Old Hollywood Scandal: Clara Bow, the First ‘It’ Girl
From her tragic childhood, to her meteoric rise to fame, all the way through the scandal that ended her career. Who was Clara Bow? And why is her story so relevant today?
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SOURCES
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/clara-bow-book-claras-secret-love-1918523936
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Clara-Bow
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https://thewalkingboxranch.sites.unlv.edu/exhibits/show/clara/claraschildhood
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of Horrors, Hauntings and mysteries, I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
This is our second installment of our old hollywood series, where we go back and discover the ghosts, curses, scandals, and murders that shaped the Golden Age of hollywood.
I’m reporting to you live from the Heart Starts Pounding headquarters. And for this one, I had to go deep into our archives up in the attic to pull out the very special and dark story of one woman.
I’m going to tell you about Clara Bow, Hollywood’s first IT girl. Though her name hasn’t managed to become as synonymous with old hollywood as say Mary Pickford, Mae West, or Marilyn Monroe, in her day she was more famous than all of them.
But Clara was a firecracker, she burned hot and bright, and was gone in an instant when she lost everything in the midst of a scandal.
It’s interesting then, that Clara’s name has resurfaced today. This week, Taylor Swift is releasing her 11th album, and on it is a song titled Clara Bow. I don’t know what the contents of the song will be just yet, but there’s no denying that the two starlettes lives have parallelled each other in a few ways. And for that reason, the story of a woman born 119 years ago feels as relevant as ever. The problems she faced, the scandal, the hardship, the mental health struggles, are all things we can still relate to today.
Lots of rumors have been spread about Clara, but today I’m going to take you on a journey through the story of the real woman. Who was Clara Bow? Was she a villain, a floozy, a homewrecker like the tabloids said? We’ll get into it after a quick break. And as always, listener discretion is advised. By the way, if you’re a first time listener–welcome to our darkly curious community. I’m really glad you’re here. We’re an eclectic bunch and I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m here with new episodes every week, as well as bonus episodes and ad-free listening for Patreon and Apple subscribers, so make sure you check those out. And now, to the break.
Our story starts on March 19th, 1931, at the height of Clara’s stardom. At this point in her career, at just 26 years old, she was the most famous woman in hollywood. Though Clara wasn’t the first flapper, she popularized the image, and brought a new era of what women could be to the big screen. Men wanted her and women wanted to BE her. Her untamed short auburn hair and pencil thin eyebrows were copied by women across the country.
She had starred in the first ever movie to win an academy award, she was getting a record setting 45,000 letters of fan mail a month, and she could hardly go a single day without newspapers reporting on some piece of her life. “Clara Bow Has Face and Fortune, but few close friends” one headline read, another simply read “Clara Bow- What”, as if her story defied words.
She was used to these kinds of headlines, ones that speculated who she was dating, and guessed when the tides of Hollywood would turn against her. They were annoying, but they never affected her star power. Those papers needed Clara more than she needed them. if they needed to spin some tale about her to sell papers, so be it.
But this day, March 19th, 1931, all of that would change. This day would be the day that the headlines would deal their fatal blow.
Clara stood in her Beverly Hills home looking down at a pamphlet in her hands. She had been getting ready for rehearsals for her next film when her housekeeper ran to her. Miss Clara, you have to see this. She handed Clara a little booklet that read Clara’s Secret Love Life, as told by Daisy.
On the cover was a drawing of a red headed woman, who was supposed to represent Clara kissing a brown haired mustacheod man. Her palms started sweating. She knew exactly what this was. As Told by Daisy. Daisy was her former secretary, and that rat must have sold lies about Clara to the news. This is why she didn’t trust anyone. That headline that once read Clara has Face and Fortune but few close friends? Yea, that was for a reason.
Her hands shook as she opened the first page, where she read the table of contents. Chapter 1, a girlhood of shame. Chapter 3, Clara Lures Innocent Youth. Chapter 5, Clara in Role of Homewrecker. The pamphlet accused her of everything. Homosexuality, which was not looked at kindly back then, threesomes, a sexual appetite so ravenous that when no person could satisfy her, she turned to animals. It claimed she had taken a lover in Mexico who had killed his wife and then himself when his wife found out about the affair. The rumors preyed upon modest america's biggest fears about Hollywood, and this personalized burn book was being mailed across the country to thousands of households as some sort of smear campaign. Clara didn’t know it yet, but it had even been mailed to the Superior Court judges and local parent-teacher association offices. This was a targeted attempt to take Clara down.
Just then, her phone started ringing off the hook. Everyone was calling. Her studio, her family, the press. But Clara couldn’t bring herself to talk to anyone. Instead, she ran to her bathroom and threw up.
This was the beginning of the end. By this time next year, the most famous actress would be locked inside of an insane asylum with no film career. But To tell the story of how Clara’s former secretary launched an attack that took the star down, I think we should start at the beginning. Because the Clara you read about in the papers was not the same as the real woman.
Clara Bow was born on July 29th, 1905 in the slums of Brooklyn, New York, with a full head of Auburn hair that would become a staple in her signature look.
The few moments that Clara was silent upon first entering the world might have been the only moments of peace Clara would ever know. Once born, she didn’t make a sound. The doctors and her mother stared at her incredulously as she looked around the hospital room with curious eyes. It wasn’t until her grandmother ripped her from the doctors arms and shook her for a few minutes that she let out a loud wail.
Her mother was so paranoid after this the baby would die, she didn’t even get Clara a birth certificate at first. And so the woman whose name would eventually be known in every household across america, started her life nameless.
from an early age her big personality shined through. She was a tomboy in a world that rewarded women for their domestic pursuits. Clara didn’t want to play with dolls and learn how to mother. she wanted to wrestle with the boys, and even bragged in her adulthood that she was stronger than any of the boys on her block.
As Clara got older, though, she developed the curvaceous body her career would be built on, and wrestling with the boys came to a screeching halt. The boys no longer wanted to hang out with her, she wasn’t one of them anymore. And the girls saw her as poorly dressed, loud mouthed, and awkward. She was universally bullied for having a stutter. There wasn’t space for Clara in her peer groups anymore, and there certainly wasn’t space for her at home
Clara’s family life had disintegrated before it even started. Her father struggled with alcohol and couldn’t hold a job. And her mother, Sarah, well her mother was struggling with some severe mental health issues on top of her epilepsy., back then, in the early 1900’s, it was believed that Epilepsy was caused by sunstroke, and masturbation. So basically if you had it, it was your fault.
So no one thought to look into Sarah’s past or family history to try and understand her mental anguish. Sarah had suffered a devastating fall out of a second story window when she was just 16. She was never the same after that.
Maybe that was the root of Sarah’s problems, or perhaps it was a genetic curse she couldn’t escape from. Sarah’s father had her mother committed to an asylum for the terminally insane, and she died the next year. We don’t know exactly what her mother, Clara’s grandmother suffered from, but we know that Sarah never forgave her father for what he did.
Sarah was prone to fits and delusions, and often took out her frustrations on Clara. When Clara’s grandfather died, Sarah cooley looked at her daughter, who was crying from watching her grandfather die of a heart attack while she pushed him on a swing, and told her bluntly “I wish it had been you”.
By the time she was 13, in 1918, Clara needed an escape. Shunned by her peers, unloved by her family, and forced to leave school and get a job to make up for her fathers slack, she searched for somewhere to go.
And that’s when she found it. The movies. every cent she made from her job that didn’t go to her mother, she spent at the movies. There, she watched as her favorite starlets escaped their circumstances for better days. At the movies Lillian Gish could be saved from her alcoholic, raging father in Broken Blossoms, and Mary Pickford could win the affection of her emotionless, wealthy aunt.
The young girl would rush home after and sit in her mirror, practicing making the faces she had just seen on the screen. Happy, surprised, in love. Emotions she only saw in movies.
Three years later, in 1921, Clara was reading a magazine when an ad jumped out at her. Win a role in a film. All she had to do was submit two photos of herself and she could be in a real movie, a picture called Beyond The Rainbow! The only problem was, she didn’t have any photos of herself. She begged her father to bring her to Coney Island so she could have two pictures taken in a cheap studio. The pictures came out horrible. They were grainy and Clara hated the way her face looked. But still, it was all she could afford. She took a streetcar downtown to submit the photos, all without telling her mother, who thought that women who were in movies were loose and hated Clara’s obsession.
Within a few days she got asked to come in person and test in front of producers. Even in grainy, low quality photos, Clara sparkled. At the test, she was so natural, and her beauty and red hair stuck out amongst a sea of girls who all looked similar. But what really won the producers over, was Clara could cry on cue. A talent that not many actors had perfect, but came so easily to Clara. Later in life, when asked how she did it, she’d reply “all I had to do was think of home”. With that, she booked her first ever role.
Sarah did not take the news well. When she learned her daughter had been sneaking around behind her back to audition, she told her to her face, “I’d rather see you dead”.
And then, one night, Clara awoke to a strange feeling that she was being watched. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and saw a figure standing above her, in one of their hands was a knife. It was her mother. “Im gonna kill ya Clara. It’ll be better.” she said. With that, she slowly started bringing the knife to Clara’s throat. The girl laid still hoping it was a dream, but knowing in her heart it wasn’t. Just as the knife was about to reach her neck, her mother fainted.
The next morning, Sarah had no recollection of what had happened, but Clara knew something had to change. It wasn’t until Sarah chased her daughter around the house with a butcher knife a few more times that Clara’s father agreed. Less than a week after Beyond the Rainbow’s release, on February 24th, 1922, Sarah was sent to an asylum for the criminally insane by her husband. She suffered the same fate as her mother.
Clara saw a pattern starting to form with the women in her family, and she was desperate to get away. No longer needing to worry about her mother and with her first picture under her belt, Clara was finally ready to set her sights on something bigger. Clara Bow takes on Hollywood, after the break.
It didn’t take long for Clara to find work in Hollywood. In 1922 she was signed to a contract at Preferred Pictures, by executive B.P. Schulberg, where she made a whopping $750 a week, that’s almost $14,000 today. And in her first 18 months of her contract, she was in 16 movies. It was undeniable that she had something special. She brought a grounded realness to silent pictures that many of them lacked. Without dialog, actresses relied heavily on big expressions and overacting to convey their message, but Clara could get what she wanted across with just a few movements of her pencil thin eyebrows.
Really though, it was her sexuality that set her apart. Her curvaceous body, short hair, knack for on screen flirting and tomboy style represented a new era of womanhood. The flapper. The 1920’s brought about new freedoms for women, the right to vote being a major one, and flappers represented a rejection of what women once were and an embrace of what they could be. Flappers were unmarried, but still enjoyed sex. They made their own money, and loved to go out on the town. They smoked, weren’t overtly feminine. They didn’t sit pretty on the sidelines, they were in the game, and they played by their own rules.
By 1925, she had been in over 30 films, and while most of them were arguably not very good, Clara still caught the attention of other producers who saw her star potential.
Which lead to her breakout hit. The 1927 film called “It”, adapted from a book by Elinor Glyn. It told the story of a working class girl who develops a crush on a wealthy department store manager. The concept of IT, which the movie revolves around, is the intangible quality that makes someone irresistible. And Clara had IT. Clara was IT. Christina Ball in a 2001 article, described what Clara had as raw animal magnetism and an unselfconscious indifference to this same ability to attract members of both sexes.
This movie is what made Clara the first ever It girl, and what coined the phrase. “IT” ushered in a new era of her career, where she was getting cast in better movies by better writers and directors who wanted her to be the star.
This also ushered in a new era of her personal life as well. Clara had money now, she had made it out of the slums of Brookly and she wanted to enjoy her life. She bought herself a red roadster sports car, and would often be seen around town with 7 Chijuahuas in the backseat.
Clara embodied so many of the flapper tropes she portrayed on screen. She was still the tomboy she was when she was 13 years old, just now with adult interests, like gambling, smoking, and going to football games.
She was also in no rush to get married but still enjoyed a slew of male suitors. At one point, she was in a torrid relationship with her co-star, Gary Cooper. The same Gary Cooper that Irene was in love with in last week's episode. The only problem with Clara dating Cooper, was she was engaged to actor Gilbert Roland. And on top of that, she already had a boyfriend on the side, Wizard of Oz director Victor Fleming. This kind of behavior, at least back then, was enough to get an actress fired. Contracts had something called a morals clause, where actresses promised to be on their best behavior to not embarrass the studio. Maybe it’s because Clara was a modern woman with no interest in doing things how they’ve been done before, but she successfully negotiated the morals clause out of her contract. She was, in fact, allowed to be on her worst behavior.
So, as you can imagine, it’s around this time that rumors about Clara’s life start swirling. The tabloids all called her promiscuous when word of her affairs got out. It was said that Clara was a nymphomaniac who had quote tackled the entire USC football team. The rumors were terrible and cruel but some of them were true. Like how a woman sued Clara for $150,000, or 2.7 million today, after she learned her husband had an affair with the actress. There was also the time that a night out gambling went sour when Clara owed the casino, run by mobsters, more money than she could pay. The movie studio came to her rescue both times, but they were really wishing they had fit the morality clause into her contract.
Clara had been cast as a sex symbol, as a woman who could seduce any man with that IT quality so many other women coveted. And now parts of her real life were starting to mimic that, so fans, desperate for morsels of their favorite stars life, ate them up.
But the real story of Clara at this time, is also one of loneliness and pain. By the mid 1920’s, her father had moved out to Los Angeles to meddle with his daughter's financial affairs. He was desperate to mooch off of her now that she was making money.
Clara also had a hard time fitting in. Remember that headline, “Clara Bow Has Face and Fortune, but few close friends?” well, that was also truer than many would believe. Other stars saw Clara as a loose canon and didn’t want to associate her. Plus, she marched to the beat of her own drum. She’d wear gold, expensive slippers to a football game, and then turn around and show up to a fancy dinner in a belted swimsuit. She swore, she talked openly about sex. Her peers thought she was low-class and vulgar. You could take the girl outta Brooklyn, but not Brooklyn outta the girl
It was so unfair though. The men got to sleep around, gamble and party, and no one batted an eye. Gary Cooper wasn’t smeared at all for their affair. His career and image were doing better than ever, and actually, it was because they dated and Clara wanted to help him that he even had a career at all. But the papers weren’t reporting on that, they didn’t care. They didn’t care that they had made her a sex symbol, and now that she was finally acting like one, they were tearing her down. They just wanted to sell more papers.
Maybe it’s why, at this point in her career she was so vulnerable. She was constantly in trouble with the movie studio due to her partying, her finances were a mess due to her gambling, and her friends were few and far between. Because it’s around this time that Clara lets a woman into her life who would eventually lead to her downfall.
Daisy DeVoe was a hair dresser from Kentucky, who met Clara around 1926 when she was filming her movie Wings. The two girls hit it off immediately. Daisy had also left home for a better life, and had been supporting herself since she was 16 years old. They were kindred spirits in that way.
Daisy invented a secret formula to make Clara’s hair an even more vibrant red (editors note: it was just bleach), and after that, Clara demanded Daisy be on every film Clara worked on moving forward.
While she did her hair, Daisy would hear about EVERYTHING going on in Clara’s life. Her issues with her mooching father, her gambling debts and other money troubles. Daisy had been good with money, it was her savviness that supported her since she was 16. So she offered to help Clara get her affairs in order, she would be her secretary.
After learning of this new partnership, B.P. Schulberg, the man at Preferred Pictures who had signed Clara, pulled Daisy aside. He wanted to know if she’d do him a solid and keep tabs on the actress. You know, Who she was seeing, where she was going, and report back to him, JUSTTT so he could make sure she wasn’t going to embarrass the studio even more than she already had. But Daisy could see right through him, and she wasn’t going to betray her friend. Without even giving it a second thought, she replied, “No dice. I dont work for the studio anymore” She was not here to tattle on her friend. She was here to help.
Once Daisy started working for Clara, she whipped the starlettes finances into shape. Money was Clara’s biggest private struggle; she allowed everyone to mooch off of her, and whatever little she had left she went gambling with. So daisy opened an account all of the actresses paychecks would be deposited into. Daisy would pay herself from that account, as well as all of Clara’s other bills. She also had no problem being the bad cop when someone asked her for money. If Clara’s dad needed some cash, if a friend swore they’d pay Clara right back, they had to go through Daisy, and Daisy said no. A Lot.
Two years after the account was set up, in 1930, Clara had $250,000 in savings. Today, that’s 4.6 million dollars. Things were good, and they were only getting better.
But what goes up, must come down. and just when Daisy thought that things were changing for Clara, just when the actress had gotten back on her feet. Is when Clara brought home her new boyfriend. Rex Bell music
In the midst of trying to clean up her image, Clara and the studios thought it was time she get a serious boyfriend, and Rex Bell seemed like the perfect man, Rex, born George Beldam, was an actor, but more importantly, he had a squeaky clean reputation. He was seen as a good, all american Mans man. Rex spoke publicly about not wanting to be an actor forever, he wanted to own a ranch one day and run for office in local government.
When he met Clara she was engaged to Harry Richman, and involved with another man, Big Boy Williams. Rex took third priority, but he stuck it out. And with some heavy suggesting from the studio, eventually they were a public couple.
But behind the scenes, Rex was controlling, and he immediately started looking into Clara’s finances. He demanded Daisy show him the books she had been keeping on Clara, and came to the conclusion that Daisy had been stealing from the money she had been putting away, though, there was little evidence that had been happening.
So, with Rex in her ear, Clara fired Daisy, the woman who got the overspending actress out of the red. Daisy did not take the news well, she was devastated. She had poured so much into this job and saw Clara as more than a boss, she was like a sister to her. Daisy had been at her side through the scandals, through the studios working Clara to the bone, she had advocated for her, told freeloaders and snooping studio execs to take a hike. and what- some stupid boyfriend comes along and ruins all that?!
Daisy asked for at least some severance while she found another job, but Clara, used to people taking advantage of her financially, interpreted that as blackmail. Her internal alarm system panicked at the request. So Rex notified the police, and on November 6th, 1930, Daisy was arrested.
January 13th, 1931, thousands of people and reporters flocked to the LA County courthouse to watch the trial of Daisy Duvoe. Perhaps she’d testify about something scandalous she had learned about her actress boss that the papers could publish, and no one wanted to miss out on that.
Soon, a car pulls up and Daisy emerges from the back seat, immediately flanked by two officers who escort her up the stairs, pushing through microphones, flashing bulbs, and posters calling her all sorts of names.
Inside, she sits on a cold wooden bench in a courtroom. On the other side is her former boss, dressed to the nines and staring down at the floor. Next to her the man who got everyone into this mess in the first place, smiling glibly like some kind of congressman. For the next few hours, the DA, a man named David Clark, makes an argument to the jury that Daisy is a conniving villain in Clara’s life, hell bent on mooching off the stars finances. The official amount she’s charged with is just one missing $825 check. Daisy swore it was used to pay Clara’s income taxes- Clara even signed it, she saw what it was being used for! But when Daisy looks out at the crowd from the witness stand, she sees a sea of studio exec faces, including that of BP Schulberg, the man she told to kick rocks when he asked her to spy on his cash cow. It’s not a friendly crowd.
Finally, it was time for the jurors to deliberate. For the next three days, Daisy bit her nails down to the quick waiting for the verdict. And finally, it came. Not guilty.
But things would take a sharp turn. Daisy was still sentenced to jail. The judge was friends with those powerful studio execs Daisy stood up to, and she was given an 18 month Jail sentence.
That was the final straw. After this betrayal, this media circus, her reputation was ruined, no one was ever going to hire her. That’s when she was contacted by Frederic Girnau, the Perez Hilton of his day. He sat down with her to get a full account of her time with Daisy, spare no details. Then, he went off and crafted the pamphlet tell all of Clara’s scandals. Full of tales of an unquenchable sexual desire, exhibitionism, drug addiction, STDs, of the curse of insanity that followed the women in her family.
Which brings us to where we started this story, Clara holding this pamphlet in her hands, knowing this was the nail in her coffin. The trial had already dug up a lot of dirty secrets about Clara, of her lavish lifestyle, her partying habits, her gambling debts. The media had not been kind to her and studios felt that audiences were turning against the star.
Clara lost the movie she was in rehearsal for. She became fretful, and too scared to go outside. The whole event caused Clara to have a mental breakdown so bad, that Rex, unsure of what else to do, committed Clara to a sanatorium. Just as her father had committed her mother, and just as her grandfather had committed her grandmother. The family curse she had been running from had finally caught up with her.
Why Clara’s story is important today, and her parallels to one of today’s biggest stars, after the break.
On July 18th, 2016, almost 90 years after Clara’s media circus, Taylor swift found herself in the middle of one.
The pop star was no stranger to scandal, she had made headlines ever since she was a teen, but this time was different.
The night before, Kim Kardashian had released a video of her husband at the time, Kanye West on the phone with Taylor. Recently, he had released a song in which he mentioned Taylor, and Taylor claimed that she had not given Kanye her blessing to include her in the song. That’s when Kim posted the infamous video of Kanye on the phone with Taylor from months before, where he was explaining to taylor how he’d use her name in the song, though not in full detail. There were lines in the song that he withheld from her, calling her That ‘Bitch’, and claiming that he was the one who made her famous.
And though it sounds relatively minor, the following media frenzy was unlike anything Taylor Swift had dealt with before. She opened her phone to see snake emojis in the comments on every post. After having the biggest year of her career up until that point, it was all crashing down. Tabloids called her a perpetual victim, and a liar, and dragged up other damning things from her past. Before the dust settled, Taylor, like Clara, retreated from the spotlight and went to go live in isolation. She was just 26 at the time, the same age Clara was during her scandal.
But this is where the two women’s stories stop intersecting. Both of them would experience entirely different trajectories. Taylor swift, obviously, still has a career today. She emerged from her year long isolation with a new album, and 8 years after her scandal, is the biggest superstar on the planet.
For Clara, however, that was the end of the road. She’d go on to make two more movies in her career, both flops, before being officially diagnosed with Schizophrenia and choosing to live most of her life in total isolation in LA, away from even her kids and husband. She passed away in 1965 at the age of 60 from a heart attack.
Daisy, would also never work in hollywood again. After jail, she married and worked in the aircraft industry. She died in 1996 at the age of 92.
Perhaps Taylor sees some of herself in Clara’s story, the story of a girl whose world was rocked by scandal, who was subjected to harsh criticism for just living her life to the fullest, who was crushed under the pressure.
But I want to talk about the story that I think is at the core of this. The story of two friends.
Before Daisy’s sentencing, Clara tearily wrote a letter to the DA, begging for the Judge to go easy on Daisy, even though Rex warned Clara she better not interfere. The letter read ““I would never have called the matter to your attention if Daisy had not threatened to blackmail me, and I knew of no other way to protect myself. I wish you would tell the judge about this letter.” The DA never relayed the letter to the judge.
Everyone wanted so much from Clara. The studios wanted her time, her father wanted her money, her mother wanted her dead, the press wanted every morsel of her personal life, and her husband wanted control. Ironically, the only person who never wanted anything from Clara was Daisy. She was the only person in Clara’s life who was there just to help.
I cant help but think about what would have happened if Rex had never gotten in Clara’s ear. Would her star have continued to rise with Daisy by her side the whole way? Would she be a household name today like Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe? Or was she always destined to burn out because of her impending mental health issues? We’ll never know, Clara will never get the chance to show us.
But it’s great that her name has been reintroduced into the cultural zeitgeist, if only for a moment. Listen to the Clara Bow song when it comes out, and I’ll even link a playlist I made and listened to while I wrote this episode to get myself into the Clara Bow mindset.
And once again, thank you everyone who listened. This episode was really special to do, I love when I can get to know a person and try to understand them, and thank you if you’re a first time listener, I hope you find other episodes in my catalog to enjoy, and check out the other episodes I’m doing on the dark history of hollywood. My episode next week is about curses, and the one afterwards is all about a hollywood whoddunit. This month I also have a bonus episode I’m super excited about, on the dark history and hauntings of the Waverly Hills Sanitorium, so make sure to subscribe on patreon or Apple podcasts to get access to that.