TW- SA, Suicide.
Clara Gordon Bow
July 29th, 1905
When sitting in my palatial writing suite, perched at the very top of the highest pinnacle of Potentially Interesting Towers, with a fresh sheet of vellum unrolled before me and the ink drying slowly on the end of razor-sharp cut goose feather quill, I begin each day at the crack of the sparrow’s call by leafing through my extensive memory banks, or Google, to decide which person to write about. If I had any sense, I would work it all out days in advance and have them ready to go, pop tart fresh each morning. But I don’t, so I don’t.
The name of the daily column is, as you probably know by reading this, ‘Happy Birthday, You Bastard’ and while the term ‘bastard’ is subjective and can mean nasty bastard, glorious bastard or just bastard, sometimes the people whose birthday it is on that particularly day virtually cry out to be included.
Today, for example, is the birthday of fascist bastard Benito Mussolini and what better subject to write about in a column about bastards than one of the 20th Century’s biggest bastards? Well, I could, but there’s a couple of things to think about. Firstly, Benito Mussolini is somebody everyone knows about. You might not know that July 29th is his birthday and that he was born in 1883 in the small town of Dovia di Predappio, but now you do. The other thing I have to consider is good journalistic practice and whilst I don’t have a strict word limit, I try to bring them in somewhere under a million words so you can read the whole thing whilst sitting on the toilet without your arse going numb. And I can bring in long biographies in a short time frame if I have a specific angle I’m looking for, but with Mussolini, in order to achieve that goal, I’d have to leave out so much stuff that it would almost seem like letting him get away with those hideous things. Or I’d have to bullet-point them and you’ve got Wikipedia for that. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly to me personally, is that I can use this opportunity to give a little bit of the limelight to people who deserve it more than the Fascist Dictator of Italy and Conqueror of Abyssinia.
People like Clara Bow, who was once arguably the most famous woman on the planet but who’s beautiful, shining star has somewhat dimmed over the decades since she died. Clara Bow was a glorious bastard.
Clara Gordon Bow was born at 697, Bergen Street, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn to Robert and Sarah Bow, first generation immigrants from Europe. The date on her grave says 1907 but the censuses of 1910 and 1920 put her age as 4 and 14 respectively and 1905 is the accepted year of her birth.
She was the third child, both of her older sisters having died in infancy and despite warnings from doctors, her mother became pregnant with Clara in late 1904. She was born during the sweltering heatwave of 1905, making the birth even riskier. Years later, Clara wrote: "I don't suppose two people ever looked death in the face more clearly than my mother and I the morning I was born. We were both given up, but somehow we struggled back to life."
Robert was often out of work and the family moved from place to place, often with Robert absent. When Clara was 16, her mother fell from a second story window, suffering a serious head injury that was to affect her for the rest of her life. Sarah was diagnosed with "psychosis due to epilepsy” and Clara had to learn how to take care of her mother during episodes of seizures and hostile mood swings. "As a kid I took care of my mother, she didn't take care of me" she later recalled.
Sarah’s condition, and the effect it had on her temper, worsened. One night in 1922, Clara awoke to find her mother over her with a knife to her throat. She managed to fend off the attack and lock her in a bedroom, but by now Sarah’s condition, which Clara said was no fault of her own, meant that she was committed to a sanitorium.
Clara recalled that night:
It was snowing. My mother and I were cold and hungry. We had been cold and hungry for days. We lay in each other's arms and cried and tried to keep warm. It grew worse and worse. So that night my mother—but I can't tell you about it. Only when I remember it, it seems to me I can't live..
Whilst her mother was institutionalized, her father raped her.
Sarah died aged 43 in 1923 and at the funeral, Clara was overcome with grief, jumping into the grave to be with her mother and shouting that they were "hypocrites" and that they hadn't loved or cared for her mother while she was alive.
In the Fall of 1921, against her mother's wishes but with her father's support, Clara competed in Brewster publications' magazine's annual nationwide acting contest, "Fame and Fortune". Part beauty contest and part talent search, Clara had no acting experience at all, yet the judges were enchanted by her:
She is very young, only 16. But she is full of confidence, determination and ambition. She is endowed with a mentality far beyond her years. She has a genuine spark of divine fire. The five different screen tests she had, showed this very plainly, her emotional range of expression provoking a fine enthusiasm from every contest judge who saw the tests. She screens perfectly. Her personal appearance is almost enough to carry her to success without the aid of the brains she indubitably possesses.
Her reward was an evening gown, a silver trophy and the chance to be in the movies. Initially, Brewsters failed to find her any work, but she made a nuisance of herself every day until eventually she was cast in Beyond the Rainbow, released in 1922. She impressed with her ability to cry on cue, which was perhaps not surprising given all she had been through, but although she shot five scenes, they were all cut from the final edit.
She kept pestering studio agencies for parts "But there was always something. I was too young, or too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat." Eventually, she was cast as a tomboy in the movie Down to the Sea in Ships, a film about whaling, shot in Massachusetts for which she was paid $50 a week. The movie was released in 1922 and although she was only billed 10th, stole the show.
"Miss Bow will undoubtedly gain fame as a screen comedienne"
"With her beauty, her brains, her personality and her genuine acting ability it should not be many moons before she enjoys stardom in the fullest sense of the word. You must see 'Down to the Sea in Ships'"
Clara’s career rocketed from there on, making a series of movies in New York before, in 1923, departing for California and Hollywood. She signed with the studio Preferred Pictures but also worked with other studios and rented an apartment off Hollywood Boulevard. Her first Hollywood picture was Maytime in 1923.
Her career took off. Playing the personification of the ideal aristocratic flapper; mischievous, pretty, aggressive, quick-tempered and deeply sentimental. She radiated sex appeal, she was funny, was a brilliant actor and was playing other actors, male and female off the screen. In 1923 she was earning $200 a week and by 1925 it was $750.
Perfect Pictures went bust and she was snapped up by Paramount, paying her $2837 a week. By the end of her time at paramount she was being paid $4000 a week. She managed to negotiate a contract without a ‘morals clause’, which allowed her to play with gender roles and sexuality in public images. Alongside her tomboy and flapper parts, she appeared in boxing films and posed for publicity shots as a boxer, unheard of at the time for a woman. By appropriating masculine traits and embracing androgynous parts, she portrayed herself as the icon of the confident, powerful, modern 1920s woman. She could play meek and cry on cue, or she could knock your teeth out, and she could look stunning while she did it.
In 1927 she had perhaps her most famous role in It, not a film about a murderous clown in a storm drain, but a shop-girl-marries-rich-guy Cinderella story that earned her nothing less than outstanding reviews. It also earned her the nickname ‘The It Girl’, a term still in use today.
In 1929 she made the successful transition in talkies and although the audience didn’t mind her voice or her Brooklyn accent, she never enjoyed the new experience, particularly when the studio made her sing, which she found deeply uncomfortable. As a result, filming became harder, took longer and began to take a toll on her mental health. She began to take sedatives and off-screen problems began to spiral. The pressures of fame, financial scandals involving her secretary, relationships and her inability to cope at such a young age saw her voluntarily sent to a sanitorium. Her own manager, B.P. Schulberg, began referring to her as "Crisis-a-day-Clara".
Paramount released her from the financial obligations of her contract whilst retaining her on a salary but when the studio went into receivership, Clara was 25 years old and her career was at an end.
Clara left Hollywood for the Nevada ranch of fellow actor Rex Bell, who she married in a small ceremony in 1931. The ranch became her refuge and she loved it there. They had two sons, Tony born in 1934 and George in 1938. She made two more movies, Call Her Savage (1932) and Hoop-La (1933) and then retired from acting. Clara and Rex opened The 'It' Cafe in the Hollywood Plaza Hotel near Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, which closed in 1943.
Clara eventually began to show signs of mental illness, perhaps the same that had plagued her mother. She became increasingly isolated and refused to either socialize with Rex nor let him leave the house alone. In 1944, while Bell was running for the U.S. House of Representatives, Clara attempted suicide. A note was found in which she said she preferred death to a public life.
In 1949, she checked into a psychiatric hospital to be treated for chronic insomnia and abdominal pain. She was given shock therapy and it was noted that she was sexually inappropriate, showed poor judgement and engaged in strange behavior. Behavior that in her 20s had, perhaps, marked her out as the quintessential flapper now, in her 40s, marked her down as of questionable sanity. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia yet never experienced any auditory or visual hallucinations. In the end, she checked herself out, but never went home.
She bought herself a bungalow in Culver City, California and lived there for the rest of her life, under the care of a nurse, from the proceeds of her illustrious career.
She died of a heart attack on September 27th, 1965, aged 60 and is buried in the Freedom Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Heritage at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
For a time in the 1920s the idea of gender roles in movies, theatre and the arts became so blurred that it was deliberately ambiguous as to whether someone was a man, a woman or neither. And nobody cared. In fact, people adored the new way that gender and sexuality were being portrayed. Contrary to what some people think today, gender fluidity wasn’t invented in 2016 simply to annoy their delicate sensibilities. These are roles that humans have always played with, from the opening if the 2024 Olympics in Paris to the gender identity swapping antics of the god Hercules and Queen Omphale in ancient myth. Whatever roles Clara was playing, whatever gender role or sexuality she was portraying, she was always devastating.
Clara’s life was always tinged with sadness and haunted by mental health issues and she played her role with la tristesse as a backdrop:
”All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing, there's a feeling of tragedy underneath, she's unhappy and disillusioned, and that's what people sense.”