Clara Bow: the hard-partying jazz-baby airbrushed from Hollywood history

Clara Bow’s biography could have been a fairy story but instead it is a cautionary tale. This vivacious young woman exchanged the rags and deprivations of her slum childhood in Brooklyn for the glamour and riches of Hollywood, but lived to regret it. In 1921, she was a movie-mad teenager who dropped out of school after winning a talent-spotting contest (“She screens perfectly,” said a judge). The contest earned Bow a trophy and a small film role, but no contract. She still had to tout herself around the agencies and studios, swallowing rejections as she went. “There was always something. I was too young, or too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat,” she remembered. It was two years before she moved to Hollywood, and another three before she signed a contract with Paramount.

The films she went on to make there included some silent classics: they, and she, were precociously flirtatious, youthful and saucy. “Flapper” movies such as The Plastic Age or Dancing Mothers were perfect for Bow, who had a stunning ability to move naturally in front of the camera, bobbing and smirking with humour and sexiness. Bow became a hugely popular actor, and, in tabloid-speak, a notorious wild child. On screen she epitomised the joie de vivre and permissiveness of the jazz age, and for many people she remains the ultimate flapper, the “It girl”, with charm and sex appeal to spare.

Sadly, while the movie contract took Bow out of Brooklyn, where she had spent her abusive and impoverished childhood, her new home had dangers of its own. For all her successes, Bow was snubbed by the in-crowd, and for years after her heyday she would be nudged out of history. Her film career held more future sadness and scandal than she could have possibly imagined when she signed on the dotted line. Studio executives tried to manipulate her, calling her a “birdbrain” and a “dumbbell” while she continued to make them masses of money at the box office.

And as confident as she was on a silent movie set, the looming microphones and wires of the sound era terrified her. Perhaps because of those misfortunes and the outsider status they brought, she can now be claimed as one of the sharpest commentators on show business, and the studio system. She knew what it meant to be a “jazz baby” and it wasn’t always a party. “All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing, there’s a feeling of tragedy underneath,” she said once. “She’s unhappy and disillusioned, and that’s what people sense.”

Bow will always be best remembered for It, a romantic caper adapted from Elinor Glyn’s novel, its title a euphemism for sexual magnetism. Bow plays a department store worker in hot pursuit of her handsome boss, and Glyn herself has a cameo. Bow’s character is modern, sexual, compassionate, funny and single-minded. She’s something of a Cinderella, but that means she is defined by her working-class status: ripping up her cheap work frock to pass for an evening gown on a ritzy date one night, or introducing her paramour to the raucous pleasures of Coney Island on another.

Hollywood saw Bow in much the same way – she was the scruffy, lower-class kid whose behaviour jarred with the smart set and who had to work twice as hard as the others for her success. Louise Brooks, who saw through the workings of Hollywood just as keenly as Bow, said that she “became a star without nobody’s help”. She found friends more readily among the studio crew than the actors and directors who should have been her peers. A magazine quoted her as saying: “Mosta my friends’re ones I knew before I paid income tax.”

In a town that liked to go to bed early, Bow stayed up late. Her love life was far more thrilling and varied than the films she made, and there’s a reason why she negotiated not to have a morals clause in her Paramount contract. But she paid a price for being brazen. Even at the height of her success, she was alone in Hollywood. As fellow actor Lina Basquette said: “She wasn’t well liked amongst other women in the film colony. Her social presence was taboo, and it was rather silly, because God knows Marion Davies and Mary Pickford had plenty to hide. It’s just that they hid it, and Clara didn’t.” Bow knew the truth. “I’m a curiosity in Hollywood,” she said. “I’m a big freak, because I’m myself!”

Beyond It, her film roles tended to reflect the industry’s ambivalence. Even when she has the opportunity to woo the audience by displaying her charms in a comedy such a Mantrap (“How she vamps with her lamps,” praised Variety), her inveterate flirting condemns her to an unhappy ending. In the blockbuster Wings, she plays the girl next door fighting for attention in a world full of men. It’s an energetic but thankless role but Bow knew full well how inessential she was in that movie. “I’m just the whipped cream on top of the pie,” she said, and she would come to regret the gratuitous nudity in that role too: “I don’t want to be remembered as somebody who couldn’t do nothin’ but take her clothes off.”

The biggest misconception about Bow is that her career foundered with the coming of sound because her Brooklyn accent was too ugly. She made several talkies, in fact, starting with The Wild Party, a big success that was directed by her friend and champion Dorothy Arzner. In truth, Bow’s physical and mental health issues (she had schizophrenia, like her mother) were exacerbated by the stresses of her fame, particularly the fallout from her notorious tell-all memoir in Photoplay and a lurid lawsuit brought by her former secretary.

The unfamiliar soundstages and the more rigid, less natural performance style required by talkies, added to her burden. She retired from acting in 1933, but two decades later her reputation received an extra blow with Singin’ in the Rain, which featured Lina Lamont, the talentless flapper with a Noo Yoik twang who can’t hack it in the sound era. The class snobbery that feeds into that portrayal is unmistakable.

Now we can watch It and Wings, and many other of Bow’s movies on DVD, but there was a time when her name had slipped through the cracks of film history. Kevin Brownlow’s essential oral history of silent Hollywood, The Parade’s Gone By, doesn’t even mention Bow, because none of his other interviewees gave her a namecheck (a fault rectified in his TV series Hollywood, in which Brooks ably discusses her career and her mistreatment at the hands of the studio system). Bow had died just before the book came out, aged 60 and living alone. Her mental health had continued to suffer in her retirement and she attempted suicide when her husband Rex Bell decided to re-enter public life as a politician in the 1940s. By three years, she had outlived both Bell and Marilyn Monroe, the star she saw as her natural successor: youthful, sexy, vulnerable, smart and sad.

For more on Clara Bow, I recommend the biography Runnin’ Wild, by David Stenn. This profile was written in response to a request in the comments by Dickthetag. If there is an aspect of silent cinema you would like to see featured in Silent but deadly! let me know below.