One of the several inspirations for the early cartoon character Betty Boop (the others including sin

One of the several inspirations for the early cartoon character Betty Boop (the others including singer Helen Kane and Esther Jones) was early silent movie actress Clara Bow, pictured above in in a terrifying butterfly ride of some kind.Clara Bow is an interesting figure for a number of reasons, one of the more tragic of these being how she was effectively forced out of showbiz despite her at the time high level of fame due to a blackmail scheme by a Hollywood tabloid and a disgruntled employee.Essentially, the story was thus: In 1930, Clara’s friend and former hairdresser-turned-manager-turned-secretary Daisy DaVoe stole a bunch of Clara’s personal papers and attempted to blackmail her now former friend about her personal life if she didn’t cough up some cash.When this didn’t happen, Daisy teamed up with the Coast Reporter’s publisher Frederic Girnau to write a 60 page article, titled Clara’s Secret Love-Life as told by Daisy, where they laid out Clara’s supposed history of drug fueled bisexual orgies. They then contacted actor (and Clara’s later husband), Rex Bell, saying that if they paid Girnau $25,000 (approximately $432,797.90 in 2022 money) for the entire newspaper, they wouldn’t publish the hit piece.Bell, acting on Clara’s behalf, refused to pay, so out of spite Girnau sent copies of the article to Will Hays (first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and the man for whom the Hollywood censorship code was named), Superior Court Judges, and local PTA officials. This, ironically, got Girnau in trouble with the federal government even as Bell called the cops on Daisy for her scheme, as due to the statutes surrounding mailing “obscene“ materials at the time, Girnau had violated Section 211 of the U.S. Penal Code on top of his involvement in the blackmail scheme.Unfortunately for Clara, while it’s totally possible that the studio could have made Daisy and Girnau’s fictional tales of Clara, say, sleeping with an entire football team that included a pre-stardom John Wayne, just go away by paying them what they wanted, Bow’s decision to go to court ended up getting the content of article being made public… And Hollywood being Hollywood, and people who already had a low opinion of Clara due to her being the poster girl for flapper girl subculture (folk taking a dim view of how young women were suddenly openly drinking, dancing to jazz, and so on), a lot of people saw the content of the article and assumed that it must be true. Because in their minds, Clara apparently having more than one boyfriend prior to her eventually marrying Rex “obviously“ means that the deliberately defamatory content of the article must be true too, right?Daisy was eventually convicted for grand theft, as it came out in the trial that even before her extortion attempt she had been using her position as Clara’s secretary to steal thousands of dollars from the star. Girnau, meanwhile, was sentenced to eight years in prison due to the aforementioned charge related to posting obscene materials.Clara’s career, meanwhile, was already on the decline by the time the trial started, and a combination of the stress of the trial and the enormously negative press coverage surrounding DaVoe and Girnau’s lies (as in local papers reported the claims as fact, not condemning them for making stuff up) eventually leading to her having a breakdown, resulting in a period in a sanitarium.At the age of only 25, her career was over.While she went on to make a few more movies (mostly due to pressure from her manager), at her request, she was released from the contract of her final movie, the pre-Hays Code noir City Streets (1931). She would eventually go on to marry Rex, and retired to a ranch in Nevada where she lived for the next few decades with her kids and dealt with bouts of poor mental health. Interviews with her following her retirement made it seem like she didn’t particularly regret her career, even if she had come to loathe public life. As she states in a 1933 interview with the Kansas City Star: My life in Hollywood contained plenty of uproar. I’m sorry for a lot of it but not awfully sorry. I never did anything to hurt anyone else. I made a place for myself on the screen and you can’t do that by being Mrs. Alcott’s idea of a Little Woman. She died in 1965 of a heart attack at the age of 60. -- source link

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