by Joshua Zeitz
Luck was bound to strike sooner or later, and it did. Though she had been cut from the final print, Clara’s role in Beyond the Rainbow caught the attention of another director, who cast her in a film called Down to the Sea in Ships. That role, in turn, won her a part in Grit, a low-budget film produced by a motley group of Ivy League alumni and written by their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both of these movies brought her to the attention of a producer named Jack Bachman, who persuaded his West Coast partner, B. P. (Ben) Schulberg, a former producer at Paramount who had formed his own outfit, Preferred Pictures, to pay Clara’s way out to California. She would start with a three-month trial contract at $50 per week. The year was 1923.
It didn’t take long for Clara’s career to take off. Her first several films caught the eye of executives at other studios, who began paying Schulberg for Bow’s services. Under a system then common in Hollywood, she continued to earn $50 per week—soon raised to $200—while Preferred Pictures, her contractual employer, raked in several times that amount for loaning her out. This was the case in 1924, when First National retained Bow for a new flapper feature, Painted People, starring Colleen Moore.
Three weeks into production, Colleen and Clara began shooting a scene together. When the director, Clarence Badger, ordered some close-up shots of Clara, Moore objected sharply. “You don’t need that close-up,” she told him. Badger acquiesced. What else could he do? Colleen Moore was the star of the film and the toast of Hollywood. Her husband, John McCormick, was the film’s producer and, by extension, Badger’s boss.
Clara might not have been articulate, but she was street smart. She understood the dynamics at play. “You’re a big star,” she pleaded with Colleen. “Ya don’t need close-ups like I do. Every close-up I get helps me. Why d’ya haveta stop ’em?” The answer was self-evident.
Miscast in a Victorian role, contemptuous of Colleen Moore, and generally desperate to extricate herself from the picture, Clara went to a doctor and asked him to perform sinus surgery that she had been putting off since her arrival in California. “Now. I want the operation right now,” she demanded. When she showed up on the set the next week in bandages, it was clear she would have to be replaced and all the scenes involving her reshot with a new actress.
Painted People went over time and over budget. And the last laugh was on Colleen Moore. “She made that bitch pay,” recalled Artie Jacobson, Clara’s then boyfriend, with a smile. It was the only time that Moore and Bow would work together.15
Years later, Colleen condescendingly sized up her rival as an unsophisticated dimwit. “The only time I ever met Clara socially was at a party given by Adela Rogers St. Johns in her English country house at Whittier, California,” she wrote. “The conversation was a fairly intellectual one, and Clara finally became bored, I guess, and decided the time had come to liven up the party. She livened it up considerably. She stood up and, after getting everyone’s attention, proceeded to tell the dirtiest story imaginable, with such perfect pantomime that nothing was left to the imagination. I was as shocked as everybody else, but I had to laugh inside, she did such a first-rate job.”
In fairness to Moore, Clara was, in fact, known for her off-color stories and her off-color lifestyle. In just four years—from 1925 to 1929—she burned through five fiancés, including Victor Fleming, who later directed The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind; had affairs with a number of other men, including stuntman-turned-leading man Gary Cooper; and frequently boasted to friends—in the most indelicate language she could muster—of Cooper’s physical attributes and sexual prowess.
Where Colleen Moore bought a mansion, Clara purchased a modest seven-room Spanish bungalow made of stucco for $15,000. She filled one room with dirt, so her dog would have somewhere to play at night. Her accent was working-class Brooklyn, and she made no apologies for it. Her grammar was terrible, and she made no apologies for it. In effect, she made no apologies for who she was.
But in her own way, Clara was a class act. In an industry teeming with prima donnas, she showed up to the set on time, worked well with the directors, and never hogged the camera. “She could cry at the drop of a hat,” remembered Billy Kaplan, a prop man on the Preferred Pictures set, “and you’d believe her. A beautiful actress, just beautiful. And I often wondered to myself, ‘Where did this young girl get all this knowledge, this understanding, this feeling?’ ”
Kaplan remembered that the entire crew had a crush on Clara. “We all loved her,” he said, smiling.16 “The electricians, the grips, the painters … everyone loved Clara.” She was one of them—working-class, unpretentious, without airs. “Clara was always a good guy on the set,” Kaplan concluded. “Very professional, always on time.”
She was also kind—a rarity in Hollywood, even in those early days—and particularly with Budd Schulberg, Ben Schulberg’s shy thirteen-year-old son.
“Golly, Mr. Schulberg,”17 she asked with a smile, “is this your little junior? Gee, he’s cute as a button.” Clara ran her hands through Budd’s hair and teased, “How wouldja like ta drive up to Arrowhead this weekend, Buddy? Just the two of us.”
“Now, Clara,” replied Ben, “he’s just a little boy.”
“Okay, maybe we’ll hafta wait a couple of years,” she answered.
When Ben ushered his son out of the office, Clara gave him a big wave. “See ya, Buddy boy. C’mon ’n’ see me on the set. Sincerely I’m very glad to’ve meetin’ yuz.”
Buddy would have occasion to take her up on the offer. He was on location at Pomona College when Clara filmed It, the movie that would immortalize her. With the entire cast and crew watching, Clara ran over to young Buddy, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and informed everyone present that he was her “secret boyfriend,” her “steady fella.” In between takes, Buddy sat with Clara in her brand-new red Kissel roadster—one of Clara’s rare indulgences—and discovered they had something in common: Buddy had a terrible stammer. Over the next few weeks, while the young boy idled the time away on the set, waiting for his famous father to wrap up each day’s business, Clara made a point of sidling up to him in the roadster, shoulder to shoulder, asking him how he was enjoying school—which, of course, he wasn’t; the other kids were teasing him mercilessly—and sharing stories about her own unhappy childhood. She fed him sticks of gum and assured him that his father was “awful proud of ya. He’s even showed me some of ya poetry.…
“Someday you’ll grow up and be a big producer becuz of all the things he’s teaching ya,” she promised. “I know yuh gonna make me awful proud of ya, too.” This was pure Clara Bow—more content to idle the time away with an unhappy thirteen-year-old than to flaunt her own importance. On some level, it was a defense mechanism.
“She was peppy and vivacious in front of people,” one of her colleagues remembered, “but when you talked to her one on one, she was serious and sad.”
“I liked her,” recalled another actress, “but I didn’t get to know her well.18 Nobody did. She was away from the crowd, a loner.… Clara was an awfully sweet girl, but a very lonesome sweet girl.”
Budd Schulberg, who went on to become a screenwriter, seems to have gotten over his acute sensitivity. Years later, he callously misinterpreted Clara’s kindness as a sexual overture and summed up his “secret girlfriend” as “an easy winner of the Dumbbell Award. … 19 She was simply an adorable, in fact irresistible, little know-nothing. It was as if Father had picked out a well-made collie puppy and trained her to become Lassie.”
Budd was clearly a quick study in the family business. His father, Ben Schulberg, and his uncle, Sam Jaffe, treated actresses like sex toys and seem to have compelled Clara into relationships that she could scarcely afford to decline in those early days.20 “She was scared of all the people in the business,” an unrepentant Jaffe maintained years later, “but she trusted me. She was in love with me and wanted to marry me, but I couldn’t think of marrying her. She came from Brooklyn. She looked cheap. Men wanted to screw her.”
It
was easy to dismiss Clara as a déclassé kid from Brooklyn, but what Colleen Moore, Budd Schulberg, and Sam Jaffe didn’t understand was that Clara was a pro.21 She fashioned a new flapper image that was more dangerous and overtly sexual than Moore’s winsome Irish flapper, and in so doing, she became a viable alternative for many young girls searching out a slightly more risqué standard-bearer than Colleen Moore.
In The Plastic Age (1925) Clara played Cynthia Day, a fast-living coed who catches the eye of a clean-living scholar-athlete, Hugh Carver, and leads him down a dim path away from books and football practice and toward an alluring nightlife involving lots of cocktails and lots of heavy petting. Chastised by his parents, who expect more of their son, the young hero steels himself for a slow march back to gridiron glory. But not without help. In a selfless gesture that few viewers would expect from a femme fatale, Clara’s character, billed as “the hottest jazz baby in film,” withdraws herself from the equation. For Hugh’s own good—realizing that he will never crack the books or commit himself to football as long as she’s around—Cynthia breaks off the relationship.
In the final scene, Hugh achieves lasting glory at the “big game,” and the two protagonists are reunited. It was the role that made Clara Bow famous. “She has eyes that would drag any youngster away from his books,” crowed one reviewer.22
While on the set in 1927, Clara astonished Clarence Badger, who was directing her in a new film, with her astute grasp of audience dynamics.23 “Following my directions,” he later explained, “Clara gazed at [her male counterpart] with an expression of lingering, calflike longing in her pretty face: perfectly all right if she had stopped there. But she did not. Continuing on, the camera still grinding away, her doll-like tantalizing eyes suddenly became inflamed with unwholesome passion. Then the rascal suddenly changed her expression again, this time to one of virtuous, innocent appeal.”
It had been a long day, and Badger was on edge. “Cut!” he cried out, and demanded to know why Clara had taken it upon herself to direct the scene. “Well, Santa,” she replied with a smile, using her pet nickname for the normally even-keeled, cheerful director, “if ya knew your onions like ya was supposedta, you’d know the first look was for the lovesick dames in the audience, and the second look, that passionate stuff, was for the boys an’ their poppas, and the third look … well, just about the time all them old ladies’re shocked an’ scandalized by the passionate part, they suddenly see that third look, change their minds ’bout me havin’ naughty ideas, and go home thinkin’ how pure an’ innocent I was. An’ havin’ got me mixed up with this girl I’m playin’, they’ll come again when my next picture shows up.”
Badger had to admit that the logic was impeccable. If he had any lingering doubts, the box office returns would have set his mind at ease. Clara’s next film, It, based on a best-selling novel by Elinor Glyn, turned her into the uncontested flapper queen of Hollywood. Bigger than Colleen Moore. Bigger than Joan Crawford. Bigger than them all.
In It, Clara played Betty Lou Spence, a lovesick lingerie salesgirl who falls for the wealthy son of the department store owner. “Sweet Santa Claus,” she declares, “give me him!” The complex plotline runs the same course as Bow’s other films. Her character is naughty but nice—sexy but sweet—red hot but redeemable. In the end, Betty Lou gets her man, and Clara Bow became the first “It Girl”—a sobriquet Glyn came up with to describe a woman with that elusive sex appeal all women (supposedly) want but few (supposedly) have.
“It, hell,” quipped Dorothy Parker.24 “She had Those.”
Though Clara Bow never raked in the kind of salary that Colleen Moore made—in part because she was indifferent to the sort of Hollywood politics that Moore and McCormick excelled at—in the aftermath of It she hired an attorney. Together, they went to the mat with Paramount—Clara’s new studio, now that Ben Schulberg and Adolph Zukor, Paramount’s founder, had made amends and merged their operations.
Her new contract called for a salary of $5,000 per week, a limit of four films per year, a no-loan-out clause to prevent Schulberg from exploiting her talent, a $25,000 cash advance, and a $10,000 bonus for each film she completed.25 Unlike most contracts, Clara’s did not contain a decency clause. She could not be summarily fired for landing on the front pages in some sordid sex scandal. Bow’s only concession was that her bonus money would be held in escrow until 1931. Payment would be contingent on her satisfying the general decency code.
At the time, it seemed like a good deal.
Louise Brooks, “the girl in the black helmet,” as she appeared in the mid-1920s.
23
ANOTHER PETULANT WAY TO PASS THE TIME
THOUGH LATER IN LIFE she would prove exasperatingly coy on the subject of sex, in her prime, Louise Brooks showed little compunction about telling it like it was. “I like to drink and fuck,” she announced to friends and acquaintances on more than one occasion.1 In a rare, candid moment, Brooks estimated privately that “at a modest 10 a year from [age] 17 to [age] 60,” the number of men she had “been to bed with” numbered somewhere around 430.2
When in the late 1920s her younger brother mistook one of her dispatches from Berlin (where she was shooting a film) as an indictment of the loose principles that governed Weimar Germany, Louise chastised him sharply. “You are either a fool or a liar to say I would comment on the low state of anyone’s morals,” she shot back, “—mine being non-existent.”3
If Colleen Moore was Hollywood’s archetype of the safe flapper—unthreatening, endearing, hapless, more bark than bite—and if Clara Bow represented the naughty flapper who flirted and smoked a lot but could always be counted on to see the error of her fast-living ways, Louise Brooks was the real deal.
Ironically, of the three great flapper actresses who graced the silver screen in the 1920s, Brooks arrived in Hollywood last and exited first. Long before Colleen Moore and Clara Bow adopted the flapper mystique as their own, and long after both women abandoned that image for different kinds of roles, Brooks—with her distinctive jet black bob, piercing gaze, and lithe dancer’s body—lived the life of the New Woman in ways that made Zelda Fitzgerald seem like a conservative schoolmarm.
Brooks was born in the small town of Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906. Her father, Leonard, was an attorney for a local oil and gas company, and her mother, Myra, was a vain but uncommonly bright autodidact whose dual regrets in life were that she lived in Kansas rather than Chicago or New York and that she bore her husband four children whose needs and wants distracted her from more rarefied pursuits.
To her parents’ great credit, Louise grew up surrounded by books, music, art, and ideas. Years later, she remembered their house in Wichita, where her family moved in 1919, as a “fourteen-room gray frame structure [that was] literally falling down with books.4 The foundation on the right side had sunk eleven inches from the weight of the lawbooks in Father’s third-floor retreat. There were new books in the bedrooms, old books in the basement, and unread books in the living room.”
As a child, Louise reveled in exploring the overstuffed shelves in the family’s library. She pulled down volumes at random—Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Darwin, Emerson, Hawthorne, Twain. “All these books I read with delight, not caring in the least that I understood little of what I read,” she admitted. When she was five years old, Louise began learning to sound out words by following along as her mother read to her from A Child’s Garden of Verses and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She never stopped reading. In the mid-1920s, when she was a feature chorus girl in Ziegfeld Follies, Louise passed the time in the communal dressing room devouring works like Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow. “The other girls were reading the Police Gazette,” she sneered. “They would look at me and say, ‘Who is this Kansas bitch? How dare she?’ ”5
It didn’t make her any more popular on Hollywood movie sets in the late twenties when she passed the time between takes with a dog-eared volume of Schopenhauer.
Intellectual pursuits aside, Louis
e’s childhood appeared conventional enough. Like so many other girls coming of age in the early twenties, she was boy crazy. Her diary for 1921, when she was just fourteen years old, chronicled in considerable detail one ill-fated romance after another.
May 7: Marene and I have some affair. We were together all evening, and he brought me home in Dinman’s car. We rode around for quite a while, and oh, boy! … Well, I’m crazy about Marene, and I surely have him going. I suppose I’ll be lovesick for a few days.
June 14: Meridith and I are still devoted. We went down to see the river several times.
June 22: Sally Lahey is crazy about Meridith, and she said not a few catty things to me. There was a boy who was hanging about me incessantly. Mercy! Don’t boys love con-man stuff. I have let M. knock me around enough to ruin anyone. They love to lord it over us, and I pretend to be so weak.
June 23: Honestly—I must be boy struck, I mope around all day now and take no interest in the things that used to be so nice.… I have been swimming a great deal lately with Campbells and Meridith. We have lots of fun. Robert is awfully rough. He throws me around considerably, but you know what women love.…
June 30: I have a new one on the string—Everett Fox. I know I have him jolly well.
A week later: Charles Corbett … kissed me five times—the villain—and some of the other boys tried it.
What Louise didn’t confide to her diary, her parents, or her friends was that when she was nine years old, a local handyman, Mr.6 Flowers, lured her into his house with the promise of freshly made popcorn and sexually assaulted her. When she was fourteen, her Sunday school teacher, a prosperous businessman named Mr. Vincent, seduced her into posing for provocative photographs and, a short while later, a sexual affair.