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9 A Lost Epic: The Rough Riders Fleming and Bow may have set the screen and the box office ablaze (at a cost of $216,584, Mantrap netted $415,600 in rentals), but exactly when their affair turned serious isn’t clear. In their few weeks between pictures back in Los Angeles, they followed separate tracks. Bow was still an outsider. Though Fleming was living not far from Bow’s Hollywood Boulevard home and then in the Hollywood Hills, he was becoming a member of “the Club”—literally. In 1925, the Hollywood Sixty Club, a group that tried (and failed) to build a “clubhouse” for moviemakers, proudly announced Fleming as one of its founders, along with Chaplin, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and other luminaries. But Hollywood never took to Bow. “Most people in Hollywood were burying their pasts,” says David Stenn, author of Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild (1988): She was exhuming hers. They were doing everything behind closed doors, and she was talking to the press. Esther Ralston told me a story on herself that I thought revealed a lot about Clara and Hollywood. She and Clara were shooting Children of Divorce and the day they wrapped, Esther was having a big party. Esther was very proper—blonde, petite, pretty—and she lived in a big mansion. And everyone in Hollywood was invited: that is, all the right people. So Esther was getting dressed in the dressing room and Clara walked by and lingered in the doorway and said, “You’re having a party, ain’t cha, Esther?” And Esther said, as if it had just hit her, “Oh Clara, would you like to come?” And Clara Bow stood in the doorway and said, “Oh, no, I know you don’t want to invite me.” This is the biggest star in Hollywood—and she’s a pariah to the point Srag_9780375407482_3p_02_r2.z.qxp 10/13/08 10:36 AM Page 117 where no one even pretended to accept her. And Esther liked her. I mean, there are plenty of people around who don’t like the big female stars today, but they sure put on a great act. “Clara did strange things,” even the besotted Arthur Jacobson had to admit. “Someone told her she shouldn’t leave her two dogs in the backyard. She brought the dogs into the spare bedroom, and had someone cover the floor of the room with dirt. When she sold the house, she had to replace the floor.” (Fleming would later use his knowledge of Bow’s helter-skelter home life to enrich Bombshell.) When the Mayfair Club, a more successful and elitist version of the Hollywood Sixty Club, held its first formal dinner dance at the Biltmore Hotel, the lady on Fleming’s arm was Norma Shearer. The Hollywood Sixty Club would serve dinner to anyone who could cough up $15; the Mayfair Club was much snootier. Mary Astor described it as “a social experiment” to see whether Hollywood mainstays could find a space without gawkers or press to “be themselves”: to eat and dance and (especially during Prohibition) drink. “But as for movie people being themselves,” Astor wrote, “it was absurd. The men wore top hat, white tie and tails. Everybody got a good look at everybody else, and who was with who, and who got drunk, and who looked terrible, and the columns duly reported the long lists of important names the following day; and if your name wasn’t there you called the paper and raised hell.” The galas sometimes doubled as charity benefits, and the organization was exclusive—a nonmember couldn’t come as a guest to two galas in a row. A local madam did manage to puncture the group’s airs: she sent fifteen employees to infiltrate a dance, all dressed in red. At the club’s glittering first night in August 1926, Fleming had his last known date with Shearer; his pal Hawks had his first date with Shearer’s sister, Athole, his future wife; and Astor went with Hawks’s brother Kenneth, her future husband. Patsy Ruth Miller, the performer turned writer who had played Esmeralda to Lon Chaney’s Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), was in a good position to understand the Hawks-Fleming allure; she married John Lee Mahin, who in the 1930s became Fleming ’s favorite screenwriter. She knew how men like Hawks and Fleming denigrated the flaccid side of make-believe and treasured their risky real...

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