Clara Bow: Hollywood's Lost Screen Goddess

Clara Bow.

Silent movie star.

The 'It' girl.

Once she was the queen of Hollywood.

Today she's all but forgotten.

Whatever happened to Clara Bow?

The chance of a lifetime to see Hollywood.

The city of magic.

On a personally conducted coach tour

where you'll get an eyeful of these folks!

That modest bungalow belongs to Mary Pickford.

And this little shack over here keeps the California sunshine

and the rain from beating down upon that little redhead - Clara Bow.

Clara Bow was a sensation and if no-one else recognised it,

the public definitely did.

Her movies were box office gold.

There was no-one like her and there really hasn't been anyone like her.

I don't think people realise how much,

how popular she really was at her height.

She almost seems, in hindsight, to have been genetically engineered

to be a movie star in terms of her ability to convey emotion on camera.

When you see her in action, she is flirting.

She learned...

all in a dark way, to please men.

And to please people in Hollywood too.

To say she's photogenic is an understatement.

You don't want to look at anybody else in the scene.

You only want to look at Clara Bow.

Clara Bow was born in 1905

and grew up in the tenement slums of Brooklyn.

When you talk about Clara Bow's background,

there's almost no way to describe it

and make it sound credible and believable

because it defies any kind of wild imaginative fiction.

She was born into the most brutal poverty that was known at that time

in the tenements of Brooklyn which were more populist than Calcutta.

She couldn't have come from a worse background, truly.

Poverty, or what you might call working poor in today's language,

a history of mental illness, her mother, her grandfather.

Her father, kind of a chronic drunk with all the worst things

that goes along with that.

As a teenager Clara took refuge in the newly emerging world

of silent cinema.

Out of the movie house darkness, stars like Pearl White,

Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish flickered into life.

Clara was from the first generation that was influenced by movies.

She was just the right age to have been going to the movies

in her adolescence and, you know,

falling in love with the dream state that movies created.

Clara Bow longed to be a motion picture actress.

She knew it was ridiculous to, but it was her place of escape

and she just thought there might be a chance

and she used to tell the girls at school

and they all thought she was ridiculous and a poseur.

Clara's unstable mother was disturbed by the very idea

of her daughter being, of all things, a lowly actress.

With her father's permission but without her mother's knowledge,

16-year-old Clara entered a fame and fortune contest in a movie magazine.

The prize included a bit part in a film.

Her mother associated actresses with street walkers.

They wore heavy make-up, they were seen on the streets

and she said to her daughter, "I'd rather see you dead."

Clara Bow woke up one night,

her mother was hovering over her with a butcher's knife.

Her father wasn't around and her mother chased her around the room. Clara Bow ran out of the apartment.

She lived on the streets for about three days

before she went back home.

After that her mother was committed to a mental institution

and never came out again.

Not long after the attack,

Clara found out she had won the competition.

She put her troubled home life to one side

and embarked on her new career - movies.

The year is 1922

and this is Clara Bow's first ever screen appearance.

But cinema audiences didn't get to see her

because her scenes didn't make the final cut.

Having told the kids at school she was going to be in a picture

and made sure they all went to see it,

to her humiliation she was a face on the cutting room floor.

Can you imagine?

The humiliation.

For her second film, a drama centred on the whaling industry,

Clara began to exhibit the magnetism that would become her hallmark.

The camera loved her.

You can see in the picture, as soon as she appears as a stow-away,

playing a tomboy which she said she was as a kid,

that this is a character to watch.

This was perfect for her. It's what Beyond the Rainbow didn't do.

She brought a naturalism to screen acting

that hadn't been seen before and she wasn't doing it consciously.

She was a teenager with no training and no education.

She was just doing what she knew how to do

and it was almost like a prodigy or a genius without understanding that.

Clara's next role was a bit-part in a romantic comedy.

During filming, her father arrived on set with the news

that her mother had died in the asylum.

That was devastating because she said, "Here I was dancing

"while they were shooting a movie and my mother was dying."

Clara soon had four films under her belt.

She was now earning a little money and supporting her father.

But she was still in New York.

The real movies were happening on the other side of the country.

It would take a Hollywood scout to sit up and take notice,

transporting her from the back lots of the east coast to sun-drenched California.

Clara's the one in the striped coat arriving here

at Preferred Pictures, the offices of her new boss, BP Schulberg.

Before she knew it,

the naive 17-year-old had signed a deal she'd ultimately regret.

But for now, who cared? It was Hollywood and she'd arrived.

Schulberg always took the credit and the money.

But it wasn't a good studio.

It had directors who were really bottom of the barrel, cheap.

This producer's loaning her out for thousands of dollars

and paying her 50 a week and making a fortune at her expense.

She doesn't know, and if she knew she didn't care

because she just loved what she was doing. It was a dream come true.

She couldn't believe this was happening to her.

Clara soon made her Hollywood film debut as a supporting actress

in Maytime, a run of the mill period romance.

The story goes the film crew suggested the leading lady,

here on the right, be replaced with Clara.

It didn't happen but the point was made and she was on her way.

A lot of the films she made in her early years were routine

and that might be a kind word to describe some of them.

They were pot boilers, as they used to call them.

But even though the films weren't inspired,

every time you see even an excerpt with Clara she's just so alive.

She is so alive on camera.

It's as if she found herself

while performing before the camera

in a way that she hadn't in her real life.

The former child star, Diana Cary, known as Baby Peggy,

remembers working alongside a teenage Clara in the 1924 film, Helen's Babies.

Even though it was a very simple ingenue role,

she did have personality. It comes right through.

She was very demure, extremely nice

and even the role was so far away from anything she became later -

she wasn't snappy, she wasn't sharp-looking

and she had always the eyes downcast.

But she had a lot of expression.

Even then she played the girl next door.

Clara was on the Hollywood treadmill and to add to her workload,

her unemployed father had decided to move to California to join her.

Her father's presence was a constant pebble under her shoe.

There's almost no way to talk about Clara Bow's father

without being insulting

because he seems to have served no productive purpose his entire life

and certainly he was a malignant force in hers.

He did nothing for her as a child, in fact ended up doing far worse than nothing,

and then he followed her to Hollywood,

installed himself in her house and lived off her money.

He was known to walk around saying, "Hello, I'm Clara Bow's father,"

especially to extra girls.

When Clara, here on the left, was chosen as One to Watch

by the Western Association of Motion Pictures Advertisers,

her father should have been on hand to chaperone her on the publicity trip to San Francisco.

Instead he got drunk and was banned from travelling on the train.

Among the other girls and their mothers, Clara travelled alone.

But the parts kept rolling in and the cinema tickets kept selling.

Clara was turning into box office gold

and her producers couldn't get the films out fast enough.

In 1925 alone, she made a staggering 15 films.

They worked all day and into the night, whatever it took

to get the film shot and to stay on budget and on schedule.

She was making four and five pictures at a time

because BP Schulberg had got her working like a dog.

Nobody knew these things.

There were a lot of independent producers

at that time in the early '20s, cranking out films

because you could do it on a fairly low budget.

Actors were the lowest rung on the ladder.

There were hotels in Hollywood

when film companies first came there that said no actors or dogs.

The actors, you know, weren't able to have much of another life.

They were under contract

and went from one picture to another to another.

The amazing thing about Clara is she had no formal training,

she had no formal education but she just popped.

She popped off the screen.

She has this spark, this fire,

she has this effervescence, this enthusiasm.

She seemed to thrive on this sort of a tomboy,

even when she's all dressed up and looking beautiful and sexy and everything.

There's always that tomboy image, she's always this feisty...

She's real.

You don't feel she's acting.

You feel that every character that she's playing, that's the way she is.

She really didn't need dialogue.

She had an enormously expressive face

and she could tell you what she was thinking without speaking.

Billy Wilder called it 'flesh impact'.

He said it's the ability of someone to appear

three-dimensional in a two-dimensional medium, like film.

He said the only people he ever saw who had that were Clara Bow

and Marilyn Monroe.

They made you feel they were real even though you were really

only watching a shadow on the screen.

She had developed all of these little skills,

all of these wonderful expressions and these side-long glances

and she just sparkled on the screen and she jumped off the screen.

It was a time when personality was everything.

The things about Clara is she just exuded, not just personality,

she had tremendous vitality and personality,

but also a very natural sexuality.

You couldn't muzzle it.

She's pretty.

She has a quality about her that you just want to be with her.

A key part of the Clara Bow look was created

by legendary stylist, Max Factor.

Max had more to do with her re-shaping her eyebrows,

changing the colour of her hair.

That was the kind of thing that Max would have done the whole package.

The whole look for an actress

and so many actresses turned to him at that time.

She was lucky to have her costumes designed by Travis Banton.

I'm not sure she realised it at the time.

She was notoriously carefree about these beautiful gowns

he would make her.

He would send her onto set with a beautiful gown

and you were never sure how it was going to last by the end of the day

because she treated everything like it was just her casual clothes.

Clara, with a Hollywood makeover, proved to have a universal appeal.

Men and women like her equally.

Usually you have an actress where men are more interested in her

than women or vice versa.

With Clara Bow, men wanted her and women wanted to be her.

So they all went to see the movies.

This carefree magnetism synced perfectly with the mood of the day.

Clara's persona and the flapper movement seemed made for each other.

Flapper refers to a new woman at the beginning of the 20th century,

after World War One, who broke with traditional standards.

Everybody gasped at the way the skirts were going up

and the way they carried on.

They sat in the back of cars with young men(!)

They cut off their hair, they cut off their skirt lengths, they wore make-up, they drank,

they had a very casual attitude about sex and relationships.

Much to the chagrin of the older generation.

It was quite a thrill just to see a picture with a flapper in it.

They didn't have to do much.

Clara's vivacious personality just made that lifestyle

so compelling and then, of course, the roles that she was in.

So she really became the face,

and a pair of shapely legs to boot, of the movement.

Flapper icon Clara then became part of a publicity stunt

cooked up between Paramount and a pretentious British novelist

who was taking Hollywood by storm.

Elinor Glyn was a novelist who had a voguish popularity in the 1920s.

A mature woman who wrote in a coy way about sex and sexuality.

And she wrote a novel called It.

Everyone was talking about It.

What is "it"? There were so many articles written on it.

Everyone wanted to talk about it.

Who else had "it"? It was a big thing.

I read in the paper the other day that "it"

is really just the same thing as sex appeal.

Is that really true?

Well you see, if that were really the case,

every good looking woman in the entire world would have "it".

Whereas, I suppose, if one counted it's one in every ten thousand.

How does one tell this "it" in a person?

Is it the way they talk or move or..?

No, I should say, to give it the most exact description,

it is something which emanates from the eyes.

Paramount bought the rights to It for 50,000 and said,

how about you say Clara Bow has "it".

Elinor Glyn said, for 50,000 I'll say Clara Bow has "it".

But then she actually met Clara Bow and watched her work

and realised she really does have something unique and special.

In the film, Clara plays a vivacious shop girl

loaded with the essential "it", who pursues her handsome boss.

People adored what Clara was given to say by the top title writers

who received huge sums for getting her to say them.

You had to have something for the player to do that was dynamic

and kept the attention of the audience.

What better than to have a fellow kiss you

and you think she's fast and you think she's easy and pow!

And that was always the basic plot.

She saw a man and she went after him.

As commonplace as that may sound today,

there's no way to describe how profoundly revolutionary it was at the time

that you could, as a young woman, go to the movie theatre

and watch a movie about another young woman who didn't wait around for a man to pursue her.

Clara Bow flipped the whole ritual of courtship.

SLOW ROMANTIC VIOLIN MUSIC

There's the scene where she goes to the arcade on a date

and you can see briefly her bloomers under her skirt

which she may not have worn in real life

but for film, propriety dictated that if she was going to be rolling around

inside of a moving tube she probably needed to have some bloomers.

PLAYFUL UPBEAT MUSIC

Clara's style in It was an inspiration for Peppy Miller,

heroine of 2012's surprise Oscar winning silent film, The Artist.

MUSIC: "George Valentin" from The Artist

I definitely think there's a connection between The Artist and It.

I used it as a reference and was very excited about using it.

I wanted to use Clara's early costumes as an inspiration

for Peppy Miller.

The way I used a scarf.

She's on the back of the ship playing a ukulele later in the film,

and I used that look on Peppy Miller in The Artist.

Then Peppy Miller is playing tennis and we put a scarf in her hair

that was a style and a way of wearing a scarf

that Clara often wore her hair.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, there's a great bit of influence

from Clara Bow in the costumes of The Artist.

And it was this striking image perfected in It

that defined the look of the day and helped make Clara a superstar.

# Cos she's got it

# And plenty of it, brother

# She's got it

# I never saw another have so much

# Of such and such

# She's really not exquisite But after all, what is it? #

At the height of her fame, Clara was receiving more mail each week

than the average US town of 5,000 people.

# No, it ain't that That ain't it... #

People used to mail things to her that simply said -

The It Girl, Hollywood, California. and she got it.

She'd got many, many letters from people,

young girls as young as 12 saying,

"You have amazing eyes, you have an amazing mouth,

"I love your hair."

She got so much fan mail about her behaviour and I think they took cues

on how to relate to the opposite sex, how to behave on a date.

One woman wrote she learned about closing her eyes

when her boyfriend kissed her from watching Clara in the movies.

She didn't identify with movie stars, she identified with her fans.

She called them 'my wonderful fan friends' and to her

she was just one of them who had been elevated to be a movie star.

That same year saw the release of Wings,

an ambitious, risky, big budget, World War One action movie.

The studio gave Clara a lead role to help guarantee the film's success.

They re-wrote the part to make it bigger

so that she would be their insurance against this 1.2 million investment.

In Wings, Clara is literally the girl next door who's always had

a crush on Buddy Rogers's character, which he doesn't reciprocate.

He thinks of her more as a pal.

When he goes on a drunken bender on a weekend off from flying

during World War One in Paris,

she pretends to be a Parisian woman of the night

in a misguided attempt to make love to him.

The film has its cake and eats it too.

Clara's allowed to be sexy and vivacious

and to even lead Buddy Rogers on.

But she's not going to take advantage of him

because she's a good girl.

In this scene, Clara memorably reveals all to the camera.

Again, this is just skirting the edge of what was acceptable

at that time in American mainstream movies.

In the end of course the girl next door gets her man.

That was the emblematic Clara Bow part.

Wings was a colossal success.

The picture played for 63 weeks at the Criterion Theatre

in New York City.

At two dollars a tickets, that's a high price.

Back in 1968, Wings co-star Richard Arlen

was asked about his memories of working with Clara.

She was a very courteous, lovely little girl.

Vivacious, full of life

and one of the nicest persons I've ever worked with.

She was most generous with herself.

She was the biggest star we had at that particular time

and she was the last to know it.

But the massive box office success and critical acclaim for Wings

did little to endear her to the Hollywood elite.

She was one of the boys with the grips

and would eat lunch with everybody.

There was none of this high-hat stuff at the studio, movie star stuff.

She was still going to be one of the tomboys from Brooklyn

and that endeared her to everybody she worked with

except the people who wanted to put their humble origins

behind them and project this image of something else.

I think that's what got her in Dutch with a lot of the Hollywood community.

Fellow actress Louise Brooks was an accepted part of that community

but she could see the absurdity of Clara's predicament.

She wasn't acceptable socially.

Eddie Sutherland, my husband,

gave absolutely the best parties in Hollywood.

So I asked him one day to invite Clara Bow and he went,

"Oh, heaven's no, we can't have her.

"We don't know what she'd do. She's from Brooklyn."

Everyone on the lot at Paramount said she's the greatest actress,

but she wasn't acceptable and she knew that.

Initially, Clara Bow was invited to these Hollywood social events,

but her behaviour was so mortifying to these people

that invitations quickly ceased.

One of the funniest stories is she was invited to dinner

by a director and his family at the Beverly Hills Hotel

and she showed up in a bathing suit and high heels!

Not only had she disregarded the idea of dressing for dinner,

but also the dress code of the Beverly Hills Hotel

and she couldn't understand why anybody should care what she wears.

It was no accident that Clara's film characters

shared this disdain for rules.

In Rough House Rosie, a girl from the wrong sides of the tracks

tries to gatecrash high society.

But the crash for Clara came

when her punishing schedule resulted in a breakdown during filming.

For years she had ignored her chronic insomnia,

worked all day and famously partied at night.

The cracks began to show.

Paramount realised that their valuable star needed a rest

and gave her a three month holiday.

This may have been a break from her crushing workload,

but she still maintained an intense personal life.

Clara Bow's love life was the fodder of a lot of speculation

and heavy press coverage.

She encouraged it in the sense she was very open and direct

and honest about what she was doing.

She would call her boyfriends her 'engagements'

which at the time was a euphemism which everyone understood tacitly

that we're sleeping with each other.

Gary Cooper was one of several very public 'engagements'

in the same year.

Her relationships didn't last very long.

But they were very intense and they must have been...

She was one of the most famous people in the world,

so you can imagine how the queue must have been around the block.

Clara had fallen for future matinee idol Gilbert Roland

when they appeared together in The Plastic Age.

I did know him and he had that terrific sense of protection.

He was very, very powerful and huge and quiet and, you know, a Mexican.

Victor Fleming was another close relationship which started

when he directed Clara as flirtatious minx Alverna

in the acclaimed 1926 film - Mantrap.

Fleming was one of those characters she loved.

The macho, absolutely self-confident man.

I don't see how Clara could have resisted him.

He went on to direct The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind in the same year

and he said Clara Bow was the most natural talent he ever worked with.

These were people that she respected but if she liked you

she wasn't going to be shy about it.

She was very aggressive and almost masculine

in terms of how she behaved and that hadn't been seen.

I don't think she fully realised she had as much of a reputation

as she was getting.

Because the only time I ever heard my father gossiping about somebody

because he didn't do that.

But Clara herself fed the gossip machine

by giving a major magazine confessional where she told all.

The family mental illness,

growing up in poverty and her current insecurity,

breaking all the rules of Hollywood.

It was too honest.

We want to hear a dramatic story about how

she was an abandoned countess and made it away from the Bolsheviks.

We didn't want to hear about a tenement upbringing in Brooklyn.

What she was doing without realising it was exposing the hypocrisy

of all these other actresses who were putting on airs

and pretending they were so refined

when they were behaving the same way.

It's no coincidence that Clara Bow's good buddy was Joan Crawford

until Joan Crawford married Douglas Fairbanks Jr

and then she pretended she didn't know Clara Bow

because knowing Clara Bow brought you down socially.

But who cared what the glitterati thought?

Clara was a box office winner and Paramount wanted more.

They had a new invention and Clara was earmarked to showcase it.

The year was 1929 and sound was the next big thing.

Fellow silent movie star Greta Garbo was given two years

to tone down her foreign accent before moving into Talkies.

Moneyspinner Clara was given just two weeks.

She developed an immediate fear of the microphone.

There was a prejudice against talking about a 'goirl' and a 'toikey'.

They had to level that out.

She was a typical example of not only the general adult attitude

towards microphones, but the Hollywood intensity.

It was a panic time.

People had true panic attacks

because everything in their lives hung on it.

For stars like Clara who had no stage background,

no theatrical training, and who may have depended in large part

on the director talking her through a scene,

which now wouldn't be possible with a microphone present,

this was enormously frightening.

It came at a time when she was at the peak of her box office success,

the absolute zenith of her popularity.

She was scared to death.

Having now spent seven years working on an incredible 46 silent films,

it was in this scene that Clara's fans heard her speak

for the very first time.

Just a working girl.

LAUGHTER

If you want exercise, try your muscles on this.

To add to the unwelcome demands of talking pictures

Clara's personal life was becoming increasingly stressful.

In 1929, the Wall Street crash and subsequent Depression

and unemployment was in contrast to the excesses of Hollywood.

Where movie fans and the tabloid press were once fascinated

with the lifestyles of the stars, they were now appalled.

The succession of scandals she was involved in

made the public less and less tolerant of her behaviour.

Here she is paying off 30,000 to a married doctor's wife to keep her silent

and then losing 14,000 in a gambling spree.

Even both of those stories were slanted in her disfavour

and she was a lot more innocent than she appeared to be,

the public disapproval about them was enormous because it felt like,

are you completely insensitive to what's going in the world right now?

But there was some calm in the turmoil.

After the many boyfriends and fiances,

Clara met someone on set who was to play a big part in her future.

Goodbye, baby.

I know it's going to be tough on you but I've got to shove off now.

Goodbye, Eddie.

Clara Bow, who had so much misfortune in her life,

from her earliest years on, finally got lucky when she met Rex Bell

because they obviously loved each other

but more than that, he wanted to protect her

and look after her and she no longer felt

the only time she had value was when she was in front of a camera.

She was still a very young girl and her youth was probably extended

because she had no way to mature mentally,

intellectually.

She didn't have a therapist,

she didn't have anyone explain to her what was happening to her.

Thank God she had Rex Bell because he took care of her.

At least Rex was on the scene to support Clara

when she was hit by yet another scandal.

This time a devastating fraud case

involving her best friend and assistant, Daisy DeVoe.

That's when the public turned against her because Daisy,

under oath, told all of these lies about Clara Bow's,

what the newspaper called, wild spending orgies and all of these men.

Suddenly everything she had been celebrated for in the 1920s,

now in the early 1930s, she was being condemned for.

It didn't seem so funny or amusing any more.

In 1931, a tabloid news-sheet crossed the line.

Salacious, vicious and above all fabricated,

the story would leave a permanent stain on Bow's reputation.

The Coast Reporter printed four issues that accused her,

among other things, of bestiality, drug addiction, incest,

lesbianism, gambling orgies, sexual orgies.

The man was convicted in a federal court and sent to prison

but the damage was done.

She had to read this and when she read it she threw up.

Then she had another nervous breakdown

and that was when she had to leave Hollywood.

She was only 25 years old.

After a brief spell in Glendale Sanitarium

Clara finally severed ties with Paramount.

At that point in her life, Rex Bell was an answered prayer

because he was sincere and loving and kind and strong and he was a cowboy.

He didn't particularly care about the movie business.

In fact, he didn't like it. He wanted to get out and be a rancher.

He could move her somewhere else, he could take care of her, he could protect her.

So he seemed to be the answer and the exact man she was looking for

after all these men who had failed her or not lived up to her expectations

or hadn't been strong enough for her. He seemed like Mr Right.

Together, they pursued their dream of ranch life

and bought land near to what was then the small town of Las Vegas.

This ranch was actually 400,000 acres.

They ran about 1,800 head of cattle during that time.

Living in the Mojave Desert back then and even today,

it hasn't changed a lot.

It's definitely a wonderful retreat out here.

We're in the middle of hundreds of thousands of acres

and you come out and you have serenity in your soul.

Something I think Rex and Clara were really looking for

was that sense of getting away and the retreat.

I feel like that every time I come out here.

They were soon married but their desert retreat was short lived.

Irritated by a magazine headline suggesting she had given in

and tempted by a huge cheque by Fox Pictures,

Clara was back in Hollywood on a lucrative two movie deal.

Call Her Savage, based on a lurid bestseller,

did excellent business and got Clara glowing reviews for her acting.

She overcame all her awkwardness and all her fear of that microphone

and delivered the goods just as she had in so many silent films.

As a reward for her success, Fox sent Clara on a European press tour

for what would be her final film - Hoopla.

The trip included a visit to Britain.

I just came back to do one more picture and I hope that you all will like it very much.

I would like to be known as a serious actress

and not just as an It Girl.

And now here's a big surprise.

I want you to meet the most gorgeous man in the world -

Mr Rex Bell, my husband. Hooray!

-Say hello, darling.

-Hello, everybody.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, no fool.

In Hoopla, Clara plays an exotic carnival dancer

with a heart of gold.

Come on, Carrie.

You get my bed tonight and tomorrow morning you'll feel OK.

I love Hoopla.

I think Hoopla is a beautiful and exceptional movie.

Clara runs the gamut of emotions in this film. She's a wiseguy.

The next time you pull anything like this,

-I'm going to kick you off the show.

-You and who else?

She's a woman in love and everything in-between.

Haven't you ever had a girl back home that you used to hold

close in your arms and kiss sometime?

I thought so.

Couldn't you shut your eyes and pretend I'm her?

And that's her last appearance on screen.

You watch that and you think, oh, really?

No-one else was able to find a decent film

and persuade her to come back before the cameras?

But there would be no more movies.

This was her final scene in her final film.

Clara Bow was 28 years old.

She hated making it but she's great in it.

You can see the beginning of a real, serious, dramatic, talking actress.

But the love had left and she was done and she walked away.

She walked away back to the ranch in Nevada.

This time for good.

The pay cheque from Fox financed the building of a dream ranch house.

After a decade of non-stop hard work and 57 movies,

Clara was trying to settle down.

GUNSHOT

GUNSHOT

Clara may have closed the door to more movies but she used her fame

to launch a restaurant called the "It" Cafe back in Hollywood.

Although we live on a cattle range in Nevada, we do have a soft spot

in our hearts for our friends in Hollywood, and Hollywood.

We have considerable time to spend here and we had to have somewhere to spend it

and, also, a place to receive our friends.

Very good. May I add, if I had more time I'd tell you about my pet fox,

pet hawk, lambs, cattle, 25 dogs etcetera,

but I haven't the time so please excuse.

While the "It" Cafe provided a kind of therapy,

chaos was never far away.

Much to Clara's dismay, Rex had begun to get interested in politics.

She saw her life as a politician's wife looming

and it pushed her over the edge.

In 1943, Clara took an overdose

leaving a suicide note saying she preferred death to public life.

I think she saw her move to the desert and her ability to now

become a wife and a mother and live out of Hollywood as the answer.

In fact it turned out to be her undoing,

sort of the paradox of her life.

When she was in crisis, she could function.

When she had domestic bliss is when she started to fall apart.

She needed to be doing something.

It's really a feminist parable in a way

because this is a story of someone who needed a career.

It's what she needed to do, it's how she was able to survive

and when you took her career away from her,

she didn't know who she was any more. She had no identity.

For over 15 years, Clara had made no public appearances.

Then in 1947, she appeared in a charity competition

on the hugely popular radio show, Truth or Consequences

as the mystery voice codenamed Mrs Hush.

We know that for many years,

you've wanted nothing more than the privacy of your home and family.

You voluntarily quit films at the pinnacle of your career

because you wanted a normal home life with your husband, Rex Bell,

and your two wonderful sons, George and Tony.

You were very happy and even the hundreds of fan letters

that still pour into your home weekly could not sway you from this.

We know you are constantly turning down fabulous film contracts.

Miss Clara Bow, or, as she has been so happily known

for a good many years, Mrs Rex Bell.

APPLAUSE

I'd like to thank the people who really made this contest

the great contribution it was for the March of Dimes.

And that is you other listeners who entered the contest

and contributed your dimes, dollars or just anything.

All of our thanks to you.

But the public and private face were at odds.

Clara was putting on a good show,

while in reality, she was, as ever, plagued by insomnia.

In addition, she now complained of aches, pains and headaches

and was displaying increasingly erratic behaviour.

A year later, she checked into a prestigious psychiatric hospital,

the Institute of Living in Connecticut.

A former psychiatric aide remembers meeting a subdued Clara in 1949.

When I first met Clara, she was pleasant.

Sort of aloof, but still pleasant to me.

She didn't talk very much with the other guests.

I guess she didn't want to be disturbed.

I think she wanted to be by herself. I think she was probably sad.

Nobody's really happy to be institutionalised like this,

but she seemed a little sad.

The one thing I noticed, she looked very old for her age.

I think she was in her 40s, I guess, when she got there.

She looked 65.

Clara Bow's treatment for her own mental health problems

was really ahead of the curve.

She was very forthright always,

and she would talk about it

and she sought the best treatment there was.

She went to the top mental hospitals in America

and she would stay for long periods, often as long as a year.

She received electroconvulsive therapy treatments,

which she liked because she said,

"They help me forget my childhood." That's what she told her sons.

Rex came to visit regularly. Hopeful of a cure.

That support from him must have meant a lot to her, too.

Here's someone who's your spouse who's being understanding,

both privately and publicly.

She seemed very happy and he seemed very happy to see her, too.

Because I think he felt that she was getting better.

And eventually, I guess she did improve enough

to leave the Institute.

In her ten-month stay,

Clara was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.

The intense psychotherapy sessions

had also revealed some shocking facts.

Memories came flooding back to her that, for the first time,

she seems to have shared with her doctors.

One of which was the fact that

not only her mother tried to kill her, which she talked about before,

but the fact that her mother

had been a part-time prostitute when it was necessary.

And the other revelation, which was more difficult, even,

was that her father, after her mother had been committed to a mental institution

and she was still a teenager, her father had raped her.

That was more difficult because her father was still alive at the time.

Despite this, Clara continued to support her father financially

until his death in 1959.

The diagnosis of schizophrenia left no real hope of improvement

and it was the end of the road for her marriage.

A return to family life in Nevada was no longer possible for her.

And in 1950, Clara moved back to LA,

to a suburb only a few miles south of Hollywood,

but to a very different world.

Clara Bow lived in Los Angeles in a small, humble house

with a practical nurse.

Not a licensed nurse, a practical nurse. Like a caretaker.

Clara's son, Tony, had by then married,

and his wife Jackie remembers visiting her mother-in-law in the early 1960s.

I never was overwhelmed with who she was.

I think it was because that part of her life...

wasn't there.

It was...she was a different person.

A former neighbour remembers time spent growing up

in the house opposite the ageing actress.

To us, she was just the pretty lady across the street.

I can't ever remember ever calling her Clara Bow

or Mrs Bow or Mrs anything.

It was just the pretty lady across the street.

She very seldom came outside,

and when she did, she was usually in a bathrobe or night robe.

She always had sunglasses on. Her hair was always made up.

Her hair was always done well.

And she would sit on the porch and, er...smoke a cigarette.

I know our Christmases together were planned

right down to the, to the wire.

And we would have to... SHE LAUGHS

I shouldn't put it that way.

But it was a tradition with her.

And Tony had told me this, that that's what we do.

And so we'd watch one of the silent films.

She had an old projector.

I know we watched one with Gilbert Roland.

In the very, very back, she had kind of a collect-all room,

where the photo albums and knickknacks and stuff were.

And she sat there with me and showed me pictures, photo albums.

A lot of different pictures from movies and family and friends.

That was probably the fondest memory.

She read constantly.

She was well read.

And it was a joy to talk to her.

Although hidden away and protected from the stresses of life,

Clara still had one problem that had never gone away.

Clara had insomnia.

She never exhibited any mood changes

or, you know, she was never...

er...seemed out of sorts to me, ever.

I assumed and never questioned it either, that, er...

..she got a shot every night.

But I, I never questioned anything about that.

Clara had remained amicably apart from her husband, Rex.

His sudden death from a heart attack in 1962

saw Clara make a very rare appearance in public.

I have an image I remember

of her coming out of the house and standing on the porch

dressed in the black memorial-type clothes.

And that was one of the few times that I saw her actually dressed up.

Within three years, Clara herself was to die

in the house she had retreated to almost 15 years before.

In the days before the funeral,

fans queued at the chapel to pay their respects.

She micromanaged her own funeral at home.

She made a long list for her sons

of what she wanted to be dressed in, the colour of the casket,

the colour of the lining of the casket, what make-up she wanted.

It's all specified in writing for them.

So it was almost like the actress until the end.

I remember the ride to Forest Lawn.

And people that were alongside the road up to Forest Lawn.

And the people outside the chapel.

The whole thing was so surreal to me.

It was hard for me.

When Clara Bow passed away, as a memorial tribute for her,

all the neighbourhood people,

the close ones that had some kind of association with her,

I believe it was her older son,

set up a projector and screened one of her movies.

I believe it was the It Girl.

And I remember sitting on the floor

with the other couple of neighbourhood kids, my mom and dad

and a few other mom and dads in the living room,

watching the movie.

And that was the last recollection that I had.

Her son thanked everybody

and, you know, end of the chapter, you know.

Clara's seclusion, her early death

and the lack of recognition for silent film created a void.

I think the fact that Clara Bow's career ended so early

and then she vanished from the spotlight so completely

had a lot to do with her, er...

disappearing from the public consciousness.

So many of her films vanished, too.

That was kind of a one, two punch.

By the time she died, Clara was so forgotten

that she was even overlooked by film historians.

Kevin Brownlow failed to mention her

in his 1960s' appraisal of silent cinema,

The Parade's Gone By,

much to the displeasure of Clara's contemporary Louise Brooks,

who fired off a series of outraged letters.

And she would get so angry.

And they would almost burn their way out of the envelope.

I could tell by the way she'd written,

it was in sort of SS lettering.

You know, lightning flashes.

And, um...so I knew,

"Oh, my God, I've done something wrong."

But I do feel very sad that I didn't meet Clara Bow.

A younger audience has discovered Clara Bow. That's really exciting,

but it makes perfect sense to me. Because in a way,

she's the forerunner of Sex and the City.

She's the forerunner of the young, modern, independent woman.

Clara Bow is the most colourful, delightful,

wonderful creature on the screen.

I quite understand people will go on being fascinated by her.

She comes bursting out of the period with all guns blazing.

So, after decades of neglect,

Clara Bow's legacy is, like her films,

gradually being restored.

Now, out of the 57 films she made,

we have over 30, including all her sound films.

They've all been preserved.

And even now, new clips turn up out of nowhere.

In the past year, the long-lost colour footage

from the movie Red Hair, made at the height of her career,

the only footage of Clara Bow in colour,

with her famous signature red hair, has turned up.

So it never ends.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd