Clara Bow was a film star by the age of 20 — and washed up by 28. Now she’s poised to win over a brand new era of followers because the title of the final observe on Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Division.”
Often called the “It Woman” for each her starring function within the silent comedy “It” and her place as one of many pre-eminent attractive symbols of ’20s Hollywood, Bow wasn’t washed up as a result of her field workplace slipped. She was washed up as a result of her scandal-plagued life made her a legal responsibility, each for the studios and for her personal psychological well being. In David Stenn’s masterful biography “Runnin’ Wild,” he sums up the tragedy of Bow’s life with two quotes from the previous Brooklyn lady who discovered her unaffected zest for residing slowly overwhelmed out of her. “Marriage means the success of everythin’ to me,” Bow mentioned in 1933. “This sounds just like the bunk, I do know. However I imply it. Else I wouldn’t say it.” Straight beneath, Stenn quotes a psychiatric report from seven years and marriage to film cowboy Rex Bell later: “She has been exceedingly sad at [Bell’s] ranch and sees nothing however hopelessness and damage forward of her…”
Which is to say that Clara Bow is somebody who knew her method round a damaged coronary heart. And she or he had a lot through the years, all breathlessly recapped within the tabloid press. Sound acquainted?
Swift is hardly the primary particular person to mine Bow for modern commentary. Damien Chazelle largely primarily based Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy in “Babylon” on Bow. However the place Robbie’s character was deliberately brash, Bow was more and more bewildered by folks’s response to her. Penniless Mary Pickford grew to become a star and promptly began serving tea at her Pickfair property; Bow survived a gothic nightmare of a childhood (she woke one evening to her mom holding a knife to her throat), grew to become a star, and mentioned issues like, “Poor Gary [Cooper]. The most important cock in Hollywood and no ass to push it with.” Within the course of, Bow grew to become an object lesson in what occurs if you’re unwilling — or incapable — of taking part in the sport.
Hollywood lore (and Kenneth Anger) has it that man-eater Bow blew her profession (and the microphones) on the set of her first talkie together with her nasal Brooklyn honk. In actuality, her sound movies are outstanding achievements for simply how nicely her still-modern persona made the transition; Bow was by no means cloying within the ’20s, and he or she appeared uniquely poised to segue effortlessly into a brand new chapter. However a messy trial by which Bow sued her secretary/finest buddy for embezzlement and the erstwhile bestie went straight to the tabloids with gossip about Bow’s intercourse life put a damper on Paramount’s willingness to proceed working together with her.
“Clara laid all the pieces however the linoleum,” went one joke. The rumors had it that Bow was a lesbian, that she participated in orgies, that she had intercourse the whole USC soccer workforce (together with a younger John Wayne), even that she had intercourse together with her Nice Danes! The nickname was merciless however correct when the fits started referring to her as “Disaster a Day Clara.”
She escaped in 1931 by marrying Bell and transferring to Nevada. However then Bell grew to become a politician, and who higher to trot out to occasions and dinners than his film star spouse? In 1944, Bell ran for Congress and Clara tried to kill herself, writing in a suicide observe that she most popular demise to public life. In 1949, she checked right into a sanitarium, the place nobody may agree on what was fallacious together with her (if something). When she obtained out, she moved right into a bungalow and lived alone and away from her household till her demise in 1965.
It’s arduous not to consider Swift — a goal for vitriol and gossip as a result of she likes to sing — when studying this quote from Bow, reflecting on her popularity: “My life in Hollywood contained loads of uproar. I’m sorry for lots of it however not awfully sorry. I by no means did something to harm anybody else. I made a spot for myself on the display and you may’t do this by being Mrs. Alcott’s thought of a Little Lady.”