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By Kimberly Martin

September 27, 2005, will mark the fortieth anniversary of the death of Clara Bow (Picture: 1), the original "It Girl" and Hollywood's first bona fide sex symbol. Clara's sultry, mostly silent, skin-o-rific onscreen performances and even more shocking offscreen shenanigans seem more the titillating stuff of today's tabloids, not the (sometimes) true tales of an actress who hit her peak more than seventy years ago.

Clara's daringness to bare all--onscreen, to tabloid reporters, to her numerous "fianc? and poorly chosen "confidantes"--kept her in more Hollywood hot water than any other star of the day and cost her thousands in settlements. Clara was considered a "bad girl" even by Hollywood standards and was shunned by most of its stars. The public, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of her and would see every one of her movies, no matter how bad. Though her career was ruined by scandals and bad nerves, Clara is still remembered today, and it takes no great leap of logic (or lust) to see why.

Early silent-film heroines were typically virginal little goldilocks of the Lillian Gish sort. Clara, on the other hand, was the "Hottest Jazz Baby in Films" and the horniest flapper in Hollywood, the epitome of post-WWI flaming youth. She usually played an under-dressed and over-sexed manchaser in movies like It (1927), The Fleet's In (1928), Free to Love (1925), Get Your Man (1927), and Mantrap (1926).

Clara's 1927 starring vehicle Wings was not only the first Academy Award-winner for Best Picture but part of a growing Hollywood trend toward onscreen flesh that didn't abate until Will H. Hays cracked his censorship whip for good in 1934 with the Hays Code.

In Wings a group of WWI soldiers (and millions of filmgoers) catch a sight of Nurse Clara's boobs in what she thinks is a private dressing-room moment (Picture: 1 - 2). In It Clara prepares for her date with the boss by cutting up her dress with scissors in order to look sexier, then having her girlfriend powder up her bra-less back before slinking into her new creation.

For My Lady of Whims (1925), Clara played a Greenwich Village bohemian who shed her ankle-length fur coat in favor of a see-through sequined gown at a pirate-themed costume party. These weren't the last glimpses of forbidden flesh she would tease audiences with before the end of her career in 1933.

Rumors of her outrageous offscreen antics were much more than a tease--they made her out to be no less than the Whore of Babylon. Sure, there might have been a seed of truth to some of it (she had become engaged five times in four years), but the gossip rags made millions by making the biggest star in Hollywood out to be the biggest slut in the universe.

Kenneth Anger repeats some of the nastier hearsay about Clara's life in his infamous tome Hollywood Babylon, mostly gleaned from page-one headlines of Clara's incredibly public 1931 trial against former live-in secretary Daisy DeVoe. Fired by Clara for attempted blackmail and extortion, Daisy got her revenge by spilling the beans about Clara's numerous "beaux" on the witness stand.

"DeVoe kept tabs on all the gentleman callers to Clara's Chinese Den," Anger states. "The four-year register of Clara's beaux reads like a roll-call of he-man talent . . . the list ranged from comics (Eddie Cantor) to cowboys (Rex Bell and newcomer Gary Cooper) to heavies (Bela Lugosi). And that wasn't all." DeVoe also claimed that Clara would "play party girl to the entire 'Thundering Herd' (crack University of Southern California football team) during beery, brawling, gangbanging weekend parties, accommodating the fun-loving bruisers right down to the eleventh man: hulking tackle Marion Morrison (later known as John Wayne)." (This rumor has since been widely discredited).

As if that weren't enough, a depravity-craving pre-Code public wanted to hear more. Later that same year, a tabloid published details of Clara's "blushless love life" that were, according to biographer David Stenn, "shocking even by today's standards."

The magazine's three-week "expos?(mostly falsely) accused Clara of "promiscuity and exhibitionism, kinkiness and incest, lesbianism and bestiality, drug addiction and alcoholism, venereal disease and family insanity." The claims were (and are) outrageous: Clara, when done seducing male movie stars, would seduce her chauffeur and cousin; when men weren't around she would sleep with her girlfriends and maids; when no women could be found she would mate with her pet koala bear and Great Dane.

Though the tabloid's publisher was eventually charged with libel and admitted he "modified about 300 percent" of the material, the poverty-stricken public of the Great Depression was more than eager to believe every word about their fallen idol. "No movie star had ever been vilified in such an obscene and brazen manner," Stenn says, but "the novelty of accessible pornography with a world-famous protagonist made the [tabloid] an instant sensation."

In 1932 Clara decided she'd have the last laugh by lampooning these scandals (and maybe trying to justify her behavior) with her talkie Call Her Savage. The film is not only racy but racist--sure, Clara's character is a total slut, but only because her father is a "wild savage" Indian! The film almost casually portrays extramarital sex, adultery, interracial coupling, prostitution, and homosexuality.

En route to a liaison with her half-breed lover Moonglow, Clara rides horseback, wearing a sheer blouse through which her visibly erect nipples can be seen jiggling away. She then bull-whips her forbidden love interest in an undeniable S&M scene. She mocks the DeVoe court trial by sharing a catfight scene with ice-cream blonde Thelma Todd. Later, Clara and her estranged (white) husband visit a Greenwich Village cabaret in which they are served by a pair of obviously gay waiters who mince between tables while singing a limp-wristed ode to the joys of sailors.

Clara Bow looms on today as a bona fide trailblazer, a maverick maiden who paved the way for Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, and every other "It Girl" since. Sure, she was exploited, but to this day, people continue to buy their entertainments libido-first. This is the true "magic of movies," the alchemical process that transforms the most terrible trash Tinseltown has to offer into beaucoups de box-office bounty.