Hooray for Hot Honey Harlow (Lenny’s Shady Lady)

The story of showgirl and stripper Honey Harlow (Harriett Jolliff, 1927-2005) is usually told from the perspective of her husband, comedian Lenny Bruce; today we place the focus primarily on her.

Born in Arkansas, Harlow moved with her widowed mother and a sister to Detroit as a young child. Her mother worked in night clubs and remarried a low-level criminal, yet imposed strict Catholic rules on the girls. The natural outcome of this was that Harlow rebelled and became wild as a teenager. She and a group of friends ran away, boosted a series of cars, and wound up in Miami, where they were jailed after breaking into a vending machine.

Miami became Harlow’s base, and she stripped and worked as a showgirl in the nightclubs there. She met Bruce while working at a Baltimore joint in 1951. They had one child (Kitty) and remained together until 1957, which is just about when Bruce was beginning to become a national figure. She performed with him onstage sometimes, notably in his Bride of Frankenstein bit. She also appeared with Bruce, his mother Sally Marr, and Ed Wood stalwart Timothy Farrell in the 1953 movie Dance Hall Racket, which Bruce co-wrote. The following year she was an extra in big budget Hollywood film Princess of the Nile, starring Debra Paget.

Like Bruce, Harlow was a heroin addict; surely that contributed to her lack of further success in show business in later years. She was portrayed by Valerie Perrine in Bob Fosse’s 1974 film Lenny, and also served as an adviser on the picture. The heightened profile allowed her to publish her memoir Honey: The Life and Loves of Lenny’s Shady Lady in 1976. Harlow was also played by contemporary burlesque legend Billie Madley in Adam Nelson’s off-Broadway adaptation of Bruce’s memoir How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (1997-2001). On The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Harlow is played by Caitlin Mehner.

Long known as Honey Bruce, in 1984 Harlow married a man named Jeffrey Friedman, altering her name to Honey Bruce Friedman…which invariably makes me want to elongate it just a little further to Honey Bruce Jay Friedman, which has the twin drawbacks of being completely inaccurate and a joke that only consummate show biz lovers will ever get, and even fewer will find amusing.

In 2003, Harlow was among the many who succeeded in getting New York governor George Pataki to bestow a posthumous pardon on her ex-husband for his obscenity busts. She spent her last couple of decades living in Hawaii.

For more on show biz history,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.