Tragic Details About Clara Bow's Life

The place? Brooklyn, New York. The time? July 1905. While nowadays, you might think of the bustling borough of New York City as hipster headquarters with its overpriced lattes and aspiring musicians in flannels and beanies, back in the early 20th century, Brooklyn was defined by its extreme poverty and unsafe living conditions. This was the Brooklyn that future starlet Clara Bow was born into on July 29, 1905. 

Biographer David Stenn writes in his book "Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild" that the tenement neighborhoods in which Bow's parents lived were rat-infested, impoverished places. He goes as far as to describe these Brooklyn apartments as "slum buildings." In a time before sanitation regulations or health and safety codes, it was completely legal for landlords to cram their tenants into small homes with no windows, often with many families sharing a single toilet. 

These conditions made the Bow family home a perfect breeding ground for disease. With no ventilation in the borough's small apartments, diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, and diphtheria were incredibly common. Infant mortality rates were high, and it was a wild stroke of luck that the little Clara made it to adulthood. According to Stenn, reformers of the early 20th century called the Bows' neighborhood "hell on Earth." In particular, records show that her parents, Robert and Sarah Bow, once lived at 160 Sands St. — one of the "roughest area[s] in America" at the time.

It's undeniable that Clara Bow's early life was defined by pain, tragedy, and want. Between her unstable mother and abusive father, her childhood in Brooklyn was one that no one should envy. However, her early days weren't all dark. One silver lining in the young Bow's life was the affection and love she received from her maternal grandfather, Frederick Gordon. 

Bizarrely, Bow biographer David Stenn reported that Gordon was no loving husband or father. In fact, he was downright cruel to his daughter, Sarah, during her own childhood. However, with a baby on her hip and her husband spending a large amount of time away from home, Sarah decided to invite her father to move in with her and her 1-year-old daughter. The infant must have softened him because Stenn wrote that Frederick "treated his granddaughter with kindness and affection." 

With Sarah struggling to manage her own failing mental health, Bow's grandfather seemed to have taken on the role of babysitter and playmate. He even built an indoor swing in the family's tenement in an attempt to make the home a bit warmer and more loving for his granddaughter. However, true to Bow lore, it wasn't long before tragedy struck. On January 20, 1909, the littlest Bow was flying high on her swing when her grandfather, who was pushing her, suffered a neurological episode. Clara's screams alerted her mother and the next day Frederick Gordon, Clara's primary caretaker, was declared dead.

Outside of the home, life on the streets of Brooklyn was also tough for the young Clara Bow. Her biographer reports that she was a lonely child who only had one true companion, a little boy named Johnny who lived in the same tenement. However, what was once a much needed friendship soon turned to tragedy when Johnny perished in a house fire.

Speaking to the celebrity magazine Photoplay in 1928, Bow gave an account of how the tragedy unfolded. "He was several years younger than I was," she said of Johnny,  "and I used to take him to school with me, and fight the boys if they bothered him. I could lick any boy my size." It was after their school run one afternoon when Bow heard "a terrible noise" coming from downstairs. 

What she found was Johnny aflame, having been caught in a house fire. Though she was just a child herself, the young starlet-to-be came to her friend's aid. She recalls Johnny screaming "Clara, Clara, help me" before falling into her arms. Bow said, "I laid him on the floor and rolled him up in the carpet and tried the best I could to put the fire out." Tragically, her efforts were to no avail and Johnny died in her arms. Looking back, Bow remembers crying "for hours" after the event. She said, "I have never cried but once like that since. That was when my mother died."

If the #MeToo movement is anything to go on, Hollywood has not historically been a very safe or welcoming place for women. With today's biggest actresses still fighting to have their voice heard when they speak up about abusers and sexual predators in the industry, one can only imagine how hostile this environment was for an actress like Clara Bow who was working in the early days of the industry. 

While Bow never had her own #MeToo moment, naming names and calling out toxic individuals, she did speak broadly in her later years about some of the bullying she received from Hollywood bosses and casting agents as a young woman trying to make it on the big screen. At the start of her career, rejection was everywhere. Often, this rejection came with a heavy dose of body shaming on the side. Later in life,  Bow would reveal that her rejections were almost always down to her weight. She said, "I was too young, or too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat."

Even when she hit the big time, the Hollywood elite still looked down their noses at this street smart girl from Brooklyn. Hollywood bosses in particular regularly made fun of what they saw as Bow's lack of intelligence. With a reputation as a "jazz baby," aka party girl, they weren't shy about calling Bow a "birdbrain" and "an easy winner of the Dumbbell Award," according to biographer David Stenn.

Like many performers who make their living stepping into different characters and situations, the line between persona and real life soon began to blur for Clara Bow. In film after film, she was typecast as a "jazz baby" — a fresh young thing who wore all the latest flapper fashions and loved drinking, dancing, and flirting. However, her real life wasn't too far off. 

She was a rebel and a party girl, flying in the face of what the buttoned-up Hollywood elite expected of her as their biggest star of the era. Film historian Jeff Crouse spoke with the Daily Mail about Bow's antics and how they impacted her reputation in Tinseltown, claiming, "She was free-spirited and loved sex. Men would fall at her feet, and she had affairs with some of Hollywood's most desirable men, such as actors Gilbert Roland, Gary Cooper, and film director Victor Fleming." 

Stories abounded about Bow's wild ways, including an incident in which she was invited to a posh dinner by film director Frank Tuttle only to turn up dressed in nothing but a bathing suit. While this rebellious behaviour would be charming coming from a zany film character, in real life, it only resulted in Bow being ostracized from Hollywood society. One fellow actress from the 1920s recalled Bow's standing in society by saying, "She wasn't well liked amongst other women in the film colony. Her social presence was taboo." 

Between 1926 and 1930, a sound revolution took place in Hollywood. Thanks to technological advancements, the days of the silent film — and thus, the silent film star — became a thing of the past. This was a jolt for many actors and actresses who had carved an entire career out of being incredibly expressive physically and acting out narrative after narrative without the use of their voice. 

Clara Bow was one such actress who had overcome insecurity and ridicule to make it in the "talkie" era. Hailing from the rough streets of Brooklyn, New York, Bow retained a thick accent her whole life and was nowhere near the type of vocal talent audiences would find in stars who had managed to master the Transatlantic accent — a combination of British Received Pronunciation and American English accents that film stars were encouraged to adopt to highlight their elite status. 

Bow's childhood stutter also caused her much inner turmoil. Paramount Studios reportedly gave the star "two weeks" to prepare for the filming of her first talking picture, 1929's "The Wild Party." Although the movie would go on to become a box office success, "The Wild Party" made Bow's Brooklyn accent an inextricable part of her public persona. In fact, a parody of Bow can be seen in 1952's "Singin' in the Rain," which features an airhead actress figure whose thick accent makes her a laughingstock on set.

What followed from the Daisy DeVoe trial can only be called a PR nightmare. Clara Bow's reputation, and thus her relationship with the studios, was in free fall. With the country's tabloid readers pegging her an unrepentant party girl, her employers were unsure how to cast her going forward. In fact, the original Coast Reporter article  outright called Bow "morally unfit" to be on-screen and called on Paramount executives to terminate her contract.

Not one to cower from tabloid journalists, the head of Paramount decided to give her one more shot. Bow was cast in a film called "The Secret Call," but the filming schedule — on top of the media firestorm — proved too much. Before the film could be completed, the harried starlet suffered from a nervous breakdown. Biographer David Stenn recounted in "Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild" that Bow's housekeeper awoke one night to terrifying screams coming from the star's bedroom. 

She simply couldn't face another morning of filming. Bow's lover and future husband, Rex Bell, drove her the 25-year-old to a facility called the Glendale Sanitarium. After years of hard living and hard work in Hollywood — and with her name now trashed by every tabloid in town — Bow had simply had enough. The medical staff diagnosed her with "shattered nerves." "It would be dangerous," one doctor wrote, "for her to make a picture at this time." And with that, a chapter of the Bow saga had closed. 

While Clara Bow had many relationships in her day, the one that actually made it to the altar was her relationship with fellow actor Rex Bell. He too had gone to Hollywood looking to make a name for himself in the pictures. Where Bow made a fortune as the bright-eyed ingenue, Bell found his niche as a cowboy type in Western films. However, their paths crossed in 1930 on the set of "True to the Navy," and the rest is history. 

Just one year later, the two were wed in the state of Nevada — Rex's desert haven away from the bustle of Hollywood. While their relationship took off, Bow's career and mental health began to decline. Eventually, she said goodbye to the pictures, and Rex was beginning a career as a politician. Although theirs was one of the few show business relationships to make it out of Tinseltown intact, Bow's mental health challenges eventually led to the deterioration of their marriage. 

While Rex soon became a leader in his Nevada's Republican Party and owned one of the largest plots of land in the state, his shattered wife became more reclusive. Bow was anxious and hated public life. After her second stint in a mental institution, Bow and her husband decided that they would remain married but live apart. While Rex remained in Nevada, Bow moved back to Los Angeles so she could be close to her doctor. 

Clara Bow's life was nothing if not a roller coaster ride. From her traumatic childhood on the rough streets of Brooklyn to reigning as the queen of Hollywood and her own desert paradise, Bow's life reads like something out of a work of fiction. With epic highs and even more epic lows, the journey of this early film star was not without its tragic moments. 

By the end of her life, Bow was living away from her two sons and her estranged husband. She remained in close contact with her mental health team and was involved in ongoing therapies. Later in his life, Rex Bell summarized his wife's condition by saying, "The emotional strain of her early years was just too much for her. She had to live a different life. She needs the constant care of a doctor."

After so many years hounded by photographers and journalists, it's no surprise that the former "It" girl eventually chose such a reclusive way of life. Her fear of public attention and crowds was so great that when Bell died in 1962, Bow — the mother of his two children — appeared at his Los Angeles funeral for only a few minutes. In David Stenn's study of Bow's life, he remarked that aside from holiday shopping and doctor's appointments, "she would never leave home again." It was there that a 60-year-old Bow died of a heart attack on September 27, 1965, with only her live-in nurse by her side.

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