The 1929 Paris Birth: Ruth Gordon's Secret Child with Producer Jed Harris

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The 1929 Paris Birth: Ruth Gordon's Secret Child with Producer Jed Harris

Ruth Gordon / 1920s

In 1929, at the height of a stage run in the hit play Serena Blandish, Ruth Gordon became pregnant by the show's producer, Jed Harris — a fact that, for the era, carried real social risk. Rather than return to New York to give birth under scrutiny, Gordon traveled to Paris, where her son Jones Harris was born that same year. The two never married, but as the Wikipedia account emphasizes, both parents worked to provide the boy with a normal upbringing. For a period the family lived 'discreetly' in a small, elegant New York brownstone (noted as their 1932 address), a tacit acknowledgment that parentage could be kept private while careers endured. As social conventions shifted in later decades, Jones Harris’s parentage became public knowledge; he would go on to marry actress/heiress Heidi Vanderbilt. The episode encapsulates the kind of offstage compromises and quiet reputational management that many performers and producers negotiated in the prewar theater world.