TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, Colleen Moore wasn’t the first actress to portray the flapper on-screen. In 1920, a small production company released an unmemorable film entitled, simply, The Flapper. “In some sections you may have to define the title,” one trade journal advised potential distributors, “though its meaning is pretty generally known by now.”1
The writer got it half-right and half-wrong. Even as D. W. Griffith was fighting a losing battle to wield film as a blunt cudgel in the fight against modern corruption, movie audiences in the decade before America’s Jazz Age were growing accustomed to a new sort of female character—far more sexual, more wanton, and more dangerous than charming Mary Pickford or dear, sweet Lillian Gish.
There were several early varieties on the femme fatale, none of which could be properly termed “flapper.” The “vamp,” commonly associated with the actress Theda Bara, was an exotic, sexually charged creature who left behind a trail of ruined lives and craven men. By one expert assessment, Bara had “the wickedest face in the world, dark brooding, beautiful and heartless.”2 Bara and others played this role expertly, and to wide acclaim, between 1914 and 1920.
In a world where female sexuality was increasingly discussed—but still feared and misapprehended—the vamp was a tantalizing yet sufficiently dark and distant figure for public consumption. There were fast women in the world, but they were still foreign and unusual creatures.
The vamp’s days were numbered from the start. As moviegoers became more comfortable with overtly sexual women, they turned to a less menacing model—that of Cecil B. DeMille’s crazy, debauched wife. In films like Old Wives for New (1918), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), Male and Female (1919), and The Affairs of Anatol (1921), De Mille fashioned a stock story line: Bored—and boring—housewife faces stiff competition from a faster, looser, younger woman (often her husband’s secretary); husband leaves housewife (or considers leaving her); housewife dons makeup, hikes up skirt, and begins frequenting hot jazz clubs, often on the arm of a dark, mysterious sheik; husband falls in love with his wife again; marriage is saved.
Everyone—except perhaps the husband’s secretary, who is left out in the cold—lives happily ever after. Little wonder that Motion Picture magazine hailed DeMille as “the apostle of domesticity.”3 He was preaching a new gospel of personal freedom and sexual exploration, but within the bounds of matrimony.
In some respects, The Flapper, appearing in 1920, represented a bold new direction for the New Woman of the silver screen.4 The film was “no old, creaking vehicle for a star to ride in,” announced Moving Picture World, and it turned its lead actress, Olive Thomas, into an overnight celebrity. Thomas played the part of Genevieve King, a typical middle-class girl who grows weary of life in tiny Orange Grove—a town that “didn’t even have a saloon to close”—and persuades her parents to pack her off to boarding school in New York. Forsaking her wholesome boyfriend, Bill, Genevieve begins chasing after older men and falls in with a group of ne’er-do-well city slickers, including Richard Chenning, a handsome lech several years her senior, and a gang of jewel thieves who involve her in criminal mischief.
Genevieve, a good girl at heart, devises an elaborate plot to bring the crooks to justice. The film ends with the young protagonist safely back in Orange Grove, reunited with good old reliable Bill.
The film launched Olive Thomas’s star, and it might easily have been Olive—and not Colleen Moore—who graced the cover of every fan magazine in the mid-1920s. But Olive was unlucky. On vacation with her husband in France, she mistook an unlabeled bottle of bichloride of mercury for common cold medicine. Maybe, as some of the papers suggested, she had trouble adjusting to fame and intended to kill herself. Either way, Olive Thomas was out of the picture. A few flapper films later, Colleen Moore was in.
With the release of Flaming Youth in 1923, the flapper became Hollywood’s most lucrative character type, and Colleen Moore became the visual embodiment of the flapper.
Photoplay magazine offered a ringing endorsement of Colleen’s flapper credentials, concluding that she “looks the part with her straight bobbed hair and her mischief-filled eyes.5 Once upon a time she wore curls—and a demure expression.” But no longer. A writer in Muskegon, Michigan, went so far as to assert that Colleen was “the very apotheosis of the cult of unhampered youthful self-expression.”6
In her subsequent flapper movies—Painted People (1924), The Perfect Flapper (1924), Flirting with Love (1924), We Moderns (1925), Ella Cinders (1926), Naughty but Nice (1927)—Colleen played essentially the same role.
“Colleen Moore is a brilliant young flapper who contrives to disguise her flapperish appeal with the sweetness of the eternal maiden,” a New Orleans newspaper observed.7 “If she is pert and naughty she makes you feel that your grandmother was, too. So all is forgiven. God forbid we hold anything against grandma! A very tricky young lady, Colleen, with a very wise bean, too.”
Colleen’s effectiveness as a flapper icon lay in her apparent willingness to bend the rules but never break them. She was the safe flapper—stylish, vivacious, full of verve and pluck, yet ultimately inclined to abandon life in the fast lane for more wholesome living. It was a winning combination: Young viewers loved Colleen for her modern sensibilities, and their parents loved Colleen for her fundamental decency. It was a balance she worked as hard to strike off-screen as on-screen.
“What kind of girl does a girl have to be,” asked a Hollywood fan magazine, “—to be the kind of girl the fellows want?8 The girl of today has this problem to face, says Colleen Moore.” Colleen explained that “a girl should not be too gaily dressed,” but on the other hand, “she should not dress too plainly as a bit of tinsel is attractive; and she should remember that men want her to play but not to get soiled.” Ultimately, Colleen maintained, “the golden glitter of tinsel is fine … but not acceptable in a wife.”
If she was a conservative model for a flapper, Colleen was a talented performer nevertheless. She was an expert comedian, able to act with her whole body and to move her eyes and face in perfect synch with a part. In Ella Cinders—a clever nod to Cinderella—she played the part of a beleaguered modern-day stepdaughter who scrapes together money for professional photographs, wins a magazine contest, and travels to Hollywood to become a film star. Her comic timing and adorable antics struck a resonant chord among moviegoers—men and women alike.
Much of Colleen’s commercial appeal clearly lay in the public’s knowledge that she was happily married to John McCormick, a former publicist and now producer for First National, whom she wed shortly before filming Flaming Youth. If Colleen Moore, the archetype of flapperdom, could embrace the domestic ideal, then surely it was acceptable, if not wise, for American parents to allow their daughters a little harmless experimentation with bobbed hair and jazz. And maybe even liquor. Being a flapper didn’t necessarily entail a blanket renunciation of marriage and motherhood. It was just a phase in every girl’s life. A harmless, necessary, cathartic phase.
In press interviews, Colleen drove home precisely this point. “It’s such fun asking my husband for money,” she admitted with delight, “—not a bit like the funny papers say!9 And I just love it, too. And I’m just dying to bake a cake for John. John will eat it. He is brave and he loves me. I didn’t know there was a domestic bone in my body, but all of a sudden I get such a thrill out of ordering milk and paying the butcher’s bill! I always have breakfast with John—always fix his coffee for him. Do you think I’d let anybody else do that? I should say not. He takes one lump with cream. I’m trying to be a model housewife.…”
None of this was true. Colleen usually spent eighteen hours a day on the set and took most of her meals, including breakfast, at a bungalow on the studio lot. The mansion she shared with John McCormick was well staffed by an army of cooks and servants. She probably didn’t even know where to find the coffee in her own kitchen.
No matter. For millions of young women torn between the romantic ideal of heterosexual love and marriage and Jazz Age glitz, Colleen held out hope that one could have her cake and eat it, too.
But hers wasn’t the last word on the subject. By 1925, the other studios were eager to cash in on the flapper. They turned to Clara Bow, whose on-screen portrayal of the flapper was as different from Colleen Moore’s as were her origins and upbringing. “Nobody wanted me t’be born in the first place,” she once claimed.10 Sadly, it was probably an accurate assessment.
Clara entered the world in 1905 in a tenement slum on Sands Street in Brooklyn, a neighborhood strewn with garbage, rats, prostitutes, pawnshops, cheap saloons, and dangerous characters.11 Her parents, Robert and Sarah Bow, were a mismatch from the start. Robert was an alcoholic with an addiction to street prostitutes; Sarah was an emotionally unstable teenager who married to escape her even drearier childhood home. When their first child died two days after birth, Sarah threw her body into a trash bin outside the family’s cheap railroad flat. A second baby also died in infancy. Sarah handed her over to the public health authorities for an anonymous burial.
Later in life, Clara was tight-lipped about her childhood in Brooklyn. “I have known hunger, believe me,” she once admitted.12 “We just lived, and that’s about all.”
Life would have been hard enough if young Clara had only had to contend with her profoundly dysfunctional parents. But nothing else seemed to go right. For one thing, she stuttered. “H-h-h-ello, Clara,” the other kids at P.S. 111 would greet her in scornful imitation. They mocked her ragged clothing and ridiculed her family. “I was the worst-lookin’ kid on the street,” she once acknowledged.13 Virtually alone in life, Clara learned how to protect herself against the roving street gangs that did unspeakable violence to neighborhood residents. “My right was famous,” she boasted years later. “I could lick any boy my size.”
She did have one friend—a local boy named Johnny who lived in the downstairs apartment. But even that friendship was too good to be true. One day, Clara heard a hair-raising cry from Johnny’s flat. She ran downstairs to find the young boy engulfed in flames. There had been a kitchen fire. Clara smothered Johnny in a blanket and cradled him as he wailed out her name. He died in her arms.
School didn’t offer much in the way of solace. Clara’s education ended in seventh grade, and even that was a stretch. “I never opened a book and the teachers were always down on me,” she confessed with typical self-doubt and deprecation. “I don’t blame ’em.”
Just getting up in the morning caused her heartache. Going to school was misery. The other kids were merciless. “They was always hurtin’ my feelings, and I thought they was silly anyway. I never had no use for girls and their games.” The only consolation she had in life came at the price of a nickel admission. “In this lonely time, when I wasn’t much of nothin’ and I didn’t have nobody,” she explained, there was “one place I could go and forget the misery of home and the heartache of school.
“That was the motion pictures.”
Every spare nickel Clara could get her hands on, she fed right into the local movie theaters. “We’d go to the Carlton or the Bunny Theater,” remembered John Bennett, one of her few friends from the neighborhood, “and see whatever was showing. I was the only one who would listen to her little tales of fantasy, her dreams.” One day, as they sat out on the front stoop of her building, Clara “told me that she was going to be a great movie star. Of course, I didn’t believe it.”
Bennett would live to eat his words.14 In a sequence of events that could easily have been ripped from a Hollywood script (say, for instance, Ella Cinders), in 1921, at age sixteen, Clara entered a Fame and Fortune contest sponsored by Motion Picture magazine. Dressed in the only outfit she owned—“a little plaid dress, a sweater, and a red tam”—she dragged her father to a local photography studio at Coney Island and somehow persuaded him to pay a dollar for two cheaply produced snapshots. Clara thought the results were “terrible,” but she hopped the subway to the offices of Brewster Publications, which owned Motion Picture, and submitted her application personally. “Called in person—” the contest manager scrawled beneath her paperwork. “Very pretty.”
Much to Clara’s surprise, she made the final cut and was invited for a mock screen test. The other girls laughed at her worn clothes. How could someone win a Fame and Fortune contest with holes in her shoes? “I hadn’t thoughta that angle,” she acknowledged later. “I’d only looked at my face, and that was disappointin’ enough.”
The girls lined up for the screen test. They were to walk before the camera, pick up a telephone, fake a casual conversation, and then suddenly appear deeply concerned by the voice on the other line. While the other finalists scratched and clawed at one another for the privilege of performing first, Clara stood back.
“I sat through every one of those tests,” she remembered, “watchin’ everythin’ that was done, everythin’ they was told, every mistake they made. The trouble was, I thought, that they was all tryin’ t’do it like somebody they’d seen on screen, not the way they’d do it themselves. When it came my turn, I did it the way I’d do it myself.” Three days later, Clara received a call from Brewster Publications. She had won.
It was tough going at first. The contest carried a small role in a feature-length film, Beyond the Rainbow. Humiliatingly, it was only after she dragged several neighborhood girls to the local theater to see the film that she learned her part had been cut. But she was tenacious.
“I wore myself out goin’ from studio t’studio, from agency t’agency,” she told an interviewer years later. “But there was always somethin’. I was too young, too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat.”
Luck was bound to strike sooner or later, and it did. Though she had been cut from the final print, Clara’s role in Beyond the Rainbow caught the attention of another director, who cast her in a film called Down to the Sea in Ships. That role, in turn, won her a part in Grit, a low-budget film produced by a motley group of Ivy League alumni and written by their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both of these movies brought her to the attention of a producer named Jack Bachman, who persuaded his West Coast partner, B. P. (Ben) Schulberg, a former producer at Paramount who had formed his own outfit, Preferred Pictures, to pay Clara’s way out to California. She would start with a three-month trial contract at $50 per week. The year was 1923.
It didn’t take long for Clara’s career to take off. Her first several films caught the eye of executives at other studios, who began paying Schulberg for Bow’s services. Under a system then common in Hollywood, she continued to earn $50 per week—soon raised to $200—while Preferred Pictures, her contractual employer, raked in several times that amount for loaning her out. This was the case in 1924, when First National retained Bow for a new flapper feature, Painted People, starring Colleen Moore.
Three weeks into production, Colleen and Clara began shooting a scene together. When the director, Clarence Badger, ordered some close-up shots of Clara, Moore objected sharply. “You don’t need that close-up,” she told him. Badger acquiesced. What else could he do? Colleen Moore was the star of the film and the toast of Hollywood. Her husband, John McCormick, was the film’s producer and, by extension, Badger’s boss.
Clara might not have been articulate, but she was street smart. She understood the dynamics at play. “You’re a big star,” she pleaded with Colleen. “Ya don’t need close-ups like I do. Every close-up I get helps me. Why d’ya haveta stop ’em?” The answer was self-evident.
Miscast in a Victorian role, contemptuous of Colleen Moore, and generally desperate to extricate herself from the picture, Clara went to a doctor and asked him to perform sinus surgery that she had been putting off since her arrival in California. “Now. I want the operation right now,” she demanded. When she showed up on the set the next week in bandages, it was clear she would have to be replaced and all the scenes involving her reshot with a new actress.
Painted People went over time and over budget. And the last laugh was on Colleen Moore. “She made that bitch pay,” recalled Artie Jacobson, Clara’s then boyfriend, with a smile. It was the only time that Moore and Bow would work together.15
Years later, Colleen condescendingly sized up her rival as an unsophisticated dimwit. “The only time I ever met Clara socially was at a party given by Adela Rogers St. Johns in her English country house at Whittier, California,” she wrote. “The conversation was a fairly intellectual one, and Clara finally became bored, I guess, and decided the time had come to liven up the party. She livened it up considerably. She stood up and, after getting everyone’s attention, proceeded to tell the dirtiest story imaginable, with such perfect pantomime that nothing was left to the imagination. I was as shocked as everybody else, but I had to laugh inside, she did such a first-rate job.”
In fairness to Moore, Clara was, in fact, known for her off-color stories and her off-color lifestyle. In just four years—from 1925 to 1929—she burned through five fiancés, including Victor Fleming, who later directed The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind; had affairs with a number of other men, including stuntman-turned-leading man Gary Cooper; and frequently boasted to friends—in the most indelicate language she could muster—of Cooper’s physical attributes and sexual prowess.
Where Colleen Moore bought a mansion, Clara purchased a modest seven-room Spanish bungalow made of stucco for $15,000. She filled one room with dirt, so her dog would have somewhere to play at night. Her accent was working-class Brooklyn, and she made no apologies for it. Her grammar was terrible, and she made no apologies for it. In effect, she made no apologies for who she was.
But in her own way, Clara was a class act. In an industry teeming with prima donnas, she showed up to the set on time, worked well with the directors, and never hogged the camera. “She could cry at the drop of a hat,” remembered Billy Kaplan, a prop man on the Preferred Pictures set, “and you’d believe her. A beautiful actress, just beautiful. And I often wondered to myself, ‘Where did this young girl get all this knowledge, this understanding, this feeling?’ ”
Kaplan remembered that the entire crew had a crush on Clara. “We all loved her,” he said, smiling.16 “The electricians, the grips, the painters … everyone loved Clara.” She was one of them—working-class, unpretentious, without airs. “Clara was always a good guy on the set,” Kaplan concluded. “Very professional, always on time.”
She was also kind—a rarity in Hollywood, even in those early days—and particularly with Budd Schulberg, Ben Schulberg’s shy thirteen-year-old son.
“Golly, Mr. Schulberg,”17 she asked with a smile, “is this your little junior? Gee, he’s cute as a button.” Clara ran her hands through Budd’s hair and teased, “How wouldja like ta drive up to Arrowhead this weekend, Buddy? Just the two of us.”
“Now, Clara,” replied Ben, “he’s just a little boy.”
“Okay, maybe we’ll hafta wait a couple of years,” she answered.
When Ben ushered his son out of the office, Clara gave him a big wave. “See ya, Buddy boy. C’mon ’n’ see me on the set. Sincerely I’m very glad to’ve meetin’ yuz.”
Buddy would have occasion to take her up on the offer. He was on location at Pomona College when Clara filmed It, the movie that would immortalize her. With the entire cast and crew watching, Clara ran over to young Buddy, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and informed everyone present that he was her “secret boyfriend,” her “steady fella.” In between takes, Buddy sat with Clara in her brand-new red Kissel roadster—one of Clara’s rare indulgences—and discovered they had something in common: Buddy had a terrible stammer. Over the next few weeks, while the young boy idled the time away on the set, waiting for his famous father to wrap up each day’s business, Clara made a point of sidling up to him in the roadster, shoulder to shoulder, asking him how he was enjoying school—which, of course, he wasn’t; the other kids were teasing him mercilessly—and sharing stories about her own unhappy childhood. She fed him sticks of gum and assured him that his father was “awful proud of ya. He’s even showed me some of ya poetry.…
“Someday you’ll grow up and be a big producer becuz of all the things he’s teaching ya,” she promised. “I know yuh gonna make me awful proud of ya, too.” This was pure Clara Bow—more content to idle the time away with an unhappy thirteen-year-old than to flaunt her own importance. On some level, it was a defense mechanism.
“She was peppy and vivacious in front of people,” one of her colleagues remembered, “but when you talked to her one on one, she was serious and sad.”
“I liked her,” recalled another actress, “but I didn’t get to know her well.18 Nobody did. She was away from the crowd, a loner.… Clara was an awfully sweet girl, but a very lonesome sweet girl.”
Budd Schulberg, who went on to become a screenwriter, seems to have gotten over his acute sensitivity. Years later, he callously misinterpreted Clara’s kindness as a sexual overture and summed up his “secret girlfriend” as “an easy winner of the Dumbbell Award. … 19 She was simply an adorable, in fact irresistible, little know-nothing. It was as if Father had picked out a well-made collie puppy and trained her to become Lassie.”
Budd was clearly a quick study in the family business. His father, Ben Schulberg, and his uncle, Sam Jaffe, treated actresses like sex toys and seem to have compelled Clara into relationships that she could scarcely afford to decline in those early days.20 “She was scared of all the people in the business,” an unrepentant Jaffe maintained years later, “but she trusted me. She was in love with me and wanted to marry me, but I couldn’t think of marrying her. She came from Brooklyn. She looked cheap. Men wanted to screw her.”
It was easy to dismiss Clara as a déclassé kid from Brooklyn, but what Colleen Moore, Budd Schulberg, and Sam Jaffe didn’t understand was that Clara was a pro.21 She fashioned a new flapper image that was more dangerous and overtly sexual than Moore’s winsome Irish flapper, and in so doing, she became a viable alternative for many young girls searching out a slightly more risqué standard-bearer than Colleen Moore.
In The Plastic Age (1925) Clara played Cynthia Day, a fast-living coed who catches the eye of a clean-living scholar-athlete, Hugh Carver, and leads him down a dim path away from books and football practice and toward an alluring nightlife involving lots of cocktails and lots of heavy petting. Chastised by his parents, who expect more of their son, the young hero steels himself for a slow march back to gridiron glory. But not without help. In a selfless gesture that few viewers would expect from a femme fatale, Clara’s character, billed as “the hottest jazz baby in film,” withdraws herself from the equation. For Hugh’s own good—realizing that he will never crack the books or commit himself to football as long as she’s around—Cynthia breaks off the relationship.
In the final scene, Hugh achieves lasting glory at the “big game,” and the two protagonists are reunited. It was the role that made Clara Bow famous. “She has eyes that would drag any youngster away from his books,” crowed one reviewer.22
While on the set in 1927, Clara astonished Clarence Badger, who was directing her in a new film, with her astute grasp of audience dynamics.23 “Following my directions,” he later explained, “Clara gazed at [her male counterpart] with an expression of lingering, calflike longing in her pretty face: perfectly all right if she had stopped there. But she did not. Continuing on, the camera still grinding away, her doll-like tantalizing eyes suddenly became inflamed with unwholesome passion. Then the rascal suddenly changed her expression again, this time to one of virtuous, innocent appeal.”
It had been a long day, and Badger was on edge. “Cut!” he cried out, and demanded to know why Clara had taken it upon herself to direct the scene. “Well, Santa,” she replied with a smile, using her pet nickname for the normally even-keeled, cheerful director, “if ya knew your onions like ya was supposedta, you’d know the first look was for the lovesick dames in the audience, and the second look, that passionate stuff, was for the boys an’ their poppas, and the third look … well, just about the time all them old ladies’re shocked an’ scandalized by the passionate part, they suddenly see that third look, change their minds ’bout me havin’ naughty ideas, and go home thinkin’ how pure an’ innocent I was. An’ havin’ got me mixed up with this girl I’m playin’, they’ll come again when my next picture shows up.”
Badger had to admit that the logic was impeccable. If he had any lingering doubts, the box office returns would have set his mind at ease. Clara’s next film, It, based on a best-selling novel by Elinor Glyn, turned her into the uncontested flapper queen of Hollywood. Bigger than Colleen Moore. Bigger than Joan Crawford. Bigger than them all.
In It, Clara played Betty Lou Spence, a lovesick lingerie salesgirl who falls for the wealthy son of the department store owner. “Sweet Santa Claus,” she declares, “give me him!” The complex plotline runs the same course as Bow’s other films. Her character is naughty but nice—sexy but sweet—red hot but redeemable. In the end, Betty Lou gets her man, and Clara Bow became the first “It Girl”—a sobriquet Glyn came up with to describe a woman with that elusive sex appeal all women (supposedly) want but few (supposedly) have.
“It, hell,” quipped Dorothy Parker.24 “She had Those.”
Though Clara Bow never raked in the kind of salary that Colleen Moore made—in part because she was indifferent to the sort of Hollywood politics that Moore and McCormick excelled at—in the aftermath of It she hired an attorney. Together, they went to the mat with Paramount—Clara’s new studio, now that Ben Schulberg and Adolph Zukor, Paramount’s founder, had made amends and merged their operations.
Her new contract called for a salary of $5,000 per week, a limit of four films per year, a no-loan-out clause to prevent Schulberg from exploiting her talent, a $25,000 cash advance, and a $10,000 bonus for each film she completed.25 Unlike most contracts, Clara’s did not contain a decency clause. She could not be summarily fired for landing on the front pages in some sordid sex scandal. Bow’s only concession was that her bonus money would be held in escrow until 1931. Payment would be contingent on her satisfying the general decency code.
At the time, it seemed like a good deal.
Louise Brooks, “the girl in the black helmet,” as she appeared in the mid-1920s.