Clara Bow: “It”
Clara Bow was born in abject poverty in Brooklyn in 1905, and she was not expected to live. She became a tough street fighter because she had to in order to survive, and as a girl she watched her best male friend burn up in a fire. Her mentally unbalanced mother tried to kill her with a butcher knife when Bow expressed a desire to act in films, and her shiftless father sexually abused her. Getting into the movies was an escape from her milieu and a reaching towards the love that she did not get from her family. What Bow wanted, like so many other movie stars who came after her, was mass love, and her desire for this was as enormous as her unlikely and cheering vitality. In the face of infernal circumstances, Bow held tight to a dream of what her life could be, and the fun she might have in spite of everything.
She was first noticed at the age of 17 as a very appealing tomboy in the adventure epic Down to the Sea in Ships (1922), where she dresses as a boy and stows away on a ship but is last seen in a field of daisies and dressed in girl’s clothes, her rebelliousness either forgotten or put on hold. Her eyes often light up with lovable mischief in Down to the Sea in Ships, but they can sometimes fill with the extreme and heavy sorrow of a battered old lady. She got a second lead in Maytime (1923), an operetta about thwarted love where Bow again displayed her command of the camera, excelling as both unrequited lover and tender friend to the heroine.
She was put under contract by B.P. Schulberg, who worked her very hard in low-budget films. Bow played her first flapper in Black Oxen (1923), a Corinne Griffith vehicle that she stole by “going to hell as fast as she can fox trot,” as a title card had it, moving her shoulders to a syncopated beat of her own while shaking a cocktail shaker and striking a self-consciously “adult” pose with a cigarette. She made eight films in 1924 and a backbreaking fifteen films in 1925, many of which were sketchy melodramas where Bow is all over the place, alternately naturalistic, electric, and badly over the top. But she made a special impression in the college comedy The Plastic Age (1925), where she worked up some chemistry with hunky Gilbert Roland both on screen and off.
In the delightful My Lady of Whims, her last released film from 1925, Bow plays a sexually avid Greenwich Village bohemian who wants to write novels and live life to the full. She has a smoldering entrance where the camera frames a close-up of her heavily made-up face and frankly appraising eyes, and her look here is nearly unreal, as if she were drawn, or as if Bow were wearing a mask to both protect herself and project a fantasy of who she would like to be; her expression of wanton sexual desire in extreme close-up here is so uninhibited that it gives her a near-brutal kind of forcefulness. When the camera moves in to just a close-up of Bow’s lusty, soulful eyes, the effect is so stirring that it feels dizzying, as if we might fall right into these made-up eyes of hers.
During a scene set at an artists’ costume ball in My Lady of Whims, Bow wears a very sexy dress with white circles on the front of it and black dots that indicate where her nipples might be, a wondrously dirty outfit, like something Marilyn Monroe might have worn in the 1950s, and Bow has many links to Monroe, not least her hints that she was drawn to shy men too. “Some girls crave good-looking men,” she tells Eddie Cantor in Kid Boots (1926). “I just want ‘em reliable.”
Bow stole the show again in Dancing Mothers (1926) as a flapper named Kittens, particularly in a scene where she takes a belt of liquor and slowly follows its descent with her finger down the length of her body, a show-stopping expression of female hedonism. Bow’s charisma in a moment like this is overwhelming and life-giving, boldly presentational but at the same time fully carbonated.
She fell for director Victor Fleming while making Mantrap (1926), an adaptation of a Sinclair Lewis story that is likely her best film and contains her most faceted and disturbing performance. As Alverna, a young manicurist who marries an older man and cannot help flirting with any man she meets, Bow’s movements and behavior are both naturalistic and somehow heightened, and her knowing eyes can stop the movie and any men at hand cold.
Bow’s Alverna in Mantrap is a little scary because it feels like she could do just about anything and still remain likable or lovable. Alverna is an independent girl who instinctively stands up for herself and doesn’t let men or social mores stand in the way of her extra-healthy lust for excitement and pleasure. Most of Bow’s movies use or exploit her energy and sexuality (and there’s usually nothing wrong with that), but Fleming delves deeper into what it means to be a liberated woman, and so the finely detailed and sensitive Mantrap is a film that is about Clara Bow and what she meant in her time.
There was always something pathetic ready to emerge from the revved-up motor of her charisma, but Fleming allows Bow to show this side of herself within the context of a three-dimensional characterization in Mantrap. Off-screen, Fleming also advised Bow about how to handle Schulberg and Paramount, who were out to cheat her financially. He helped to make sure she got a contract that did not shortchange her in any way, and so he made her most insightful film for her and also protected her in life.
When I asked Bow biographer and overall champion David Stenn in 2003 what the essential Bow films are, he said, “It (1927) and Mantrap. And Hula (1927) is a hoot.” Bow’s lost movies include a comedy for Ernst Lubitsch called Kiss Me Again (1925) and all four of her starring vehicles made in 1928. “The holy grail for me is Red Hair,” said Stenn. “It’s a sequel to It and the first reel is in Technicolor. I’d also like to see Ladies of the Mob because it was a drama and it was directed by William Wellman. I remain hopeful. We found a reel of a movie called Three Weekends. The film had fused together, it was bubbling, and all we got was 150 feet, about two minutes of it.”
Bow reached her apotheosis as a star in 1927 when she headlined Wings, an epic aerial drama that won the first best picture Oscar, and It, a slick comedy in which she was a shopgirl who plays aggressive to get her man (Antonio Moreno). At this point her spontaneous style began to seem slightly more calculated, and Paramount put her in formula vehicles after the success of It where Bow is the sexual aggressor single-mindedly pursuing one man, whereas in Mantrap and in life Bow liked to keep her options open.
Those options included Gary Cooper and then far less appealing men, and this led to some disastrous and sordid situations and scandals that tarnished both her image and her sense of worth as the switchover to talking pictures inhibited her. Bow’s spirit seems to have really perished for good after a very nasty court case in 1931 involving her former assistant and best friend Daisy DeVoe, who was falsely accused of stealing her money and took revenge by smearing Bow’s character on the stand. When people in court laughed at Bow, she broke down and never fully recovered.
Bow is awkward in most of her talking films; her speaking voice was somewhat grating, and she never quite learned how to deliver lines. Her health and nerves were a mess after the DeVoe trial, and when she could not show up for work, Paramount terminated her contract. She moved to Fox and gave her all to the hypnotically tasteless Call Her Savage (1932), and in the first half of her last film Hoop-La (1933) Bow has found a new mode, a quiet kind of toughness that makes it seem like she might have thrived at Warner Brothers. But she retired after that movie, unhappily, on the money that DeVoe had managed to save for her (roughly $250,000) and the large salary she earned ($250,000) for these two last pictures at Fox. “All she ever wanted to be was a movie star,” said Stenn. “When she was robbed of her work she was robbed of her identity.”
Bow had married cowboy star Rex Bell in 1931, and she had two children with him. The sympathetic Bell did all he could for her, but by the 1940s Bow had declined and become a very reclusive and guilt-tripping hypochondriac, unable to deal with memories of her childhood and adolescence that she had somehow suppressed during her manic heyday as a movie star. From 1950 on, Bow lived in seclusion with a trained nurse. In deep denial about her past, she still saw and eventually lived with her strange father. She died in 1965, shortly after looking at Gary Cooper in Victor Fleming’s The Virginian (1929) on television.
The very sad, isolated, and aimless second half of Bow’s life should not obscure the filled-to-the-brim excitement of her best work in silent movies. Bow’s performances in that medium are studded with all kinds of inspired, in-the-moment details, as in the memorable scene from It where she looks at a little stuffed dog, turns it around, and spanks it. You can almost always tell what Bow is saying when she speaks in her silent films, and all of her emotions are right there at the surface for her.
Josef von Sternberg directed portions of Children of Divorce (1927) and proclaimed her a major talent, but it was a raw talent; she needed direction and very rarely got it. Bow had no real education, and most people in Hollywood spurned her for this and for her lack of inhibition, but in close-up in My Lady of Whims and Mantrap she can look very worldly, her face taking on frank, good-humored, and meta attitudes in a surprisingly modern sort of way like her fellow silent star Louise Brooks, who admired Bow very much.
Her own devil-may-care viewpoint is more than reflected in her work. “We had individuality, we did as we pleased, we dressed the way we wanted,” Bow said as an older woman who hid herself away. “Today stars are sensible and end up with better health, but we had more fun.” It couldn’t last for long, but while it did Bow gave such a lovely light.
by Dan Callahan