THE PLASTIC AGE PUT CLARA’S saucy face on the cover of fan magazines, and in the year that followed, with Father choosing her vehicles carefully, she achieved full-fledged stardom with Dancing Mothers and Mantrap. In Kid Boots, he cast her opposite his and Ad’s little friend from the Lower East Side, now a top Broadway song-and-dance comedian, Eddie Cantor. But what carried Clara to a peak far above silent rivals like Colleen Moore and Joan Crawford was a providential meeting that my father arranged for her with Elinor Glyn.
Elinor Glyn was the Jacqueline Susann of the Twenties, with the racy best-selling qualities of Irving Wallace and Harold Robbins thrown in. Her autographed picture on the mantle over the fireplace in my study shows a long- and strong-faced, handsome woman in her middle forties, her hair parted in the middle and looped neatly over her high forehead like a theater curtain. “William S. Hart in drag,” a studio wit had described her. More sophisticated than Percy Marks, she had written novels that were considered naughty-naughty if not immoral: Three Weeks and His Hour. Now she had written It, a word that had its modest place in our language as an impersonal pronoun until Miss Glyn, with the showmanship of the English aristocrat she affected, dusted it off, shined it up, and upper-cased it as a more compact and suggestive word for what the Jazz Age magazines had coyly been calling S.A.
Elinor Glyn, with her arch-grande dame manners, her exaggerated British accent, and her sweeping conception of it, was as generic to the Twenties as Aimee Semple MacPherson, Peaches Browning, and—thanks to Miss Glyn’s magic wand—Clara Bow. If her work was laughed off by the highbrow critics as unadulterated junk, you would never have guessed it from Miss Glyn’s hauteur. To hear her talk, she was the embodiment of all the great English lady novelists from Emily Bronte to Virginia Woolf.
When It was published, my father snapped it up as the ideal balloon in which to waft his red-haired protégée even higher into the Hollywood heavens. He arranged a meeting at the studio between the preeminent authoress and the preeminent Jazz Baby, and Miss Glyn placed on the head of Miss Bow the official crown: “Of all the lovely young ladies I’ve met in Hollywood, Clara Bow has It!”
Thus Clara Bow became not just a top box-office star but a national institution: The It Girl. Millions of followers wore their hair like Clara’s and pouted like Clara, and danced and smoked and laughed and necked like Clara. They imitated everything but her speech because fortunately the silent screen protected them from that nasal Brooklyn accent.
Fifty-odd years ago—in the Golden Age of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Gertrude Ederle, Bobby Jones, Big Bill Tilden, and Lucky Lindy—Clara Bow reigned as the carefree princess of a carefree generation, the idol of the shopgirl and the sweetheart of the frat house. Her salary jumped like a hot tip on Wall Street from fifty to two-fifty, from five hundred to a thousand dollars a week, and then two, three, four, five thousand dollars pouring in every week! She couldn’t spend it fast enough, though she found a lot of people who were happy to help her. She bought the most expensive red roadster she could find, to match her hair, and she filled it with seven chow dogs, also chosen for fur to match Clara’s flaming locks. In a great blur of red she would speed down Sunset Boulevard, driving faster than the cars on the oval racetrack on the open flatlands of Beverly Hills (where the Beverly Wilshire Hotel now stands). A press agent’s dream, she kept firing her chauffeurs because they were afraid to drive fast enough to please her. Her simultaneous love affairs with her leading men, her directors, and handsome hangers-on were the talk of Hollywood and the subject of spicy fan-magazine spreads.
By this time, it seems, B.P. had become more father-confessor and guidance counselor than paramour. Her own father, frankly, was a mess, though in the true Clara Bow style she remained openhearted and openhanded in her devotion. Robert Bow had followed his daughter to Hollywood, where he made awkward stabs at managing her unexpected career. Then she set him up in a dry-cleaning establishment, but even though she twisted the arm of all her studio friends to bring their business to him, the enterprise failed. Even when Clara offered to hustle the clothes from the studio to his shop on roller skates, Robert Bow failed. Undaunted, he opened a restaurant. That too went down the drain, at a cost B.P. estimated at $25,000. Everything Robert Bow touched turned to tin—or worthless paper. But in those high-kicking Twenties, it didn’t really seem to matter: Clara had more than enough for everybody. Fan mail was flooding in at the rate of 3,500 letters a week. If she watched her weight and her booze—an extra few pounds on that energetic little frame could make the difference between the irresistibly curvaceous and the undeniably pudgy—there was no reason why The It Girl, still in her early twenties, could not roll along at her dizzy pace of two hundred and fifty thousand a year for at least another ten years.
While my father was working to keep Clara’s star high above the world, my mother was coming to the rescue of another volatile career, Judge Ben Lindsey’s. The Judge had established himself as one of the controversial figures of the period by advocating Companionate Marriage. People, according to his daring conception, should not join together in marriage without first knowing if they were sexually compatible. A period of trial marriage, in Lindsey’s opinion, would avoid a great number of the divorces over which he was presiding in his Denver court. A particular case in which he voiced this opinion caused him so much notoriety that he was virtually hounded out of that straitlaced city. Ever on the prowl for intellectual innovators, Mother invited Judge and Mrs. Lindsey to come to Los Angeles as her houseguests while she tried to find a place for him in the local judicial system.
In contrast to his theories, the Judge turned out to be a mild-mannered fellow, prim in appearance, conservative in dress and manner. Somehow Ad found him a place in a Court of Domestic Relations, over which he presided with the same attack on conventional procedure he had demonstrated in Denver. He felt that a couple appearing in court for a contested divorce would have a better chance of working out their personal differences in a more relaxed atmosphere—not just in his chambers but in a private home. Sometimes Ad would be allowed to sit in on these unravelings of domestic knots, and even to put in her psychoanalytical advice. (So deep an impression did Mother’s new prize make on our household that years later, when I was to be married in my father’s house in Beverly Hills, I felt it only proper to track down Judge Lindsey to officiate. And preside he did, in his most unconventional style, saying “Now let me see, I forget which side you’re supposed to stand on, Budd… I don’t think I ever actually married anybody before. Mostly I helped to get them unmarried, or companionately married.”) Vanity Fair, the sparkling magazine of that era, was featuring an amusing series called Impossible Interviews, between, for example, Stalin and Rockefeller, Coolidge and Garbo…. One of these Impossible Interviews came to actuality in our living room when Judge Lindsey decided he would like to meet Clara Bow and asked my mother to arrange it. The apostle of unmarried sex in America wanted to interview one of its most celebrated practioners.
When Clara arrived late, as expected of sex goddesses, it was obvious she had tested her latest delivery of bootleg scotch before leaving home. Introduced by my mother, Clara said, “Hi, Judge, B.P. tells me ya believe people oughta have their fun without havin’ t’ get married. Ya naughty boy!” Whereupon she brought that famous Cupid’s bow of a mouth close to his and gave him a fat smack on the lips. Judge Lindsey drew away—but not before a smear of lipstick was left on his face. Poor Mrs. Lindsey glanced at my mother for help. The Judge had hoped to carry on a conversation with Clara regarding her modern views on sex and marriage. Perhaps it would supply a chapter or at least some apt quotations for his next book. But Clara Bow was the original existentialist before that word was invented. She insisted that the Judge get up and dance with her, and while he tried awkwardly to oblige her, she began to play a coy game with his buttons. Beginning with his top jacket button, she said, “Rich man… poor man… beggar man… thief…,” her busy little fingers unbuttoning with each designation. By the time the childhood game had brought her to “Indian Chief,” Clara Bow was undoing the top button of Judge Lindsey’s fly. The ultra-liberal judge became as arch-conservative as a Salt Lake City elder. He quickly retired to the protective arm of Mrs. Lindsey, reasonably safe from Clara’s ardent pursuit. In a little while the Lindseys had taken flight.
When B.P. upbraided Clara, she pouted like the child she was. “Well gee whiz, if he believes in all that modern stuff like ya say he does, how come he’s such an old stick-in-the-mud?”
My father’s million-dollar property had become a million-dollar headache. He used to call her Crisis-a-Day Clara. When she could not decide between two persistent lovers, Gary Cooper and the equally virile Vic Fleming, one of B.P.’s strongest directors, she had a nervous breakdown.
Her home in Beverly Hills was modest compared to Pickfair and Valentino’s Falcon Lair, but it was the scene of a nonstop open house. There were all-night poker games; the back door to the kitchen was always open so that patrolling cops and other friendly passersby could drop in and help themselves to beer from the icebox; there were always jazz records playing loudly on the Victrola; Clara’s bootlegger was there so often that he became one of the regular guests; and every now and then a young extra-boy or bit-player from Clara’s last hit picture would threaten her with blackmail if he didn’t get his love letters back.
She would bring her problems to Father’s office, and he would try to bring some order to her life even if finally he was unable to provide the same service for himself. He advised her to settle down a little bit; to concentrate on a single man, if she could; to put her father on a modest salary rather than to indulge his commercial dreams at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. He thought she should find a secretary-companion to live with her and take care of her affairs. When she followed that advice, her father promptly fell in love with the young lady and married her. So Clara had both of them to support while casting about for a new companion.
During this so-called search for stability, she wandered off to the Cal-Neva Lodge on the California-Nevada boundary at Lake Tahoe. In those days Las Vegas was not even a gleam in a Godfather’s eye. But as soon as you were one inch into the state of Nevada, you could take part legally in games of chance, and the boys who operated these games were happy to make them available to the well-heeled suckers from Hollywood. So Clara Bow was introduced to the game of blackjack. A nice man in a tuxedo explained the rules to her rather quickly and gave her some pretty blue chips to play with. The trick of the game is to draw a total of 21. If you draw a card that carries your total above that amount, you lose the bet you anted. If you stop with a total under 21 and the dealer has a greater total under 21, you also lose. It’s a nice game, lots of fun to play, and very nice for the boys in the tuxedoes.
Clara was already a rather proficient if reckless poker player, and this game seemed easy. The only trouble was, the dealer seemed either better at it or luckier than Clara. After twenty minutes she had lost all her pretty blue chips. But the tuxedoes could not have been more obliging. They were happy to hand her another hundred chips. In less than an hour the dealer had raked in all her chips again. By this time she was bored with the silly little card game and thought she would try roulette. This was fine with the tuxedoes. Clara Bow didn’t have to worry about credit at Cal-Neva. They would advance her anything up to one hundred thousand dollars. But meanwhile, they thrust a blank check in front of her, for her to sign for her losses at the blackjack table.
As in a scene from a movie my father was soon to produce, Underworld, the diminutive Miss Bow looked around at the lumbering bodyguards with wrestlers’ chests stretching their starched shirt-fronts, and signed—a check for twenty thousand dollars.
What Clara thought she had lost was a mere one hundred dollars. For as she tried to explain to my father, “Y’see Ben, I thought those chips were only worth fifty cents each. It wasn’ until I had to sign the check that they told me they were a hundred dollars each. I was bettin’ ten ’n’ twenty on every deal. How was I supposed t’ know?”
My father told his tearful little sexpot that she had been duped. If they had failed to explain the value of the chips in advance, and had encouraged her to buy a second stack, she had been doubly duped. This was the morning after the infamous blackjack game and there was still time to stop payment on the check.
“Oh, what a swell idea!” she said. “They really cheated me. I shouldn’t hafta pay it.”
“I’ll help you,” my father promised, “but only on one condition, Clara. That you never go into a casino again. They’re dangerous places when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”
My old man was talking from firsthand experience.
“I promise. I promise. Anything to get out of this awful mess!” said the poor little rich girl.
Two days had passed when Clara called my father at midnight. She was almost too hysterical to talk. “B.P., something awful—something terrible just happened! I’ve got to talk to ya right away—hurry—please!”
My father put down a script he was reading late—for he worked as hard as he played—and drove out to Clara’s. She was still in hysterics. Two tough customers had come from Cal-Neva to see her. Their bosses had sent them with this message: “Either you make that check good—tomorrow—or you’ll get acid all over your pretty puss. Instead of the It Girl you’ll be the Ain’t Girl.”
That may sound like dialogue left over from a Grade-B Warner Brothers movie, but my father told me this story at least a hundred times without a single variation, until I not only memorized it but became convinced of its truth.
When Clara told him of this threat, he advised her to appear cooperative, but to ask them to pick up the check at the studio from her boss, Mr. Schulberg. She was to say that she was such a hot property that the company was prepared to pay her debt rather than risk the destruction of her face.
Early next morning my father phoned Buron Fitts, the local district attorney. This was a legitimate extortion case, but even if it hadn’t been, Mr. Fitts was always ready to go out of his way to help any motion-picture executive. To put it bluntly, the studios owned Buron Fitts. This was in the post-Desmond Taylor and Arbuckle days, when scandals that might have destroyed the reputations of valuable movie stars could be hushed up by the hear-no-evil-see-no-evil approach of the D.A.’s office. This was Cover-up, Hollywood Style, in the days when the film capital was a self-sufficient oligarchy, sunny and benevolent on the surface but hard and vindictive at the core.
The Clara Bow-Cal-Neva case gave Mr. Fitts an opportunity to score a double whammy: to provide an invaluable service to a studio while throwing a net around criminal invaders from Nevada. Fitts told my father to alert his office as soon as the call came in from the Lake Tahoe boys. B.P. was to make an appointment with the goons, his tone promising payment on arrival. The call came in as expected. Fitts ordered a brace of detectives to B.P.’s office, where they staked themselves out behind the long red-gold curtains on the far wall. When the enforcers arrived, Father played out the scene he had rehearsed with the district attorney. A large checkbook was displayed conspicuously open on his desk.
“Now let me get this straight,” B.P. began. “You’re telling me that unless I write out this check and hand it over right now, you’re going to throw acid in Miss Bow’s face, so that she’ll never be able to work in pictures again?”
“You heard it right, mister,” one of those George Rafts rose to the bait. “And we ain’t playin’. We got the juice right on us. So no more jaw-music. Gimme that check or Miss It won’t be worth shit.”
The visitors were enjoying their little couplet when out from behind the curtains, pistols drawn, sprang the Buron Fitts specials. Before the blackjack cowboys knew what hit them, they were in handcuffs and booked for extortion and a sheet of other crimes. For a while both my father and Clara Bow were given police protection, for fear that the Cal-Neva masterminds would retaliate. But gamblers needed the good will of the free-spending movie crowd and someone up there must have called off the dogs, for there were no further threats or efforts to get even.
There was a joke going around in the dying months of the Twenties: “She had It but she lost it at the Astor.” Precisely where Clara Bow lost It was more difficult to pinpoint. The decline and fall of It and the It Girl was a downward spiral. The economic collapse near the end of 1929 had only an indirect effect on the world’s most identifiable flapper. She wasn’t wiped out in the market as were some of her famous co-stars. Her money had never been invested, wisely or unwisely. It was all in cash and furs and jewels and handouts and, best of all, in the contract that promised her five thousand dollars every week, come rain or come shine, come drunk or sober, come champagne happy or midnight blue, for years on end. So should Clara Bow worry?
The answer was a sobbing yes. The impact of sound on silence was nightmare and renaissance: literally death and life. These victims didn’t jump out of windows like the Wall Street plungers. Their suicide was more gradual. Behind the locked doors of their Beverly Hills mansions, the talkie drop-outs searched for an answer to their fears and frustrations in the amber bottles their bootleggers hauled to the back door by the case.
For Clara Bow it was the beginning of a thirty-five-year death-in-life. Her first sound picture was a resounding disaster. Overnight, the Clara Bow I had listened to on my father’s sets and locations, and in his office and living room, had to talk from the newly installed sound-picture screen. Millions of adoring fans heard for the first time the flat, nasal Brooklynese we who knew her had always associated with her. It was a playback to the days of Theda Bara, when the Vampire suddenly went out of style at the end of World War I. Unbelievably out of a job after having played to a million fans a week, the little Jewish girl from Cincinnati—whom William Fox promoted as an Arabian princess born at an oasis in the shadow of the Sphinx—turned to the theater. Her opening on Broadway drew a sold-out audience laced with all the reigning celebrities. The first time she opened her mouth, they laughed. This was the irresistible vampire against whom the Church and an organized group of outraged wives had fulminated as a threat to the established order? This was the Serpent Woman? Cleopatra and Salome incarnate? At the first sound of her childlike piping, cruel laughter ended Theodora Goodman’s career.
Clara’s trouble was more than vocal. In the early days of sound, photographic fluidity was surrendered to mechanical rigidity. The microphone, not yet movable from a boom, had to be hidden in a flowered plant or a centerpiece on a table. The actors had to play to it. And the camera, imprisoned in an enormous soundproof box, had lost its mobility. In those early years of primitive sound, the performers were far more circumscribed in movement than they would have been on a proscenium stage. Clara’s appeal was in her movement—her impromptu Charleston, her incomparable necking. Even her moments of Rock-a-bye-Baby sadness could not be played to a stationary mike.
To add to the pressure, she was faced with the new leading men with stage experience, like Freddie March. His voice was theatrically trained and when he spoke his dialogue he did so with a confidence that conveyed a new kind of screen realism—realism in sound. And the more effective the image of this new wave from the theater, the Marches and the Ruth Chattertons, the more pathetic and ludicrous became the efforts of the great silent stars like Jack Gilbert and Clara Bow.
Life was throwing little Clara pitches she had never had to face before, sinkerballs, spitballs, and knuckleballs. Strike One was the sudden decline and fall of the flapper. In a time of breadlines, dust bowls, farm foreclosures, rent strikes, and men in frayed double-breasted suits selling apples on street corners, somehow the high-kicking, gin-swizzling, short-skirted apostles of the carefree were going out of style. Even if she had been endowed with a golden throat and the theatrical poise of an Ethel Barrymore, Clara Bow as the ultimate flapper would have been discarded in favor of new models better suited to the troubled Thirties.
Strike Two was the terrifying challenge of sound.
And Strike Three came in the form of a blonde hairdresser-turned-secretary who became Clara’s constant companion. Her improbable name was Daisy DeVoe.
After Clara’s first secretary became her stepmother, Daisy moved in. Thanks to her fussing over Clara’s spit curls and wind-tossed bob at the Studio, Miss DeVoe had been invited to the house for one of those merry all-night poker games. Daisy stayed on until the morning, fell asleep in one of the guest rooms, and waked to find herself appointed personal secretary and live-in companion to Clara Bow. The relationship ripened into virtual sisterhood, or even closer. One never traveled anywhere without the other. At last Clara had a true protector. Daisy De Voe stood between the beleaguered sex goddess and the outside world.
I have only fleeting memories of Miss DeVoe when she and Clara began to summer near our house at Malibu Beach. With my pal Maurice, I used to fish for tomcod off the rickety Malibu pier and sometime I’d drop off a few at Clara’s. Daisy De Voe was always the first to come to the door, knowingly separating Clara’s friends from the hordes of undesirables. Clara was always effusively affectionate with me, making a fuss about the little tomcod and showing them off to her chums.
But I saw very little of Clara and Miss De Voe because I spent most of my time on the beach or the tennis court while they seemed to spend all of their time in their little house. In fact I don’t remember ever seeing them on the beach. Ever since my mother—the great innovator—had discovered Malibu as a peaceful retreat from Hollywood, and had built the first house on its crescent beach, it had quickly developed into a select, very in movie colony, each house that of a reigning celebrity.
Clara and Daisy simply had moved their smoke-filled nonstop party to the shores of the Pacific. They were poker people, loud-music people, night people. Although Father’s liaison with Clara was by this time a burned-out case, or a case smothered in scores of subsequent cases, my mother did not like the idea of Clara’s moving so close to us, and discouraged me from going over there. It wasn’t jealousy on Ad’s part but a lifelong contempt for the ignorant, the wastrels, the low-lifes. If I wanted adult companionship, Mother suggested, I would do much better to visit with our immediate neighbors, the Frank Capras. They were serious, productive, and moral citizens. The thoughtful Frank Capra and his loving wife Lucille went out of their way to be hospitable to the young son of a rival studio head. They were their own people and—Ad was right as usual—the ideal antidotes to Clara and her devoted Daisy.
Their first summer at Malibu, Daisy De Voe was a time bomb ticking. It was detected by an obscure young actor who had changed his name from George F. Beldam to Rex Bell. He became a member of the Clara Bow household in that high-pressure period when Clara was suffering from mike fright. Rex Bell was the latest, most devoted, and seemingly most conscientious of Miss Bow’s many suitors. He became highly suspicious of Miss De Voe’s life-style. In fact, from his favored seat at the banquet, Rex Bell was convinced that Daisy had been stealing Clara blind. He got Clara to fire the woman with whom she had shared her house and her life for the past three years, and to file charges against her.
Rex Bell obtained a warrant to open Daisy’s bank vault, and there, to no one’s surprise, was an interesting collection of Clara’s jewelry. There was also a parcel of Clara’s missing canceled checks and, strangely enough, on each of those cancellation dates there was a transfer from the Clara Bow Special Account—over which Daisy DeVoe held complete domain—to Daisy’s personal account. Apparently, for several years Daisy had been writing checks from the Clara Bow account on the basis of “one for you and one for me.” And if the suspicious or perceptive Mr. Bell had not come along, the trusting Clara probably would have left her bank account and her household in her closest friend’s sticky fingers until the end.
Daisy had not only heisted fistfuls of jewelry, costly gowns, and fur coats, but something she thought might be even more valuable—packets of Clara’s love letters. Clara was romantic about those letters. She had a rich assortment from Gary Cooper, Vic Fleming, Harry Richman, an Ivy League football star who tried to commit suicide after Clara had kissed him so forcibly that he had begun to lose his sanity, the doctor who had performed an appendectomy on Clara and whose wife had sued Clara for alienation of affection and settled for thirty thousand dollars. … Clara never bothered to look over her canceled checks or to read her bank statement, but sometimes she liked to take out these letters from old beaus and enjoy a good cry. Well, now that Rex Bell had caught Daisy with her hand in the sugar bowl, the rejected companion thought those letters from lost loves offered the most promising avenue of escape.
She came to my father, and also to Clara’s attorney, with a simple proposition. She would accept $125,000 in exchange for the letters; simultaneously Clara would withdraw the charges. Otherwise under cross-examination in the courtroom she would reveal all. If Daisy DeVoe was to go under, Clara Bow would go down with her.
Unfortunately, what the embattled Daisy did not realize was that although Clara had not yet gone under for the third time, she had been down twice and was now desperately treading water in a final effort to stay afloat. Clara’s fans were deserting her in droves, were turning to those silent beauties able to break through the sound barrier, like Carole Lombard, or to actresses recruited from the stage, like Claudette Colbert. Putting it harshly, the reputation of Clara Bow was no longer worth $125,000 to the studio. But even if Clara had still been the It Girl of 1928, my father probably would have followed the same course he chose: to call Hollywood’s good friend, District Attorney Fitts.
With charges of extortion as an added threat, Daisy signed a thirty-page confession admitting theft of $35,000 in cash, along with all the other loot. Meanwhile, Clara was having another of the nervous breakdowns that would plague her for the rest of her tormented life. Suffering from insomnia and crying spells, she used alcohol and pills to assuage the pain.
Clara wanted to withdraw the charges against her ex-confidante, she told my father. She was afraid to face the public ordeal of the trial. Her eyes were puffy from drink and sleeplessness and anxiety, her kewpie-doll face slightly bloated, all those cute curves rounding into fleshiness. She didn’t want her fans to see her this way. She was afraid of the reporters and the photographers who would hound her on her way into and out of the courtroom. And finally, she was still somewhat ambivalent toward her pal Daisy. She was convinced that Rex, who had replaced Daisy as manager of the exchequer and housemate, had been in the right and Daisy shockingly in the wrong. But Clara had given her unquestioning heart to Daisy De Voe and she dreaded having to stand up and accuse her in court.
The migrant workers were starving in southern California and the soup kitchens in Los Angeles were doing a better business than the movie palaces, but Clara’s appearance in our local court still drew thousands of curiosity seekers. The It Girl who had been the personification of the super-flapper was now subdued and withdrawn. At times she burst into tears in the courtroom as Daisy tried to fling the charges back in Clara’s pretty little teeth. Daisy said she had had to write all the checks because most of the time Clara was too drunk to know what she was doing. Although it was irrelevant, she exposed Clara’s exorbitant gifts to various boyfriends, from college football players to aging directors. At times the judge would have to admonish Daisy and her defense attorney: Remember, it is Daisy De Voe who is on trial here, not Clara Bow.
But that was only for the record. In the minds of the tabloid readers and the scandalmongers it was the peccadilloes of Clara Bow that turned the trial into a drama more irresistible than It or Dancing Mothers. Clara and Daisy pointed fingers and traded tears, cries of outrage, reproachful silence, and choked-up press conferences.
When the circus was over, Daisy was convicted on only one count, although in the opinion of the judge there was evidence to convict her on all thirty-seven. A shaken Clara appealed to the judge to be merciful in his sentencing. But he gave Daisy DeVoe eighteen months.
Although the judge had done his best to exonerate Clara, her penalties were heavier. Daisy helped to defray her defense expenses by selling a series on Clara’s bedroom activities to the yellow press. It was peddled in book form as Clara’s Secret Love Life. Clara was scheduled to start a new picture, but in an emotional session with my father she told him her nerves were shattered and she wasn’t sure she could ever work again. She withdrew to a sanitarium and he signed a sexy young Irish girl, Peggy Shannon, to replace her.
Clara’s contract still had several years to run, but it was canceled by mutual agreement. She was rescued from still another breakdown by Rex Bell, who married her and took her to his ranch in Nevada. It would be nice to think that they lived happily ever after. But this was no movie. Though they lived on a ranch that in Rex Bell’s Midas hands grew to 350,000 acres, Clara had a weight problem, a drinking problem, a sleeping problem, and, most of all, the problem of being out of a job as the Number One Sex Goddess of the World. Washed up at 26, Clara Bow had staggered into the winter of her discontent in what should have been the summer of her youth.
It was more than half a dozen years before I saw Clara again. By that time, I was out of college and living with my father in one of those white-stucco neo-Spanish mansions in Beverly Hills. B.P. told me that Clara had just been released from a local sanitarium and had phoned to say she would like to drop in. When she arrived I saw a roly-poly woman who looked to be in her forties, although her actual age at the time was only 32. Instead of the bangs and spit curls that had given her the look of a windswept hoyden, her hair was set in a reddish-brown permanent wave. A layer of fat imprisoned the once-perfect oval face that fan magazines liked to call heart-shaped. But neither jowls nor bulges at the hips could take away from the dancing brown eyes of Clara Bow, still accentuated by their dark frame of mascara, still punctuated by eyebrows drawn with an eye for symmetry.
Father asked his butler Lloyd to bring champagne. Lloyd popped the cork and poured Moët-Chandon into three fine glasses. Clara raised the glass to her lips and peeked over the rim of it at my father with those same flashing and flirty eyes I had first seen when she was twenty and I was ten. “Well, B.P., here we are!” she said. Behind the excess flesh, the childlike face was still there begging to be loved. I thought of the day I had sat with her in her red roadster in Pomona, with the smitten young Gilbert Roland hovering nearby. “Let’s drink to all the good times we had,” Clara said. “And to you, Clara dear,” my father said gallantly.
Clara finished her wine, and as Lloyd refilled her glass, she looked vivacious and merry-eyed. I felt a little uncomfortable because even after all the years and all the changes they had both gone through she was being outrageously flirtatious with my father. He was only in his mid-forties at the time, but I in my intolerant early twenties felt he was far too advanced in years for these silly games.
“You know, your father and I were always very good friends,” Clara said, turning those big brown saucer-eyes on me, and it was almost as if she was picking up the dialogue left over from our tête-à tête in the roadster.
“And we still are, Clara,” my father said.
“Yes, of course we still are,” Clara parroted. “And we always will be—to the end of our lives.” And she raised her glass to toast the promise.
“To my favorite producer,” Clara said.
“And my favorite star.”
“Now Ben, you’re going to make me cry,” Clara said. And a tiny tear slid down her round, rouged cheek. In the background I could hear the ghosts of the mood trio who used to play on her silent set: “Rock-a-bye, Baby …”
I felt it was their moment. And as it turned out it was, so far as I know, the last time they ever saw each other. When I rose and went over to shake her hand, she pulled me to her and kissed me on the lips. “I c’n hardly b’lieve yer so grown-up,” she said, with that same Brooklyn accent. “I guess I’ll always think of ya as that shy little kid who stammered so bad ya c’d hardly talk t’ me. If I hadn’t been in love with ya poppa, I betcha I’d’ve fallen in love with yuh.”
I left them alone in that enormous cavern of a living room. Two of the great names of the Hollywood Twenties were like Hansel and Gretel lost in the backwoods of Beverly Hills. From the two-storied hallway, I could hear them laughing together over their champagne at some private joke from long ago.
After that farewell visit with my father, Clara Bow lived her life as a ghost of Hollywood Past, either as a prosperous rancher’s wife near Searchlight, Nevada (where the one-time actor had become a political power in the state), or in sanitariums, to which her condition increasingly restricted her. Another decade was to pass before her old friends heard of her again. In 1947 she surfaced momentarily as “Miss Hush,” the mystery voice in an NBC radio contest. She murmured a mysterious jingle:
“Two o’clock and all’s well.
Who it is I cannot tell.
Queen has her king, it’s true,
But not her ribbons tied in blue.”
Listeners phoned in to nominate the Duchess of Windsor, Alice Marble, Shirley Temple, Margaret Truman… But a resourceful Midwestern housewife deciphered the hushed code: In nautical time two o’clock was four bells, and there were Clara and Rex Bell and their two sons. The anonymous Who it is struck echoes of the old It. Her king was Rex, of course. And the ribbons tied in blue would make a bow: a Clara Bow. For this flash of perception, the winner earned an airplane, a refrigerator, a new car, a furnace, a fur coat, and maid’s service for a year. All Clara won was a few days’ return to notoriety. The double prongs of the irony pressed sharply on those who had cared for her. Clara had been chosen as the target for this contest because she was so totally unknown to the new generation that was coming in as her fame was flickering out. And when she came back for her moment in the spotlight, it was through the microphone that had driven her into retirement. Instead of being seen and not heard, as in her glory years, now she was heard but unseen.
As the years rolled on, Clara became unable to speak coherently or even to recognize old friends. Every Christmas she wrote to Louella Parsons, whose column was still a king-maker and a queen-breaker in the fickle fiefdom of Hollywood. “Do you still remember me?” a shaky scrawl begged. There was another brief surfacing in 1960 when Clara wrote to Louella’s rival columnist, Hedda Hopper: “I slip my old crown of It Girl not to Taylor or Bardot but to Monroe.”
Unlike Marilyn, Clara Bow lingered on in living death until she was a completely forgotten sixty-year-old recluse. Her final years were spent in a small apartment in West Los Angeles, watching television. Her favorite shows were the Late-Lates. She needed lots of sleeping pills to overcome the insomnia that had set in in the days of her mike fright and the ordeal of Daisy De Voe. Early one morning, her live-in nurse discovered, she would be able to sleep forever. Ten years of worldwide fame had been sandwiched between almost twenty years of penniless obscurity and thirty years of has-been obscurity. But for one last day little gum-chewing, g-dropping Clara was back on the front page, and not merely of the racy Los Angeles Examiner, but of the august New York Times:
CLARA BOW, THE ‘IT’ GIRL, DIES AT 60; FILM ACTRESS SET VOGUE IN 1920’S.
When I stared at that story in the Times I thought of the vibrant Clara I had known in my youth. And although I had never met her, I thought also of Zelda Fitzgerald, who was the flapper of the literate international set during the same riotous period over which Clara Bow had presided. They were like opposite sides of the same shiny coin—let’s call it Zelda for heads and Clara for tails—and when the coin fell dead on the dance floor both sides came up losers.