by Joshua Zeitz
The problem was, by 1920 or so these were precisely the things that a lot of American moviegoers wanted to see. “D. W. Griffith is an idealist,” observed Irving Thalberg, the production chief of MGM Studios in 1927, “and his love scenes on the screen were idealistic things of beauty … but his pictures are not stressed today because modern ideas are changing.7 The idealistic love of a decade ago is not true today. We cannot sit in a theater and see a noble hero and actually picture ourselves as him.”
Thalberg had a point. The same social forces that were producing a revolution in morals and manners were rendering obsolete the didactic themes that informed Griffith’s work.
Films produced between 1908 and 1912—those directed not just by D. W. Griffith, but by all the major production outfits—tended to follow set plotlines. Leading men and women turned inward to find strength and thereby prevailed over insidious threats to Victorian virtue—over alcohol, material indulgence, sexual urges, crime, passion. By 1913 or 1914, those themes began to give way to a glorification of pleasure, excitement, physical comedy, athleticism, and luxury—that is, to the consumer ethos that was coming by and by to dominate American culture. Moviegoers now reveled in the antics of Charlie Chaplin, “the little tramp,” and the Keystone Kops, whose bumbling incompetence appealed to the lowest common denominator of popular humor.
The most popular film personages of the new era were Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, whose off-screen love affair—and, later, marriage—seemed to mirror perfectly the on-screen magic they produced in dozens of films.8 Doug was a man’s man for the new age—athletic, handsome, dazzling, perfectly attired, and suave to a fault. Mary, on the other hand—“our Mary,” “Little Mary”—was demure and childlike, yet carefree and full of life. She represented the altar of youth before which so many Americans were dropping to their knees. “We are our own sculptors,” she advised her devotees. “Who can deny that passion and unkind thoughts show on the lines and expressions of our faces … young people seldom have these vices until they start getting old, so I love to be with them.”
So compelling was her cinematic exaltation of youth and vivacity that the poet Vachel Lindsay composed an ode to Little Mary for McClure’s magazine:
Oh Mary Pickford, Doll Divine,
Like that special thing Botticelli
Painted in the faces of his heavenly
creatures. How you made our reverent
passion rise, our fine desire you won.
Oh, little girl, never grow up.
In fact, Little Mary did grow up. When the big distributors began clamping down on talent—insisting on lower salaries and more artistic oversight—she and Fairbanks combined forces with D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin to form a new company, United Artists, which arranged its own production deals and distributed its own films. Mary was a driving force behind the idea, and it made her one of the wealthiest women in America.
On-screen, though, she was still “Our Mary.” And by the 1920s, the public craved something more. It would take a new breed of movie men to grasp that business was business.
“If the audience don’t like a picture,” Samuel Goldwyn insisted, “they have a good reason.9 The public is never wrong. I don’t go for all this thing that when I have a failure, it is because the audience doesn’t have the taste or education, or isn’t sensitive enough. The public pays the money. It wants to be entertained. That’s all I know.”
If he wasn’t the most articulate of wordsmiths, few could deny that Goldwyn had his finger on the pulse of the national film audience. He was a leading member of a small group of studio pioneers who were making the “movies”—a term that didn’t come into popular use until the early twenties—a top-dollar entertainment industry. Over were the days of Victorian moralizing. In were the currents of change.
Clara Bow bids farewell to 1927.
22
THE KIND OF GIRL THE FELLOWS WANT
TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, Colleen Moore wasn’t the first actress to portray the flapper on-screen. In 1920, a small production company released an unmemorable film entitled, simply, The Flapper. “In some sections you may have to define the title,” one trade journal advised potential distributors, “though its meaning is pretty generally known by now.”1
The writer got it half-right and half-wrong. Even as D. W. Griffith was fighting a losing battle to wield film as a blunt cudgel in the fight against modern corruption, movie audiences in the decade before America’s Jazz Age were growing accustomed to a new sort of female character—far more sexual, more wanton, and more dangerous than charming Mary Pickford or dear, sweet Lillian Gish.
There were several early varieties on the femme fatale, none of which could be properly termed “flapper.” The “vamp,” commonly associated with the actress Theda Bara, was an exotic, sexually charged creature who left behind a trail of ruined lives and craven men. By one expert assessment, Bara had “the wickedest face in the world, dark brooding, beautiful and heartless.”2 Bara and others played this role expertly, and to wide acclaim, between 1914 and 1920.
In a world where female sexuality was increasingly discussed—but still feared and misapprehended—the vamp was a tantalizing yet sufficiently dark and distant figure for public consumption. There were fast women in the world, but they were still foreign and unusual creatures.
The vamp’s days were numbered from the start. As moviegoers became more comfortable with overtly sexual women, they turned to a less menacing model—that of Cecil B. DeMille’s crazy, debauched wife. In films like Old Wives for New (1918), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), Male and Female (1919), and The Affairs of Anatol (1921), De Mille fashioned a stock story line: Bored—and boring—housewife faces stiff competition from a faster, looser, younger woman (often her husband’s secretary); husband leaves housewife (or considers leaving her); housewife dons makeup, hikes up skirt, and begins frequenting hot jazz clubs, often on the arm of a dark, mysterious sheik; husband falls in love with his wife again; marriage is saved.
Everyone—except perhaps the husband’s secretary, who is left out in the cold—lives happily ever after. Little wonder that Motion Picture magazine hailed DeMille as “the apostle of domesticity.”3 He was preaching a new gospel of personal freedom and sexual exploration, but within the bounds of matrimony.
In some respects, The Flapper, appearing in 1920, represented a bold new direction for the New Woman of the silver screen.4 The film was “no old, creaking vehicle for a star to ride in,” announced Moving Picture World, and it turned its lead actress, Olive Thomas, into an overnight celebrity. Thomas played the part of Genevieve King, a typical middle-class girl who grows weary of life in tiny Orange Grove—a town that “didn’t even have a saloon to close”—and persuades her parents to pack her off to boarding school in New York. Forsaking her wholesome boyfriend, Bill, Genevieve begins chasing after older men and falls in with a group of ne’er-do-well city slickers, including Richard Chenning, a handsome lech several years her senior, and a gang of jewel thieves who involve her in criminal mischief.
Genevieve, a good girl at heart, devises an elaborate plot to bring the crooks to justice. The film ends with the young protagonist safely back in Orange Grove, reunited with good old reliable Bill.
The film launched Olive Thomas’s star, and it might easily have been Olive—and not Colleen Moore—who graced the cover of every fan magazine in the mid-1920s. But Olive was unlucky. On vacation with her husband in France, she mistook an unlabeled bottle of bichloride of mercury for common cold medicine. Maybe, as some of the papers suggested, she had trouble adjusting to fame and intended to kill herself. Either way, Olive Thomas was out of the picture. A few flapper films later, Colleen Moore was in.
With the release of Flaming Youth in 1923, the flapper became Hollywood’s most lucrative character type, and Colleen Moore became the visual embodiment of the flapper.
Photoplay magazine offered a ringing endorsement of Colleen’s flapper credentials, concluding that she �
��looks the part with her straight bobbed hair and her mischief-filled eyes.5 Once upon a time she wore curls—and a demure expression.” But no longer. A writer in Muskegon, Michigan, went so far as to assert that Colleen was “the very apotheosis of the cult of unhampered youthful self-expression.”6
In her subsequent flapper movies—Painted People (1924), The Perfect Flapper (1924), Flirting with Love (1924), We Moderns (1925), Ella Cinders (1926), Naughty but Nice (1927)—Colleen played essentially the same role.
“Colleen Moore is a brilliant young flapper who contrives to disguise her flapperish appeal with the sweetness of the eternal maiden,” a New Orleans newspaper observed.7 “If she is pert and naughty she makes you feel that your grandmother was, too. So all is forgiven. God forbid we hold anything against grandma! A very tricky young lady, Colleen, with a very wise bean, too.”
Colleen’s effectiveness as a flapper icon lay in her apparent willingness to bend the rules but never break them. She was the safe flapper—stylish, vivacious, full of verve and pluck, yet ultimately inclined to abandon life in the fast lane for more wholesome living. It was a winning combination: Young viewers loved Colleen for her modern sensibilities, and their parents loved Colleen for her fundamental decency. It was a balance she worked as hard to strike off-screen as on-screen.
“What kind of girl does a girl have to be,” asked a Hollywood fan magazine, “—to be the kind of girl the fellows want?8 The girl of today has this problem to face, says Colleen Moore.” Colleen explained that “a girl should not be too gaily dressed,” but on the other hand, “she should not dress too plainly as a bit of tinsel is attractive; and she should remember that men want her to play but not to get soiled.” Ultimately, Colleen maintained, “the golden glitter of tinsel is fine … but not acceptable in a wife.”
If she was a conservative model for a flapper, Colleen was a talented performer nevertheless. She was an expert comedian, able to act with her whole body and to move her eyes and face in perfect synch with a part. In Ella Cinders—a clever nod to Cinderella—she played the part of a beleaguered modern-day stepdaughter who scrapes together money for professional photographs, wins a magazine contest, and travels to Hollywood to become a film star. Her comic timing and adorable antics struck a resonant chord among moviegoers—men and women alike.
Much of Colleen’s commercial appeal clearly lay in the public’s knowledge that she was happily married to John McCormick, a former publicist and now producer for First National, whom she wed shortly before filming Flaming Youth. If Colleen Moore, the archetype of flapperdom, could embrace the domestic ideal, then surely it was acceptable, if not wise, for American parents to allow their daughters a little harmless experimentation with bobbed hair and jazz. And maybe even liquor. Being a flapper didn’t necessarily entail a blanket renunciation of marriage and motherhood. It was just a phase in every girl’s life. A harmless, necessary, cathartic phase.
In press interviews, Colleen drove home precisely this point. “It’s such fun asking my husband for money,” she admitted with delight, “—not a bit like the funny papers say!9 And I just love it, too. And I’m just dying to bake a cake for John. John will eat it. He is brave and he loves me. I didn’t know there was a domestic bone in my body, but all of a sudden I get such a thrill out of ordering milk and paying the butcher’s bill! I always have breakfast with John—always fix his coffee for him. Do you think I’d let anybody else do that? I should say not. He takes one lump with cream. I’m trying to be a model housewife.…”
None of this was true. Colleen usually spent eighteen hours a day on the set and took most of her meals, including breakfast, at a bungalow on the studio lot. The mansion she shared with John McCormick was well staffed by an army of cooks and servants. She probably didn’t even know where to find the coffee in her own kitchen.
No matter. For millions of young women torn between the romantic ideal of heterosexual love and marriage and Jazz Age glitz, Colleen held out hope that one could have her cake and eat it, too.
But hers wasn’t the last word on the subject. By 1925, the other studios were eager to cash in on the flapper. They turned to Clara Bow, whose on-screen portrayal of the flapper was as different from Colleen Moore’s as were her origins and upbringing. “Nobody wanted me t’be born in the first place,” she once claimed.10 Sadly, it was probably an accurate assessment.
Clara entered the world in 1905 in a tenement slum on Sands Street in Brooklyn, a neighborhood strewn with garbage, rats, prostitutes, pawnshops, cheap saloons, and dangerous characters.11 Her parents, Robert and Sarah Bow, were a mismatch from the start. Robert was an alcoholic with an addiction to street prostitutes; Sarah was an emotionally unstable teenager who married to escape her even drearier childhood home. When their first child died two days after birth, Sarah threw her body into a trash bin outside the family’s cheap railroad flat. A second baby also died in infancy. Sarah handed her over to the public health authorities for an anonymous burial.
Later in life, Clara was tight-lipped about her childhood in Brooklyn. “I have known hunger, believe me,” she once admitted.12 “We just lived, and that’s about all.”
Life would have been hard enough if young Clara had only had to contend with her profoundly dysfunctional parents. But nothing else seemed to go right. For one thing, she stuttered. “H-h-h-ello, Clara,” the other kids at P.S. 111 would greet her in scornful imitation. They mocked her ragged clothing and ridiculed her family. “I was the worst-lookin’ kid on the street,” she once acknowledged.13 Virtually alone in life, Clara learned how to protect herself against the roving street gangs that did unspeakable violence to neighborhood residents. “My right was famous,” she boasted years later. “I could lick any boy my size.”
She did have one friend—a local boy named Johnny who lived in the downstairs apartment. But even that friendship was too good to be true. One day, Clara heard a hair-raising cry from Johnny’s flat. She ran downstairs to find the young boy engulfed in flames. There had been a kitchen fire. Clara smothered Johnny in a blanket and cradled him as he wailed out her name. He died in her arms.
School didn’t offer much in the way of solace. Clara’s education ended in seventh grade, and even that was a stretch. “I never opened a book and the teachers were always down on me,” she confessed with typical self-doubt and deprecation. “I don’t blame ’em.”
Just getting up in the morning caused her heartache. Going to school was misery. The other kids were merciless. “They was always hurtin’ my feelings, and I thought they was silly anyway. I never had no use for girls and their games.” The only consolation she had in life came at the price of a nickel admission. “In this lonely time, when I wasn’t much of nothin’ and I didn’t have nobody,” she explained, there was “one place I could go and forget the misery of home and the heartache of school.
“That was the motion pictures.”
Every spare nickel Clara could get her hands on, she fed right into the local movie theaters. “We’d go to the Carlton or the Bunny Theater,” remembered John Bennett, one of her few friends from the neighborhood, “and see whatever was showing. I was the only one who would listen to her little tales of fantasy, her dreams.” One day, as they sat out on the front stoop of her building, Clara “told me that she was going to be a great movie star. Of course, I didn’t believe it.”
Bennett would live to eat his words.14 In a sequence of events that could easily have been ripped from a Hollywood script (say, for instance, Ella Cinders), in 1921, at age sixteen, Clara entered a Fame and Fortune contest sponsored by Motion Picture magazine. Dressed in the only outfit she owned—“a little plaid dress, a sweater, and a red tam”—she dragged her father to a local photography studio at Coney Island and somehow persuaded him to pay a dollar for two cheaply produced snapshots. Clara thought the results were “terrible,” but she hopped the subway to the offices of Brewster Publications, which owned Motion Picture, and submitted her application personally. “Called in person—”
the contest manager scrawled beneath her paperwork. “Very pretty.”
Much to Clara’s surprise, she made the final cut and was invited for a mock screen test. The other girls laughed at her worn clothes. How could someone win a Fame and Fortune contest with holes in her shoes? “I hadn’t thoughta that angle,” she acknowledged later. “I’d only looked at my face, and that was disappointin’ enough.”
The girls lined up for the screen test. They were to walk before the camera, pick up a telephone, fake a casual conversation, and then suddenly appear deeply concerned by the voice on the other line. While the other finalists scratched and clawed at one another for the privilege of performing first, Clara stood back.
“I sat through every one of those tests,” she remembered, “watchin’ everythin’ that was done, everythin’ they was told, every mistake they made. The trouble was, I thought, that they was all tryin’ t’do it like somebody they’d seen on screen, not the way they’d do it themselves. When it came my turn, I did it the way I’d do it myself.” Three days later, Clara received a call from Brewster Publications. She had won.
It was tough going at first. The contest carried a small role in a feature-length film, Beyond the Rainbow. Humiliatingly, it was only after she dragged several neighborhood girls to the local theater to see the film that she learned her part had been cut. But she was tenacious.
“I wore myself out goin’ from studio t’studio, from agency t’agency,” she told an interviewer years later. “But there was always somethin’. I was too young, too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat.”