Clara Bow, the It Girl Hollywood cashed in on and then wrote off

Clara Bow

Photo: Otto Dyar (1892-1988) / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 29, 1905 Brooklyn, New York City, United States
Died	September 27, 1965 (60)
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Wings, It
Awards	Hollywood Walk of Fame star

In the film that gave her a nickname for life, Clara Bow plays a department-store salesgirl who decides she wants her boss, the heir who runs the store, and goes after him with nothing but nerve and a grin. Nothing in It looks rehearsed; directors kept extra cameras running around her because she rarely did the same thing twice. Paramount sold that spontaneity by the reel. When she broke, the people who had profited from her decided she had never been much of an actress at all, and film history mostly took their word for it.

The life behind the grin was close to unbearable. She arrived in a bare room above a church in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, the third child of a mother who had already buried two infant daughters. Sarah Bow suffered from epilepsy and episodes of psychosis; Robert Bow was often out of work, and the family moved constantly, rarely leaving the neighborhood. From early childhood she nursed her mother through seizures. One winter night she woke to find her mother holding a butcher knife to her throat. Sarah was committed and died within the year. According to her biographer David Stenn, Bow was raped by her father as a teenager, while her mother was institutionalized.

The movies were her exit. Clara Gordon Bow, born on July 29, 1905, entered the Fame and Fortune contest run by a Brooklyn fan-magazine publisher at 16, won it, and haunted the publisher’s office until something came of it. Her break was a tomboy part in Elmer Clifton’s whaling drama Down to the Sea in Ships, shot in New Bedford, Massachusetts; billed tenth, she stole the picture, reviewers said, and she was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars of 1924.

In the summer of 1923 she left for Hollywood under contract to B. P. Schulberg’s Preferred Pictures, a small independent. Preferred loaned her to other studios for $1,500 to $2,000 a week while paying her between $200 and $750. In 1925 alone she appeared in 14 productions, sometimes juggling three pictures at once and working 18-hour days. After The Plastic Age, her biggest hit yet, Preferred went bankrupt, and Schulberg landed at Paramount as an associate producer, catapulted there, the trade press noted, because he held Clara Bow’s personal contract.

Paramount made her the defining screen face of the late twenties. Herbert Brenon’s Dancing Mothers and Victor Fleming’s Mantrap, both in 1926, showed a performer who could turn a flirtation into a full character in a single close-up, and she negotiated her Paramount contract without a morals clause. Then came Clarence Badger’s It in 1927, built around Elinor Glyn’s notion of an indefinable magnetism, and the label stuck for good. She also starred in William A. Wellman’s Wings, the first Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards, which she dismissed as a man’s picture with her as the whipped cream on top of the pie. She was the top box-office draw in America in 1928 and 1929, and in January 1929 she received more than 45,000 fan letters.

Sound did not finish her, whatever the familiar story says. Dorothy Arzner’s The Wild Party kept her at the top in 1929, though she hated the microphone and kept glancing up at it. What wore her down was everything around the films. The trial of her former secretary, Daisy DeVoe, over Bow’s finances dragged her private life into the papers; a tabloid called The Coast Reporter printed lurid allegations about her, most of them untrue, and its publisher’s $25,000 blackmail attempt earned him eight years in prison. In 1931 she entered a sanatorium and Paramount released her from her last assignment. She married the actor Rex Bell that December in Las Vegas and made two successful films for Fox, Call Her Savage and Hoop-La, before retiring in 1933, still in her twenties.

The verdict on her talent was written largely by men who had something to protect. In 1981 Budd Schulberg, B. P.’s son, called her someone who couldn’t act and compared her to a puppy his father had trained to become Lassie. A convenient memory for the heir of the man who rented her out at a markup. Kevin Brownlow’s history of silent film, The Parade’s Gone By, left her out entirely; he later explained he had never secured an interview, but the gap hardened into a judgment. Louise Brooks wrote to Brownlow that Bow had made three pictures that would never be surpassed. In 1999 the American Film Institute named her among the nominees for its 100 Years…100 Stars list and then left her off the final selection. Bow fed the instinct myth herself, saying rehearsals sapped her pep. Yet David O. Selznick put a price on that instinct: with her in a picture, he recalled, the studio could gross a million and a half where another actress would gross half a million.

The years after Hollywood were harder than the scandals. Bow and Bell raised two sons on a Nevada ranch and ran The It Cafe on Vine Street from 1937 to 1943. In 1944, while Bell was campaigning for Congress, she attempted suicide. In 1949 doctors at the Institute of Living diagnosed schizophrenia although she had no hallucinations; she rejected their explanations and left. She spent her final years largely alone in a bungalow in Culver City, cared for by a nurse, and died of a heart attack on September 27, 1965, at 60. A Hollywood Walk of Fame star came in 1960; an Al Hirschfeld portrait on a United States postage stamp followed in 1994.

Her afterlife has run ahead of the canon. Betty Boop borrowed her look. Bérénice Bejo’s Peppy Miller in The Artist was modeled mainly on her, Margot Robbie played a character drawn from her in Babylon, and Taylor Swift closed The Tortured Poets Department in 2024 with a song named after her about what fame costs the person inside it. The films themselves are slowly coming back. A presumed-lost short, The Pill Pounder, turned up in an Omaha auction; a complete 4K restoration of Victor Fleming’s Hula from a nitrate print held at the Library of Congress has screened with Stenn introducing it; and on March 22, 2026, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival showed a new 4K restoration of It at the newly reopened Castro Theatre.

In June 2026 the publisher Histria collected for the first time in book form the memoir she serialized in Photoplay at the height of her fame, issued as Clara Bow: My Story. Of her 58 films, eleven are lost outright, and the ones that survive still argue her case better than any history that skipped her. She had put it more bluntly herself: she had made a place for herself on the screen, and you could not do that by being Mrs. Alcott’s idea of a Little Woman.

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Tags: actors, actresses, silent film, Clara Bow, Victor Fleming, Call Her Savage

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