The Girl Who Had “It”
In 1927, a twenty-one-year-old Brooklyn shopgirl with flame-red hair, a heart-shaped face, and an energy that seemed to burst through the screen became the defining symbol of an era. Clara Bow — in the film It, based on Elinor Glyn’s novella — played Betty Lou Spence, a department store clerk who pursues her boss with a combination of audacity, charm, and sheer life force. The film’s title referred to Glyn’s concept of “It” — that indefinable quality of magnetic sex appeal — and Bow had it in abundance.
She didn’t just play the “It Girl.” She became the It Girl, and the phrase entered the language permanently. For the rest of the 1920s, Clara Bow was the Jazz Age — the flapper, the liberated woman, the embodiment of youth, fun, and sexual freedom. She received 45,000 fan letters a week. Her bobbed hair was copied by millions. Her cupid’s-bow lips (the makeup style was named for her) became the beauty ideal.
But It was more than a star vehicle. It was a perfect match of actress and role, a film that captured Bow’s essence so completely that it both made her immortal and trapped her forever.
Betty Lou: The Shopgirl Who Wanted Everything
Betty Lou Spence is, on paper, a simple character: a working-class girl who sets her sights on her wealthy employer, Cyrus Waltham (Antonio Moreno), and pursues him with relentless, cheerful determination. But Bow infuses her with such vitality, such joy, that she becomes something revolutionary — a woman who wants sex, fun, and love on her own terms, and who refuses to apologize for it.
Watch Bow in the film’s famous scenes: riding a roller coaster with Waltham, screaming with delight, her hair flying; crashing a yacht party in a borrowed dress, outshining the society girls through sheer force of personality; confessing her love with a directness that was shocking in 1927. She is not coy. She is not manipulative. She is alive — and her aliveness is erotic, not because she’s trying to be sexy, but because vitality itself is sexy.
Director Clarence Badger, who was not known as a great stylist, deserves credit for recognizing what he had. He essentially pointed the camera at Bow and let her be herself. The film’s best moments are not directed; they are captured. When Bow grins directly into the lens, breaking the fourth wall with conspiratorial delight, she is not acting. She is sharing a joke with the audience. It is the most intimate performance in silent cinema.
Elinor Glyn, the British novelist who coined “It” and who appears in the film as herself, later said that Bow was the only actress who truly understood the concept. “It is that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force,” Glyn wrote. “With ‘It’ you win all men if you are a woman.” Bow didn’t just possess “It.” She defined it for the twentieth century.
The Brooklyn Energy
What made Bow different from every other silent star was her authenticity. She was not a trained actress; she was a force of nature. She had won a fan magazine contest in 1921 — “Fame and Fortune” — by sending in photographs of herself, and she had clawed her way from Brooklyn poverty to Hollywood through sheer determination. She didn’t know technique, but she knew life.
Her acting style was revolutionary for its naturalism. While other silent stars were still using the exaggerated gestures of the stage, Bow was being — laughing, crying, flirting with a spontaneity that felt like documentary. She had, as director Victor Fleming (who directed her in The Rough Riders and Mantrap) put it, “the ability to be completely unselfconscious in front of the camera.” It was a gift that couldn’t be taught, and it made her the most modern of all silent stars.
In It, this naturalism is everywhere. When Betty Lou is happy, Bow’s whole body radiates joy — she bounces, she spins, she can’t contain herself. When she’s hurt, the light goes out of her face so completely it’s painful to watch. There is no artifice, no “performance.” There is just Clara, being.
This was both her genius and her doom. She couldn’t turn it off. She couldn’t protect herself. The same openness that made her a great actress made her vulnerable to an industry that would chew her up.
The Cultural Earthquake
It was not just a hit; it was a phenomenon. It codified the flapper image, validated female sexual assertiveness, and made Bow the most famous woman in America. She was on the cover of every magazine. Her films — Wings (1927), the first Best Picture Oscar winner, in which she had a supporting role; Hula (1927); Red Hair (1928) — were massive hits. At her peak, she was arguably the biggest box office draw in Hollywood, male or female.
But the film also created expectations Bow couldn’t escape. She was now the “It Girl” — not an actress, but a symbol. The studios didn’t want her to act; they wanted her to be Clara Bow, the red-hot mamma, in every film. When she tried to stretch — to play dramatic roles, to show range — audiences rejected it. They wanted the grin, the energy, the “It.” She was trapped in her own image.
Worse, the film’s success made her a target. The press, which had built her up, began tearing her down — reporting on her affairs, her partying, her “scandalous” behavior. The same vitality that had made her a star was now evidence of moral degeneracy. The double standard was brutal: male stars were expected to be wild; Bow was condemned for it.
The Girl Behind the Image
What audiences didn’t know — what Hollywood chose to ignore — was that Clara Bow was a deeply wounded woman. She had grown up in the most brutal poverty, with a schizophrenic mother who once tried to kill her and a father who was emotionally absent. She had no education, no social graces, no protection. She was a child when she came to Hollywood, and she never really grew up — not because she was immature, but because no one ever gave her the chance.
In It, when Betty Lou pursues Waltham, there is a desperation beneath the comedy that Bow brings from her own life. Betty Lou wants not just a man but security, safety, a way out of the working-class life that is grinding her down. Bow understood this because she had lived it. Every grin in the film is shadowed by the knowledge of what happens to girls like Betty Lou who don’t get the guy.
It is this depth — this unspoken pain beneath the exuberance — that makes Bow’s performance endure. She is not just a flapper; she is a survivor. And when she finally wins Waltham, the triumph feels earned, not just romantic. She has fought for her happiness, and she has won.
The Legacy of “It”
Clara Bow retired in 1933, at the age of twenty-eight, broken by the transition to sound, by scandal, by mental illness. She spent the rest of her life in seclusion, rarely leaving her Nevada home. She died in 1965, largely forgotten by the public.
But “It” never died. The phrase is still used. The image — the bobbed hair, the grin, the boundless energy — is still iconic. And the film, when screened today, still works. Bow still leaps off the screen. She still has “It.”
She was the first modern movie star — the first whose fame was based not on mystique but on relatability, not on perfection but on vitality. Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and every “It Girl” since are her descendants. But none of them had her rawness, her wound, her truth.
In It, Clara Bow gave us herself — unguarded, unprotected, utterly alive. It made her a legend. It destroyed her. And it remains, nearly a century later, one of the most alive performances in cinema history. She had “It.” And “It” had her.
The Director’s Muse
Clarence Badger, who directed It, was not an auteur — he was a competent studio craftsman. But he had one great gift: he recognized Bow’s genius and got out of its way. “My job,” he later said, “was to point the camera at Clara and not mess it up.”
He allowed her to improvise, to be herself. When she broke the fourth wall with that conspiratorial grin, it wasn’t scripted — it was Bow being Bow. Badger kept it because he knew it was gold.
Other directors learned from this. Victor Fleming, who directed Bow in Mantrap, said: “You don’t direct Clara. You unleash her.” It was a new way of working with actors — not imposing a vision but capturing a spirit.
Bow’s naturalism influenced the next generation. Actresses like Carole Lombard and even Marilyn Monroe studied her — the way she could be sexy without trying, funny without forcing. She made it look easy because for her, it was easy. It was just being alive.
And the camera loved her for it.