Clara's Biography

[Miss Retro]

Clara Gordon Bow (July 29, 1905 – September 27, 1965) was an American actress and sex symbol, best known for her silent film work in the 1920s. Bow was widely recognized as an archetypal flapper and the original "It Girl".

Bow was born in a tenement in Brooklyn, New York, the only surviving child of a dysfunctional family afflicted with mental illness, poverty, and physical and emotional abuse. She was the third child born to her parents; the first two children, both daughters, were stillborn. Bow's mother, hoping that her third child would also die at birth, didn't bother with a birth certificate.[1]

As a child, she was a tomboy and played games in the streets with the boys. Her clothes were ragged and dirty; other girls wouldn't play with her. Clara's friend Johnny burned to death in her arms when she was 10 years old. Years later, she could make herself cry at will on a movie set by singing the lullaby "Rock-a-bye Baby". She said it reminded her of Johnny.[2]

Bow's mother, Sarah Gordon, was an occasional prostitute who suffered from mental illness and epilepsy. She was noted for her frequent public affairs with local firemen. Bow's father, Robert Bow, was rarely present and may have had a mental impairment. Whenever he returned home, he was verbally and physically abusive to both wife and daughter. Bow's father reportedly raped her when she was between the ages of 15 and 16 years old.[

Having dropped out of school at the age of seven and with little more worldly experience than a job at the Coney Island amusement park, through a stroke of fortune, young Clara Bow found herself working as a movie actress by her mid-teens.

Always an avid movie fan herself, Bow won the Motion Picture Magazine's Fame and Fortune contest in 1921, the grand prize being a part in a film. She needed two photographs in order to enter the contest, so she begged her father for the money and he finally took her to a cheap studio. Although she hated the results, the contest judges were impressed. After numerous screen tests, Bow was selected the winner. She won a part in Beyond the Rainbow (1922), but to her humiliation and disappointment, her scenes were cut from the final print and were not seen until the film was restored years later.

Bow also had to deal with her mother, Sarah Gordon. Gordon told Bow that acting was for prostitutes. She had also taken to sneaking up behind Bow and threatening to kill her because she felt her daughter would be better off dead. One night, she awoke to find her mother holding a butcher knife to her throat. Clara ran and locked herself in a closet until her grandmother came home. Bow suffered insomnia for the rest of her life.[2]

[Miss Retro]

Bow's screen introduction wasn't until her next film, Down to the Sea in Ships. This was a silent film, as were all of Bow's early films until the advent of sound in the late 1920s.

She began to appear in numerous small movie roles. All the while, she suffered guilty feelings over her mother's disapproval. In 1923, Bow was on the set when she learned that her mother had died. She was devastated, feeling that her acting was somehow responsible for her mother's death.

With her earliest films being all East Coast productions, Bow got her big break when an officer of Preferred Pictures approached her on the set. He offered her free train fare to make a screen test in Hollywood, and Bow agreed to make the trip. The first time Preferred Pictures head B.P. Schulberg saw disheveled Clara Bow in her one ragged dress, he was dismayed. He was reluctant even to give her a screen test, but when he finally did, the results astounded him. Bow was already adept at pantomime, and she could cry on command.

Starting with Maytime (1923), Schulberg cast Bow in a series of small roles. She nearly always stole her scenes. However, instead of creating projects for her, he loaned her out to other studios for easy money. Nevertheless, Bow started to make a name for herself through these many small roles and was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1924.

As soon as Bow started to make money, she brought her father to live with her in Hollywood. For the next few years, she funded numerous business ventures for him, including a restaurant and a dry cleaners, all of which failed. He soon became a drunken nuisance on her sets, where he would try to pick up young girls by telling them his daughter was Clara Bow. Despite the behavior of her unwanted relative, Bow was adored during this time of her career. Crew members always seemed to fall in love with her. She was friendly, generous, and so grateful for her success that she always remained humble.

In 1925, Schulberg cast Bow in The Plastic Age. The movie was a huge hit, and Bow was suddenly the studio's most popular star. She also began to date her co-star Gilbert Roland, who would become the first of many engagements for her. Bow followed her first big success with Mantrap (1926), directed by Victor Fleming. Though he was twice her age, Bow quickly fell in love with her director. She began seeing both Roland and Fleming at the same time.

In 1927, Bow reached the heights of her popularity with the film It, after Bow had already been dubbed "The It Girl" by Elinor Glyn — "It... that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes... entirely unself-conscious... full of self-confidence... indifferent to the effect... she is producing and uninfluenced by others.") (The Glyn quote appears in her novel, It). More commonly, "It" was taken to mean "sex appeal" ("It, hell," said Dorothy Parker, "She had those.")[4]

This image was enhanced by various off-screen love affairs publicized by the tabloid press. However, some Hollywood insiders considered her socially undesirable, especially in light of rumored sexual escapades with many famous men of the time. Bela Lugosi, Gary Cooper, Gilbert Roland, John Wayne, director Victor Fleming, and John Gilbert were reputed to be among her many lovers.

Bow's alleged alcoholism, drug abuse, and mental illness were also becoming problems for the studios. Budd Schulberg, the producer's son, said, "There was one subject on which the staid old Hollywood establishment would agree: Clara Bow, no matter how great her popularity, was a low life and a disgrace to the community" (The Schulberg quote appears in his memoir, Moving Pictures). Not all of the negative rumors were true, but Bow probably did inherit mental illness from her mother.

Her acting, however, was finer than her good-time-girl reputation implied. Bow was praised for her vitality and enthusiasm — Adolph Zukor once said that "She danced even when her feet weren't moving"[citation needed] — though her roles rarely allowed her to show much range. In the early 1930s, Motion Picture magazine complained that the studio never gave her film plots any thought beyond "Hey, let's put Clara in a sailor suit!"[citation needed] At least one important film writer, Adela Rogers St. Johns, felt Bow had enormous promise that was never tapped by the studios.

Documentation indicates that as Bow developed a reputation as "Crisis-a-Day Clara".[citation needed] Paramount went out of its way to humiliate the increasingly emotionally frail actress by cancelling her films, docking her pay, charging her for unreturned costumes, and insisting that she pay for her publicity photographs. Her contract also included a morality clause offering her a bonus of $500,000 for behaving like a lady and staying out of the newspapers.[citation needed]

In 1927, Bow starred in Wings, a war picture largely re-written to accommodate her, as she was Paramount's biggest star at the time. The film went on to win the first Academy Award for Best Picture. After movies such as Wings, Bow's career continued with limited success into the early sound film era. Much of the mystique around Bow was destroyed by the advent of sound, when her fans heard her heavy, lower-class Brooklyn accent. Worse, Bow began experiencing mic fright on the sets of her sound films.

In 1928, Bow wrote the foreword for a novelization of her film The Fleet's In.

She finally retired in 1933 to raise her children with her husband, cowboy actor Rex Bell (actually George F. Beldon), later a lieutenant governor of Nevada. Bow and Beldon married in 1932 and had two sons, Tony Beldon (born 1934, changed name to Rex Anthony Bell, Jr.) and George Beldon, Jr. (born 1938).

After being diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1949, Bow's treatment regimen included shock treatments. Later in her life her husband sent her to one of the top mental institutions in the nation at the time. Doctors found out that Clara had been raped by her father at a young age. Clara Bow died on September 27, 1965 of a heart attack. She was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

For her contributions to the motion picture industry, Clara Bow was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1994, she was honored with an image on a United States postage stamp designed by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.