Clara Bow is second only to Garbo as the sex symbol of silent
pictures: where Garbo smouldered, Clara was all superexcited,
outgoing, and selling "It." Clara in reruns may seem less sexy
today, but her liveliness remains undimmed. Then, however, her
sexuality was a phenomenon: she was F. Scott Fitzgerald's
quintessential flapper, known to be sleeping with director Victor
Fleming and actor Gary Cooper at the same time. When she sued her
best friend for embezzlement, the friend revealed Clara's goings-on
to a shocked nation (items to be laughed with or applauded today).
When nervous Clara defended herself on the witness stand, her
tears, fears, and thick Brooklyn accent mixed with a heavy head
cold had the courtroom jeering her. Since winning a beauty contest
at 16 and breaking into movies, Clara had lived on her fans'
adoration. Their jeering knocked her flat; she had no other
resources. She had devoted so much of herself to her image over a
ten-year period (in one year she made 15 movies), that - says Stenn
- "off-camera, she did not exist as an actualized. personality."
Doctors agreed, labeling her schizophrenic like her mother and
sisters, who were themselves in asylums. (Her mother, a part-time
prostitute, would lock scared little Clara into a
rat-and-roach-infested closet while turning her tricks - later she
tried to murder Clara for being a "hoor"; at 16, Clara was raped by
her father.) When she died at 65, after nearly 40 years of hermetic
seclusion and partial recovery from mental illness, she was
wealthy, with a $450,000 estate. Aside from genetic continuance in
her two sons and grandchildren, she had also really become Clara
Bow, existing only in film, at her most beautiful and
superspirited. Nicely turned, clean, clear debut volume by Stenn,
above average as a celebrity bio. (Kirkus Reviews)
Hollywood's first sex symbol, the ' It ' girl, Clara Bow was born
in the slums of Brooklyn in a family plagued with alcoholism and
insanity. She catapulted to fame after winning Motion Picture
magazine's 1921 " Fame and Fortune" contest. The greatest
box-office draw of her day-she once received 45,000 fan letters in
a single month, Clara Bow's on screen vitality and allure that
beguiled thousands, however, would be her undoing off-camera. David
Stenn captures her legendary rise to stardom and fall from grace,
her success marred by studio exploitation and sexual scandals.
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