Photoplay/Volume 36/Issue 5/Empty Hearted

"IF I could only find the right man! Someone who would give ME something!"

"I'm unhappy, desolate. My mind goes on even when my body sleeps. I've always given. I've had no childhood. My mother's illness. Her horrible death. The demands that have always, always been made upon me. But I could be happy, I believe, if I could find the right man."

Just a few weeks after Clara Bow made these remarks the papers announced that she had found the right man. Gay photographs of the couple showed a smiling, vivacious Clara and an entranced young man called Harry Richman.

In New York and the other large cities Richman is known. The owner of a night club. Radio and phonograph singer. Co-respondent in the Bill Hayworth divorce. One time rumored engaged to Ann Pennington. And again to Lily Damita.

But Clara is world famous. Clara is known wherever motion pictures are shown. She typifies every woman's suppressed desire. And her amours are discussed as fluently in Medicine Hat as they are in Beverly Hills.

Well, here is Clara with a new boy friend. There have already been Victor Fleming, Gary Cooper, Gilbert Roland, the Muller brothers, Morley Drury and a number of others. Now it's Harry Richman. Heigh-ho, Clara has another boy friend.

But Clara needs more than a boy friend. She needs, in her own words, a man "who can give ME something."

Clara running restless fingers through her flame colored hair (You've never seen such hair. It's red. Just red red). Miserable as a caged tigress. Discontented as a cowboy on Broadway. Unhappy Clara. Clara who has given too much of herself to her father, to her friends and to the camera she serves.

On the little table by her bed stand rows of bottles of sedatives put there to lull her active, restless, undisciplined brain. Maybe Clara has worked too hard. Maybe she has lived too hard. She thinks too much, undoubtedly, yet she knows nothing actually of the art of thinking. She strives for some vague, far off Utopia where her mind may be lulled and her tired little body may rest.

SHE wants much in a strange, groping fashion. Some indefinable Eros, perhaps. Cheated by life, a slave to work, a slave to desire, she knows that there is more to life than work and play, but she doesn't know what it is. Clara has dissipated her energies, given too much.

Clara Bow is not wealthy. Her salary has never been what her magnetism at the box office warranted. She now earns twenty-five hundred dollars a week while other stars, not half as popular as she, make from five to ten thousand. Of material things she wants very little. A slight measure of happiness is all she wants, so she says.

"I always want to cry," she said (her hands never still, her lean sensitive fingers running through her hair). "I could cry any minute. It all seems so silly. I don't want much―God knows! I don't spend anything on my clothes. I haven't any imposing mansions. Just a simple house in Beverly Hills and a little shack at Malibou. I can take my friends down there. I take the people I like. Extra girls. Prop boys. Kids I used to know. They're regular.

"Everybody criticizes me for ​that. They yell at me to be dignified. But what are the dignified people like? The people who are held up as examples to me? They're snobs. Frightful snobs. They didn't pay any attention to me when I was just a kid around the lot, but now I'm Clara Bow―now they think I am somebody―they invite me to their homes just out of curiosity.

"I'm a curiosity in Hollywood. I'm a big freak because I'm myself!

"God―I hate a pose. When I first moved into Pola Negri's dressing room on the lot, a newspaper man came to talk to me. He evidently thought that because I was using Pola's bungalow that I'd act like her, so he was very grand. He called me 'Miss Bow' and said he was paying tribute or something to a great artist. I just turned and looked at him and said, 'Aw, he yourself!'"

"Nobody is ever himself. I don't know why. I don't really know about anything. But I know that this isn't living.

"Listen―I've worked like a dog all my life. I go from one picture to another. Soon as I finish acting in one opera there's another one for me. And they're all alike, yet I get enthused over each new one.

"I've never been anywhere. Last year New ​York for six weeks. First time I'd been there since I was a kid living in Brooklyn. A couple of weeks ago a trip to Agua Caliente. I had fun gambling. Won a lot of money, too, until people recognized me and I had to be on parade and couldn't be myself.

"Well that's all. Those are the only places I've been. Get up in the morning―go to work. Work, work, work. Go home at night. Can't sleep. Think too much. Think about everything. Mind goes on and on and on. Think about my life, about the new picture, about my lines.

"Is that living? To h——— with it! What's life? THIS isn't it!"

She perched her feet on a desk. She kept running her hands―hot, restless hands―through that amazing tumble of hair, somehow like herself, flaming, turbulent and mad.

"WELL, where am I going to find life? Listen―do you suppose it might be in Europe? Somewhere away from Hollywood and all the familiar scenes and well known faces? Do you suppose life is in Europe, in some quiet little house in the south of France with some man who could give me something?

"I'm getting maudlin. It's because I've worked too hard. My nerves are all shot―honestly. Really, I'm at the breaking point. My contract has two more years to go. Maybe―after that. Maybe, I might resign. Maybe I might have enough money to go away and stay away."

And now there's Harry Richman. But I'm afraid he isn't what Clara Bow is seeking. He's just another playboy. I'm afraid he's only an antidote for Clara's suffering.

Clara really suffers and who is to say that it's any the less acute because she hasn't the fundamental background necessary for complete and thorough introspection? If ever there was a Prometheus spirit, Clara Bow has it.

She hates her flapper rôles―all cut to the same pattern. She has the power to do great dramatic work, Paul Bern, whose critical judgment I revere more than that of almost any man in Hollywood, says Clara has possibilities of being the greatest dramatic actress on the screen today. He says that she could do Zasa or Catherine the Great, or any other highly emotional part.

And Clara knows she could. She doesn't know how she knows it, but she does.

Harry Richman? I'm afraid he doesn't mean the final answer to the riddle of the universe for Clara.

They met in New York when Clara went back last year. He was nice to her. He could sing. She loves music―both gay and grave. He took her around a bit, like the other boys she met there and when she returned to Hollywood they corresponded.

THEY met again a few weeks ago at Joseph Schenck's home. Harry, you know, is doing a picture for United Artists, of which Mr. Schenck is president. And Clara, ever searching, ever restless, ever miserable, liked him as well in Hollywood as she had in New York.

An engagement was announced. Clara has been engaged many times. This time the name is Harry Richman. The colony is rather skeptical and inclined to say "Richman needs the publicity." But Hollywood is like that.

But Clara needs more than gayety and jazz music. Clara needs rest―if she can rest―and a different background. New scenes. New faces. New hopes and ambitions.

She has worn herself out with giving. Her money, her time, her energy, her love―each is a blank check on which she scrawls her name. You can make out your own ticket if Clara likes you.

She doesn't go about much. She leads her own life away from the studio. The gossips have hurt her deeply. She has been goaded by circumstance.

One of the most famous we women in pictures is a pitiful, tired child who has called to life and heard only her own echo.