorious MGM director.

However, at this point I felt useless continuing on my own with further regressions with Valerie. The doctor had become the patient. It was as if God wanted to test me by having me experience what thousands of my patients had gone through as I performed past-life regressions on them over the previous three decades. I was to feel, for the first time, the intense emotional turmoil of facing the results of a very nontypical, traumatic past-life discovery: having died of a gunshot wound.

To soothe my searing emotional pain from experiencing during hypnosis and afterwards my traumatic death as Paul Bern at age forty-two and the loss of Jean Harlow, a bride of only two months and the love of my life, as well as the profession of filmmaking that I loved so much, I sought help from another objective professional. So I set up another round of hypnotic past-life regressions in Seattle on July 9 and 10, 2010, but this time conjointly with Valerie Franich—the first time this has been done, to my knowledge—by a veteran past-life regressionist, Dominique Glaub, PhD. This way, Jean Harlow and Paul Bern spoke directly to each other in the same room. It was very emotional for me. All those many hours of regressions were videotaped, and I was amazed at my own dramatic regression and the deep suffering I, as Paul Bern, went through. When the questions were directed at Valerie speaking as Jean Harlow, then and during other regressions, she was often equally emotional about those tragic events and their aftermath.

Objectively reviewing the transcripts, I had to conclude that I could indeed be Paul Bern, the MGM director who collaborated with Irving Thalberg on many productions. I now understood what had drawn Jean/Valerie into my life: the love that we had shared together and how it was taken away from both of us. And now I had become a collaborator with Valerie in resurrecting the reputation of Paul Bern, which had been sullied by Louis B. Mayer to protect his financial investment in Jean Harlow’s career. She never participated in this deception; it only compounded her loss and indirectly contributed, we both feel now, to her early death at age twenty-six.

Acknowledgments

We are very thankful to our families and friends who supported us with angelic sweetness and patience as we researched and wrote this very involved and demanding story from the Hollywood Golden Age over the course of the last four years.

Gratitude, appreciation, and heartfelt thanks go to our editor John Nelson at Book Works for his expertise, crafty editing, and positive suggestions.

We are indebted to and sincerely thank the iUniverse publishing company for their professionalism in helping us with the production of the book.

Warmheartedly, we thank our dear friends Donna and Dave Erskine for their long, ongoing support, constructive suggestions and feedback, and illustration advice.

Warmest friendly thanks go to Darrell Rooney, Jean Harlow historian and author, who assisted us as a conduit in our research and allowed us to use many images from the Darrell Rooney Archive.

Our deepest appreciation goes to E. J. Fleming for his ongoing friendly support and permission to use some images from his groundbreaking book on the life and legacy of Paul Bern, titled Paul Bern: The Life and Famous Death of