Clara Gordon Bow (; July 29, 1905 – September 27, 1965) was an American actress who rose to stardom during the silent film era of the 1920s and successfully made the transition to "talkies" in 1929. Her appearance as a plucky shopgirl in the 1927 film It brought her global fame and the nickname "The It Girl". Bow came to personify the Roaring Twenties and is described as its leading sex symbol.
Bow appeared in 58 films, all but 11 of which were silent. Thirty-three are extant in their entirety, 14 are partially lost, and 11 are completely lost. Some hits include Mantrap (1926), It (1927), and Wings (1927). She was named the first box-office draw in 1928 and 1929 and the second box-office draw in 1927 and 1930. Her presence in a motion picture was said to have ensured investors, by odds of almost two-to-one, a "safe return". At the apex of her stardom, she received more than 45,000 fan letters in a single month, in January 1929.
After marrying actor Rex Bell in 1931, Bow retired from acting in 1933. Her final film, Hoop-La, was released in 1933. She then became a rancher in Nevada. Bow had two children. In September 1965, Bow died of a heart attack at the age of 60.
Bow was born in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, New York City, at 697 Bergen Street, in a "bleak, sparsely furnished room above [a] dilapidated Baptist Church". Her birth year, according to the US censuses of 1910 and 1920, was 1905. In US census records, enumerated April 15, 1910, and January 7, 1920, Bow's age is stated 4 and 14 years, respectively. The 1930 census stated an age of 23.
Bow was her parents' third child. Her two older sisters, born in 1903 and 1904, had died in infancy. Her mother, Sarah Frances Bow (née Gordon, 1880–1923), was told by a doctor not to become pregnant again for fear the next baby might die as well. Despite the warning, Sarah became pregnant with Clara in late 1904. In addition to the risky pregnancy, a heat wave besieged New York in July 1905, and temperatures peaked around 100 °F (38 °C). Years later, Clara wrote: "I don't suppose two people ever looked death in the face more clearly than my mother and I the morning I was born. We were both given up, but somehow we struggled back to life."
Bow's parents were descended from English and Scots-Irish immigrants who had come to America the generation before. Bow said that her father, Robert Walter Bow (1874–1959), "had a quick, keen mind... all the natural qualifications to make something of himself, but didn't... everything seemed to go wrong for him, poor darling." By the time Clara was four and a half, her father was out of work. Between 1905 and 1923, the family lived at 14 different addresses, but seldom outside Prospect Heights, with Clara's father often absent. "I do not think my mother ever loved my father," she said. "He knew it. And it made him very unhappy, for he worshipped her always."
When Bow's mother was 16, she fell from a second-story window and suffered a severe head injury. She was later diagnosed with "psychosis due to epilepsy". From her earliest years, Bow had learned how to care for her mother during the seizures, as well as how to deal with her psychotic and hostile episodes. She said her mother could be "mean to me—and she often was," but "she didn't mean to be and that it was because she couldn't help it." Still, Bow felt deprived of her childhood; "As a kid I took care of my mother, she didn't take care of me".
Sarah worsened gradually, and when she realized her daughter was set for a movie career, Bow's mother told her she "would be much better off dead." One night in February 1922, Bow awoke to a butcher knife held against her throat by her mother. Clara was able to fend off the attack and locked her mother in her room. In the morning, Bow's mother had no recollection of the episode. Later, she was committed to a sanitarium by Robert Bow.
Clara spoke about the incident later:
It was snowing. My mother and I were cold and hungry. We had been cold and hungry for days. We lay in each other's arms and cried and tried to keep warm. It grew worse and worse. So that night my mother—but I can't tell you about it. Only when I remember it, it seems to me I can't live.
According to Bow's biographer, David Stenn, Bow was raped by her father at age sixteen while her mother was institutionalized. On January 5, 1923, Sarah died at the age of 43 from her epilepsy. When relatives gathered for the funeral, Bow was so upset that she "went crazy" and tried to jump into the grave to be with her, shouting that they were "hypocrites" and that they hadn't loved or cared for her mother while she was alive.
Bow attended P.S. 111, P.S. 9, and P.S. 98. As she grew up, she felt shy among other girls, who teased her for her worn-out clothes and "carrot-top" hair. She said about her childhood, "I never had any clothes ... And lots of time didn't have anything to eat. We just lived, that's about all. Girls shunned me because I was so poorly dressed."
From first grade, Bow preferred the company of boys, stating, "I could lick any boy my size. My right arm was quite famous. My right arm was developed from pitching so much ... Once I hopped a ride on behind a big fire engine. I got a lot of credit from the gang for that." A close friend, a younger boy who lived in her building, burned to death, something that haunted her. She heard his screams and ran to his aid, rolling him up in carpet to stop the fire, but he died in her arms. In 1919, Bow enrolled in Bay Ridge High School for Girls. "I wore sweaters and old skirts ... didn't want to be treated like a girl". Her mother had a long spell of good health and changed Bow's appearance, cutting her hair more femininely. Bow said that "there was one boy who had always been my pal ... he kissed me ... I wasn't sore. I didn't get indignant. I was horrified and hurt ... I knew I could never go back to being a tomboy."
Bow's interest in sports and her physical abilities led her to plan for a career as an athletics instructor. She won five medals at the cinder tracks and credited her cousin Homer Baker—the national half-mile (c. 800 m) champion in 1913 and 1914 and 660-yard (c. 600 m) world-record holder—for being her trainer. The Bows and Bakers shared a house—still standing—at 33 Prospect Place in 1920.
In the early 1920s, roughly 50 million Americans—half the population at that time—attended the movies every week. As Bow grew into womanhood, her stature as a "boy" in her old gang became "impossible". She did not have any girlfriends, school was a "heartache," and her home was "miserable". On the silver screen, she found consolation; "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, glamor." And further; "I always had a queer feeling about actors and actresses on the screen ... I knew I would have done it differently. I couldn't analyze it, but I could always feel it." "I'd go home and be a one girl circus, taking the parts of everyone I'd seen, living them before the glass." At 16, Bow says she "knew" she wanted to be a motion picture actress, even if she was a "square, awkward, funny-faced kid."
Against her mother's wishes but with her father's support, Bow competed in Brewster publications' magazine's annual nationwide acting contest, "Fame and Fortune", in fall 1921. In previous years, other contest winners had found work in the movies. In the contest's final screen test, Bow was up against an already scene-experienced woman who did "a beautiful piece of acting". A set member later stated that when Bow did the scene, she actually became her character and "lived it". In the January issues 1922 of Motion Picture Classic, the contest jury, Howard Chandler Christy, Neysa McMein, and Harrison Fisher, concluded:
She is very young, only 16. But she is full of confidence, determination and ambition. She is endowed with a mentality far beyond her years. She has a genuine spark of divine fire. The five different screen tests she had showed this very plainly; her emotional range of expression provoked a fine enthusiasm from every contest judge who saw the tests. She screens perfectly. Her personal appearance is almost enough to carry her to success without the aid of the brains she indubitably possesses.