Hollywood: The Girl Who Had IT

Until 1926, it was just another pronoun. After that, It became the most provocative two-letter word in the language—all because of her. She was Clara Bow, the ultimate flapper for the movie audiences of the ’20s, grown too sophisticated for the synthetic, exotic Theda Bara (“Kiss me, my fool”) and Pola Negri. Clara Bow, by contrast, was as fresh and authentic as the girl next door, only more so. She had enormous saucer eyes, dimpled knees, bee-stung lips and a natural boop-poop-a-doop style. She was the cat’s pajamas, the gnat’s knees, and the U.S.’s favorite celluloid love goddess.

Her rise was almost a caricature of the starlet’s climb to the top: birth in Brooklyn, a psychotic mother (who once threatened to kill Clara if she became an actress), first prize in a beauty contest at 16, a bit part that wound up on the cutting-room floor, a sympathetic producer (B. P. Schulberg), a role in a Big Movie, recognition.

Aching Lips. Her great moment came when bestselling Author Elinor Glyn spotted her on a Paramount set and demanded Clara, then 21, for the screen adaptation of her lightweight novel It. Clara Bow explained It as the ability to give your undivided attention to the person you were speaking to. That was not the definition her fans bought. To them, It was s-x, and Clara was It’s embodiment. From 1927 to 1930 she was among Hollywood’s top five box-office attractions. She made as many as eight pictures in a single year, commanded a salary of $5,000 a week.

She was the pressagents’ dream. To please them, she barreled her red roadster down Wilshire Boulevard at top speed, accompanied by seven chow dogs chosen to match her auburn hair. She refused to hire a chauffeur, she announced, because she couldn’t find one who drove fast enough. She invited the U.S.C. football squad to scrimmage with her on her lawn—at midnight. She privately bathed in imported perfume, publicly pondered whether to succumb to the ardor of Director Victor Fleming or Gary Cooper, until indecision brought on a nervous breakdown. A jilted Yale football player who slashed his wrists was given a sanity hearing and released after he told the court that Clara had kissed him so forcefully that his lips ached for two days.

Many Traumas. Clara Bow and the ’20s ran out of luck at about the same time. Fans who saw her first talkie, The Wild Party, co-starring Fredric March, were shocked to hear her flat, nasal voice and unlovely Brooklyn accent. It was the first of many traumas.

In 1931, Clara accused her former secretary Daisy DeVoe of embezzling $16,000 from a special account. Miss DeVoe counterattacked with a long list of her employer’s love affairs. Paramount Studios abruptly canceled her contract, and overnight she was through in Hollywood, a has-been at 26.

Clara Bow never found the limelight again. Her comeback efforts—two pictures, a Hollywood cabaret called, embarrassingly, It—all flickered feebly and failed. She retired to live with her husband, Cowboy Actor Rex Bell (later Lieutenant Governor of Nevada), on Bell’s 350,000-acre ranch near Searchlight, Nev., and raised their two sons in complete obscurity. She took the fever of the ’20s with her. Throughout the next three decades she was in and out of sanatoriums, continually racked with insomnia, often unable to speak coherently or recognize old friends. Every Christmas she wrote to Louella Parsons in a shaky backhand scrawl, “Do you remember me?”

She was seldom heard from again. In 1947 she showed up on TV as Mrs. Hush, the mystery guest on Truth or Consequences. In 1960 she made news by writing Hedda Hopper: “I slip my old crown of It Girl not to Taylor or Bardot but to Monroe.”

Last week, still battling sleeplessness, Clara Bow suddenly stiffened and collapsed with a heart attack as she watched television at her home in West Los Angeles. By the time her nurse could summon help, the ’20s fever was over.