Famous Flappers
Clara Bow was born in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, New York, on July 29, 1905 to an epileptic, schizophrenic mother and a destitute, abusive father.
Raised in poverty as a child, she only had boys to play with since the girls at school would tease her tattered and dirty clothes. Lonely and burdened by the obligation to care for her sick mother, she turned to the movies for consolation, watching her favorite actresses Mary Pickford, Mae Murray, and Theda Bara, and imitating them in front of a mirror, more to her mother’s dismay.
At 16, though she showed up in rags, she won a magazine's beauty contest. The first prize was a part in a movie, eventually launching a career that would encompass 46 silent films and 11 talkies, including hits such as Mantrap (1926), It (1927) and Wings (1927). Thus, in 1922, she got her first role in Beyond the Rainbow, but to her disappointment, her scenes were cut. Undaunted, she persevered, and eventually landed a part in Down to the Sea in Ships in 1922. The same year, Bow awoke to a butcher knife held against her throat. Her mother, Sarah, in one of her schizophrenic episodes, had tried to kill her. Sarah was institutionalized and died shortly after, on January 5, 1923, and Bow made her way to Hollywood to sign with B.P. Schulberg’s Preferred Pictures.
She starred in silent films such as Grit (1924), The Plastic Age (1925) and Dancing Mothers (1926), but it was 1927's It, a film adapted from an Elinor Glyn's novella that made her popular, gaining the nickname of "The It Girl.” In the movie, which became the culprit of how
society looked at itself, her character shortens her dress with a pair of scissors to look sexier for a
date with her boss. Bow’s sexy performances spoke to the Flapper persona of the Roaring Twenties, as she representated the “youth in rebellion,” introducing in her films that sex meant having a good time too. It soon appealed to young Americans, who were moving away from the previous restrictive era of Victorian morals for Clara’s characters were unashamed about going after men. They shortened their dresses, cut off their hair, drank, smoked, and partied all night long. Bow, suddenly, was an idol and a style icon as well, with her particular look—as she applied her red lipstick in the shape of a heart—taken on by women everywhere. The first Hollywood sex symbol was born.
Bow also had a brutal honesty about her disturbing childhood. While most of Hollywood's celebrities of the time had come from poor backgrounds, they pretended otherwise. Clara hid nothing; not even her affairs with a score of leading men and directors. This behavior horrified her entourage and Hollywood shunned her.
With the coming of sound, Clara made the transition to talking movies in The Wild Party (1929). Her thick Brooklyn accent did lend itself pretty well with the fans, but the Depression's new attitude of dislike towards the extravagances of the previous years, and Clara’s boom microphone fright, marked a shift downward in her popularity. On top of an overloaded work schedule, Bow was involved in several law suits with her private life splashed all over the papers. Accusations ranged from unpaid taxes to stealing husbands, and em-bezzlement by her secretary. The scandal ruined her. In 1931, she had a breakdown, and entered a sanitarium.
She made a couple of attempts to regain her popularity with Call Her Savage in 1932, but it failed at the box office. Her last movie was Hoop-La in 1933. Soon after she retired, and moved to Nevada with her husband of two years,
37 | Ceres Magazine | Oct/Nov 2015
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