Hollywood’s First “It” Girl Was Tragic
Starlet Clara Bow’s mother suffered from acute psychosis and came to resent her daughter more and more as Clara grew up and grew beautiful. Then, suddenly, came the day it all unraveled—that terrible, secret day that would haunt Clara all the way to Hollywood and her own tragic end.
Clara Bow was born on July 29, 1905, and came into the world in a bleak, sparsely furnished room above a dilapidated Baptist church in Prospect Heights, New York. These very humble beginnings were about to turn into an absolute nightmare. Clara’s mother, Sarah, had lost her two eldest children when they were babies, and doctors had begged her not to get pregnant again for fear that this infant would perish too. Her mother didn’t listen. When Clara was born, New York was in the middle of a ravaging and dangerous heatwave. Both Clara and her mother nearly didn’t make it, and Clara later recalled: “I don’t suppose two people ever looked death in the face more clearly than my mother and I the morning I was born. We were both given up, but somehow we struggled back to life.”
But there was a much more disturbing side to this triumphant story. As a girl, Clara’s mother had fallen from a second-story window and suffered seizures and psychosis ever since from the head trauma, which may explain her unwillingness to listen to the doctors. It also meant that Clara had to control her mother during these various fits, especially as her hostile episodes got worse as Clara got older. Her father wasn’t any help; in fact, there’s evidence he mistreated Clara himself. It led to one infamous day that would both shape and ruin Clara forever, but it would take her many, many years to reveal it.
Unsurprisingly, Clara couldn’t wait to escape this life and become famous, even after her mother told her she’d be better off dead than as a Hollywood star. Audacious and with a heavy Brooklyn accent, Clara gained fame quickly for her flame-haired beauty. Her huge eyes and expressive face were part of the inspiration for Betty Boop. The henna she used to keep her red hair its most vibrant frequently sold out, and her lips were a national sensation. She drew on her lipstick in a now-iconic heart-shaped style, which became so popular that when women put on their lipstick that way, they often said they were “putting their Clara Bow on.”
Despite this constant ardor, Clara was always looking for two things: more affection and more attention. Her reckless party girl behavior earned her a reputation as a flapper and later helped her land a role in the movie “It,” which turned her literally into the first “It Girl.” One day, though, Clara took her charm and verve way too far. In 1924, Clara was on the set of “Painted People” with the at-the-time more famous star Colleen Moore. The still-green Clara was due to play a bit part as Moore’s kid sister. Well, that simply wasn’t good enough. Clara reportedly went up to Moore and stated frankly, “I don’t like my part, I want to play yours.” Shocked at Clara’s total disregard for the fame food chain, Moore refused to let the director get any close-ups of Clara or her famously beautiful face from then on. Now that’s how an old Hollywood starlet does mean girl.
This heart-on-her-sleeve quality could also go from feisty to tragic in a blink. Indeed, Clara was renowned throughout the studio lots for her ability to cry on cue. As one of her directors, Frank Tuttle, recalled, she could cry on demand, opening the floodgate of tears almost as soon as he asked her to weep. But the reason this happened was because Clara was incredibly emotionally fragile, and Tuttle also noted that Clara was full of nervous energy and pitifully eager to please everyone. Reportedly, all she had to do was listen to the lullaby “Rock-a-bye Baby” in order to start crying.
After her mother Sarah passed in 1923, Clara let out a lot of complicated emotions. She screamed at her other family members who had gathered for the funeral, calling them hypocrites for never caring about Sarah. She then tried to jump into her mother’s grave. Clearly, Clara had issues. Hollywood responded with cruelty. For all that they were making stacks of money off her, Clara’s studio executives and directors were incredibly demeaning of their star. People called her “bird brain,” while another executive named her the “easy winner of the dumbbell award” and claimed she couldn’t act. In actuality, Clara was very sharp; it’s just that her acting was more hands-on than cerebral. She needed specific direction and hated rehearsals, but after that, she’d take off. One of her more understanding directors, Victor Fleming, compared her to a Stradivarius violin, saying, “Touch her, and she responded with genius.”
As if to prove them all wrong, Clara starred in the first movie to ever win Best Picture at the Oscars, “Wings,” alongside the burgeoning heartthrob Gary Cooper. That said, the making of the film was complete chaos. The director, William Wellman, described Clara as “mad and crazy, but what a personality.” During filming, the cast and crew spent nine months at the St. Anthony Hotel, where they all began sleeping with each other with reckless abandon. According to Wellman, by the time the film was finished, all of the elevator girls were pregnant. Clara certainly did her part in all this. She had long jumped in and out of passionate, turbulent affairs. It was that constant need for affection and attention again, and she and Gary Cooper began a tryst despite the fact that Clara had only just gotten engaged to another man.
This wasn’t even her most scandalous affair, either. That honor goes to her steamy liaison with horror star Bela Lugosi, the original Count Dracula. Clara was attracted to Lugosi when he was still doing the stage version of “Dracula” and sauntered down to a performance one night wearing only her mink coat and a bathing suit. The pair were obsessed with each other but also saw other people. Lugosi must have gotten confused about this arrangement because during this time, he married… not Clara Bow. Lugosi tied the knot with the wealthy socialite Beatrice Weeks, then divorced her after three days to be with Clara again. In the end, their love flamed out almost as fast, but Clara did give Lugosi a memento of their time together, and it wasn’t a chaste lock of hair—it was her own naked portrait. Even more scandalously, Lugosi hung it over his bed for the rest of his life, including through his two next marriages. The risqué work was still hanging over him when he died. And they say love isn’t real.
But in 1929, Clara’s life took another tack entirely, a ruinous one as it would happen. Talkies were now the thing in Hollywood, and the former silent film star had to put her vocal cords on the line for the first time ever. When audiences first watched her in a talkie, they might have been shocked at what they heard. You see, Clara still had an intense Brooklyn accent. The shift from silent films to talkies was an enormous sea change in Hollywood that drowned many a star, but contrary to popular belief, audiences still loved her, Brooklyn accent or not, and Clara’s new films were a hit. No, it was Clara who couldn’t handle the talkies. She never liked them, calling them stiff and limiting, and complaining that “you lose your cuteness.” She also never got comfortable with them. One day on the set of her talkie “The Wild Party,” she had to endure retake after retake because she couldn’t stop nervously glancing at the microphone above her.
Around this time, she also began hiding a dark secret. Urged on by the stresses of her new job and her long-standing emotional turmoil, she began relying on pills to get her through the days and nights. The magazine Photoplay even reported sightings of bottles of sedatives by her bed in one long row. Everything was incredibly precarious, and it only took one betrayal to make it all topple down.
In 1931, Clara discovered that her secretary and confidante, Daisy DeVoe, had been mismanaging her money. Accordingly, she took her to court. Though it was DeVoe who was on trial, somehow Clara ended up with all the backlash, especially when Daisy dropped a bombshell on the stand. In front of the judge and jury, DeVoe began relating all of Clara’s various affairs and loose ways. Were many of them exaggerated? Sure, but true or not, it didn’t matter. The tabloids started running infamously vicious stories about Clara with outlandish claims of very unsavory acts.
After this blow, all of Clara’s inner torment reached a terrifying climax. Her frayed nerves during this time had already earned her the dubious title of “Crisis-a-Day Clara” from her studio executives, but after this trial, she simply couldn’t take it anymore. Clara was so worn down, she begged the studio to release her from her contract and checked herself into a sanatorium. She was only 25 years old.
Clara did try to make a comeback a couple of years later, but although audiences and studios were still thirsty for her, her heart wasn’t in it. She signed a two-picture contract with Fox Film Corporation and admitted she had come back to Hollywood for the sole purpose of making enough money to be able to stay out of it. The damage was already done.
For a time after this renaissance, Clara tried to return to her normal life. She settled down with her hunky cowboy co-star Rex Bell, moving into his ranch outside of Hollywood and marrying him in December 1931. It almost worked. They had two children together and lived happily at first. Yet, as always with Bow, darker days were just around the corner.
When Bow made her short-lived comeback in the 1933 drama “Hoopla,” she really let it all hang out. Her costumes in the film were so scarce one magazine noted they wouldn’t weigh two pounds soaking wet. Maybe more scandalously, Bow’s new husband Rex Bell was less than pleased about her giving away the goods. When Bell saw “Hoopla,” he raised his eyebrows higher than anyone, and he and Bow got into an explosive fight about her scantily clad acting. According to Clara, Bell accused her of enjoying showing herself off. The only thing was, he’d soon have much bigger issues to worry about.
Before long, Clara began exhibiting disturbing symptoms. She almost never went out of the house and refused to socialize, but she also hated it if her husband left her alone. By 1944, the truth was unavoidable: the star was suffering from deep and violent mental issues. That very year, Clara resorted to desperate measures. At the end of her rope, she checked into a sanatorium again. This time, although doctors never definitively answered her issues, they believed she had schizophrenia and forced her into shock treatments that were surely nightmarish. But they also discovered Bow’s biggest, darkest trauma.
While in the sanatorium, Clara told doctors about the darkest period of her life, and it went right back to the very beginning with her mother. In February 1922, when she was still just a girl, Clara awoke to a horrifying sight: her unbalanced mother holding a butcher’s knife to her throat. Clara was miraculously able to escape and disarm her mother before she could hurt her, and she quickly locked Sarah up. The next morning, the older woman couldn’t even remember the incident. Clara tried to forget it too. When she attempted to talk about it once, she cut herself off, saying, “But I can’t tell you about it. Only when I remember it, it seems to me I can’t live.” And in Clara’s case, reliving that trauma as she did in the sanatorium brought her nowhere good. She refused to believe that her mother’s attack had anything to do with her current mental problems and left the sanatorium in a huff.
But she didn’t return to her young family. Instead, she locked herself away in a small bungalow right until her devastating end. Unable to cope with the pressures of a public life or work through the traumas of her childhood, Clara spent decades in that bungalow. Then, in 1965, she died of a heart attack at the young age of 60, almost entirely alone.
And this wasn’t the only tragedy. By the time Clara Bow died, almost no one remembered the reclusive It Girl. AFI left her off their iconic “100 Years… 100 Stars” list, and movie historian Kevin Brownlow completely omitted her from his silent film book “The Parade’s Gone By.” All this even when Bow was one of the most recognizable stars of her day.
But there was, at long last, a happy ending for Clara Bow, and it came from a surprising source. After reading “The Parade’s Gone By,” Clara’s fellow silent film star Louise Brooks personally wrote to Kevin Brownlow and admonished him for giving her a whole chapter while giving Bow zilch, as she wrote: “You brush off Clara Bow for some old nothing like Brooks.” Brooks’s letter actually had the intended effect. Appropriately chastised, Brownlow included a whole segment on Bow in his next documentary, sparking renewed interest in the lovely, effervescent, and indescribable Clara Bow.
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