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This Q&A was conducted by Lisa Burks and is presented here as it was on harlean.com, with her permission.

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And now, ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Eve Golden....

EVE GOLDEN: Because nothing decent had ever been done on her. I remember when I was a kid and I first read the Irving Shulman book, I was horrified. I'd always found her interesting -- I'd been watching her films since I was pretty small -- and I kept thinking to myself "I wish somebody would write a book on her." I was working as an advertising copy writer at the time and thought "for goodness sake, why don't I do it?" Had somebody else been working on one at the time I just probably would have helped them and never written the book but no one else was.

PP: When you were doing your research did you run into sources that, due to the Shulman book, were reluctant to talk to you because they'd been burned before?

EG: Not really, I found quite the opposite -- that people were so desperate to tell the truth; that her friends and relatives were very anxious to get the truth out there.

PP: Was it easy to track down these sources?

EG: No, that's half the work right there, finding the sources. And it's always invariably after the book is published that somebody will pop up who you didn't know existed and that's infuriating. But people were delighted to help out and just sheerly by chance I located one of Jean's cousins who was really very helpful in getting her FBI records and getting her medical records declassified and things like that. He and I are still friends and it was a sheer coincidence because I wrote to the historical society where Jean's grandparents came from and the same day my letter arrived he had arrived to research family history. So it was just absolute coincidence that we ran into each other and he was a great help.

PP: Was this cousin your best source?

EG: He was one of them. He was good as far as background and family history. I also spoke to Gilbert Roland, Sam Marx, Irene Mayer Selznick, Olivia De Havilland. I was very, very angry that I didn't really find Anita Page until after the book was published because she had some great stories. Barbara Brown was Jean's stand-in, I spoke to her, and also Maureen O'Sullivan.

PP: When you were approaching publishers for this book, was it a hard sell?

EG: Oh gosh, yes! Any biography today is a hard sell unless it's Jackie or O.J. Publishers do not want to put the time and money into the advertising and promotion of biographies that aren't guaranteed bestsellers. So Jean Harlow was a kind of a hard sell but fortunately I found a good publisher. I was lucky.

PP: Your book did well, are you surprised to find that there are still so many Jean Harlow fans out there?

EG: Oh, no! I knew if I liked her, other people had to. I was kind of surprised at all the Theda Bara fans out there.

PP: Another wonderful biography as well!

EG: Thank you. But you can pick anybody, a person that you think nobody else in the entire world has ever even heard of, and you will find hordes of fans out there, it's amazing.

PP: What do you think is the one quality that Jean Harlow possessed that still makes her appealing to fans today?

EG: I think she comes across as just a genuinely nice person. There's a few people, like her and Marion Davies, that you can just tell by looking at them and watching them act. I mean Jean Harlow was not the greatest actress in Hollywood. She was a good comedienne and she was a so-so dramatic actress but there were other women that were prettier than her and there were other women who were more talented than her. But she comes across as just a really genuinely nice person.

PP: In talking with fans, what do you find was the biggest misconception that they had about Jean before they read your book?

EG: I think the way she died. I was fortunate in, that after almost two years of fighting with the hospital, getting her medical records declassified and finding out that she had constant medical treatment during her illness. Also, of course, all the nonsense that Shulman started about Paul Bern's death. And also the fact that in the last year or two of her life she was really starting to take charge of her life. She helped Mama Jean toss out Marino Bello, she was taking more of an interest in her career, things like that. She was starting to grow up in the last year and a half or so.

PP: With the film rights to your book optioned, who do you have in mind to be cast in the major roles?

EG: I don't have any Jean Harlows in mind but do you know who I would love to see play Mama Jean? Jean Smart. I just think she'd be a fabulous Mama Jean and I also think Jeff Bridges would be a great William Powell. Also, and this is an odd one, you know who I think would be a good Paul Bern? I don't know if you're familiar with him or not but he's a British comic named Rowan Atkinson. He's a very good actor and he looks like Paul Bern. This is completely off the top of my head, I don't know if any of these people are available or interested or affordable but it's my wishlist. I don't have any Jeans in mind at all though.

PP: It didn't seem to work casting a name actress in the lead role (Carroll Baker and Carol Lynley) for the two really bad 1965 films based on Shulman's book.

EG: Oh god, oh god, they were so awful. But you know there's almost never been a good movie biography made which is why I really think this has got to be done on television. I see this done as a two-part mini-series. Almost every single feature film biography bombed. I mean you go back to the 50's and you see the ones they did then and they were just horrendous.

PP: I would think that an unknown actress would be perfect to play Jean. The previous films were more like "Carroll Baker *is* Jean Harlow!" It takes away from who Jean really was.

EG: Well you know who physically resembles Jean Harlow a lot, I don't know if she'd be right for the role or not, is Emily Lloyd. Just facially she looks like her a lot but I have no idea if she'd be right for the role or whether she'd be available or not. But the woman who gets the role has to be able to play light comedy, that's very important.

PP: On a totally different topic, are you a collector of Harlow or other movie memorabilia?

EG: Not really, no. I have a three-drawer filing cabinet of articles, photographs and obituaries that I've been collecting literally since I was 10 years old. I'm not going to tell you how long ago that was. (Laughs) But I write for Classic Images, a monthly magazine on film history. They've been in business for about 30 years and I've been writing for them for about five years now. Almost every month I do a 1500-2000 word piece on an old movie star and I go to Lincoln Center and just xerox tons of original material on them and of course I keep all of that in the files. My dream is to be locked in Lincoln Center over a weekend and have unlimited access to the xerox machine, it's an incredible place. Theda Bara left her scrapbooks to Lincoln Center and those were just amazing to go through. It's so sad because they're falling to shreds and there's nothing they can do about it.

PP: A stylistic parallel between your biographies of Jean Harlow and Theda Bara -- and something that I appreciated reading -- is the fact that you actually admitted when certain records are no longer available to prove or disprove undocumented information.

EG: That is really important, I think, in a biography and it really annoys me when biographers pretend to know things that they can't possibly know. You have to give your readers credit for some intelligence. There are some things that you just don't know and what you have to do is place the best evidence before them and say this is what we do know, come to your own conclusions. And that's what I do because there's lots of things that I can never know. I'd like to write a book about Rudolph Valentino someday and then you have to get into the whole thing about "was he gay, was he straight, was he bisexual?" We don't know and people don't like to hear that. But at this late date in time there are certain things that will never be known and all you can do is say this is what we know, this is my best guess, come to your own conclusion. I'm glad you brought that up because I think that's really important not to try to fake your readers out and pretend to know something that you don't. It makes me feel like the biographer's trying to put something over on you. My rules for biographies are never quote conversations, never make up dialogue, never use exclamation marks -- exclamation marks have no place in nonfiction. Don't tell them something is exciting, make them feel it through what you're saying. As soon as I see a biography with invented dialogue I toss it across the room, I just can't read any further.

PP: Speaking of biographical novelization, I just picked up a copy of Patricia Hearst's "Murder At San Simeon"...

EG: (Moans) I will go on record as saying Patricia Hearst is the last person to be digging up family scandals. I really don't think this woman can afford to throw stones. She may take into mind that the major reason that Orson Welles' career failed in Hollywood was because he was mean to Marion Davies. You don't screw around with Marion Davies, everybody loved that woman.

PP: Along the lines of quotation, you attribute many direct quotes to Jean and Mama Jean. Were those from personal letters?

EG: Those are from letters and from interviews and it was easy with Jean to tell when she was being quoted accurately because she had a very specific speech pattern. In a lot of press releases and interviews you would see her using very flowery press agent-type language and you could tell right off the bat, so in that case I would say "Jean was quoted as saying" or "in article it said." But she had a very plain, flat-out, non-flowery speech so it was really very easy with her. Surprisingly enough, Louella Parsons was very good at quoting people accurately. She has a bad name but she really worked hard on her interviews. With Theda it was a lot harder because Theda really did speak like that. She was really tough to tell between the interviews and her real speech and in some cases I had to fudge it saying "well she was quoted as saying, we don't know whether she actually said it or not." But with Jean it was really pretty easy because after a while I really learned her speech pattern.

PP: Do you feel that fan magazines of that era were used as tools of the studio publicity machines? How reliable are they as sources?

EG: Oh gosh yes, of course they were. But on the other hand a lot of interviews were done in person. If Jean had said something horrendous, if she sat there and told a fan magazine writer "Oh yeah, I shot Paul Bern," they wouldn't have printed it (laughs) but if they asked her about her favorite color then your quote was probably pretty accurate. As a matter of fact I saw Esther Ralston and she said she did'nt ever remember being misquoted by a fan magazine.

PP: The tabloid mentality wasn't around back then.

EG: It wasn't really until the 50's. Well, they had the tabloid newspapers back then like The New York Graphic which did that sort of story but it wasn't really until the 50's and Confidential magazine that that thing really started and it really hasn't stopped since. And you know, I think people are really getting sick of it. On the other hand, I will say that if you are getting paid $12 million to do a movie you can damn well wave to the camera. We aren't paying Julia Roberts $12 million for her talent, we are paying her to be a movie star. And Sharon Stone is one of the few people who understands that. I love Sharon Stone because she understand the duties and responsibilities of being a movie star as well as being an actress and that's something that most people have forgotten nowadays.

PP: I didn't pay much attention to Sharon Stone until she hosted Turner's Harlow biography special but I did notice afterwards that she does seem to encompass that era on some levels. I was surprised at the inaccuracies of that special and how annoying it was that you could tell she was reading from cue cards.

EG: It could have been worse. She wrote me a lovely letter; I got in touch with her when I heard she was doing that and I sent her a copy of the book and said that I was obviously concerned about how it was going to be done. I don't know what she was shooting at the time but she wrote me a very nice letter saying that they'll try to be sure that it's as accurate as possible. It was nice of her to take time out to do that.

PP: That's nice, some celebrities might have ignored your letter.

EG: Just like Joan Crawford, always answer your fan mail!

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