American Fun (30 page)

More to the point, as was clear from her first screen tests, this lonely teenager was wild good fun. Despite her uncanny talent for crying on cue (“
All I hadda do was think of home”), this strange new girl galloped like a mustang: “
She is plastic, quick, alert, young, and lovely,” wrote the contest judges. Throughout her intensely prolific career (fifty-four feature films by 1933), cameramen struggled to keep her in the frame as she romped and cavorted about the set—often making editors fill in with close-ups when they lost her altogether. Her unbound, vivacious, improvisational style reflected her genuine effervescence: playing the flapper daughter Kittens in
Dancing Mothers
(1925), she overrode the script’s Hays-placating disapproval and “played her,” in Bow’s words,
“as a girl out for havin’ fun”—out, that is, for writhing on furniture, relishing liquor, gulping cigarettes, and flirting with men young and old at a pirate-themed
speakeasy. In this otherwise dour cautionary tale about the modern family’s disintegration, she’s a spark plug, a sparkler, exquisitely out of place. But she also frolicked out of Chaplinesque “defiance,” as she did during the filming of
Enemies of Women
(1923), when her mother was on her deathbed in an asylum: “
In the picture I danced on a table. All the time I had to be laughing, romping wildly, displaying nothing for the camera but pleasure and the joy of life.… I’d cry my eyes out when I left my mama in the morning—and then go dance on a table.” By all appearances, however, she did it wholeheartedly, and the critics adored her in the worst of movies.

She was right at home in tomboy roles—as a roustabout stowaway in
Down to the Sea in Ships
(1922), as frontier girls and gutter urchins, and like the male comic stars she did her own stunts. But her stock-in-trade was to play the “jazz baby”—the neighbor girl, newlywed, or college coed whose lip-biting desire and smoldering appeal threaten to torch the whole neighborhood. She perfected this role in
Victor Fleming’s 1926 funny adaptation of
Sinclair Lewis’s
Mantrap;
her lead character, Alverna, the Emma Bovaryescent wife of a clueless country bumpkin, cracks the ice under their cold Canadian town when she is tempted by a New York divorce lawyer. A serious social novel played for laughs (the joke is on frigidity),
Mantrap
showcased Bow’s ultramodern talent for making sex fun: frolicsome, not fearsome; liberating, not damnable. “
Alverna channels all her vitality in flirtation,”
Michael Sragow observes. “She stands for life amid a mob of pious zombies.” For Bow eroticism wasn’t an act; it was her most authentic mode. It gave her power and put her at ease. Fleming was ensnared by it on the set of
Mantrap,
at the same time
Gary Cooper was, and the Hollywood gossip mill went berserk—because, true to character, she refused to be discreet. She liked them both. Where was the shame? In Hollywood, as she put it, she was “
running wild”—“in the sense of trying to have a good time”—and moviegoers were the beneficiaries: “I suppose a lot of that excitement, that joy of life, got onto the screen, and was the sort of flame of youth that made people enjoy seeing me.” All her bad name lacked was a brand.
So in 1927 her relentless producer,
B. P. Schulberg, the same spin doctor who had trademarked
Mary Pickford as “America’s Sweetheart,” enlisted the aging
Elinor Glyn, a British romance writer who had become the decade’s authority (after Freud) on sexual prowess, to ordain Clara Bow as America’s “It girl”—
It
being the title of Glyn’s recent novel. “It”—a winking play on id—referred to a sort of erotic chutzpah. Did Clara Bow have it? For a $50,000 promotional fee, Glyn allowed she did and fawned over the object of her endorsement. The honeymoon ended when Glyn’s (unsolicited) etiquette lessons prompted Bow to call her “
that shithead.”

It
(1927) is the film for which Clara Bow is legend and one of the decade’s biggest box-office hits. In it, she plays downtown Betty Lou who works the fabric counter of a midtown department store. By dint of her pluck and flirty wit, she catches the eye of the dashing store president (
Antonio Moreno), who eagerly tries to win her for himself. His uptown idea of having fun is to treat her to a night at the Ritz (where Glyn makes
a stiff and stagy cameo)—though, predictably, their evening falls flat. She agrees to give him a second chance. Her idea of a “real good time” is to take him out to
Coney Island. Among the rubbed-up Steeplechase throngs, he takes some encouraging but gradually loosens up. At a climactic moment in a romantic sequence that entails the usual carnival fun, she drags him into the
Fun House, where they mount
George C. Tilyou’s Human Roulette. In
It
it’s called the Social Mixer, and risk and democracy are part of its structure. The ride, as we have seen, is a broad, gently sloping cone, surrounded by a wide and generous dish. Patrons pile up onto the cone, and as it spins they cling tightly to each other, lest they be thrown off in all directions and ultimately be “mixed up” in the dish. In the film, the It girl and the president are the last two revelers left clinging to the center, gleefully resisting centrifugal force. She flies off first into the writhing rabble. Though he holds on with all his might, he accepts natural law that the center cannot hold and is flung into the spinning crowd (and our heroine’s arms). But the whirling motor under the movie’s hood isn’t Tilyou’s outmoded toy, it’s Clara Bow’s up-to-the-minute
id
.

Clara Bow: The Brooklyn Bonfire. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

And like her libido, her folksiness was real. She was more at home with working-class film crews than with her fellow superstars—who widely shunned her for her bad table manners, her coarse Brooklyn accent, and her refusal to put on the high-class airs that Hollywood’s lowborn society affected. At the height of her fame and fortune, instead of buying the expected sprawling mansion, she moved with her infamously drunken father into a modest bungalow, best known for its lurid Orientalist boudoir, and she roller-skated up and down the driveway. When the rest of the “colony” wouldn’t keep her company, she cold-called the Sigma Chi house of
Morley Drury, the captain of the University of Southern California’s famous
“Thundering Herd,” and spent the late fall of 1927 entertaining the entire
football team (including the undergraduate who would become
John Wayne)—whether in loud dance parties at her bungalow or in the Garden of Allah’s jazz club and swimming pool. When she managed to break the thumb of an All-American tackle in a late-night game of touch football, the Herd’s coach publicly rounded them up. The bad-news It girl was officially off-limits. But the twentieth-century
g’hal from Brooklyn’s mean streets kept thriving in her milieu of fun. “
I like young people and gaiety,” she said in 1928, “and have a lot of both around me whenever I have time.”

Bow and her generation of so-called
flappers—brash “
New Women” like
Bessie Smith,
Louise Brooks, Zelda Fitzgerald, and
Dorothy Parker—headed up a fun-loving jazz revolution that electrified the middling masses. For the real social mixer, of course, was sex, and the capacity to admit it if you
liked
it. But it was still risky business: the Victorian Age wasn’t that long ago. All it took was the scorching
Mae West, another frank rebel from Brooklyn’s mean streets, to blow the lid off
Will Hays’s cooked Formula.

THE JAZZ AGE CAUSE CÉLÈBRE
was booze. After the Volstead Act
of 1920, the opposing sides of Main Street became radicalized into the temperate “drys” and the wild-living “wets.” The drys, as ever, had the moral high ground, and now the law was on their side. The historian
Paul A. Carter makes a reasonable case for Prohibition’s “
democratic faith,” explaining how the
Eighteenth Amendment “met all the tests of proper democratic action: the test of time, the test of full discussion, the test of decisive majority expression (forty-six of the forty-eight states had, after all, ratified the constitutional change).” When the law passed in 1919, the winning majority was mostly rural Protestants fulfilling the wishes of their temperance forebears, but they were met with such resistance from the growing minorities—most notably from blacks and Catholic and
Jewish immigrants—that the law also signaled the decline, as Carter argues, of Protestant ideological power.

In the Jeffersonian spirit of hedonism and rebellion, the wets (or
“Wild Wets,” as they were punningly known) felt no obligation to honor a law that denied their self-defined right to pursue happiness. A rebel front comprising all ages, classes, races, and gender identifications attacked the new law from every angle and rallied around their fight for freedom. The playwright
Dwight Taylor remembered this revolutionary sentiment being especially fervent in the literary world: “
Our national heritage of freedom seemed in jeopardy, drinking became a patriotic
duty, and the average American writer’s reaction to the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment was to embark on a prolonged
Boston Tea Party, in which he very often found himself acting like an Indian. Some of the outstanding editors and publishers of the period were enthusiastic leaders in the revolt.” Even the socially conservative
William Randolph Hearst, who once campaigned in San Francisco for “wholesome and decent fun,” touted the values of old-school rebellion, saying of Prohibition: “
If the American people had had respect for all laws, good or bad, there would have been no Boston Tea Party.” Like the original Sons of Liberty, the wets used action, publication, and antics to demonstrate their right to play.

Bootlegging became a common hobby. Accessory stores opened nationwide, offering the necessary equipment and ingredients to fire up a bathtub distillery. All generations got in on the act. Often when their parents were sent up the river, children kept the home fires burning. Doctors padded their incomes writing prescriptions for alcohol. Even the
American Medical Association, which in 1917 had declared prescriptions for alcohol had “
no scientific value,” changed their minds in 1922 and named twenty-seven medical uses for it. (In New York, counterfeit prescriptions sold for twenty-five to thirty dollars.) One of the law’s biggest loopholes was sacramental wine. Protestants (who had voted in the act to begin with) usually used grape juice in their services; rabbis and Catholic priests could make a solid case—for purchasing a case. Few actual rabbis are believed to have abused the law, but its ambiguous wording allowed the non-rabbinical to don hats and beards and procure enough wine to supply fictitious congregations. With millions in agreement that the law was absurd, transgression itself became a stylish sort of fun and encouraged an epidemic of nervy
pranks. An ambitious little still, with a running capacity of 130 gallons, was found bubbling away “
on the farm of Senator
Morris Sheppard, the author of the Eighteenth Amendment.”

Some drys, for their part, got in on the fun.
Harry S. Warner inverted popular wet rhetoric, calling Prohibition “
the liberation of the individual from the illusion of freedom that is conveyed by alcohol.”
Izzy Einstein, a trickster detective of the
Prohibition Commission, allegedly disguised himself as a rabbi and a jazz musician to nab bootleggers and crash
speakeasies.
But even without the formidable opponents of
Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and the rest of the syndicate, the drys were playing a losing game. “
Stills were everywhere,” wrote the ever-colorful
Herbert Asbury, “in the mountains, on the farms, in small towns and villages, and in the cities. In New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other cities with large foreign populations the pungent odor of fermenting mash and alcoholic distillate hung over whole sections twenty-four hours a day.”

Speakeasies were the staging area for the revolt. From exclusive nightclubs like New York’s ‘21’ to the nation’s dives and roving gin parties, houses and their patrons shared the risks and taboos of resisting Prohibition. Whereas more “respectable” houses just violated the act, while enforcing erstwhile drinking ages, the majority welcomed anyone (except the cops) and offered the full menu of illegal vices—gambling, drugs, prostitution, cockfights. In the moral murk of the underground, it was hard to draw the line between fun and crime—a confusion that was often blamed on the liberal mixing of race, class, and gender. But mix people did. “
Homosexuality,
transvestitism, and interracial relationships,” the historian
Michael A. Lerner writes of New York’s speakeasy culture, were no longer “discreetly hidden and visible only to those who actively sought them out” but rather “part of the amusement for every thrillseeker who ventured into the city’s nightlife.” A government survey of 373 New York speakeasies declared that 52 of them were “respectable” while the remaining 321 were veritable brothels where “hostesses” and other women employees were “connected with the business of commercialized prostitution.”
George E. Worthington, in a 1929 article for the
Survey,
distinguishes between the “disreputable night club” of his contemporaries “and its forerunners in the long history of
maisons de tolérance,
” San Francisco’s traditional upper-crust bordellos: “
To it come all classes and conditions of people.” Another report suggested that most of Detroit’s “vices” emanated from its socially open speakeasies: “
Narcotics are said to be distributed among them, crime plots are hatched there, and there among the criminals mingle the members of respected families. I doubt,” observes the author, Ernest W. Mandeville, “if the influence of one class on another, in this case, is an uplifting one.”