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1900s, 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s…oops! I forgot the 1920s, but it’s okay so do most people today. Though why? This decade is rarely thought of, even though it enclosed many important events.

Women getting the right to vote, the invention of sliced bread, the formation of the American Professional Football League(changed to the NFL), Amelia Earhart’s transatlantic flight, the first sound film, the opening of JCPenney, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth, and America’s first sex symbols graced the screen, both in silent films, and starting in 1927-sound films. The fate of the 20s should have been sealed when F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway joined the ranks of the best and most memorable writers of all time. (the Great Gatsby <3) The jazz age and its steps forward in gender independence and equality, are more forgotten than it should be.

Lately, I’ve been working on a school project. It’s about an exceptional silent film actress named Clara Bow. She was Hollywood’s first “sex icon” and a woman who has been looked up to by many. I looked at this site listing the top sex symbols of all time, for the 1920s, it listed Louise Brooks and only her, Brooks would be turning in her grave at that. Clara Bow wanted nothing other than to be loved, and she got it. In 1926, she starred in the first film to win an academy award for best film, she was the biggest star in the world through the late 1920s, and the only recognition she gets today is a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. Let’s just say that Marilyn Monroe was a cheap copy of Bow, who wasn’t as strong and was in WAY less films.

This forgotten star doesn’t deserve this. Just because Paramount couldn’t take good care of her films, she was subjected to an actress who was only remembered by people who saw her in theaters.  This is a copy of my school project…I know that it’s long, you don’t have to read the whole thing but this is who Clara was, told from her point of view.

As you read, imagine that you are film historian Rudy Behlmer reading Clara’s response to your manuscript informing her that you would like to write about her life. Welcome to 1963.

Dear Mr. Behlmer,

You say that you are writing of my life. In your manuscript you wrote about the big events in my career, and the well-known events from my past, but the closest you got to today in writing of my life, the life of Clara Bow, was 30 years ago. Do you know why that is? It’s because 30 years ago was the last time I had talked to a reporter or anyone outside of my family and my doctors. It is time that the world knew what has become of Clara Bow.

As you know, I grew up in Brooklyn. My father couldn’t hold a job, my mother couldn’t work, and they both resented the fact that I had been born. The girls at school thought that I was fat, ugly, and didn’t deserve for them to be nice to me. So, I cast my lot with the neighborhood boys, I played football and baseball, and I boxed. I could beat any guy my size. But, once my “womanly traits” started to develop they began to do weird things, they started asking me on dates, and kissing me. That was the first time that I remembered feeling ashamed at where my life and body had led me.

Through the rest of my childhood, “I had one haven of refuge. Just one place where I could go and forget the misery and gloom of home, the loneliness and heartache of school. That was to the motion pictures. I can never repay them what they gave me.” I’d save and save and beg Dad for a little money, and every cent of it went into the box office of a motion picture theater.” I’d feel the cold metal on my palms as I traded the coins for a ticket to the latest show. I’d go and watch the films and listen to the bands, piano players, or orchestras play along to Mary Pickford’s silent conversations. I’d smell the mustiness of the cheaper Brooklyn theaters, the only ones that I could afford. “For the first time in my life I knew there was beauty in the world. For the first time I saw distant lands, serene, lovely homes, romance, nobility, glamour.” all of which I had never known in the real world.

“My whole heart was afire, and my love was the motion picture. Not just the people of the screen, but everything that magic silversheet could represent to a lonely, starved, unhappy child…A great ambition began to unfold in me.” Watching the films, I wanted to be what the people on the screen were to me. I wanted to be a salvation, a way for others to escape , I wanted to act on the screen and be part of my own refuge. “I kept it hidden for fear of being laughed at. I felt myself how ridiculous it was. Why, I wasn’t even pretty. I was a square, awkward, funny-faced kid.” *change in quotes* I knew even then, waiting, looking, hoping for a part that it would be hard, because “I was the wrong type to play ingenues. I was too small for a leading woman and too kiddish for heavies. I had too much of what my wonderful friend Elinor Glyn calls ‘it’ apparently for the average second role or anything of that sort. I got turned down for more jobs, I guess than any other girl who ever tried to break into pictures.”But all the same I knew I wanted to be a motion picture actress. And I can say one thing, right here. If I have had success beyond my own greatest dreams, it may be that it is the reward for the purity of my motive when I first dreamed that dream. For I truly didn’t think of fame or money or anything like that. I just thought of how beautiful it all was and how wonderful it must be to do for people what pictures were doing.”

I knew that my dream was one shared by most of America, the way I got there…was a hope for many of the same people. While reading Motion Picture Magazine in 1921, I saw an ad for a contest. This one was different from the others, it was a talent contest rather than a beauty contest, I knew I could never win the latter. This contest was somethin’ that all girls hoping to break into films loved the idea of…they loved the prospect of winnin’ and gettin’ the part in their first movie, of being a silent film star. So, I entered.

I walked into the contest offices. I saw the other girls. Oh, they were gorgeous. To me, they seemed the most beautiful girls in all the world. Blondes and brunettes, no vulgar little redheads. They were elegantly dressed, perfectly groomed, with lovely manicured hands and slim, delicate legs in sheer stockings. I was wearin’ an old curtain.

“They all wanted to do it first. I didn’. So I never said a word. I sat there, though, through every one of those tests and watched everythin that was done, everythin they were told, every mistake they made.

The trouble was, I thought, that they was all tryin’ t’do it like somebody they’d seen on the screen, not the way they’d do it themselves.” So when everybody else had gone, and it was my turn…I did like I would do in real life, not that way I’d seen Marion Davies do it a hundred times.

When I got home, my mother asked where I had been. I had been hiding this contest from everybody but my dad. But, now I figured I could tell her so…I did. I was hopin’ for a better response than what she said, but expected it nonetheless. She looked me in the eye “You are a whore! You’re goin’ straight to hell. I’d rather see you dead.” And collapsed onto the floor.

She used the threat more and more.

My mother, I loved her, she was so caring and beautiful. When I was young, she was diagnosed with epilepsy, accompanied by psychosis. Her seizures were some of the scariest times of my life, part of the fear was reserved for the fact that I could lose my mother at any time…the other part was for my own life. She had this idea that all actresses were whores, and that we all deserved to die and go to hell. When Motion Picture Magazine put me in their January 1922 issue,”A Dream Come True”, her mind took a turn for the worst. She put actions to what she had already been saying.

The first time my mother tried to kill me, she woke me up from a night of sleep.

“Mother?”

She didn’t answer. Just came closer to the bed. I had to rely on the creaking floorboards to tell me where she was, it was too dark to see.

“Mother, darling, what are you doing?” Creak. Creak. Creak.

She pinioned my hands down. “I’m going to kill you, Clara. It will be better.”

She put the knife at my throat.

The room went all black. I fought to keep consciousness. I knew if I didn’t I was lost – we were both lost. I kept thinking. “Oh, poor mother, poor mother, how terrible she will feel if she ever knows she has done this. I mustn’t let her.” I could already smell the metallic tang of my own blood.

I moved. The knife came closer. The hands tightened their grip, turning to steel.

I started to talk, to plead, to soothe, watching her all the time. She didn’t seem to hear me. Her eyes burned into mine. I don’t know how long it was, but it seemed hours. At last, when she seemed to relax for a final effort, I made a desperate spring, as swiftly, as strongly as I could. It knocked her away from me. I ran across the room and out the door and turned and locked her in.”

I got away. This time. It wasn’t the last…but it is why even last night I had trouble sleeping. She got worse and worse, her mind never giving her a break. That February, she was committed to the same mental institution that my grandmother had died in, due to what the doctors called “Psychosis due to epilepsy”. About a year later, she was transferred to a different institution.

I was dancing on a table…working…when my mother left me for good. My dad walked into the studio in 1923, and without even him saying anything…I knew she was gone. It hadn’t even been a year since she was put into the asylum, but nonetheless, she died in one. If I was a sadistic maniac, I’d say that it was funny. Mother and daughter dying in the same type of place. I was broken, but I couldn’t let the cameras see, I had to keep going.

And I did. My mother’s passing may have been the first thing to tear a piece of me off. She never wanted me to be an actress, she had this idea that we were all whores and that actresses deserve to be out on the streets or dead.

When I filmed “It” in 1927, everyone was sending in letters or telling me in person that I was, am, the “It girl of Hollywood”, and maybe I was, but that didn’t last long. Because later that year, when “The Jazz SInger” came out and put the soundstage in the spotlight, I was betrayed by my dreams. I wasn’t fit for “Talkies”, the microphone was my enemy. With the silent films, the audience could choose what I sounded like, with the soundstage my real voice was found. I had always hated my accent, how it kept me from forgetting the tribulations of my past.

While working “True to the Navy” which not only was I expected to talk, but also sing-it wasn’t my first musical, but it was the first film that I starred in with Rex Bell at my side. When I met Rex, I was in my 4th engagement. But, I soon dropped Harry Richman and fell in love with a cowboy star. My plan all along was to stay in the films until marriage, and Rex was the one who finally took me away.

We were married in 1931, my 5th engagement but my first and only marriage.

I loved him for taking me away from the life that Hollywood pushed me into, and for taking care of me through everything that happened.

“A sex symbol is a heavy load to carry when one is tired hurt and bewildered.” I never knew that more than in 1941 when Rex was running for Congress and I knew that I would have to return to the spotlight. I knew that I wouldnt be able to do it, so I took my pills in my hand, laid down on my bed and placed the note next to me.

I woke up the next day, and I was disappointed that I did. Until, my sons and Rex caught my eye, and I was glad that I was given another chance.

We lived happily on our Nevada ranch for a few more years, but then I became sick, my symptoms resembling my mother’s 50 years before. I was taken to doctors all over the country, none of them being able to find out what was wrong with me. I assumed that the symptoms were connected to insomnia, for not sleeping at night for many years. But, it kept getting worse psychological rather than physical, and in 1949, I was admitted to the Institute for Living, and diagnosed as schizophrenic. My long treatment regimen included Shock Therapy. After a while I was transferred to a hospital closer to home, in Los Angeles. It was there that we learned that I had been subconsciously repressing childhood memories.

These memories let me remember how much my parents loved me. My mother loving me so much that she would lock me in the cupboard as she came home late at night with an “uncle” I remember being proud of having such a big family. I was clueless, still she did it for me. While she was in the hospital, I did everything that I could to please my father. All I wanted was love, and tenderness. I cooked, cleaned, did his laundry. He showed his love to me by wanted to get closer to me, by forcing me into the bed with him. My father raped me when I was 17. I think that I forgave him a long time ago, because although it was wrong, he was just showing how much he loved me.

Later, after I left the hospital, I was sent home with a nurse. I reverted back to my old ways and spent all my time watching films, of me, or newer ones. I even had a favorite actress, one who once said in an interview that it was me who had inspired her to be a star. I was shocked! Why would Marilyn Monroe, look up to me? A poor, beaten down woman who was destroyed by that life. I think it was because we had a lot in common, our moms and grandmas had both needed psychiatric treatment and we both grew up poor, not to mention that we were both seen, by Hollywood and the rest of the world, as sex symbols.

So, earlier this year, exactly a month after the sadness of Rex passing away and leaving me out of his will, not because he disliked me, but because there wasn’t a lot to the will and he knew that I could easily support myself for the rest of my life, I was devastated when Monroe decided to take the same path that I had tried 22 years before. That was the difference between us. Her tribulations were minor compared to many of mine, I think that I am stronger than she was, but I know why she did it. That life is a horrible one when you’re exhausted and not paid nearly as much as the stars who weren’t bringing in as much money to the studios.

If I can say one more thing, it is that I was surprised to hear from you, that people were still interested in me. I know that Paramount didn’t take very good care of the silents, I knew all along that I’d be forgotten as old age struck me, and after not hearing from the reporters or anyone, for years…I thought it had already happened. I’m still just glad that I was loved in my day. I don’t mind if I’m forgotten, and I know I’m mostly there, but soon I’ll be forgotten by myself.

Sincerely,

Clara Bow