Flapper (34 page)

Everyone—except perhaps the husband’s secretary, who is left out in the cold—lives happily ever after. Little wonder that
Motion Picture
magazine hailed DeMille as “the apostle of domesticity.”
³
He was preaching a new gospel of personal freedom and sexual exploration, but within the bounds of matrimony.

In some respects,
The Flapper
, appearing in 1920, represented a bold new direction for the New Woman of the silver screen.
⁴
The film was “no old, creaking vehicle for a star to ride in,” announced
Moving Picture World
, and it turned its lead actress, Olive Thomas, into an overnight celebrity. Thomas played the part of Genevieve King, a typical middle-class girl who grows weary of life in tiny Orange Grove—a town that “didn’t even have a saloon to close”—and persuades her parents to pack her off to boarding school in New York. Forsaking her wholesome boyfriend, Bill, Genevieve begins chasing after older men and falls in with a group of ne’er-do-well city slickers, including Richard Chenning, a handsome lech several years her senior, and a gang of jewel thieves who involve her in criminal mischief.

Genevieve, a good girl at heart, devises an elaborate plot to bring the crooks to justice. The film ends with the young protagonist safely back in Orange Grove, reunited with good old reliable Bill.

The film launched Olive Thomas’s star, and it might easily have been Olive—and not Colleen Moore—who graced the cover of every fan magazine in the mid-1920s. But Olive was unlucky. On
vacation with her husband in France, she mistook an unlabeled bottle of bichloride of mercury for common cold medicine. Maybe, as some of the papers suggested, she had trouble adjusting to fame and intended to kill herself. Either way, Olive Thomas was out of the picture. A few flapper films later, Colleen Moore was in.

With the release of
Flaming Youth
in 1923, the flapper became Hollywood’s most lucrative character type, and Colleen Moore became the visual embodiment of the flapper.

Photoplay
magazine offered a ringing endorsement of Colleen’s flapper credentials, concluding that she “looks the part with her straight bobbed hair and her mischief-filled eyes.
⁵
Once upon a time she wore curls—and a demure expression.” But no longer. A writer in Muskegon, Michigan, went so far as to assert that Colleen was “the very apotheosis of the cult of unhampered youthful self-expression.”
⁶

In her subsequent flapper movies
—Painted People
(1924),
The Perfect Flapper
(1924),
Flirting with Love
(1924),
We Moderns
(1925),
Ella Cinders
(1926),
Naughty but Nice
(1927)—Colleen played essentially the same role.

“Colleen Moore is a brilliant young flapper who contrives to disguise her flapperish appeal with the sweetness of the eternal maiden,” a New Orleans newspaper observed.
⁷
“If she is pert and naughty she makes you feel that your grandmother was, too. So all is forgiven. God forbid we hold anything against grandma! A very tricky young lady, Colleen, with a very wise bean, too.”

Colleen’s effectiveness as a flapper icon lay in her apparent willingness to bend the rules but never break them. She was the safe flapper—stylish, vivacious, full of verve and pluck, yet ultimately inclined to abandon life in the fast lane for more wholesome living. It was a winning combination: Young viewers loved Colleen for her modern sensibilities, and their parents loved Colleen for her fundamental decency. It was a balance she worked as hard to strike off-screen as on-screen.

“What kind of girl does a girl have to be,” asked a Hollywood fan magazine, “—to be the kind of girl the fellows want?
⁸
The girl of today has this problem to face, says Colleen Moore.” Colleen explained that “a girl should not be too gaily dressed,” but on the other hand, “she
should not dress too plainly as a bit of tinsel is attractive; and she should remember that men want her to play but not to get soiled.” Ultimately, Colleen maintained, “the golden glitter of tinsel is fine … but not acceptable in a wife.”

If she was a conservative model for a flapper, Colleen was a talented performer nevertheless. She was an expert comedian, able to act with her whole body and to move her eyes and face in perfect synch with a part. In
Ella Cinders—
a clever nod to Cinderella—she played the part of a beleaguered modern-day stepdaughter who scrapes together money for professional photographs, wins a magazine contest, and travels to Hollywood to become a film star. Her comic timing and adorable antics struck a resonant chord among moviegoers—men and women alike.

Much of Colleen’s commercial appeal clearly lay in the public’s knowledge that she was happily married to John McCormick, a former publicist and now producer for First National, whom she wed shortly before filming
Flaming Youth.
If Colleen Moore, the archetype of flapperdom, could embrace the domestic ideal, then surely it was acceptable, if not wise, for American parents to allow their daughters a little harmless experimentation with bobbed hair and jazz. And maybe even liquor. Being a flapper didn’t necessarily entail a blanket renunciation of marriage and motherhood. It was just a phase in every girl’s life. A harmless, necessary, cathartic phase.

In press interviews, Colleen drove home precisely this point. “It’s such fun asking my husband for money,” she admitted with delight, “—not a bit like the funny papers say!
⁹
And I just love it, too. And I’m just dying to bake a cake for John. John will eat it. He is brave and he loves me. I didn’t know there was a domestic bone in my body, but all of a sudden I get such a thrill out of ordering milk and paying the butcher’s bill! I always have breakfast with John—always fix his coffee for him. Do you think I’d let anybody else do that? I should say not. He takes one lump with cream. I’m trying to be a model housewife.…”

None of this was true. Colleen usually spent eighteen hours a day on the set and took most of her meals, including breakfast, at a bungalow on the studio lot. The mansion she shared with John McCormick
was well staffed by an army of cooks and servants. She probably didn’t even know where to find the coffee in her own kitchen.

No matter. For millions of young women torn between the romantic ideal of heterosexual love and marriage and Jazz Age glitz, Colleen held out hope that one could have her cake and eat it, too.

But hers wasn’t the last word on the subject. By 1925, the other studios were eager to cash in on the flapper. They turned to Clara Bow, whose on-screen portrayal of the flapper was as different from Colleen Moore’s as were her origins and upbringing. “Nobody wanted me t’be born in the first place,” she once claimed.
¹⁰
Sadly, it was probably an accurate assessment.

Clara entered the world in 1905 in a tenement slum on Sands Street in Brooklyn, a neighborhood strewn with garbage, rats, prostitutes, pawnshops, cheap saloons, and dangerous characters.
¹¹
Her parents, Robert and Sarah Bow, were a mismatch from the start. Robert was an alcoholic with an addiction to street prostitutes; Sarah was an emotionally unstable teenager who married to escape her even drearier childhood home. When their first child died two days after birth, Sarah threw her body into a trash bin outside the family’s cheap railroad flat. A second baby also died in infancy. Sarah handed her over to the public health authorities for an anonymous burial.

Later in life, Clara was tight-lipped about her childhood in Brooklyn. “I have known hunger, believe me,” she once admitted.
¹²
“We just lived, and that’s about all.”

Life would have been hard enough if young Clara had only had to contend with her profoundly dysfunctional parents. But nothing else seemed to go right. For one thing, she stuttered. “H-h-h-ello, Clara,” the other kids at P.S. 111 would greet her in scornful imitation. They mocked her ragged clothing and ridiculed her family. “I was the worst-lookin’ kid on the street,” she once acknowledged.
¹³
Virtually alone in life, Clara learned how to protect herself against the roving street gangs that did unspeakable violence to neighborhood residents. “My right was famous,” she boasted years later. “I could lick any boy my size.”

She did have one friend—a local boy named Johnny who lived in
the downstairs apartment. But even that friendship was too good to be true. One day, Clara heard a hair-raising cry from Johnny’s flat. She ran downstairs to find the young boy engulfed in flames. There had been a kitchen fire. Clara smothered Johnny in a blanket and cradled him as he wailed out her name. He died in her arms.

School didn’t offer much in the way of solace. Clara’s education ended in seventh grade, and even that was a stretch. “I never opened a book and the teachers were always down on me,” she confessed with typical self-doubt and deprecation. “I don’t blame ’em.”

Just getting up in the morning caused her heartache. Going to school was misery. The other kids were merciless. “They was always hurtin’ my feelings, and I thought they was silly anyway. I never had no use for girls and their games.” The only consolation she had in life came at the price of a nickel admission. “In this lonely time, when I wasn’t much of nothin’ and I didn’t have nobody,” she explained, there was “one place I could go and forget the misery of home and the heartache of school.

“That was the motion pictures.”

Every spare nickel Clara could get her hands on, she fed right into the local movie theaters. “We’d go to the Carlton or the Bunny Theater,” remembered John Bennett, one of her few friends from the neighborhood, “and see whatever was showing. I was the only one who would listen to her little tales of fantasy, her dreams.” One day, as they sat out on the front stoop of her building, Clara “told me that she was going to be a great movie star. Of course, I didn’t believe it.”

Bennett would live to eat his words.
¹⁴
In a sequence of events that could easily have been ripped from a Hollywood script (say, for instance,
Ella Cinders
), in 1921, at age sixteen, Clara entered a Fame and Fortune contest sponsored by
Motion Picture
magazine. Dressed in the only outfit she owned—“a little plaid dress, a sweater, and a red tam”—she dragged her father to a local photography studio at Coney Island and somehow persuaded him to pay a dollar for two cheaply produced snapshots. Clara thought the results were “terrible,” but she hopped the subway to the offices of Brewster Publications, which owned
Motion Picture
, and submitted her application personally. “
Called in person—” the contest manager scrawled beneath her paperwork. “Very pretty.”

Much to Clara’s surprise, she made the final cut and was invited for a mock screen test. The other girls laughed at her worn clothes. How could someone win a Fame and Fortune contest with holes in her shoes? “I hadn’t thoughta that angle,” she acknowledged later. “I’d only looked at my face, and that was disappointin’ enough.”

The girls lined up for the screen test. They were to walk before the camera, pick up a telephone, fake a casual conversation, and then suddenly appear deeply concerned by the voice on the other line. While the other finalists scratched and clawed at one another for the privilege of performing first, Clara stood back.

“I sat through every one of those tests,” she remembered, “watchin’ everythin’ that was done, everythin’ they was told, every mistake they made. The trouble was, I thought, that they was all tryin’ t’do it like somebody they’d seen on screen, not the way they’d do it themselves. When it came my turn, I did it the way I’d do it myself.” Three days later, Clara received a call from Brewster Publications. She had won.

It was tough going at first. The contest carried a small role in a feature-length film,
Beyond the Rainbow.
Humiliatingly, it was only after she dragged several neighborhood girls to the local theater to see the film that she learned her part had been cut. But she was tenacious.

“I wore myself out goin’ from studio t’studio, from agency t’agency,” she told an interviewer years later. “But there was always somethin’. I was too young, too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat.”

Luck was bound to strike sooner or later, and it did. Though she had been cut from the final print, Clara’s role in
Beyond the Rainbow
caught the attention of another director, who cast her in a film called
Down to the Sea in Ships.
That role, in turn, won her a part in
Grit
, a low-budget film produced by a motley group of Ivy League alumni and written by their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both of these movies brought her to the attention of a producer named Jack Bachman, who persuaded his West Coast partner, B. P. (Ben) Schulberg, a former producer at Paramount who had formed his own outfit, Preferred
Pictures, to pay Clara’s way out to California. She would start with a three-month trial contract at $50 per week. The year was 1923.

It didn’t take long for Clara’s career to take off. Her first several films caught the eye of executives at other studios, who began paying Schulberg for Bow’s services. Under a system then common in Hollywood, she continued to earn $50 per week—soon raised to $200—while Preferred Pictures, her contractual employer, raked in several times that amount for loaning her out. This was the case in 1924, when First National retained Bow for a new flapper feature,
Painted People
, starring Colleen Moore.

Three weeks into production, Colleen and Clara began shooting a scene together. When the director, Clarence Badger, ordered some close-up shots of Clara, Moore objected sharply. “You don’t need that close-up,” she told him. Badger acquiesced. What else could he do? Colleen Moore was the star of the film and the toast of Hollywood. Her husband, John McCormick, was the film’s producer and, by extension, Badger’s boss.