9
Clara Bow, the Lawsuit and the Breakdown
“People are always bringing suits against me and printing scandals about me,” complained Clara Bow in June 1930. She wasn’t wrong. Clara, the original “It Girl” after her leading role in the film It (1927), was the most scandalous star of the 1920s and by the early 1930s she was about to experience her most scandalous – and her saddest – period yet.
In September 1930, Clara Bow was reported to owe a Cal Neva casino $13,900 in gambling debts, which raised many eyebrows in the Hollywood community. Word soon spread that the star had played and lost at the roulette wheel to such an extent that she had to write four cheques for her losses. Unfortunately for the casino, however, each one was returned to the resort as being “stopped” before payment was ever issued.
Clara denied this and laughed off the story, stating that she always paid honest debts promptly, and declaring, “If anyone in the world feels he has a rightful claim against me for any sum of money whatsoever, which I deny, I will gladly accept service of any legal documents.”
As described in an earlier chapter (“Clara Bow’s Scandalous Love Life”), “Crisis a Day Clara”, as she was known, had been in and out of the headlines for the past few years on account of her scandalous love life with a publicity-hungry nightclub-owner and a married doctor. Now happy with her new beau, Rex Bell, both she and the studio wanted to put the last two years behind them and hoped this new scandal – and any future ones – could disappear without incident. Unfortunately for Clara, however, the casino gossip was just the tip of the iceberg; less than two months later the scandal of all scandals would erupt, thanks to her long-time secretary Daisy DeVoe.
Clara had met DeVoe on the set of her movie, Wild Party, where the woman had been assigned to take care of the actress’s hair. They quickly became chummy, and Clara enjoyed her company so much that it was not long before DeVoe was asked to work for her full-time as a secretary.
“I studied it over for a day or two,” Daisy later said, “because everyone said Clara was kind of a hard girl to work for and I didn’t want to lose my job.”
It was true that Clara had something of a reputation, but still, the money was better than she was earning at the studio, so DeVoe was certainly interested.
“But if you discharge me, I probably won’t get my job back at the studio,” DeVoe warned the actress, to which Clara laughed.
“If you work for me you’ll never have to worry about your job at the studio,” she said. So despite her initial concerns, DeVoe did indeed give up her job, with a promise that Clara would employ her for five years as a personal assistant and companion, starting at $75 per week. However, they also agreed that she would receive a raise in the very near future, which unfortunately never materialized, no matter how much DeVoe reminded her boss.
“I asked her for it numerous times,” Daisy later complained. “She always said no.”
The working relationship gave her many responsibilities, some of which – as it turned out – were not related to being a secretary at all. This may have been okay if her salary had been raised as agreed, but as it wasn’t, DeVoe began to get more than a little irritated. “Clara is a funny child,” she later said. “She wanted my companionship and everything.”
It would seem that as well as being a secretary, DeVoe was also saddled with routine tasks such as doing Clara’s hair and nails, and dressing, undressing and inspecting the actress’s clothes every time she intended to go out. She was also given the task of shooing away unwanted male admirers; grocery shopping; mending clothes; and seeing to it that “her clothes were not left piled on the floor”.
The first real rumblings of just how much of an influence DeVoe was having on Clara’s life came when Bow was out of town for six weeks, and the secretary took it upon herself to have the entire house not only cleaned but completely reorganized too. “Her house was terribly dirty,” she said. “I had the drapes taken down and the rugs taken out and cleaned; floors polished; furniture gone over and everything.” What Bow thought of the matter remains unrecorded, but certainly it would seem that as far as a working relationship went, DeVoe had her feet well and truly under the newly polished table.
The biggest example of how much DeVoe took over Clara’s life comes in the discovery that the pair took the decision to set up a bank account together. They nicknamed it “The Clara Bow Special Account” and it was opened with $1,500 of Clara’s money, giving DeVoe the ability to take cash out for household expenses. She later explained the purpose of the account to police:
I couldn’t draw anything on Clara’s [personal] account unless I had a cheque with her signature, and each week I would take a cheque with her signature to the bank and put money into the special account for the household expenses. Almost all the money Clara spent was out of the household account. She very seldom wrote her own cheques.
But while it was nice for Clara to be looked after, the secretary went too far at times, such as the day when she found love letters to her employer from ex-boyfriends Dr Earl Pearson, Harry Richman, Gary Cooper and Victor Fleming. “She had two drawers of letters that she had gotten from them,” explained DeVoe. “I knew she would want them but I took them and burned them because I didn’t think it was advisable for a woman in her position to have things like that lying around.”
On that particular occasion, Clara arrived home just in time to see her beloved letters burning to a crisp in the back yard. “What have you done?” she screamed at the secretary, but it seems that DeVoe was not in the least bit apologetic. Clara was furious that her secretary had not only found her letters, but had seemingly also decided to read and destroy them. The two women fought for days about the episode.
Unfortunately, although she was torn to pieces for touching Clara Bow’s personal property, astonishingly this still did not stop DeVoe from finding and destroying even more letters, without the knowledge of her employer. “As far as I know she doesn’t know it,” DeVoe later said. “She would be as mad as the devil about it.”
These shocking incidents proved once and for all that DeVoe was stepping over the line between a professional and an obsessive interest in her employer’s affairs. It is little wonder then that Clara’s boyfriend Rex Bell grew to dislike her immensely, and it would seem that the feeling was mutual, with both parties becoming extremely suspicious and jealous of the time spent with the vivacious Clara. Bell’s frustration came when he suspected that as well as general nosiness, DeVoe was also guilty of stealing from her employer, while in return DeVoe believed Bell was trying to persuade the actress to invest money in a phoney get-rich-quick scheme. To say that the hatred of one another was adding to Clara’s already heightened stress levels would be an understatement.
On 29 July 1930 – Clara’s birthday – DeVoe gave the actress a beautiful, silver dresser set with the initials CB engraved on it. Clara was absolutely delighted. “I thought she was being sweet and kind to me,” she later told police. However, sweet and kind wasn’t what she thought of her later, when it was claimed that the set had actually been paid for out of Clara’s “Special Account” using a cheque authorized by the actress herself. Although Bell did not know for sure that Clara’s money had bought her own present, he was suspicious enough about her behaviour to share his concerns with his girlfriend.
Clara was far more trusting, it would seem, and brushed away his comments, refusing to believe that her secretary was being in any way dishonest. However, when she later went to her safety deposit box and noticed several items had gone missing, the actress was mortified. When questioned later, DeVoe claimed to have removed Clara’s items from the box in a bid to protect her employer from Bell’s dodgy investment scheme. But that was later, and for now, on finding the items missing, Clara told Bell that he must be right; DeVoe really wasn’t as honest as she had once believed her to be.
Rex told Clara he thought she had no option but to fire DeVoe, but the conversation between the two was fraught;
Clara did not want to let her secretary go, but at the same time she knew she could no longer trust her. The couple began a rather heated debate about how they should tell DeVoe the news . . .
“If you want her to go, Rex, you can tell her yourself, because I won’t tell her,” Clara told him.
“When will I tell her?” asked her boyfriend, to which Bow replied:
“Any time within the next few days.”
“Fine,” answered Bell. “I’ll tell her Saturday or Monday.”
But while this discussion was going on, what neither of them realized was that the secretary was actually resting in the next room. Lying down on her bed, DeVoe had overheard the entire conversation and was absolutely mortified. How dare Clara Bow plan to fire her after all they had been through and everything she had promised? DeVoe was confused but still believed that at the very heart of the matter lay her nemesis, Rex Bell, urging Clara on in matters that DeVoe frankly felt were nothing to do with him.
Later, as he had promised, Rex went to Daisy’s room in order to give her the news of her termination, which sent the furious secretary scuttling straight to Bow for an explanation. Shockingly for her, the actress did not deny that DeVoe was losing her job, and instead she told the woman that what Rex had told her was quite correct; she was to leave the house and Clara’s employ, effective immediately.
According to DeVoe, when she was ready to leave the Bow house, her employer was so drunk that she decided not to announce her departure; that it was “more ladylike” not to say anything at all. This decision was made, she said, for fear that “she would have tried to kill me”, before adding – quite dramatically – that the actress had actually tried to do that on a previous occasion. “I thought it would be better to walk out and later on straighten out her affairs. I wanted to get things settled as quietly as possible,” grumbled the secretary.
For DeVoe, “as quietly as possible” meant returning to the house once the dust had settled in order to demand her job back. The answer was a definite no. She was stunned, believing that once Bow had sobered up, she would have seen things differently. Furious, DeVoe then naively contacted Clara’s attorney in a misguided attempt to blackmail his client and demanded she receive $125,000 for the very items Daisy had illegally acquired in the first place. If they didn’t comply, she added, things could get “complicated”.
The lawyer retaliated by telling the secretary that instead of paying the ransom money, his advice to Clara would be to tell the entire, sorry story to the proper authorities. The disgruntled woman then left the office, but did not go home. Instead, she turned up at Clara Bow’s house once again, by which time the actress had been advised of the blackmail attempt.
“Give me back my job!” DeVoe screamed at Bow.
“Didn’t you just try to blackmail me?” Clara snapped. After which the shocked Daisy apparently admitted everything. “Yes, my best friend; that was the way she answered me,” Clara Bow later said in court.
The actress had no wish to give the woman her job back or pay the money being demanded; but at the same time she also had no desire to have a full-blown argument, and refused to listen to Daisy’s explanations as to how Clara’s personal items had ended up in her possession. Instead DeVoe was sent on her way; the locks to the house were quickly changed; and Clara brought in District Attorney Buron Fitts to investigate the entire matter.
The investigators listened to what Bow had to say, then travelled to the home of DeVoe’s sister to interview the secretary about the theft. They questioned her extensively and made notes as she gave her explanation of taking the items for safe keeping. Nobody believed her story and, instead of giving her a warning, they demanded she open her safety deposit box to let them see what was inside. DeVoe did as she was told and the police retrieved a stash of jewellery, a large amount of personal papers and a cashier’s cheque.
“I was never going to cash the cheque myself,” DeVoe cried. “Clara knows as well as everybody else that I could never have cashed it. I intended giving it back the same as everything I had that belonged to her.”
Also included in the box were telegrams from boyfriends Rex Bell, Earl Pearson and Harry Richman, which surprisingly had not been included in the burning ceremony that DeVoe had given the others. All of these remaining notes were of a loving nature, and bound to cause a sensation if publicly released, so when the police turned them back over to Clara, she was exceptionally relieved. Her only hope now was that DeVoe would just disappear quietly, never to be heard of again. Unfortunately for Bow, the former secretary had other ideas about her future.
Instead of putting the whole thing behind her and moving on with her life, DeVoe started grumbling that she wanted answers to why she was fired from Clara’s employ. This was surprising considering she had just been relieved of Bow’s personal belongings from her safe, and she must have been able to remember the numerous quarrels, the mutual dislike between her and Bell, the conversation she had overheard which explained most of her questions, and finally the threats of blackmail after she had heard her fate. Yet, quite bizarrely, none of this seemed to provide DeVoe with any idea of why she was no longer required in Bow’s home. It was all quite astonishing, particularly when, in a misguided effort to gain attention from Clara, DeVoe decided to contact the press to tell them her story – leaving out the parts about blackmail and theft, of course.
“For two years I have pulled Clara out of plenty of messes and saved her plenty of money,” she joyfully told them. She then turned her attention to the gambling debts in Nevada, claiming that, sure enough, Clara did indeed have debts there, as well as approximately $12,000 more at other resorts. And still the revelations went on: “She suffers from insomnia and she doesn’t sleep,” a gleeful DeVoe revealed. “As a result she kept me awake all night. I worked twenty-four hours a day for her and if there were forty-eight hours in a day I would have worked forty-eight . . . I could never leave her alone at any time.”
The reporters were riveted. “Crisis a Day Clara” was always good press, but with an insider now on their side, they were in heaven. Once the press conference was over, the reporters scuttled back to their typewriters to pen what they hoped would be the first of many juicy articles on the It Girl’s private life. The first article was published the next day and, needless to say, Clara was blindsided. Not only was she shocked that there were revelations about her private life in the papers, but also she was utterly gobsmacked that her former secretary could spill the beans in such a way.
Never one to be quiet when it came to commenting in the press, Clara decided to issue a short statement of her own, claiming:
The more I talk the worse it gets, so I’m not saying much. If I cannot let go a secretary without a lot of fuss why should I talk? I fired Daisy for a personal reason and this reason is nobody’s business but my own. So that’s that.
The star also denied a recent rumour that she had now employed a male secretary, and then privately hoped very much that the whole sorry affair could now be forgotten once and for all. But it was not going to be that easy. DeVoe was a woman scorned and she took no time in telling reporters that if the actress refused to see her and give an explanation about why she was fired, she would have no option but to visit a lawyer.
Sure enough, the very next day Daisy hired attorney Nathan O. Freedman, who was instructed to file a suit against District Attorney Buron Fitts and his aides. This was a bold gesture, especially when it was revealed that the reason she hired him was to recover jewellery and items that she claimed had belonged to her, but were taken from her safety deposit box during the raid for Clara Bow’s belongings.
“I have returned everything that belonged to Clara,” she grumbled. “I also gave her back her fur coat, but why do they keep my cash and jewels and insurance papers? My attorney has made demand for them and they will not return them. We are going to sue.” She also assured reporters that not only would she go after the District Attorney’s office, but Clara Bow too, who she claimed h
ad kept back salary and expenses owed to her.
In the end, the persistence of Daisy DeVoe led not to a lawsuit against Bow and Fitts, but to the arrest and prosecution of the secretary herself, who was accused of thirty-seven counts of grand theft, adding up to $16,000 in total. She was absolutely astounded and determined to fight her corner with all her might. She had lost her job; been accused of theft; and had her safety deposit box rummaged but DeVoe was a fighter and this time she was determined that if she was going to fall, she would be taking Clara Bow down with her.
The much publicized trial of Daisy DeVoe began in January 1931 and from the very beginning of proceedings, the world and waiting press were transfixed. DeVoe seemed to revel in the attention her stories brought, but for Clara, the trial would reveal much more about her personal life than she ever feared, and from day one, it was a stressful and at times hurtful episode.
From the very outset, Clara’s finances were brought into the frame when it was revealed that in a period of twenty months, the actress had spent $350,000 on everything from household expenses to cars to tips in restaurants and much more. This raised eyebrows, but audible gasps were heard when it was also argued that some of the money was not spent by Bow herself, but by Daisy DeVoe, who was accused of ordering jewellery for herself using her employer’s own money. This wasn’t all. It also transpired that a cheque for $400 was cashed for her benefit, and a glamorous fur coat had been purchased – all at the actress’s expense.
Clara Bow arrived at court wearing dark glasses, which friends later claimed were to hide a recent operation on her face. She was also suffering from a bad cold and was seen crying and frequently coughing during the proceedings, while the ex-secretary glowered and smirked from her position in court. It inevitably wasn’t long before Clara looked over and saw the faces being pulled by her former friend, and this drove the short-tempered actress to the point of explosion. Much to the shock of everyone, the actress suddenly shot forward in her chair and dramatically shouted at DeVoe, “Go ahead and sneer Daisy, that’s all right!” This impromptu outburst caused the shocked Deputy District Attorney to shoot to his feet in order to caution Bow for interrupting the court.
The Mammoth Book of Hollywood Scandals Page 11