Star Scrapbooks --- Clara Bow


I was going through some old scrapbooks last night from a collector who'd acquired them years before in an estate sale. If we searched the provenance for all these clippings, they might well go back to the siege of Troy, but the thing that impressed me about this collection was how lovingly that nameless collector had gathered together and maintained it all. Among the artifacts of this long-ago devotee of Clara Bow, I found a neatly inscribed folder, brim-full of individual trims about the actress. Countless Clara images had been carefully removed from what must have been hundreds of magazines and newspapers over the years. The way he’d cut each one out, sometimes with intricate patterns, to avoid overlap with a neighboring article, was quite a monument to one man's patience and resourcefulness. I have no idea where these photos originally appeared, but a lot of them are both unfamiliar and well worth sharing with Greenbriar readers (and ask your kind indulgence, as I did opt for the sauciest poses!). Some individual cutouts were an odd size, so the collage effect on Photoshop seemed the best way to go. Just a small tribute to a Clara Bow fan of yore, artfully applying the scissors to his fan magazines, so that we might enjoy the fruits of his effort some seventy-five years later.


The full-color display above appeared in a Paramount exhibitors annual for the 1930-31 season. As you can see, great things were promised for Clara, but her career was headed for the barn by this time, and within less than two years, she’s be out of movies altogether. The Clara Bow Paramount talkies are among the rarest of her entire output, and we’d be thrilled to see Universal (they own the pre-48 Paramounts) release a box set of these, as they've recently done with the Dietrich, Lombard, and Mae West groups. If you want to read a fabulous biography of Clara Bow, look no further than HERE.