The Daily Telegraph - Features
A real-life epitome of Babylon – or one of predatory Hollywood’s earliest victims?
The wild career of Clara Bow inspired Margot Robbie’s latest role – yet the truth is sadder and darker.
As the silent era made its jerking transition to sound, there was only one star in Hollywood who was receiving 8,000 fan letters a week. She was the foremost box-office attraction in America in the years 1928 and 1929, and ranked second in 1927 and 1930, despite being paid a fraction of her peers. Yet as quickly as her flame burned bright, it was brutally snuffed out: at the ripe old age of 25, after a string of largely fictitious sex scandals, she was essentially disowned by Paramount.
Her name was Clara Bow. This epitome of the Jazz Age flapper, the original “It” girl – a soubriquet derived from her 1927 smash hit of the same name – provides the basis for Margot Robbie’s good-time girl Nellie LaRoy in Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s wild and wayward exposé of industrial-scale debauchery in the Los Angeles of the 1920s.
Babylon has borrowed many a titbit from Bow’s fairy-tale ascent. Just as LaRoy is shown doing, Bow got the upper hand over a higher-billed actress, her flapper predecessor Colleen Moore, while making the lost comedy-drama
Painted People (1924). Denied the close-ups that she pleaded with Moore to be given, she took herself off for an operation on her sinuses, and came back in bandages, bringing production to a halt. Bow’s amazing ability to cry on cue, which astonished every director she worked with, is also a Babylon staple – including her answer to one onlooker about how readily she managed this. “I think of home,” she simply replied.
The rapidity of Bow’s rise is explained by the captivating naturalism of her performances. Critics couldn’t help noticing her: she’d have a nothingy supporting part and still run away with the whole movie. Come Victor Fleming’s Mantrap (1926) and then It (1927), her star power was a sensation, guaranteeing queues around the block.
Babylon barely attempts to sketch the whirlwind ordeal of Bow’s true-life story, but at least it doesn’t resort to luridly reiterating the most salacious
legends about her – the ones set down by Hollywood reject Kenneth Anger in his infamously unreliable 1959 “tell-all” book, Hollywood Babylon.
Taken as gospel, Anger’s work would lead you to believe that Bow had sex during wild, drug-fuelled orgies with the entire USC football team, including a young John Wayne, at a time when their fame was almost as great as her own. Stories such as these have been comprehensively debunked over the years, by the likes of Bow’s biographer David Stenn, and Karina Longworth, creator and host of the podcast You Must Remember This.
Bow was certainly no retiring wallflower. Her propensity for juggling multiple male suitors (“Clara’s beaux”, quipped wags) during her rise to the top is something she had no inclination to hide. When her engagement to Victor Fleming, who had taken her under his fatherly wing, was abruptly broken off so that she could have her way with dashing co-star Gary Cooper, everyone in town knew what was going on – such was her lack of hypocrisy or guile. Bow was a very ordinary Brooklyn girl, with no grasp of the industry’s prudish etiquette.
Born into a loveless marriage and squalid circumstances, Clara was the third unwanted baby her parents produced – the previous two having died shortly after childbirth. Her very existence was unlikely, let alone her survival through a horrific childhood to eventually become the biggest film star in the firmament.
Absent most of the time, her father Robert was a philandering busboy with ambitions to sing, while her mother Sarah, who would be hospitalised for psychosis and epilepsy in 1922, hated them both, and insisted Clara would be better off dead, rather than pursuing what she considered a whorish career in the performing arts.
After she won the fortune contest in 1921 that would pave the way for her first break, Clara faced a scene of domestic terror that’s pure Piper Laurie in Carrie: waking up to the sight of her own mother coming at her with a butcher knife. This would traumatise her forever, as would memories later unearthed in psychotherapy of her father raping her.
Well before Anger’s field day, the facts of Bow’s indiscreet love life gave the press licence for distortions that today would be the stuff of large libel payouts. In March 1931, the Coast Reporter ran an unscrupulous “exposé”, alleging a drunken spree with a Mexican croupier and two prostitutes, ending with two people dead and no remorse on Bow’s part, as well as sex in public with her numerous paramours, copulation with her chauffeur, her own cousin Billy Bow, several female servants, a koala bear, and Duke, her pet Great Dane.
Paramount should have thrown every lawyer on their payroll at this career-ruining filth. (Its writer, Frederic Girnau, would eventually be sentenced to eight years in prison for writing it.) The studio, under the miserly head of production BP Schulberg, had been filling their coffers with grosses from Bow’s cheaply produced hits, while keeping her pay locked down at a measly $1,500 per week – especially insulting when you compare Colleen Moore’s $125,000 per picture.
Bow’s popularity, though, was by now on a greasy downward slide. Rather than protecting this once-prized asset or nurturing her desire to be taken seriously, Schulberg just grumbled about delays on the production line and tried forcing her back to work. The quality of her scripts had become routinely terrible – the thinking being that Bow herself in flapper mode guaranteed a healthy crowd, so why bother writing anything decent, or more dramatic, for her?
Waiting in the wings were rising stars such as Jean Harlow and Sylvia Sidney, who were afforded the helping hand of better material, whereas Bow had always had to lump whatever she was given. When the ignominy of so much dirty laundry being aired – and so much invented – caused a nervous collapse, Schulberg schemed to get her out of her contract, thereby saving the studio a $60,000 payout, and showed Bow the door.
Though two final pre-Code talkies for Fox awaited – Call Her Savage (1932) and Hoop-La (1933) – stardom had soured irretrievably for Bow, and she retired from the screen for good, embarking on a troubled marriage to the Republican politician Rex Bell. Long stints at a sanatorium would attempt to get to the bottom of her mental illness, which was diagnosed as schizophrenia. The industry had pressurised and essentially destroyed her by exploiting her fizzing vitality, just as it would do mere decades later with Marilyn Monroe. In a town that liked to operate as a tight network of family businesses, this dazzling nobody was adored by audiences – until the moment they were taught to treat her as a pariah.
‘Babylon’ is released on Jan 20
Bow’s propensity for juggling male suitors was something she had no inclination to hide