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Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild (David Stenn, 2000)
I’m pretty sure the only Clara Bow movie I’ve seen start to finish is It. Which is, all in all, not a particularly good movie. But I sometimes pull up video compilations of her on YouTube when I feel stuck. Her charisma, her natural ease on the camera… they all work, even if the movie’s no good. Anyway, I’ve been meaning to read this book for over year but a certain blonde Godzilla got me to finally open it up.1
Maybe the most interesting aspect of Clara Bow’s story is the degree to which it is not really a story about a vulnerable young woman getting destroyed by Hollywood. It is also that story, and if you read this you’ll certainly feel mounting indignation on Bow’s behalf as she’s mistreated by an industry that’s practically printing money off her.2 Particularly when a tabloid prints stories about her having sex with her own dog.3
But you get the sense in this book that Bow—whose mother tried to murder her repeatedly, whose father raped her, and who also (possibly)4 inherited schizophrenia from her mother’s side—did not have much of a shot at a happy or stable life. Given everything going against her, she did a lot better than anybody could have expected. And getting into the pictures was a part of why she did better—because they were a lifeline to a beautiful and charismatic girl without much formal education or material resources. As Stenn points out, it was when Bow quit working and retired into a domestic life that she actually began falling apart.
There’s a lot of interesting gossip in this book and insight into the making of silent film, and in general I think that Stenn is quite insightful about Bow’s career and the ways in which she was very easily exploited by the studio system, and how becoming one of the biggest stars of her day did not actually translate into leverage she knew how to use. Like Marilyn Monroe, who Clara Bow very much admired,5 she was underpaid basically her entire career, though with the help of a friend she managed to leave Hollywood on a sound financial footing and didn’t die in poverty the way she could easily have.6
But there’s also some things I found rather frustrating, particularly toward the end, after Bow’s retirement. Stenn tends to take a lot of the medical diagnoses of Bow at face value, which leads him to assert that she was basically a schizophrenic with no capacity to reason and a hypochondriac… while also acknowledging that when Clara Bow died she had been suffering from a serious heart condition for a long time. That she was actually ill is somehow, for Stenn, further proof of her hypochondria (“apparently a minor heart attack had passed unnoticed by a woman preoccupied with hypochondriacal aches and pains,” he writes). Her extensive and documented health issues when she’s working7 are treated sympathetically—at one point Bow has to have an ovary removed—but Stenn doesn’t really connect the problems he agrees she had with the general malaise she seems to have felt.
Still, I do recommend the biography with those grains of salt. I also enjoyed passages from letters that showed how fondly Clara Bow was remembered by a lot of her contemporaries, even as she was momentarily forgotten by movie history (until her movies were eventually revived). This letter from Gilbert Roland, an old friend and lover, is perhaps a nice note to end on:
I hope someday they show The Plastic Age. It would be wonderful to see that dancing scene, you and I. It would be pleasant seeing how I looked when I was your beau, and you were my dream girl. It would be pleasant seeing that. And then it might be very beautiful, and suddenly it might be very sad.
It seems you are in my thoughts.
It’s good to feel that way.
It’s good I have never forgotten you.
God bless you.
(It’s on Youtube, by the way.)
A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Suze Rotolo, 2009)
Suze Rotolo, the girl with Bob Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, has a memoir about her youth and their time together. The subjects covered are wider than Bob Dylan but I think everybody knows (Rotolo included) he’s the only reason people are cracking it open. She handles their relationship pretty delicately and what is really most interesting is how Bob Dylan transforms from some guy into somebody. Suddenly people tell him their troubles and want his advice, suddenly he’s got a bodyguard, suddenly people just want a piece of him, suddenly there are all sorts of rumors and gossip about him and other women, some of which turn out to be true.
I have a particular affection for memoir by side characters in the life of somebody famous—which I think is a fair characterization of Rotolo. (Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters is another book like this that I’ve read and enjoyed.) I rarely, in the abstract, want to read a memoir by the famous person, but a memoir by their downstairs neighbor… yes, absolutely. Do I intend to acquire a copy of Anne Stevenson’s widely hated biography of Sylvia Plath just so I can read Dido Merwin’s account of spending a miserable vacation with Plath and Ted Hughes, yes, and so on. I don’t even really care about Plath, it’s just the sort of thing I like to read.
Whether Rotolo adds much to the general body of Bob Dylan knowledge, I don’t really know. I am not a Dylanologist. (I’ve read some of The Philosophy of Modern Song and liked it.) I came away from this book with a slightly improved impression of him but I couldn’t really tell you why. But I like the sweet side of him that’s showcased in letters like this one, which he writes to Rotolo when she’s in Italy:
You sent me a great shirt—I wear it in the house…but not outside cause I don’t want no one to see me in it before you see me in it—please come back and see me in the shirt—then I’ll be able to wear it outside.
What is pretty interesting in the book and has nothing to do with Bob Dylan are her memories of being an Italian American red diaper baby. She remembers her father proposed to her mother by saying “I think I need to set up a picket line around you.” Incredible. This line would absolutely work on some people I know, by the way.
The Marigold (Andrew F. Sullivan, 2023)
Terrifically bleak horror novel in which the city of Toronto is being consumed by an intelligent fungus called “the Wet.” Sullivan slides among the inhabitants of his fictional Toronto—some of whom stick around for the whole book, some of whom only just make it a chapter—to portray a city collapsing (pretty literally) as the ground beneath it comes to life and rebels.
I do have some nits to pick—mostly that Sullivan has a love of the noirish one-liner and too many of these gets both predictable and repetitive. (“No pigeons this high up. Only birds of prey, waiting for their victims to reveal themselves,” goes one example.) There’s also a little bit of a “Richard Scarry’s Gig Economy” quality to the people we do meet: one delivers meals, another does OnlyFans, yet another does livestreams, and so on.
But these are minor problems and Sullivan brings his book to a conclusion that is somehow… sad, unexpectedly noble, and extremely funny at the same time. I don’t really want to write more! It’s best to experience the ride for yourself. Check it out. (Or don’t.)
This book made me feel awful, which I mean as a compliment. But maybe also as a warning? One of those things where you’re like, why am I in such a mood, then you finish the book and realize hmmm I’m feeling better.8
How are there no Clara Bow fancams… how…
Also, not related, but while I knew Margot Robbie’s Babylon character was based off of Clara Bow I was very surprised at how closely it was based off of her.
This story does have a kind of funny ending, in which said tabloid mails a copy to Will Hays—of the Hays Code—who instantly prosecutes them for sending him obscene material through the mail. Not quite funny enough to justify its existence. Still a little funny.
See grains of salt below.
On learning about Marilyn Monroe’s death:
“I never met M.M., but if I had, I would have tried very hard to help her,” concluded Clara wistfully. “A sex symbol is a heavy load to carry when one is tired, hurt, and bewildered.”
That friend also stole a bunch of papers from her house and dragged her through court. Well, nobody’s perfect.…
With something that certainly sounds like it could be endometriosis, but Stenn doesn’t mention this potential diagnosis (not sure why he would really).
Also, The Marigold is very much devoted to a subject dear to my heart (terribly built luxury housing).
I couldn't finish that Clara Bow biography. The first several chapters were too horrifying. Maybe I'll force myself to keep reading.