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| Birth Name(s) : Clara Gordon Bow |
Date of Birth: July 29, 1905 |
| Status:
Married
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Partner:
Rex Bell |
| Profession:
Actor |
Official Site
Go to the Clara Bow Official Homepage |
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Full Clara Bow Biography
Clara Gordon Bow, destined to become THE flapper of the 1920's, was born and raised in poverty in Brooklyn, New York, on July 29, 1905. Her family was also beset with violence. Her mother tried to slit Clara's throat when she attempted to enter the film industry.
She won a photo beauty contest which launched her movie career that would eventually number 58 films, from 1922 to 1933. It was the movie IT, in 1927, which was to define her career. Clara was flaming youth in rebellion. In the film she was presenting a worldly wisdom that somehow sex meant having a good time.
At the height of her popularity she received over 45,000 fan letters a month. She, too, was probably the most overworked and underpaid star in the industry. With the coming of sound, which did lend itself to her thick Brooklyn accent, her popularity waned. Clara was also involved in several court battles ranging from unpaid taxes to being in divorce court for "stealing" women's husbands. After the court trials, she made a few attempts to get back in the public eye. One was CALL HER SAVAGE in 1932. It was somewhat of a failure at the box office and her last was in 1933 in a film called HOOPLA. She, then, married cowboy star, Rex Bell and retired from the film world at the age of 26. She was a doting mother of her two sons and would do anything to please them.
Haunted by a weight problem, and a mental imbalance, she never entered show business again. Clara was confined to a sanitarium from time to time and was not allowed access to her loving sons she adored very much. She died of a heart attack in West Los Angeles, on September 26, 1965. She was 60 years old. Today she is finding a renaissance among movie buffs, who are recently discovering the virtues of silent film. The actress who wanted so much to be like the wonderful young lady in the IT GIRL has the legacy of her films to confirm what a wonderful lady she really was. She, too, was America's first sex symbol. |
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Additional Clara Bow Biography
Bow was born in a tenement in Brooklyn, New York, the only surviving child of a dysfunctional family afflicted with mental illness, poverty, and physical and emotional abuse. She was the third child born to her parents; the first two children, both daughters, were stillborn. Bow's mother, hoping that her third child would also die at birth, didn't bother with a birth certificate.
Bow's mother, Sarah Gordon, was an occasional prostitute who suffered from mental illness and epilepsy. She was noted for her frequent public affairs with local firemen. Bow's father, Robert Bow, was rarely present and may have had a mental impairment. Whenever he returned home, he was verbally and physically abusive to both wife and daughter. Bow's father reportedly raped her when she was between 15 and 16 years old.
Having dropped out of school at the age of seven and with little more worldly experience than a job at the Coney Island amusement park, through a stroke of fortune, young Clara Bow found herself working as a movie actress by her mid-teens.
Always an avid movie fan herself, Bow won the Motion Picture Magazine's Fame and Fortune contest in 1921, the grand prize being a part in a film. She needed two photographs in order to enter the contest, so she begged her father for the money and he finally took her to a cheap studio. Although she hated the results, the contest judges were impressed. After numerous screen tests, Bow was selected the winner. She won a part in Beyond the Rainbow (1922), but to her humiliation and disappointment, her scenes were cut from the final print and were not seen until the film was restored years later.
Bow also had to deal with her mother, Sarah Gordon. Gordon told Bow that acting was for prostitutes. She had also taken to sneaking up behind Bow and threatening to kill her because she felt her daughter would be better off dead. One night, she awoke to find her mother holding a butcher knife to her throat. Clara ran and locked herself in a closet until her grandmother came home. Bow suffered insomnia for the rest of her life.
She began to appear in numerous small movie roles. All the while, she suffered guilty feelings over her mother's disapproval. In 1923, Bow was on the set when she learned that her mother had died. She was devastated, feeling that her acting was somehow responsible for her mother's death.
Starting with Maytime (1923), Schulberg cast Bow in a series of small roles. She nearly always stole her scenes. However, instead of creating projects for her, he loaned her out to other studios for easy money. Nevertheless, Bow started to make a name for herself through these many small roles and was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1924.
In 1925, Schulberg cast Bow in The Plastic Age. The movie was a huge hit, and Bow was suddenly the studio's most popular star. She also began to date her co-star Gilbert Roland, who would become the first of many engagements for her. Bow followed her first big success with Mantrap (1926), directed by Victor Fleming. Though he was twice her age, Bow quickly fell in love with her director. She began seeing both Roland and Fleming at the same time.
In 1927, Bow reached the heights of her popularity with the film It, after Bow had already been dubbed "The It Girl" by Elinor Glyn in her novel It, "It...that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes...entirely unself-conscious...full of self-confidence...indifferent to the effect...she is producing and uninfluenced by others.") More commonly, "It" was taken to mean sex appeal. "It, hell," quipped Dorothy Parker, "She had those."
Bow's alleged alcoholism, drug abuse, and mental illness were also becoming problems for the studios. Budd Schulberg, the producer's son, wrote in his memoir Moving Pictures, "There was one subject on which the staid old Hollywood establishment would agree: Clara Bow, no matter how great her popularity, was a low life and a disgrace to the community."
Bow and cowboy actor Rex Bell (actually George F. Beldon), later a Lieutenant Governor of Nevada, married in 1932 and had two sons, Tony Beldon (born 1934, changed name to Rex Anthony Bell, Jr.) and George Beldon, Jr. (born 1938). Bow retired from acting in 1933.
After being diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1949, Bow entered a treatment regimen that included shock treatments. Later, her husband sent her to one of the top mental institutions in the nation. Doctors found out that Bow had been raped by her father at a young age.
Bow spent her last years living in a modest house, living off an estate worth about $500,000 at the time of her death. She died on September 27, 1965 of a heart attack and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
For her contributions to the motion picture industry, Clara Bow was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1994, she was honored with an image on a United States postage stamp designed by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. |
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| The more I see of men, the more I like dogs. |
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