It was the tail end of the silent era, and screen goddess Clara Bow was surrounded by users, liars, thieves and con artists. Clara was Hollywood's first and still-reigning It Girl; vivacious, beautiful, modern and talented, audiences loved Clara and she loved them back. She had far less love for the studios she worked for, Hollywood snobs, and the agents and executives who ran her career as though she were a machine to be pushed until it broke down, and then discarded for something new.

To many in Hollywood, Bow was unrefined and vulgar, and movie stars who wanted class to go along with their newfound wealth refused to invite her to their events. Yet the same people who felt they were too good to be seen with her positively adored the money a Clara Bow film could bring in. And when her star began to wane in the early 1930s, studios created movies vaguely based on her life, such as Bombshell (1933) and What Price Hollywood? (1932). Bombshell was directed by Bow's former fiancé Victor Fleming, who had nothing but praise for her in interviews, but also had no problem directing a film that took bits of Clara's life without her permission, spoofing it for money and profit. Worse, her former Paramount Pictures pal David O. Selznick had crafted a semi-autobiographical comeback vehicle for Clara in What Price Hollywood?, but happily forgot all about her when his brother's client Constance Bennett showed interest. Besides, he eventually decided, the film was too important to star someone like Clara Bow.

Less than three years before, Clara Bow had been the most popular actress in America. Now, she was tabloid fodder, an industry joke, exhausted and as done with Hollywood as it was with her. By the time she filmed her final scene in her last film, Hoop-La (1933), she saw the writing on the wall: her friends were enemies, and her enemies would settle for no less than running her out of town.

It was 1921 when Clara got her first taste of stardom. After famously winning a 'Fame and Fortune' contest sponsored by several movie magazines, the young Brooklyn-born Clara Bow tentatively entered the movie business. Immediately, she learned her first hard lesson: she was cut out entirely of her first film, Beyond the Rainbow (1922). Yet her likeness was routinely used in promotional material, as advertising executives knew that showing off a contest winner was money in their pocket. Later, when Clara became a star, the film was re-released with her scenes added back in.

After garnering good reviews in her second film, Down to the Sea in Ships (1922), she won a contract with Preferred Pictures, offering her 0 a week and the services of agent Maxine Alton. Alton would go on to tell movie magazines about her first meeting with the young Clara Bow, claiming the girl was so far removed from society she didn't know enough to wash her hands or speak with people, as though being brought up in Brooklyn was akin to having been raised by wolves. Alton also falsely claimed she had discovered Bow on her own, as well as finagled the Preferred Pictures contract herself. That honor, in fact, went to one B.P. Schulberg, independent producer and founder of Preferred Pictures, who was convinced by a former schoolmate to sign the young Clara in 1923.

Less than a year later, Bow was the cinematic epitome of flapper youth, a carefree young woman with modern ideals and plenty of pep. Her appearance on the scene just barely post-dated the first popular flapper, Colleen Moore, whose characters were generally pure and light-hearted. For a couple of years, Moore and Bow engaged in an unofficial contest as reigning flapper queen, Moore eventually moving on to a variety of roles, Bow settling into a series of popular, effervescent characters. Motion Picture Classic declared her 'the symbol of flapperdom,' and the rivalry was officially over by 1925. Critics and historians still argue over the merits of the two actresses to this day; historian Jeanine Basinger, for example, declares Moore 'the perfect flapper' and Bow merely an imitation.

Imitation or not, Clara Bow was an audience favorite, even if she played nearly the same role in every film. On screen, Clara exuded charm and sex appeal, but at the end of the day was a good girl that any red-blooded American boy would be happy to take home to his mother. The same could not be said for Bow's personal life, the details of which found their way into movie magazines on a regular basis, though many of these rumors were the invention of a hungry tabloid press. 'If I read this in a paper once more,' she once said of a false rumor, 'I'll believe it myself.'

Still, the entertainment press would often accommodate the Hollywood publicity machine; thus, live-in boyfriends became brothers, lay-about fathers became managers, mothers who passed away in mental asylums became tragic victims of tuberculosis, and Clara became your standard happy-go-lucky girl with a carefully-managed wild side. Much of this was thanks to B.P. Schulberg. But he was no protector, instead a moral arbiter of her behavior, and not averse to using his position of power to force her into a grueling work schedule.

After Preferred Pictures went bankrupt in 1925, Schulberg joined Paramount and brought Clara Bow along with him. In 1926 alone, Schulberg assigned Bow six films for Paramount, then loaned her out to other studios for four more, making himself a tidy profit while exhausting Clara, his main source of income and industry pull. By the end of the year, Clara was signed to a more agreeable salary, though still less than stars at other studios made, including her old rival Colleen Moore. Before the ink was even dry on the contract, an exhausted Bow was telling movie magazines that once her five years were up, she would retire for good.

It was during these five years that Clara Bow would go from being a popular movie star to pure Hollywood legend. Paramount was determined to cash in on Clara's continuing audience appeal and partnered with Elinor Glyn in 1927 to adapt her story It for the screen. Upon the story's publication, Photoplay asked in a rather lurid title: 'What is this quivering -- pulsating -- throbbing -- beating -- palpitating IT?' 'It' was sex appeal, of course, and Clara was its pure cinematic embodiment. A runaway hit, It made Clara once and forever “The It Girl,” and nearly 90 years after the film's release, no one else has truly taken that title away from her.

Clara was absolute dynamite on-screen, and no film showcased that more clearly than It. She wore her feelings so close to the surface she could call on them at any moment, emoting with an earnestness that few others in silent film ever achieved. Her dark kohl-lined eyes danced when she was happy, glistened when sad, turned cat-like when mischief was afoot. Clara also had the kind of curves that attracted attention, especially in an era where the slim, boyish flapper figure was the height of style.

What Clara Bow excelled at beyond any other star of the late 1920s was combining a joyous and wide-eyed innocence that she maintained even in films containing overtly adult themes. She got away with things others dared not try because she was so good-natured and fun. But underneath the surface image was a woman who simply did not believe that freely dating, partying hard, or showing a lot of skin in a film hurt anyone. Bow didn't act innocent about these things, she truly believed her actions were harmless and nobody's business but her own, a revolutionary thought for the time.

This made her the go-to bad girl of the cinema for audiences, but to class-conscious Hollywood, it also made her untouchable. B.P. Schulberg, especially, held little regard for her, dismissing health problems as fabricated crises and demeaning her at any opportunity. His son, screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg, spent the better part of his life defending his father's actions. The younger Schulberg could be perceptive at times, noting in his memoirs that the Hollywood establishment unfairly considered Bow, 'a lowlife and a disgrace to the community.' Yet in those same memoirs, he would call Bow a 'little know-nothing,' a dog whom his father 'trained to become Lassie.'

After her stellar year in 1927, which included not just It but three other major hits, including the Academy Award-nominated Wings, Clara's popularity soared. She was the most popular actress in early 1929, but her popularity was living on borrowed time. The dawn of the talkies meant she had to learn a new way of acting, including toning down her performances for new sound cameras that could not pan or follow her energetic movements. Already exhausted from a non-stop schedule, involved in progressively more troubling scandals and haunted by personal demons, the change to sound was devastating to Clara, and she was often unable to perform in front of either camera or microphone.

Paramount transitioned to talkies in 1929, putting Bow in awful films, and costars such as Kay Francis and Jean Harlow received far better reviews than Clara ever did. Meanwhile, her health and emotional state were becoming more unstable, in no small part due to a scandalous trial in 1930 involving her former personal assistant, Daisy De Voe. Bow hired De Voe to manage her money and work as a personal secretary. Clara discovered some financial indiscretions, and De Voe attempted to get out of her fix by threatening to go to the press with Bow's scandalous secrets. Clara called the cops.

What resulted was a fiasco of a trial, where De Voe was allowed to read aloud alleged personal documents about Clara, make incredible claims about her promiscuousness, all while journalists scribbled the salacious details. Already tabloid fodder, Clara Bow became a tabloid disaster. De Voe and a journalist for The Coast Reporter, who helped De Voe slam Bow's character, both ultimately received jail time, but the real damage was to Clara's reputation and nerves, neither of which recovered.

Schulberg once again showed no sympathy to Clara, offering no help during the trial. Historian Elaina Archer said of Bow, 'She really wanted everyone to love her, and the studios took advantage of that…They really used her up.' By 1931, Schulberg was done using Clara, and she sensed this. In April of that year, she sent a heartfelt plea to Paramount, asking for some time off. 'I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown,' she wrote, 'and I don't intend to have one if I can help it.' Schulberg agreed to cancel the last few months of her contract, but in truth knew this meant he could cheat her out of a significant chunk of her salary, estimated by biographer David Stenn to have been nearly 0,000.

Now finished with Paramount, Bow still had hopes that 1931 was the year she was going to retire, but she decided to stick around. She signed with agent Samuel E. Rork in the fall of that year, and married actor Rex Bell a few months later. Bell had to finish out his own studio contract, so she decided to stay in Hollywood with him, and make money toward her retirement.

Finally receiving the rest she needed after years with Paramount, Rork got her a well-paid, two-picture deal with Fox Film Corporation, who assigned her a comeback film. Bow looked beautiful; and in spite of her continuing fear of the microphone, she was more at ease in front of the camera. The end result was the astonishingly pre-Code Call Her Savage (1932).

If Clara had been a cinematic and tabloid bad girl before, nothing could have prepared audiences for her new image. Call Her Savage was a veritable a checklist of every naughty thing a studio could stuff into a film without causing widespread panic or government legislation. The Los Angeles Times called it 'flashy, trashy, tasteless and unpleasant,' which is exactly what the studio intended.  

In Savage, long gone was the wide-eyed flapper of a few years earlier, replaced instead with an outsized pre-Code hellcat. Bow plays Nasa, a tempestuous young woman who finds herself, as so many pre-Code women did, with a baby and no means of support, and turns to offering her services for a fee. Either as a bizarrely blatant attempt to cash in on Clara's notoriety, or as a send-up of all the incredible rumors launched during the De Voe trial, Call Her Savage is chock full of catfights, whippings, barely-there clothes and themes meant for adult audiences only. And those audiences loved it; Clara was back in the game.

But she didn't want to be in the game at all. She was glad for the success of Call Her Savage, and later told historian Rudy Behlmer that it was one of her favorite films, but in 1932 she was desperate to fulfill her contract and leave Hollywood for good. To that end, after waiting a year for Fox to assign her a follow-up, she begrudgingly agreed to do Hoop-La (1932).

'Again she releases the torrent of her emotional genius to flood the hungry hearts of millions!' read the promotionals for Hoop-La, lofty publicity for what was a B-movie remake at heart. One of hundreds of talkies made to replace a recent silent, Hoop-La was the talkie answer to The Barker (1928), a film not yet four years old. Bow plays Lou, one of the hula dancers in a traveling carnival, who falls for the naïve college-aged son of the carnival's manager, and has to prove to his father that their love is real.

Clara disliked the film, but surprisingly, critics were impressed, and it is indeed a fine performance in an otherwise bland feature. Variety pronounced it, 'A more mature performance which shows an improved actress,' and The New York Times begrudgingly praised its audience appeal, while scolding 'someone at the studio' for believing Bow could be the next Mae West. But it didn't matter what critics or audiences thought: Clara Bow was glad to be out of films. 'I've had enough,' she famously said. 'I don't wanna be remembered as somebody who couldn't do nothin' but take her clothes off.'

Dominick Dunne once wrote that Clara Bow was 'Marilyn Monroe decades before Marilyn.' Bow herself considered Marilyn Monroe a successor to her Hollywood sex goddess image, and when Monroe died, Bow is reported to have said, 'A sex symbol is a heavy load to carry when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.' And Clara would know. She was Hollywood's first real sex symbol, stronger and braver and far more influential than she ever knew, yet still used up by the Hollywood movie machine, the victim of everyone else's expectations. 'I had no childhood. Worked like a dog all my life. Really, my nerves are shot,' she told Photoplay when she was just 24. 'I always want to cry.'

When not watching classic movies, Stacia Kissick Jones is writing about them, dreaming about them or complaining about them. Her ruminations are there for all to see at She Blogged by Night.