In 1927, provocative novelist Elinor Glyn, popularized the term “It”, “it” being sex appeal, or what the kids would now call “riz”. Earlier, Glyn hswept the world with her controversial erotic novel Three Weeks but It was mainlined into the cultural bloodstream.
Because Glyn looked so respectable, a society-matron with the braids wrapped around her head and long gowns, etc., her endorsement of “It” as a concept was embraced by the “regulars”. Glyn didn’t come off as a vamp Jazz-Age flapper whom “society” would shun. (As Zelda Fitzgerald did). Looks are deceiving, however. Glyn was far out on the edge of what was deemed respectable.
Glyn’s definitions of “It” still hold.
Sexiness may be overt, of course, but Glyn made the point that one of the key qualities of “it” was “indifference”. This is very insightful. If you know in your heart/soul you have “It”, you don’t have to work too hard to show “It”. The deadly (in a good way) mix of confidence and indifference shows people “you are not cold”.
Some of the comments made by Glyn’s peers about the writer’s grande dame pose are hysterical. (Dorothy Parker said, “Elinor Glyn doesn’t have ‘It’. She has those.”) Her peers might have chuckled, but the public loved the concept of “It”. In the concept of “it”, sex was not dirty or hidden or considered too private to mention. “It” was something most people enjoyed, even “respectable” people. It shouldn’t be weird to say sex is fun and people enjoy it, but … here we are.
Elinor Glyn sold “It” to Paramount for $50,000. She listed a couple of people who had “It” and up-and-coming actress Clara Bow was one of them. The 1927 film It made Bow a superstar. Along with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, Bow was the embodiment of the era. However, and this is key to Bow’s appeal, she didn’t read as a “bad girl”, or seductive man-eating husband-stealing vamp, or a manipulative gold-digger. She wasn’t Theda Bera. Bow read as “fun”. It was the Roaring Twenties. Let’s have fun. Bow was the poster girl for fun.
Let’s be real. Bow wasn’t “pretty”, she was hot. She was sexy. There’s a difference. As Glyn suggested, Bow’s indifference read as ease with herself. And self-ease is SO attractive. (This attractive-ness crosses gender lines. Men desired her, women loved her and found her aspirational.) That Bow didn’t seem to have to work too hard to get attention made her persona even more appealing. Bow wasn’t threatening. Of course what she represented – sexual liberation, freedom, lack of inhibition – was incredibly threatening, but she wasn’t a vamping Theda Bera. She “read” more as a fun and reckless girl.
Audiences adored her. Watching It today, it is not hard to see why. She is adorable, she seems like a real girl you could conceivably meet out in the wild, but she also has that not-so-easily defined THING we would call “star quality”. “It”, if you will. Movie stars in this vein may not be the most technically proficient skilled actors, but that’s fine, they don’t need to be. They have something that cannot be counterfeited: personality. This type of star is not in vogue today. We distrust “personae” like this, because we prize conformity – anyone who feels free to stand out is vaguely suspect – and we also don’t like the thought that some people have innately more of something than other people do. We see this tall-poppy-syndrome thing play out in social media waves of cancellation, criticism, “discourse”. But once upon a time, movie stars were highly individualistic personae, slightly uncontrollable because they were so much “themselves”. I’ve called them “thoroughbreds of personality”. These people couldn’t “conform” if they tried.
The 1930s and 1940s were the eras of the Persona actor. Our more contemporary ideas of what “good acting” is has changed the trend. The trend today is: the people we think of as “good actors” are the ones who can most transform themselves into something else. “Hey look, I can be a medieval princess AND I can be a meth junkie in Arkansas! I can do a Cockney accent and I can do an Appalachian accent. I am a good actress!” Sure. Maybe.
But once upon a time actors worked from force of personality. People like John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford … These people are giants still today. It is incorrect (and a huge pet peeve of mine) to dismiss them with, “They were just playing themselves.” As though “playing yourself” is an easy thing. I covered this here. Just because John Wayne didn’t radically transform his appearance/accent in every single film doesn’t mean he wasn’t somehow as “good” as Dustin Hoffman or whatever. Ironically, the chameleon actor’s work tends to “date” itself whereas the work of the Persona Actors is timeless.
The Clara Bow persona was a mass-marketed star phenomenon, one of the first. Her hair, hair accessories, clothes, attitude … everyone wanted it. “It.”
Her personality was captured in film after film. She didn’t have to work to be natural. Even the gesticulations and exaggerated facial expressions, part of the silent film tradition for obvious reasons, seem genuine with her. She makes total sense, onscreen. You don’t have to do much context-correction. Her offscreen shenanigans received heavy attention. Perhaps she didn’t get the “props” more serious actresses were given, but I imagine, again, that the more serious message-y films of the day “date” themselves far more severely than something like It, which is still fresh, funny, spontaneous, and relateable.
Directed by Clarence G. Badger, It features witty title cards. One reads: “Every night in America, 18 million blondes get ready to go out to dinner with gentlemen friends.” Because we’ve already seen Bow, with dark hair, it’s a funny line, making us imagine ranks of blondes primping in front of vanity mirrors, and we know it will all be in vain as long as Clara Bow exists. There’s also, though, a social-critique embedded there, as well as a star-making validation: If blondes are the ideal beauty in American culture, and we all know they are, we all can also agree that none of them have what Bow has, and the blondes know it too. The blondes are pissed. The entire film is constructed around the awareness of Bow’s special-ness and appeal, her difference from others, her “It”-ness: every frame has an overriding objective. It is the quintessential star vehicle.
The story is a Cinderella tale, a Pretty Woman tale: lowly shopgirl enters high society, but does so on her own terms.
Bow plays Betty, who works the lingerie counter at Waltham’s Department Store (the department store a symbol of democratic economic status in the early part of the 20th century.) Mr. Cyrus Waltham Jr. (Antonio Moreno, whom Elinor Glyn also decreed had “It”) inherited the store from his father. Cyrus is a stuffed shirt, huddling over his desk, oblivious to the female charms perched behind every counter. His sidekick Monty Montgomery (William Austin), a leering vaguely gay-coded gentleman, shows Cyrus a recent article in Cosmopolitan, the one by “Elinor Glyn”, the one called “It”. It’s very meta.
During a tour of the store, Monty, now obsessed with the concept of “It”, goes up to girl working there, peering at her, before shaking his head. It’s Donald-Trump-backstage-at-pageants creepy. The story’s construction is smart: if it had been Cyrus Waltham, Jr. obsessed with “It”, the power dynamic would have been too tipped in his favor, and therefore he would not be the sort of man who deserved Clara Bow. (She needed a man who could resist her. This is what makes it fun. The dynamic makes her more relatable as well.)
So let’s talk about Bow’s general persona.
While Bow was fun, she wasn’t easy. We see this later in the film when Cyrus kisses Betty after a date, and she slaps him, saying, “Oh, so you’re one of those Minute Men, huh? Know a girl for one minute and think you can kiss her?” Her outrage is not completely genuine, as most girls navigating dating life would understand. You won’t “put out”, at least not right away, but you like it when a man at least tries. Imagine a man who DOESN’T make a pass. You wouldn’t know where you stand! Men who spend their lives being bitter about this (they’re the ones who complain that women don’t like “nice guys”) don’t understand the Game, as it should be played. And it is a Game. (And, listen, I never played this particular Game in my own personal life. It’s not how I operated, but I understand it is the dominant model and I accept it as such. It’s fine. But you can break the rules if you want to and you don’t need permission. You just need to know what you’re about, what you want, and you need to be able to state it clearly. Stop expecting people to be mind readers. You are in charge.)
Betty says to Cyrus later, “You aren’t mad cause I slapped you, are you? You know how these things are.” He does know how these things are. He tells her he is “crazy about her”, and she replies, “I love you”. Uh-oh. “Crazy about you” isn’t “love”. Cyrus wants to give her diamonds and Betty realizes what she is being offered. He wants “one of those left-hand arrangements”, she’ll be the “side girl”, the “kept” woman. She doesn’t want this! She walks out on him, and Bow’s outrage here is real, mixed with heartbreak.
Betty of course wants to dine at The Ritz, but she doesn’t want to be paid to be someone’s companion. She is a liberated woman. Perhaps she is liberated because she has integrity. She knows her boundaries, what she will put up with, what she won’t. She might have flaming red hair, but she is not Jean Harlow’s “red-headed woman”, a ruthless gold-digger. Material objects hold no allure for the Clara Bow persona. Oh, sure, she would rather not live in poverty, but she’s not interested in “fitting in”, or doing whatever it takes to be rich. If she married the rich man, it would be because she loved him. This is a crucial difference. No wonder audiences fell in love with her. Bow was one of them.
Bow has many excellent moments in It.
She doesn’t “telegraph”, her work is not presentational. When she laughs, she’s really laughing. When tears well up in her eyes, she does so within one single take, meaning you can see the feeling rise up in her spontaneously. Her body language has an insouciant quality, a careless ease which is nearly impossible to counterfeit.
There is a racy section where she gets ready to go to dinner at The Ritz. Betty has nothing to wear. She and her roommate (the lovely Priscilla Bonner) cut up her everyday dress, turning it into a cocktail dress with a revealing neckline. Priscilla wields the scissors on the front of Bow’s dress, showing the slip underneath. They’re having fun. Then we see Bow in closeup, and she’s obviously naked, her shoulders bare, with her friend slapping powder on her skin, her neck, her back. Bow is laughing. The scene may be risque, with lots of skin, but Bow plays it as though it is the most natural thing in the world. She takes such joy in herself it is difficult to resist her.
When she gets to The Ritz, all the snooty people look down on her, but she refuses to be shamed. The menu is entirely in French, and Betty sits, stunned, unaware of what she should do. Her date orders something, and she puts the menu down firmly and says, “I’ll have the same.” She is wearing a torn-apart dress and cheap shoes, and she has wound a piece of gauze through her hair. But she doesn’t slink through the crowd. She has every right to be there.
Cyrus, of course, is ensnared with a society blonde (one of the 18 million), and yet he is taken by this shopgirl, impacted by the “It” of it all. Betty treats him humorously and flirtatiously, so different from the uptight socially-conscious women in his own class. (The class critique in It strikes me as so wholly American it could be taught in history classes. It makes the point that just because you are rich doesn’t means you are automatically attractive or sexy. You never know who will have “it”. Money cannot confer “it” on you. Sex appeal is a social equalizer, a radical modern idea, one It has a lot of fun with. Everyone wants money, sure, but a more primal desire is to be desired, to be someone other people “want”.)
Betty plans her first date with Cyrus (her boss, essentially), and she takes him to a Fun House. It is a wonderful sequence.
Through Betty’s ease with herself, Cyrus relaxes, and (to echo poor Cary Grant at the end of Bringing Up Baby) “never had a better time”. The audience has ample opportunity to see Clara Bow’s knickers (difficult to conceal when you are being whipped around a rotating wheel, or sliding down a giant slide). The key for me is how none of it seems dirty. I feel protective of young actresses. Bow, in the fun house sequence, rolls around on the floor, laughing her head off, trying to pull her skirt down (a losing battle when you’re upside down), and you don’t have to worry about her. Betty is prsented in a straightforward sympathetic way, Bow plays her that way, she is not a “fallen woman”. Watching Antonio Moreno rolling around with her in the Fun House, when he has been up until this point very stuffy, is to see Cyrus fall in love. It takes him some time to get it. We often resist the thing we most need.
I love this sequence. I love her casual outfit, no more cutting up her clothes to go to the Ritz. I love how she eats her hamburger. It’s manic and captures what it feels like to have the “best date” ever. Unlike the chilly blonde Cyrus is about to be engaged to, here with Betty, Cyrus can relax. He’s more handsome when he relaxes. Relaxation suits him, and it takes a vivacious redhead, a straightforward sexy girl, the embodiment of “It”, to show him the way to his true personality.
There is a complicated side-plot with far-reaching consequences for our lovable heroine: Betty’s roommate is about to lose her child (where the father is is unclear) to what amounts to CPS, and Betty intervenes. A reporter (played by a young gorgeous Gary Cooper, who goes “uncredited” for It) happens to be on the scene. He writes an article about the scandal, and the unwed mother named … Betty. Cyrus drops poor Betty like a hot potato and she is fired. She is furious at Cyrus, and everyone who judges her without knowing all the facts. She will clear her name.
The stars who perfectly embody a specific era often do not survive that era, cannot adjust when times change, when trends and sensibilities change. The industry leaves them behind.
As I mentioned earlier, I think the Great Stars of the early age of cinema have a staying power of which today’s more chameleon-like stars could only dream.
Bow was a jazz baby, a flapper, a beneficiary of the breaking-down of class barriers, a generational expression of just wanting to have fun while you can. She made a couple of talkies, but mental health issues began to assail her, and she spent much of her later life in sanatariums, or in total seclusion. It’s so sad.
Her movies remain a testament to a specific time in American life, but, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s collection Tales of the Jazz Age, or his debut novel This Side of Paradise, the appeal is universal. If it’s a tale well-told, it will last. More trendy topical books, or political books, or message books, have not aged well, but Fitzgerald’s do.
Bow is not just a butterfly drowned in amber, caught in time. If you watch her performance in It, you can still see her appeal, her force of personality and expression. She still seems to be here. She is known for a lot of things, her Betty Boop figure, her off-screen scandals, her love affairs, her freedom with sex. Watch her in action and you will be in the presence of an original and fresh talent, a woman with the natural genius to seem offhandedly and gloriously herself, in literally every frame. This is maybe the truest definition of a movie star.
