“You look like Clara Bow in this light,” Taylor Swift croons on the final track of her cathartic new album “The Tortured Poets Department.” It’s an evocative lyrical reference, one that places the modern pop superstar in the lineage of a bygone Hollywood icon whose brief, tumultuous career burned white-hot before sputtering into tragedy.
For those unfamiliar, Clara Bow was the original “It Girl” – the 1920s sex symbol whose wild child persona, unmistakable Brooklyn brashness, and natural camera presence made her one of the biggest stars of the pre-Code Hollywood era. Her starring role in the saucy 1927 silent comedy “It” encapsulated an utterly modern, unapologetic spirit that shattered prim Victorian norms.
Like Swift herself, Bow was a ubiquitous pop culture obsession of her time. A smash hit at just 20 years old, she oozed an intoxicating charisma and lived life by her own audacious code. “Poor Gary [Cooper],” she once quipped. “The biggest cock in Hollywood and no ass to push it with.”
Also like Swift, Bow’s famously candid persona and disregard for image control made her a magnet for gossip, scandal, and intense public scrutiny that eventually destroyed her. By age 28, her career was essentially over, derailed as much by the seismic industry shift to talkies as her increasingly precarious mental state.
On “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift seems to find kinship in Bow’s arc as a beloved yet demonized pop culture icon constantly grappling with heartbreak, public scorn, and the double standards placed on young female celebrities. She namechecks the “It Girl” alongside pop culture pillars like Stevie Nicks and even herself, singing “You look like Taylor Swift in this light / We’re loving it / You’ve got edge / She never did.”
It’s a poignant meditation on the simultaneous thrills and torture of life in the spotlight – that dazzling sense of being so vividly alive while the public eviscerates your very soul. It’s the conundrum at the core of Bow’s tragically curtailed story.
Despite the widespread fame and wealth, Bow’s life was an almost unimaginable horror show from the very beginning. The daughter of a brutal Brooklyn pimp and absentee father, she woke up one night as a child to find her mentally ill mother holding a bread knife to her throat. Poverty, sexual abuse, sweatshop labor – Bow lived through it all before even making it to Hollywood.
When she did find success in the movies, the relentlessly chipper, vivacious screen presence was a whiplash-inducing departure from her nightmarish reality. “Marriage means the fulfillment of everything to me,” Bow once famously pined. “This sounds like the bunk, I know. But I mean it. Else I wouldn’t say it.”
Alas, Bow’s lifelong pursuit of domestic bliss and stability was repeatedly dashed, replaced by even more trauma, scandal, and public degradation. Her life was breathlessly chronicled by the gossipy, merciless tabloid press, which ruthlessly documented her affairs, mental breakdowns, suicide attempts, and institutionalization as her fame curdled into notoriety.
“She has been exceedingly unhappy…and sees nothing but hopelessness and ruin ahead of her,” a psychiatric evaluation of Bow read. It’s a haunting premonition of the darkness that would eventually shroud one of Hollywood’s brightest stars.
As a new biography “Runnin’ Wild” by David Stenn explores, Bow became an “object lesson in what happens when you’re unwilling – or incapable – of playing the game.” The studios deemed her a liability due to the constant drama. Cruel jabs like “Crisis a Day Clara” and vicious rumors of her sexual appetites (she was falsely accused of bestiality and orgies) became a scarlet letter wrapped around her neck.
Despite her remarkably modern sensibilities on film, Bow was ultimately a victim of the same puritanical moral panics weaponized against young female celebrities to this day. For every racy punchline or anecdote, there was an eruption of moral outrage, slut-shaming, and mental health skepticism that hounded Bow to an early grave.
“Clara laid everything but the linoleum,” went one infamous joke. As recounted in “Runnin’ Wild,” scurrilous whispers spread that Bow was a lesbian, that she took part in orgies and had sex with her Great Danes, and even that she slept with John Wayne and the entire USC football team during her heyday. Whether rooted in truth or myth, the “It Girl” branding curdled into something much darker and destructive.
In a different way, Swift herself is no stranger to the toxicity of misogyny and personal vilification packaged as entertainment. Her highly public romantic entanglements have been mercilessly dissected for years in ways that seldom happen to male artists. Like Bow, her unfiltered bluntness and emotionally candid art have provided endless ammunition for detractors to weaponize.
“You should be afraid of little old me,” Swift pointedly sings on “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” on the new album, owning her purported “reputation” while mocking the notion of being an object of fear. It’s a defiant rallying cry of self-acceptance in the face of relentless scrutiny – one could easily picture Bow muttering those words with a similar mix of exasperation and resilience.
So while the Clara Bow reference on “The Tortured Poets Department” may seem like an arcane pull for Swift, it’s also one laced with deeper meaning and melancholy. The “It Girl” lived with an authenticity and zest for life that mirrored youthful idealism before the harsh realities of public condemnation slowly chipped it all away.
It’s a fate Swift seems all too aware can befall any young woman in the spotlight, no matter the era. For Bow, that authenticity and audacious spirit helped make her a jazz age icon. But it’s also what left her so wounded and isolated when the tides inevitably turned on her freewheeling image.
In mining Bow’s tragic yet defiantly alive story, Swift points to the timeless double standards that continue impacting women in the public eye. She layers Bow’s reckless, hard-partying mystique atop her own in a way that’s celebratory yet clearly cognizant of the potential perils around every corner.
It’s a reminder that even as times change, the moral panics and persecution complexes around “troublesome” women persist. Like Bow, Swift seems determined to live life on her own brazen terms, dam the consequences. And for the devoted fans who’ll forever shower her music in adulation, that shared kinship with the original “It Girl” is part of what makes Swift feel so vibrantly, tragically alive.