true. But it didn’t matter. B. P. Schulberg called her “crisis-a-day Clara” and fired her from Paramount.
Troubles at work meant troubles at home. A series of well-publicized mental breakdowns ensued. With a mother and grandmother who had died in an insane asylum, Clara feared that she, too, would end her days in an institution.
Things improved in 1931 when she married Rex Bell, a cowboy film star who treated her well and fathered her two children. They lived in seclusion on a ranch in Nevada. Rex became the state’s lieutenant governor. Though she tried several times to make a comeback on the silver screen, Clara Bow’s career finally came to a halt in the mid-thirties. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Clara battled severe depression and began exhibiting signs of schizophrenia.
In the late 1940s, she began an intense course of psychotherapy at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. There she unbottled a number of long-repressed childhood memories, including the knowledgethat her father raped her repeatedly when she was a young girl. In the years that followed, Clara withdrew from therapy and moved to a small two-bedroom bungalow in Los Angeles. She rarely left the house.
Rex died on the ranch in Nevada, alone. A few years later, in 1965, Clara passed away at her small hideaway in Culver City.
“Miss Bow,” someone once asked her, “when you add it all up, what is ‘It’?”
Clara could only shrug. “I ain’t real sure.”
C OLLEEN M OORE’S LIFE took a happier turn. Though she continued to make films until 1934—even playing opposite Spencer Tracy in The Power and the Glory , which she regarded as the best film she ever made—Colleen’s public wanted her “to go on being a wide-eyed, innocent little girl.”
“I was too old for that,” she later wrote, “—and too tired of it in any case.”
Colleen’s marriage to John McCormick—unsteady from the start because of John’s tendency to disappear on two-week benders—ended in divorce. A second marriage also fell apart.
The punishing routine she had kept for over ten years in the film industry—eighteen-hour workdays, constant travel, a fish-bowl existence—left her exhausted and yearning for a simpler life. In the late 1930s, Colleen married Homer Hargrave, a wealthy Chicago financier. She invested her film earnings in the market and made a killing. Then she wrote a book that instructed ordinary people on how to do the same. She rented out her Hollywood mansion and later sold it, preferring to reinvent herself as a devoted Chicago wife and stepmother to Hargrave’s children.
Late in life, she wrote a lively account of her years in Hollywood.
If the crash ruined the fortunes of many a famous flapper, Colleen weathered the storm with anonymity and good cheer. “You just can’t live comfortably on less than $2 million,” she told an acquaintance.
She died in 1988, a wealthy and content woman.
U NLIKE C OLLEEN M OORE , Louise Brooks despised Hollywood from the start. She had never intended to be an actress, much less afilm star. “My [New York] friends were all literary people,” she later remarked. 2 “And in Hollywood there were no literary people. I went to Hollywood and no one read books. I went to the bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard—it’s still there—and these Hollywood people would go in and say, ‘I have a bookshelf, and I want to buy enough books to fill up the shelves.’ And that was all the reading they did. Don’t forget, most people in pictures, they were waitresses, they were very low-class people.”
This wasn’t the sort of attitude that was going to help Louise win friends and influence people in the rough-and-tumble world of studio politics. Still, when Paramount geared up in 1928 to make the transition to talkies and renegotiated the contracts of its major stars, Louise was one of the lucky ones. Ben Schulberg proposed to retain her at her current salary. No raise, but no pay cut, either.
Troubles at work meant troubles at home. A series of well-publicized mental breakdowns ensued. With a mother and grandmother who had died in an insane asylum, Clara feared that she, too, would end her days in an institution.
Things improved in 1931 when she married Rex Bell, a cowboy film star who treated her well and fathered her two children. They lived in seclusion on a ranch in Nevada. Rex became the state’s lieutenant governor. Though she tried several times to make a comeback on the silver screen, Clara Bow’s career finally came to a halt in the mid-thirties. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Clara battled severe depression and began exhibiting signs of schizophrenia.
In the late 1940s, she began an intense course of psychotherapy at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. There she unbottled a number of long-repressed childhood memories, including the knowledgethat her father raped her repeatedly when she was a young girl. In the years that followed, Clara withdrew from therapy and moved to a small two-bedroom bungalow in Los Angeles. She rarely left the house.
Rex died on the ranch in Nevada, alone. A few years later, in 1965, Clara passed away at her small hideaway in Culver City.
“Miss Bow,” someone once asked her, “when you add it all up, what is ‘It’?”
Clara could only shrug. “I ain’t real sure.”
C OLLEEN M OORE’S LIFE took a happier turn. Though she continued to make films until 1934—even playing opposite Spencer Tracy in The Power and the Glory , which she regarded as the best film she ever made—Colleen’s public wanted her “to go on being a wide-eyed, innocent little girl.”
“I was too old for that,” she later wrote, “—and too tired of it in any case.”
Colleen’s marriage to John McCormick—unsteady from the start because of John’s tendency to disappear on two-week benders—ended in divorce. A second marriage also fell apart.
The punishing routine she had kept for over ten years in the film industry—eighteen-hour workdays, constant travel, a fish-bowl existence—left her exhausted and yearning for a simpler life. In the late 1930s, Colleen married Homer Hargrave, a wealthy Chicago financier. She invested her film earnings in the market and made a killing. Then she wrote a book that instructed ordinary people on how to do the same. She rented out her Hollywood mansion and later sold it, preferring to reinvent herself as a devoted Chicago wife and stepmother to Hargrave’s children.
Late in life, she wrote a lively account of her years in Hollywood.
If the crash ruined the fortunes of many a famous flapper, Colleen weathered the storm with anonymity and good cheer. “You just can’t live comfortably on less than $2 million,” she told an acquaintance.
She died in 1988, a wealthy and content woman.
U NLIKE C OLLEEN M OORE , Louise Brooks despised Hollywood from the start. She had never intended to be an actress, much less afilm star. “My [New York] friends were all literary people,” she later remarked. 2 “And in Hollywood there were no literary people. I went to Hollywood and no one read books. I went to the bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard—it’s still there—and these Hollywood people would go in and say, ‘I have a bookshelf, and I want to buy enough books to fill up the shelves.’ And that was all the reading they did. Don’t forget, most people in pictures, they were waitresses, they were very low-class people.”
This wasn’t the sort of attitude that was going to help Louise win friends and influence people in the rough-and-tumble world of studio politics. Still, when Paramount geared up in 1928 to make the transition to talkies and renegotiated the contracts of its major stars, Louise was one of the lucky ones. Ben Schulberg proposed to retain her at her current salary. No raise, but no pay cut, either.
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