Clara Bow was the epitome of Jazz Age celebrity, receiving 8000 fan letters a week during Hollywood's silent era. Photo / Getty Images
The final track of The Tortured Poets Department is dedicated to the 1920s film star. But who was she?
When Taylor Swift dropped the track listing for her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, a name at the bottom of the running order sent Swifties scurrying off to do some internet sleuthing. Who was this “Clara Bow” – and what was it about her incandescent, yet infamous career that had attracted Swift’s empathy?
Swift teased the album on social media before its release , with snippets of lyrics. Two lines in particular – “Crowd goes wild at her fingertips/ Half moonshine, Full eclipse” – are assumed to be from Clara Bow. The theme, it appears, is a sad/scary plunge into the Tinseltown abyss.
No one was more famous in the Jazz Age, or gossiped about, than Clara Bow. As the silent era made its jerking transition to sound, she was the only star in Hollywood who was receiving 8000 fan letters a week. The foremost box office attraction in America in the years 1928-29, she also ranked second in 1927 and 1930, despite being paid a fraction of her peers. As quickly as her flame burned bright, it was brutally snuffed out: at the age of 25, after a string of largely fictitious sex scandals and humiliating court appearances, she was essentially disowned by Paramount.
This epitome of the Gatsby-esque flapper was the original “It” girl – a soubriquet derived from her 1927 smash hit of the same name. She inspired the cartoon character Betty Boop, with that coy-yet-saucy deportment, those eyes you could swim in, and a coarse New Yoik accent letting out squeaks. Madonna and Marilyn Monroe – her spiritual sister in many regards – both wanted to star in the story of her life.
Cruelly, she was the main model for Lina Lamont, the shrill, bubble-brained starlet in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), whose squawking vowels spell career doom the second she’s made to speak any lines on set. In real life, this simply wasn’t true: Bow’s flavourful Brooklyn accent was never a problem in the right role, audiences even liked her singing, and with studio support she could have followed Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard and Garbo into a whole new phase of stardom.
During Bow’s early days of struggling to make her name, this tiny, 1.6m dervish was rejected on sight by every casting agent she came across. “Usually I was too fat,” she remembered, years later. But whenever she managed to get in front of a camera, everyone stopped and marvelled.
Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022), an exposé of industrial-scale debauchery in the Los Angeles of the 1920s, borrowed many a tidbit from Bow’s fairytale ascent. Just as Margot Robbie’s good-time girl Nellie was shown doing, Bow got the upper hand over a higher-billed actress, her flapper predecessor Colleen Moore, while making the lost comedy-drama Painted People (1924).
Denied the close-ups she pleaded with Moore to be given, she took herself off for an operation on her sinuses, and came back in bandages, bringing production to a halt. Bow’s amazing ability to cry on cue, which astonished every director she worked with, was also used by Chazelle – including her answer to one onlooker about how readily she managed this. “I think of home,” she simply replied.
The rapidity of Bow’s rise hinged on the captivating naturalism of her performances. Critics couldn’t help noticing this: she’d have a nothingy supporting part and still run away with the whole movie. Reviewing one of her first lead roles, in The Plastic Age (1925), the New York Times captured something of her giddy appeal: “She has eyes that would drag any youngster away from his books [...] and knows how to use eyes, shoulders and all the rest of her tiny self in the most effective manner. She radiates an elfin sensuousness.” Come Victor Fleming’s Mantrap (1926) and then It (1927), her star power was a sensation, guaranteeing queues around the block.
Much as she didn’t enjoy her decorative role as the little lass in Wings (1927), the film was a technical milestone everyone went to see, and not only was she the single name hot enough to put above the title, but she was caught on camera topless for a few frames, boosting her racy allure. Paramount cashed in by having a Bow vehicle ready all four seasons of the year: “Winter Bow 1928″, say, would be announced well before the title, plot or other production details.
Babylon barely attempted to sketch the whirlwind ordeal of Bow’s true life story, but at least it didn’t resort to luridly reiterating the most salacious legends about her – the ones set down by Kenneth Anger in his wildly speculative 1959 “tell-all” Hollywood Babylon. The Bow of that book had sex during wild, drug-fuelled orgies with the entire USC football team, including John Wayne, at a time when their fame was almost as great as hers. Such stories have been comprehensively debunked over the years, by the likes of Bow’s biographer David Stenn, and Karina Longworth, creator and host of the podcast You Must Remember This.
Bow was certainly no retiring wallflower. Her propensity for juggling multiple male suitors (“Clara’s beaux,” quipped wags) during her ascent to the top is something she wouldn’t have denied for a second – it was simply, unlike the Gloria Swansons and Marion Davieses of their day, that she made no particular effort to hide it all.
When her engagement to Fleming, who had taken her under his fatherly wing, was abruptly broken off so that she could have her way with dashing co-star Gary Cooper, everyone in town knew what was going on. Such was her lack of hypocrisy or guile – she was a very ordinary Brooklyn girl, with no grasp of the industry’s prudish etiquette. She even rented a modest, borderline-seedy bungalow in the middle of the city, shrugging off the near-compulsory luxury her level of fame might have demanded. No one gave her credit for being a long way, in her tormented emotional life, from the carefree, liberated Jazz Babies she played to everyone’s delight on screen.
Born into a loveless marriage and squalid circumstances, Clara was the third unwanted baby her parents produced, the previous two having died shortly after childbirth. This was quite typical in the disease-stricken environment of 1905 Brooklyn, which had an infant mortality rate that soared with temperatures of 46C that summer to a staggering 80 per cent.
Clara’s very existence was unlikely, let alone her survival through a horrific childhood to became the biggest film star in the firmament. At nine, she found her best friend Johnny burning to death in a tenement fire, and tried to wrap him in a rug to put it out. He died in her arms, screaming her name. Her beloved grandfather dropped dead at her feet while pushing her on an indoor swing, leaving her largely in the care of her mother Sarah, who turned tricks at home, locking Clara in a closet and telling her not to make a sound.
Absent most of the time, her father Edward was a philandering busboy with ambitions to sing; Sarah, who would be hospitalised for psychosis and epilepsy in 1922, hated them both, and insisted Clara would be better off dead, rather than pursuing what she considered a whorish career in the performing arts. After she won the fortune contest in 1921 that would pave the way for her first break, Clara faced a scene of domestic terror that’s pure Piper Laurie in Carrie: waking up to the sight of her own mother coming at her with a butcher’s knife. This would traumatise her forever, as would memories later unearthed in psychotherapy of her father raping her.
With these extraordinary biographical details at hand, backed up not only in biographies but the account Bow herself gave to the journalist Adela Rogers St Johns in 1928, it took special malice for so much scurrilous muck of the patently untrue variety to be added. Much of it was comeuppance, and pure snobbery: she was an unrepentant wild child, who invited a journalist called Grace Kingsley for dinner in the home she shared with her father in 1924, a memorable evening for Kingsley, mainly for finding herself caught in the cross-fire of a macaroni food-fight.
Making little effort to shake off this reputation as a vulgarian, Bow was never considered classy enough for the Hollywood in-crowd, who snubbed her from its parties, as Babylon shows, then conspired with the scandal sheets in baseless gossip that wholly exaggerated her degeneracy.
Well before Anger’s field day, the facts of Bow’s indiscreet love life, alien as they were to morality clauses the industry wanted imposed, gave the press licence for distortions which today would be the stuff of eight-figure libel payouts. In March 1931, a rag called the Coast Reporter ran a hatefully unscrupulous “exposé”, alleging a drunken spree with a Mexican croupier and two prostitutes, ending with two people dead and no remorse on Bow’s part; sex in public with her numerous paramours, copulation with her chauffeur, her own cousin Billy Bow, several female servants, a koala bear, and Duke, her pet Great Dane.
Paramount, naturally, should have thrown every lawyer on their payroll at this career-ruining filth. (Its writer, Fredric Girnau, would eventually be sentenced to eight years in prison for writing it.) The studio, under miserly head of production B.P. Schulberg, had been filling their coffers with grosses from Bow’s cheaply produced hits a couple of years before, while keeping her pay locked down at a measly US$1500 per week – especially insulting when you compare Colleen Moore’s US$125,000 per picture.
Bow’s popularity, though, was by now on a greasy downward slide. Rather than protecting this once-prized asset or nurturing her desire to be taken seriously, Schulberg just grumbled about delays on the production line and tried forcing her back to work. The quality of her scripts had become routinely terrible – the thinking being that Bow herself in flapper mode guaranteed a healthy crowd, so why bother writing anything decent, or more dramatic, for her?
Waiting in the wings were rising stars such as Jean Harlow and Sylvia Sidney, who were afforded the helping hand of better material, where Bow had always had to lump whatever she was given. When the ignominy of so much dirty laundry being aired – and so much invented – caused a nervous collapse, Schulberg schemed to let her out of her contract, thereby saving the studio a $60,000 payout, and showed her the door.
Two final pre-Code talkies for Fox awaited – the critically acclaimed comeback Call Her Savage (1932) and the circus drama Hoop-La (1933), directed by Frank Lloyd, a friendly force who had helped discover her in Black Oxen (1923).
Alas, though, stardom had soured irretrievably for Bow, and she retired from the screen for good, embarking on a troubled marriage to the Republican politician Rex Bell. Long stints at a sanatorium would attempt to get to the bottom of her mental illness, which was diagnosed as schizophrenia: the traumas of her childhood and the monumental pressure of becoming a teenage sex symbol had taken their toll.
So, though, had the resentment and scorn of those charged with handling her career, who had exploited her fizzing vitality, just as they would do with Monroe, without any foundation of professional respect. In a town which liked to operate as a tight network of family businesses, this dazzling nobody, adored by audiences until they were taught to treat her as a pariah, was the very opposite of a nepo baby.
Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department is out now
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