Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1929)

Clara Bow has been engaged many times. The list of loved and left is staggering. Now she is engaged again, and this time the name is Harry Richman. Clara believes he is the right man. But is he? Or is he just another playboy? Ampty Hearted By Lois Shirley Harry Richman arrived at the psychological moment in Clara Bow 's life r Someone who would 'F I could only find the right \x give ME something!" "I'm unhappy, desolate. My mind goes on even when "my body sleeps. I've always given. I've had no childhood. My mother's. illness. Her horrible death. The demands that have always, alwaxs been made upon me. But I could be happy, I believe, if I could find the right man. " Just a few weeks after Clara Bow made these remarks the papers announced that she had found the right man. Gay photographs of the couple showed a smiling, vivacious Clara and an entranced young man called Harry Richman. In New York and the other large cities Richman is known. The owner of a night club. Radio and phonograph singer. Co-respondent in the Bill Hayworth divorce. One time rumored engaged to Ann Pennington. And again to Lily Damita. But Clara is world famous. Clara is known wherever motion pictures are shown. She typifies every woman's suppressed desire. And her amours are discussed as fluently in Medicine Hat as they are in Beverly Hills. Well, here is Clara with a new boy friend. There have already been \'ictor Fleming, Gary Cooper, Gilbert Roland, the MuUer brothers, Morley Drury and a number of others. Now it's Harry Richman. Heigh-ho, Clara has another boy friend. But Clara needs more than a bo)' friend. She needs, in her own words, a man "who can give ME something." Clara running restless fingers through her flame colored hair (You've never seen such hair. It's red. Just red red). Miserable as a caged tigress. Discontented as a cowboy on Broadway. Unhappy Clara. Clara who has given too much of herself to her father, to her friends and to the camera she serves. On the little table by her bed stand rows of bottles of sedatives put there to lull her active, restless, undisciplined brain. Maybe Clara has worked too hard. jNIaybe she has lived too hard. She thinks too much, undoubtedly, yet she knows nothing actually of the art of thinking. She strives for some vague, far off tftopia where her mind may be lulled and her tired little body may rest. SHE wants much in a strange, groping fashion. Some indefinable Eros, perhaps. Cheated by life, a slave to work, a slave to desire, she knows that there is more to fife than work and play, but she doesn't know what it is. Clara has dissipated her energies, given too much. Clara Bow is not wealthy. Her salary has never been what her magnetism at the box ofiice warranted. She now earns twenty-five hundred dollars a week while other stars, not half as popular as she, make from five to ten thousand. Of material things she wants very little. A slight measure of happiness is all she wants, so she says. "I always want to cry," she said (her hands never still, her lean sen;iti\is fingers running through her hair). "I could cry any minute. It all seems so silh'. I don't want much — God knows! I don't spend anything on my clothes. I haven't any imposing mansions. Just a simple house in Beverly Hills and a little shack at Malibou. I can take my friends down there. I take the people I like. E.xtra girls. Prop boys. Kids I used to know. They're regular. "Everybody criticizes me for [please turn to p.age 128] 2d