A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (17 page)

19

The Gutting of Clara

B
efore the trial, Dave Clark flew down to Mexico to enjoy the luxuries of Agua Caliente. Nancy stayed at home while Clark swam, played golf, bathed in the sun to top up his tan, and ate and drank well. A friend of Clark’s, an LAPD detective, saw him in The Gold Room, looking bronzed and relaxed, clicking a couple of chips together, standing alone with his back held straight. Clark always carried himself with a military bearing—it was almost the first thing that Leslie White had noticed about him.

The detective joked, “Are you going to buy me dinner with your winnings?”

Clark shrugged and offered a somewhat wintry smile. “I’m not even gambling,” he said.

The detective asked Clark how he expected the DeVoe trial to go.

“I expect to win,” Clark said with offhand nonchalance. “It’s an open and shut case.”

Some people saw Dave Clark as a bit of a playboy, and maybe he himself agreed. There was a tension in him between his father’s upright work ethic and the promise of quick wealth and transformative fame that had always been in the air around him in Los Angeles. He was very much a part of the city: he knew its institutions and was familiar with the humdrum ladders to success that were available to insiders; but he was seduced, too, by L.A.’s fancier and more dangerous dreams. He could be dogged, but he was also impatient.

W. I. Gilbert, Clara Bow’s attorney, came down while Clark was in Agua Caliente, and the two spent time going over documents and hashing out strategy for the trial. A professional relationship developed that would soon become very important for Clark. And he had a second visitor, June Taylor, whose hair was sometimes blond and sometimes brunette, a beautiful woman whose soft eyes belied a worldly toughness. June Taylor was a businesswoman; she ran a downtown hotel that had been owned by Albert Marco where she kept a brothel. She’d been Dave Clark’s friend for a couple of years by now—ever since the Marco trials. A part of Clark lived for excitement and risk; he found both in his affair with the lovely June Taylor. He was heading for trouble.

People v. DeVoe
got under way on Monday, January 12, 1931. The first day was routine. Opening statements were made, and Clark introduced into the record hundreds of cancelled checks that had been written by DeVoe in Clara Bow’s name. A jury was selected. When the court session was done, Clara herself came to the Hall of Justice, wearing a movie star’s watchme idea of disguise: a scarlet coat, a cloche hat pulled down around her face, and dark glasses with huge frames. For an hour Clark conferred with her about the evidence she’d give. He noticed a small V-shaped scar on her cheek, the result of a minor operation to remove a mole.

Next day the carnival began in earnest. Crowds mobbed Judge William Doran’s courtroom and spilled into the corridors of the Hall of Justice. Hundreds waited outside, cheering and jostling when Clara arrived, “an entrancing study in ivory gray,” said the
Examiner
, “from her modish pumps to her chic hat, gloves and purse.” A Times photograph, running beneath the headline “REAL DRAMA AND NO CAMERA GRINDING,” showed a beauty with a white patch on her left cheek, covering the scar that Clark had noticed the day before. Nervous, clinging to boyfriend Rex Bell’s arm, Bow had nonetheless dressed like a flapper on some fabulous F. Scott Fitzgerald spree. A silence fell when she took the witness stand.

“What is your name?” asked Clark.

“Clara Bow.”

“And your occupation?”

“Acting in motion pictures.”

Clark knew he had a clear-cut case. DeVoe’s attorney, Nathan Freedman, promised “a strange, fascinating tale of two young and lovely girls, a blonde and a redhead, who traveled a path strewn with the pleasures and excitement which money and fame can buy.” Freedman’s strategy was to shift the emphasis from DeVoe’s alleged theft onto Bow’s presumed behavior. And here lay Dave Clark’s big problem: much of the stuff that DeVoe had taken, and therefore the evidence he would produce, was intimate and revealing. For instance: the sheaf of telegrams that had been removed from the Beverly Hills house and found in DeVoe’s safety deposit box gave more than a glimpse of the unmarried Clara’s impassioned friendships with various men. “CLARA BOW LOVE NOTES REVEALED!” said the
Examiner
, describing how Bow, “at times in vexatious tears, at others in explosive anger and then in dazzling smiles,” was forced to share the limelight with these messages. “There were more than a dozen of them. They had come to the ‘It’ girl over a period of two years. Chiefly, they came humming their promises of love …”

Clara Bow, the world’s most famous movie actress, liked men, and liked to sleep with lots of them; the information, though not surprising, would provide even today’s media with a field day, and in 1931 every newspaper in the country seized upon those “humming” love telegrams. “Night-time and insomnia may not be for long. Wire me darling, Earl,” ran one. Let’s forget about her fans. In the men she actually knew—directors, producers, other stars, other women’s husbands—Clara Bow inspired lust and adulation.

The following day served up more scandal as Clark read into the court record the thirty-five-page statement, the “confession” that DeVoe had made in the D.A.’s office back in November. The statement told of the expensive gifts Clara gave to her boyfriends, of the diamond-studded vanity case she let her dogs play with, of visits from the bootlegger, of drunkenness and all-night poker sessions, of dresser drawers stuffed full of love letters from Gary Cooper, letters so explicit that DeVoe had felt compelled to burn them. DeVoe had told, too, of her visit to W. I. Gilbert and the extortion attempt, and had stated her motive. “It’s hard to see a girl like Clara with everything and no respect for anything,” she’d said.

The dynamic recalls that which led to the deaths of Hugh Plunkett and Ned Doheny, Jr. A put-upon and humiliated servant was finally drawing the line. But DeVoe, “a cookie baked hard,” said the
Examiner
, used slur and innuendo to assault her employer. Clara Bow listened to this recitation, dressed in a different outfit this day, but with Rex Bell still at her side. A Times photograph shows the two huddled close together in the courtroom, aware of the camera and playing for it, a gorgeous couple.

Dave Clark called upon Bow and W. I. Gilbert to give their versions of the attempted extortion. Gilbert, the famous attorney, under oath, described matter-of-factly how DeVoe came to his office late one afternoon and put on the squeeze. “I said to her, ‘How much do you want?’ And she said, ‘$125,000 and not a nickel less,’” Gilbert testified. Few could doubt his word; DeVoe had been intent on blackmail, had taken the letters and telegrams for that purpose, and was, by implication, capable of scheming and systematic theft.

Clara, dazzling in black, took the stand to tell of her final meeting with DeVoe. She spoke calmly at first, but then with emotions rocketing dangerously. “She said, ‘I’ve got some letters and telegrams that won’t do you any good at all if I turn them over to the papers,’” Bow told Clark. At this point she burst into tears and couldn’t resume her testimony for several minutes. Finally she managed to control herself, though her words came slowly and were still punctuated by sobs. “I asked Daisy—I asked, ‘You’re not kidding me? You went to Gilbert and said I had to pay you $125,000? Isn’t it true Daisy? You’re trying to shake me down for $125,000?’”

Clara sobbed openly again, blurting out an apology to the packed courtroom. “She was my friend—my best friend—my best friend in the world. I’m sorry to be crying but I can’t help it. I can’t help it,” she said.

Dave Clark was stunned. This wasn’t acting. A star, a beauty, the most famous young woman in the world, was cracking up right before his eyes.

The breakdown proved too much for B. P. Schulberg; or maybe it gave him the excuse he’d been looking for. Next day he and Paramount announced that Clara Bow would not be starring alongside Gary Cooper in Dashiell Hammett’s story City Streets. She’d been dropped and her part given to Sylvia Sidney, a fresh persona for a more sober time. Sidney, only twenty, was a product of the Theater Guild School and already a brilliant actress on the New York stage. Her waif-like appearance was a better fit for the beginning Depression than Bow’s brazen Jazz Age sex appeal. Sidney, far from coincidentally, was also B. P. Schulberg’s new mistress, sharing his bed just as Clara Bow had back in heringénue days. All of which is fascinating, “hard and vindictive” indeed, and in no way surprising: a new star was being burnished even while another whose luster was fading was cast roughly aside.

Clara Bow’s travails were only beginning; Daisy DeVoe had yet to take the stand in her own defense, and she’d promised to tell a juicy tale. Press and public waited while Dave Clark laid out the rest of the prosecution’s case. He called Leslie White to the stand, and White, who was gaining experience in court, presented evidence confidently, laying out photographs he’d taken of the diamonds and jewels that DeVoe was alleged to have stolen. The moment was significant—not for this case, although White could scarcely believe that he was standing only feet away from Clara Bow and breathing the same courtroom air as her, but because of what happened later. White would remember: “The trial involving Daisy DeVoe and Clara was another big show, and I played a small part in it. Dave Clark was a leading performer that day, and maybe he always was, though the next time I saw him in court the circumstances were different.”

Marjorie Fairchild, the first woman on Fitts’s investigative team, testified about DeVoe’s confession and the opening of the safety deposit box. Fairchild said that DeVoe, far from being ill-treated, had thanked her for her consideration. Clark called the manager of the Hollywood bank where the “Clara Bow Special Account” had been set up, and went through the laborious process of identifying the checks DeVoe had written in Bow’s name and the cashier’s checks she’d taken.

The trial went on, intermingling tedium with vivid flashes of excitement, until DeVoe took the stand late on Friday afternoon. Led by Nathan Freedman, she unveiled more stories about poker, liquor, and Clara Bow’s men. “There were so many of them I can’t remember,” DeVoe said. Part of her job, she claimed, had been to inform Bow’s lovers when their services were no longer required. She threw her barbs with a free and eager hand. “Shopping annoyed Clara so I did all that,” she said, a point that also went to the nub of her defense. Every check she’d written had been to pay for something of Clara’s, she argued. She’d hidden the jewels to look after them and taken the letters and telegrams so they wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. She talked too about her childhood and her father, a railway brakeman.

Dave Clark kept jumping to his feet to protest the relevance of all this, but damage was done. Next day was a Saturday. With a nice sense of drama, DeVoe held an impromptu press conference in Judge Doran’s empty courtroom on the eighth floor of the Hall of Justice, posing for cameras in the witness box. Meanwhile, across town, buried beneath blankets, swathed in towels, Clara Bow spoke to reporters from the
Examiner
in her bedroom. She made no effort to control her weeping. “I shall never trust anyone again,” she said. “Daisy talks about me dyeing my hair. She wants people to believe my hair isn’t red. It’s always been red.”

It was funny, it was sad; she was clinging to the shreds of her identity. The
Daily News
listed her boyfriends: “Victor Fleming, John Gilbert, Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Howard Hughes, and others.” The Evening Record noted drily that the coach of the USC football team had declared Bow’s house off-limits to his players, one of whom, Marion Morrison (later John Wayne), was known to have been Clara’s particular pal.

“It seems to me we ought to take check of just exactly who we are trying here. Daisy DeVoe is the defendant and not someone else and the issues are clear cut. The question is: did she steal this money?” said Judge Doran, trying to stop the slaughter when proceedings resumed. Nathan Freedman had lined up maids, dressmakers, and cleaners to report on the frantic comings and goings in the Bow household. Doran kept their testimonies short. In his cross-examination of DeVoe, Clark went back to her reputed confession, reading sections to her and asking whether she’d said these things or not. DeVoe denied making the approach to Gilbert, denied that she’d admitted stealing Clara’s money and telegrams.

Summing up, Clark said the issue was therefore simple: either DeVoe had just committed perjury, or every other witness he’d called to the stand was lying. This was Clark’s big moment. The weather was chilly in L.A. that day, and many court spectators still wore their coats. Clark had bought a new suit. He’d been to the barber that morning. Groomed and relaxed, he spoke to the jury:

Miss Bow was no business woman. She did not pretend to be one. She is an artist. That is why she wanted someone to take this burden off her hands. You may think her foolish, but, as I have said before, Miss Bow does not pretend to be a business woman. She is simply an artist.

Miss Bow trusted this defendant. She trusted her as a close friend and as her confidante. She took her with her every place and she placed utter trust in this defendant. In everything, including her finances.

And the defendant, how did she repay this trust? She betrayed it callously and deliberately, stealing close to $1,000 a month. She not only betrayed the friend who trusted her, but I charge that she deliberately perjured herself in this trial, time and time again.

She was authorized to buy everything that Miss Bow wanted and needed, but she was never authorized to transfer Miss Bow’s money to her own private account.

She was not authorized to take Miss Bow’s private letters and telegrams and later to use them to extort $125,000 from the generous girl who had befriended her.