It Girl: The Clara Bow Fanlisting

W E L C O M E

Welcome to "It Girl", fanlisting for silent film actress Clara Bow!

This listing is currently owned by me, Missy, and is a part of TFL.org.

S T A T S

Last Updated: October 17th, 2008
Last Added: No members or potential have submitted information since October 15th, 2008.
Member Count: 21
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A B O U T

Clara Bow (born July 29, 1907; died September 27, 1965) was an American actress and sex symbol, best known for her film work in the 1920s and early 1930s. To some, Bow was the era's archetype of the flapper.

Bow was born in a tenement in Brooklyn, New York, the only surviving child of a dysfunctional family afflicted with mental illness and Dickensian poverty and physical and emotional abuse. She was the third daughter born to her parents. The first two children were stillborn. Clara's mother had hope that Clara would also die at birth and didn't bother with a birth certificate.

Her mother, Sarah Gordon, was an occasional prostitute who was mentally ill as well as an epileptic, and was noted for her public and frequent affairs with local firemen. Her father, Robert Bow, was rarely present and may have been mentally retarded; Whenever he returned home, he was verbally and physically abusive to both wife and daughter. When he left them, Sarah would turn 'tricks' (have sex) for food money, locking Clara in a closet whenever a customer was in the apartment. Clara's father Robert reportedly raped Clara when she was 15 years old.

By her mid-teens, young Clara Bow was working as an actress, having dropped out of school at the age of seven. Sara told Clara acting was for whores. She had taken to sneaking up behind her and saying she would kill her because she would be better off dead. Clara won the Fame and Fortune contest in 1921. The prize was a part in the film Beyond The Rainbow. Clara needed two photographs in order to enter the contest.

She begged her father for the money and he took her to a cheap studio. She hated the results, but the contest judges were impressed. After numerous screen tests, Clara 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 in later years. Clara also had her mother to deal with. One night, she awoke to find her holding a butcher knife to her throat. She lay still until her mother collapsed to the floor in a seizure. As a result of the episode, she suffered insomnia for the rest of her life.

Bow's screen introduction wasn't until her next film Down to the Sea in Ships.

All the while, she suffered guilty feelings over her mother's disapproval. In 1923, she was on the set when she learned that her mother had died. Clara was devastated, she felt that her acting was somehow responsible for her death.

Clara got her big break when an officer of Preferred Pictures approached her on the set. He offered her free train fare to go make a screen test in Hollywood. She 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 to even let her make a screen test, but when she finally did, the results astounded him. She was already adept at pantomime and she could cry on command.

Starting with Maytime (1923), Schulberg cast her 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.

She was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1924. She soon became known for her expressiveness, spontaneity, and ability to project sexuality and self-mocking humor. Bow made an astonishing 58 motion pictures in 11 years. She would become the most famous redheads of the silent film era.

Now that Clara was making money, she brought her father to live with her in Hollywood. For the next few years, she funded numerous failed business ventures for him, including a restaurant and a dry cleaners. 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 her unwanted relative, Clara during this time of her career was adored on her sets. Throughout this portion 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.

The movie through which she broke out into cinematic stardom was 1925's The Plastic Age, written by feminist silent-era screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas. She also began to date her co-star Gilbert Roland. He would be the first of many engagements for flirtatious Clara.

Clara followed her first big success with Mantrap (1926), directed by Victor Fleming. Though he was twice her age, Clara quickly fell in love with her director. She began seeing both Roland and Fleming at the same time

In 1927, Clara reached the heights of her popularity with the film It. Consequently, Bow was dubbed "The It Girl" — "It" being a euphemism for sex-appeal, as defined by the British novelist Elinor Glyn. This image was enhanced by various off-screen love affairs publicized by the tabloid press.

Studio executives had a columnist proclaim that Clara, beyond all reason, was the "it" girl. When "sex" couldn't be used something was else needed to described a girl of Clara's caliber. The type men would spend hours thinking about in moments of desire, the type women would loathe upon.

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, director Victor Fleming, and John Gilbert were among her many male lovers.

Alleged alcoholism, drug abuse, and mental instability were also becoming problems for studios. Budd Schulberg, a producer's son, said, "Clara Bow, no matter how great her popularity, was a low life and disgrace to the community." Not all of the negative rumors are true, but Bow probably did inherited her mental instability from her mother.

Her acting, however, was finer than her good-time-girl reputation implied. She was praised for her vitality and enthusiasm — Adolph Zukor said that "She danced even when her feet weren't moving" — though her roles rarely allowed her to show much range. At least one important film writer, Adela Rogers St. John, felt that Bow had enormous promise that was never tapped by the studios.

Documentation indicates that as Bow developed a reputation as "Crisis-a-Day Clara," 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, and for controlling her sexual exploits.

In 1927, Clara also made Wings, a war picture largely re-written to accommodate Bow, who at the time was Paramount's biggest star. 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, (despite her thick, unmanageable Brooklynese accent) with some success, until she retired in 1933 to raise her children with her husband, cowboy actor Rex Bell (actually George F. Beldam), later a lieutenant governor of Nevada. They 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 a schizophrenic in 1949 and suffering a mental-health regimen that included shock treatments, Clara Bow died on September 27, 1965 from a heart attack and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

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

R U L E S

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