Clara Bow
 Clara Bow, the flame-haired actress known in Hollywood in the Roaring 20s as the It girl, was known for her Brooklyn accent, a brash, unrefined manner and a mentally-ill mother who, she claimed, once tried to stab her with a butcher knife to prevent her from becoming a Hollywood whore.
Bow was only 16 when she won her first film role (the prize for winning a movie magazine beauty contest). She was luckier than most young actresses. Her accent would remain irrelevant until the talkies came along a few years later and with it girls of the so-called Jazz Age werent supposed to be ladies.
No doubt about it, Bows sensual, Cupid-bow lips and a shrink-wrapped approach to her attire helped her gain a foothold in the film industry. Hard work, however, kept her there.
 Clara appeared in more than a dozen films during her first year in Hollywood, and was considered a budding young starlet.With her cropped coiffure, short skirts and a devil-may-care attitude toward most of the standard vices, Clara was invaribly cast as a flapper. However, she eventually grew to loathe portraying that type, though a role in the 1972 film It catapulted her to the top of the Hollywood heap. A couple of years later, Bow, an eighth-grade dropout from the slums, became the highest paid actress in the film industry.
Clara was just as busy off-screen as she was on-screen. Her sexual escapades caused one journalist to remark, She laid everything except linoleum. Rumor had it that she especially liked entertaining the entire Southern California football team.
 Bow earned the nickname of the Mountie of Sex, because, no matter what, she always got her man. She never had her share of serious suitors, she just had several at a time. One columnist wrote that her sexual engagements were about as frequent and enduring as the average girls headaches.
 Once, when fiance Harry Richman became upset over her fling with Gary Cooper, she told the fellow that monogamy wasnt part of her game plan, and to take it or leave it. The Hays Office (Hollywoods moral watchdog) complained frequently that Clara was doing more than just symbolizing sex. She had been seen on occasion in public cavorting with a married lover. Film execs told her to marry Harry or leave town. She did neither and her next picture, The Wedding Night, was a huge success.
 In the early 1930s, however, numerous scandals, (financial as well as sexual), caused her considerable damage. In her mid-20s, she became a Hollywood has-been. She later married B-movie cowboy Rex Bell, did a stint in a couple of mental hospitals and refused to write her memoirs, fearing her children would find the truth about her flamboyant lifestyle too shocking.
 She once observed to a Hollywood friend, I dont want to be remembered as somebody who couldnt do anything but take her clothes off. Shes also famous in Hollywood circles for another quotation: Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry.
|
|
