Queen of the 'flappers' and retired at 28: the wild life of Clara Bow, the actress who will be honored by Taylor Swift

“I don't think I'm much different from any other girl, except that I work harder and I've suffered more.

And that I have red hair,” commented Clara Bow (Brooklyn, New York, 1905-Culver City, California, 1965) in the extensive first-person story about her life that Adela Rogers St. Johns—screenwriter, writer and one of the most popular journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, whom communications businessman William Randolph Hearts described as “the best reporter in the world”—published in 1928 in the specialized film media

Photoplay

.

At that time, Bow was at the peak of her career: from nothing, she had become a big silent film star, making haircuts and lipsticks fashionable, and just a year earlier she had filmed

Wings,

a feature film about aviators of the First World War that immediately went down in cinema history, being the first film to win the Oscar for best film at the awards' founding gala, held in 1929 at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles.

But five years later, in 1933, at just 28 years old, Clara Bow retired.

The actress had a romantic life.

Traumatic experiences in his childhood and youth, excessive gambling (in 1930 he made headlines for not paying checks for $13,900 in payment for his losses in Blackjack at a hotel in Nevada) and betrayals (he went to court with his secretary, Daisy). DeVoe, who revealed gossip about her) were mixed in their 60 years of existence with famous romances (from Bela Lugosi to Cary Grant or Victor Fleming), overwhelming professional success, an aesthetic that set trends and a magnetism recognized by Dorothy Parker or Elinor Glyn.

That magnetism has not been forgotten.

Margot Robbie was based on her to create the sparkling Nellie LaRoy of

Babylon

,

the 2022 film by Damien Chazelle

(La La Land)

about golden Hollywood and, in a new script twist, now Clara Bow has returned to the news because her name gives the title to one of the themes of

The Tortured Poets Department ,

Taylor Swift's next album, which will be released on April 19.

Taylor Swift was inspired by one of Clara Bow's outfits for her big night at the Grammys, which she used to announce her new album.Getty Images

“Who is Clara Bow?”

is the question that many

Swifties

have since answered on TikTok, while speculating about the content of the song.

What has become clear is that the actress has been a great inspiration for the Pennsylvanian: her Grammy outfit, signed by Schiaparelli, emanated classic film diva vibes, and by diving into the photographic archive, her followers have found an image of around 1925 by Bow in which the parallels are undeniable.

Same lips in a deep red with the Cupid's bow marked, a similar set of necklaces, a dress with a strapless neckline and a hairstyle with a side parting.

And it seems that Swift's fixation with Bow is not something new: the star that remembers the actress on the Walk of Fame is at 1500 Vine Street, on the corner of Sunset Boulevard, and the singer's followers have spun this with a verse from his single

Gorgeous

(from the

2017 album

Reputation ):

“Whisky on ice, Sunset and Vine.”

What story will the multi-award-winning composer want to tell in the song that bears the name of the diva of golden Hollywood?

If it is inspired by her life, everything points to a sad song.

“More than any other woman artist of her time, Clara Bow personified the most dizzying aspect of an unreal era, the Roaring Twenties,” read the front page of

The New York Times

on September 28, 1965. Her obituary It occupied a prominent place, with a photo, on the front page of the newspaper.

And that for a decade, since 1931, when she married cowboy movie actor Rex Bell

(The Man from Arizona

,

Tombstone),

she lived away from the spotlight, on a ranch in the Mojave Desert, The Walking Box Ranch, which now aspires to be part of the National Register of Historic Places.

“The remote mystique of the desert landscapes of southern Nevada is exactly what captured the attention of Hollywood stars Rex Bell and Clara Bow, who longed for solitude and an escape from the competition for power and success,” the website highlights. Travel Nevada tourism.

Bow had to get away from everything, live in the middle of nowhere, to escape her own fame: she received 45,000 fan letters a month.

Clara Bow, ca.

1930Everett Collection / Everett Collection /Cordon Press

Because she forged her own legend.

In

Photoplay

she told in great detail about her sad childhood in Brooklyn: her parents were poor;

She had two sisters who died shortly after birth, one two hours old and the other two days old;

At her school the other girls made fun of her and called her a

“tomboy”

;

His best childhood friend, Johnny, died in a fire... “His clothes burned and he screamed in pain and fear, he said 'Clara, help me' and threw himself into my arms,” Bow recalled in the article ( When he started acting, it was said that he used that memory to cry authentically in front of the cameras).

But that childhood did not undermine her determination.

She decided to be an actress and achieved it by entering a contest called Fame and Fortune in 1921, when she was 16 years old.

Her mother, Sarah, was fervently opposed, but her father, Robert, supported her.

“He gave me a dollar.

She knew that even that was a great sacrifice for him.

I went to a cheap photographer in Brooklyn and he took two photos of me.

They were tremendous.

Without daring to tell my mother, I sent them to the contest.

And I sat down to wait and pray.”

Bow's prayers, and his magnetism, worked.

She was selected and appeared at the contest

casting

in an old wool dress and red pants.

She felt out of place as soon as she stepped foot in her offices, surrounded by other applicants looking over her shoulder.

"One of the men said, 'There's an interesting face here, this girl with the beautiful eyes.'

I looked around and blushed.

“It was me, little Clara Bow.”

Shortly after, the powerful producer BP Schulberg bet on Bow, giving him a three-month contract for $50 a week.

She moved to Hollywood and in 1922 she earned her first film credit,

Beyond the Rainbow,

although her role was cut.

From that moment on, she did not stop working (in 1924 she participated in seven films; in 1925, in 15).

Her career was taking off and she was having fun, but that success only served to cover up her trauma.

Her biographer, David Stenn, author of

Runnin Wild

,

maintained that her father raped her when she was 16, although she always adored him and took him to live in Los Angeles after her mother's death in 1923. Sarah Bow had suffered breakdowns. mentally and even tried to murder her daughter, according to what the actress told Adela Rogers St. Johns: “I saw my mother in her nightgown, her hair fell to her knees.

She had a butcher knife in her hand.

I said 'mom?'

She didn't respond, she just walked over to the bed.

(...) 'I'm going to kill you, Clara,' she said very quietly.

'It will be better'.

She put the knife to my throat.”

2HC5756 "It" the silent film poster with It Girl Clara Bow.

Image shot 1927. Exact date unknown.Alamy Stock Photo

Clara Bow herself dealt with mental health issues throughout her life.

She was the epitome of the

flappers,

the daring women of the jazz age that Francis Scott Fitzgerald talked about in his books, immortalized in Daisy Buchanan from

The Great Gastby,

a 1925 novel. And like Zelda, the writer's wife, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was admitted to different institutions until she died of a heart attack at only 60 years old.

"She had her moment in the sun, but even at the height of her popularity she was an

outsider,"

Playboy

founder

Hugh Hefner, executive producer of the 1999 documentary

Clara Bow: Discovering the 'It',

said of her in the

Los Angeles Times .

Girl

.

Another

outsider,

the singer Courtney Love, was in charge of narrating her life in that project.

It has not been the only documentary that has explored her life, which she has never ceased to fascinate: Elaine Shepherd produced

Clara Bow: The original 'It Girl' in 2012,

for the BBC network.

In it she explored her rise and fall.

“Her studies made her work until she was exhausted.

She took a lot of pills so she could get out of bed in the morning and sleep at night.

“Her executives were trying to exploit her as much as possible, the gossip magazines were writing the most terrible lies about her, and she had to deal with it all alone, in her early twenties,” Shepherd discovered as he delved into her dazzling career.

Bow rebelled against that wheel, and decided to get out of it.

In 1927 she was defined as the original

It girl

, starring in the film

It,

by Clarence G. Badger and Josef von Sternberg.

In it, Bow played Betty Lou, a department store clerk in love with her boss and separated from him by social class.

She was an icon of fashion and beauty, her influence went far beyond cinema.

They say that Max Factor created a lipstick for her that lasted longer on her mouth and thus arose the fashion of marking the Cupid's bow that triumphed in the 1920s;

The businessman even took charge of doing her makeup on set on occasion.

Her bob haircut also found her one of her biggest champions, along with Louise Brookes and Marion Davies.

Actress Clara Bow in a scene from the movie "Hula" (Photo by Donaldson Collection/Getty Images)Donaldson Collection (Getty Images)

She was the

flapper and the

It

girl ,

but she got tired of being that and the roles that came her way.

She couldn't break away from the profitable romantic comedies that kept her fans coming to see her, even during the Great Depression.

Her first talkie,

The Wild Party,

in 1929, was a success;

Her career was not doomed despite her Brooklyn accent, unlike several stars who were unable to make the transition.

Bow went on to make more successful talkies, including

Dangerous Curves

and

The Saturday Night Kid

, but she had great anxiety about making them, and the first signs of the mental illness that would plague her for the rest of her life were nervous breakdowns during the film. filming of talkies,” explains its entry in the

Forgotten Hollywood

section of the Golden Globes.

She left the big screen, the luxury dresses and the sparkling roles, she had two children with Rex Bell —“Not all mothers have had the same experiences.

I'm sure no other mother has had one like mine or anything like that (...) I take this very seriously.

All my life I have wanted to have a baby and now that I am going to have one I realize that I have to be very careful with what I do and what I say," she explained in a magazine, pregnant with her first child, who was born in 1934. — and from 1932 he made few public appearances.

She had already passed the time of her public exhibition, those dizzying years in which she lived dedicated to acting.

That work in front of the cameras had been her refuge, the only way in which the girl who was called “chicazo” during her childhood in Prospect Heights managed to survive.

Bow was always aware that the brilliance could cover the misery beneath: “There is only one thing you can do when you are very young and not a philosopher, if life has frightened you with its cruelty and made you distrust its mores.” bright promises.

You must make life a kind of cheerful curtain to throw over the abyss into which you have gazed and where hideous memories lie.”

Portrait of actress Clara Bow (1905-1965), wearing a fur-trimmed robe, for Paramount Pictures, 1926. (Photo by Eugene Robert Richee/John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images)John Kobal Foundation (Getty Images)