The original ‘It-girl’ Clara Bow and her sisters in mayhem

The brilliant but wild Old Hollywood star was the key inspiration for Margot Robbie’s character in Damien Chazelle’s new epic ‘Babylon’. Geoffrey Macnab explores the tumultuous life of one of cinema’s early greats

Actor Clara Bow, the original ‘It-girl’, photographed circa 1925 (General Photographic Agency/Getty)

Budd Schulberg, the virtuoso screenwriter best known for Marlon Brando film On the Waterfront, has a revealing story about Hollywood silent star and sex symbol Clara Bow in his memoir, Moving Pictures. Schulberg’s father, movie executive BP Schulberg, had signed Bow up to a long-term contract in the early 1920s. As a boy, Budd watched her on set shooting an emotional scene in her 1925 movie The Plastic Age. As always, Bow was playing a fast-living woman of the world but, in this role, she was required to show some raw feeling, too. When the director called action, the then 20-year-old redhead with the “flirty eyes, bee-sting lips and dimpled knees” began to weep uncontrollably like a “lost child”. Her tears were utterly convincing; she never needed the make-up department to squirt glycerine on her cheeks. “It takes a real actress to cry from the inside,” Schulberg noted with wonder.

You’d imagine that director Damien Chazelle must have read Schulberg’s book. His Oscar-tipped new movie Babylon, which shows silent era Hollywood at its most decadent and destructive, has a striking early scene on a movie set in which Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is also asked to weep. Nellie is a wild child. She chews gum, flirts with everybody, puts ice on her nipples so that they always stick out on camera, and tries to steal every scene in which she appears. That is why it is so startling when her eyes turn moist. The emotion seems to be entirely genuine.

Chazelle has acknowledged that Bow was the “biggest” inspiration behind the character of Nellie in his movie. After all, Bow was Hollywood’s original “It-girl”, the flapper scurrilously (and inaccurately) accused by Kenneth Anger in his book Hollywood Babylon of sexually servicing the entire University of Southern California American football team, including a youthful John Wayne. She lived fast and lived outrageously. She played very uninhibited women on screen.