Moving Pictures (27 page)

Life was throwing little Clara pitches she had never had to face before, sinkerballs, spitballs, and knuckleballs. Strike One was the sudden decline and fall of the flapper. In a time of breadlines, dust bowls, farm foreclosures, rent strikes, and men in frayed double-breasted suits selling apples on street corners, somehow the high-kicking, gin-swizzling, short-skirted apostles of the carefree were going out of style. Even if she had been endowed with a golden throat and the theatrical poise of an Ethel Barrymore, Clara Bow as the ultimate flapper would have been discarded in favor of new models better suited to the troubled Thirties.

Strike Two was the terrifying challenge of sound.

And Strike Three came in the form of a blonde hairdresser-turned-secretary who became Clara’s constant companion. Her improbable name was Daisy DeVoe.

After Clara’s first secretary became her stepmother, Daisy moved in. Thanks to her fussing over Clara’s spit curls and wind-tossed bob at the Studio, Miss DeVoe had been invited to the house for one of those merry all-night poker games. Daisy stayed on until the morning, fell asleep in one of the guest rooms, and waked to find herself appointed personal secretary and live-in companion to Clara Bow. The relationship ripened into virtual sisterhood, or even closer. One never traveled anywhere
without the other. At last Clara had a true protector. Daisy De Voe stood between the beleaguered sex goddess and the outside world.

I have only fleeting memories of Miss DeVoe when she and Clara began to summer near our house at Malibu Beach. With my pal Maurice, I used to fish for tomcod off the rickety Malibu pier and sometime I’d drop off a few at Clara’s. Daisy De Voe was always the first to come to the door, knowingly separating Clara’s friends from the hordes of undesirables. Clara was always effusively affectionate with me, making a fuss about the little tomcod and showing them off to her chums.

But I saw very little of Clara and Miss De Voe because I spent most of my time on the beach or the tennis court while they seemed to spend all of their time in their little house. In fact I don’t remember ever seeing them on the beach. Ever since my mother—the great innovator—had discovered Malibu as a peaceful retreat from Hollywood, and had built the first house on its crescent beach, it had quickly developed into a select, very
in
movie colony, each house that of a reigning celebrity.

Clara and Daisy simply had moved their smoke-filled nonstop party to the shores of the Pacific. They were poker people, loud-music people, night people. Although Father’s liaison with Clara was by this time a burned-out case, or a case smothered in scores of subsequent cases, my mother did not like the idea of Clara’s moving so close to us, and discouraged me from going over there. It wasn’t jealousy on Ad’s part but a lifelong contempt for the ignorant, the wastrels, the low-lifes. If I wanted adult companionship, Mother suggested, I would do much better to visit with our immediate neighbors, the Frank Capras. They were serious, productive, and moral citizens. The thoughtful Frank Capra and his loving wife Lucille went out of their way to be hospitable to the young son of a rival studio head. They were their own people and—Ad was right as usual—the ideal antidotes to Clara and her devoted Daisy.

Their first summer at Malibu, Daisy De Voe was a time bomb ticking. It was detected by an obscure young actor who had changed his name from George F. Beldam to Rex Bell. He became a member of the Clara Bow household in that high-pressure period when Clara was suffering from mike fright. Rex Bell was the latest, most devoted, and seemingly most conscientious of Miss Bow’s many suitors. He became highly suspicious of Miss De Voe’s life-style. In fact, from his favored seat at the banquet, Rex Bell was convinced that Daisy had been stealing Clara
blind. He got Clara to fire the woman with whom she had shared her house and her life for the past three years, and to file charges against her.

Rex Bell obtained a warrant to open Daisy’s bank vault, and there, to no one’s surprise, was an interesting collection of Clara’s jewelry. There was also a parcel of Clara’s missing canceled checks and, strangely enough, on each of those cancellation dates there was a transfer from the Clara Bow Special Account—over which Daisy DeVoe held complete domain—to Daisy’s personal account. Apparently, for several years Daisy had been writing checks from the Clara Bow account on the basis of “one for you and one for me.” And if the suspicious or perceptive Mr. Bell had not come along, the trusting Clara probably would have left her bank account and her household in her closest friend’s sticky fingers until the end.

Daisy had not only heisted fistfuls of jewelry, costly gowns, and fur coats, but something she thought might be even more valuable—packets of Clara’s love letters. Clara was romantic about those letters. She had a rich assortment from Gary Cooper, Vic Fleming, Harry Richman, an Ivy League football star who tried to commit suicide after Clara had kissed him so forcibly that he had begun to lose his sanity, the doctor who had performed an appendectomy on Clara and whose wife had sued Clara for alienation of affection and settled for thirty thousand dollars. … Clara never bothered to look over her canceled checks or to read her bank statement, but sometimes she liked to take out these letters from old beaus and enjoy a good cry. Well, now that Rex Bell had caught Daisy with her hand in the sugar bowl, the rejected companion thought those letters from lost loves offered the most promising avenue of escape.

She came to my father, and also to Clara’s attorney, with a simple proposition. She would accept $125,000 in exchange for the letters; simultaneously Clara would withdraw the charges. Otherwise under cross-examination in the courtroom she would reveal all. If Daisy DeVoe was to go under, Clara Bow would go down with her.

Unfortunately, what the embattled Daisy did not realize was that although Clara had not yet gone under for the third time, she had been down twice and was now desperately treading water in a final effort to stay afloat. Clara’s fans were deserting her in droves, were turning to those silent beauties able to break through the sound barrier, like Carole Lombard, or to actresses recruited from the stage, like Claudette Colbert. Putting it harshly, the reputation of Clara Bow was no longer worth
$125,000 to the studio. But even if Clara had still been the It Girl of 1928, my father probably would have followed the same course he chose: to call Hollywood’s good friend, District Attorney Fitts.

With charges of extortion as an added threat, Daisy signed a thirty-page confession admitting theft of $35,000 in cash, along with all the other loot. Meanwhile, Clara was having another of the nervous breakdowns that would plague her for the rest of her tormented life. Suffering from insomnia and crying spells, she used alcohol and pills to assuage the pain.

Clara wanted to withdraw the charges against her ex-confidante, she told my father. She was afraid to face the public ordeal of the trial. Her eyes were puffy from drink and sleeplessness and anxiety, her kewpie-doll face slightly bloated, all those cute curves rounding into fleshiness. She didn’t want her fans to see her this way. She was afraid of the reporters and the photographers who would hound her on her way into and out of the courtroom. And finally, she was still somewhat ambivalent toward her pal Daisy. She was convinced that Rex, who had replaced Daisy as manager of the exchequer and housemate, had been in the right and Daisy shockingly in the wrong. But Clara had given her unquestioning heart to Daisy De Voe and she dreaded having to stand up and accuse her in court.

The migrant workers were starving in southern California and the soup kitchens in Los Angeles were doing a better business than the movie palaces, but Clara’s appearance in our local court still drew thousands of curiosity seekers. The It Girl who had been the personification of the super-flapper was now subdued and withdrawn. At times she burst into tears in the courtroom as Daisy tried to fling the charges back in Clara’s pretty little teeth. Daisy said she had had to write all the checks because most of the time Clara was too drunk to know what she was doing. Although it was irrelevant, she exposed Clara’s exorbitant gifts to various boyfriends, from college football players to aging directors. At times the judge would have to admonish Daisy and her defense attorney: Remember, it is Daisy De Voe who is on trial here, not Clara Bow.

But that was only for the record. In the minds of the tabloid readers and the scandalmongers it was the peccadilloes of Clara Bow that turned the trial into a drama more irresistible than
It
or
Dancing Mothers.
Clara and Daisy pointed fingers and traded tears, cries of outrage, reproachful silence, and choked-up press conferences.

When the circus was over, Daisy was convicted on only one count,
although in the opinion of the judge there was evidence to convict her on all thirty-seven. A shaken Clara appealed to the judge to be merciful in his sentencing. But he gave Daisy DeVoe eighteen months.

Although the judge had done his best to exonerate Clara, her penalties were heavier. Daisy helped to defray her defense expenses by selling a series on Clara’s bedroom activities to the yellow press. It was peddled in book form as
Clara’s Secret Love Life.
Clara was scheduled to start a new picture, but in an emotional session with my father she told him her nerves were shattered and she wasn’t sure she could ever work again. She withdrew to a sanitarium and he signed a sexy young Irish girl, Peggy Shannon, to replace her.

Clara’s contract still had several years to run, but it was canceled by mutual agreement. She was rescued from still another breakdown by Rex Bell, who married her and took her to his ranch in Nevada. It would be nice to think that they lived happily ever after. But this was no movie. Though they lived on a ranch that in Rex Bell’s Midas hands grew to 350,000 acres, Clara had a weight problem, a drinking problem, a sleeping problem, and, most of all, the problem of being out of a job as the Number One Sex Goddess of the World. Washed up at 26, Clara Bow had staggered into the winter of her discontent in what should have been the summer of her youth.

It was more than half a dozen years before I saw Clara again. By that time, I was out of college and living with my father in one of those white-stucco neo-Spanish mansions in Beverly Hills. B.P. told me that Clara had just been released from a local sanitarium and had phoned to say she would like to drop in. When she arrived I saw a roly-poly woman who looked to be in her forties, although her actual age at the time was only 32. Instead of the bangs and spit curls that had given her the look of a windswept hoyden, her hair was set in a reddish-brown permanent wave. A layer of fat imprisoned the once-perfect oval face that fan magazines liked to call heart-shaped. But neither jowls nor bulges at the hips could take away from the dancing brown eyes of Clara Bow, still accentuated by their dark frame of mascara, still punctuated by eyebrows drawn with an eye for symmetry.

Father asked his butler Lloyd to bring champagne. Lloyd popped the cork and poured Moët-Chandon into three fine glasses. Clara raised the glass to her lips and peeked over the rim of it at my father with those same flashing and flirty eyes I had first seen when she was twenty and I
was ten. “Well, B.P., here we are!” she said. Behind the excess flesh, the childlike face was still there begging to be loved. I thought of the day I had sat with her in her red roadster in Pomona, with the smitten young Gilbert Roland hovering nearby. “Let’s drink to all the good times we had,” Clara said. “And to you, Clara dear,” my father said gallantly.

Clara finished her wine, and as Lloyd refilled her glass, she looked vivacious and merry-eyed. I felt a little uncomfortable because even after all the years and all the changes they had both gone through she was being outrageously flirtatious with my father. He was only in his mid-forties at the time, but I in my intolerant early twenties felt he was far too advanced in years for these silly games.

“You know, your father and I were always very good friends,” Clara said, turning those big brown saucer-eyes on me, and it was almost as if she was picking up the dialogue left over from our tête-à tête in the roadster.

“And we still are, Clara,” my father said.

“Yes, of course we still are,” Clara parroted. “And we always will be—to the end of our lives.” And she raised her glass to toast the promise.

“To my favorite producer,” Clara said.

“And my favorite star.”

“Now Ben, you’re going to make me cry,” Clara said. And a tiny tear slid down her round, rouged cheek. In the background I could hear the ghosts of the mood trio who used to play on her silent set: “Rock-a-bye, Baby …”

I felt it was their moment. And as it turned out it was, so far as I know, the last time they ever saw each other. When I rose and went over to shake her hand, she pulled me to her and kissed me on the lips. “I c’n hardly b’lieve yer so grown-up,” she said, with that same Brooklyn accent. “I guess I’ll always think of ya as that shy little kid who stammered so bad ya c’d hardly talk t’ me. If I hadn’t been in love with ya poppa, I betcha I’d’ve fallen in love with yuh.”

I left them alone in that enormous cavern of a living room. Two of the great names of the Hollywood Twenties were like Hansel and Gretel lost in the backwoods of Beverly Hills. From the two-storied hallway, I could hear them laughing together over their champagne at some private joke from long ago.

After that farewell visit with my father, Clara Bow lived her life as a ghost of Hollywood Past, either as a prosperous rancher’s wife near
Searchlight, Nevada (where the one-time actor had become a political power in the state), or in sanitariums, to which her condition increasingly restricted her. Another decade was to pass before her old friends heard of her again. In 1947 she surfaced momentarily as “Miss Hush,” the mystery voice in an NBC radio contest. She murmured a mysterious jingle:

“Two o’clock and all’s well.

Who it is I cannot tell.

Queen has her king, it’s true,

But not her ribbons tied in blue.”

Listeners phoned in to nominate the Duchess of Windsor, Alice Marble, Shirley Temple, Margaret Truman… But a resourceful Midwestern housewife deciphered the hushed code: In nautical time two o’clock was four bells, and there were Clara and Rex Bell and their two sons. The anonymous
Who it is
struck echoes of the old It.
Her king
was Rex, of course. And the
ribbons tied in blue
would make a bow: a Clara Bow. For this flash of perception, the winner earned an airplane, a refrigerator, a new car, a furnace, a fur coat, and maid’s service for a year. All Clara won was a few days’ return to notoriety. The double prongs of the irony pressed sharply on those who had cared for her. Clara had been chosen as the target for this contest because she was so totally unknown to the new generation that was coming in as her fame was flickering out. And when she came back for her moment in the spotlight, it was through the microphone that had driven her into retirement. Instead of being seen and not heard, as in her glory years, now she was heard but unseen.