Clara Bow’s first portraits, made by Nickolas Muray just after winning the Fame and Fortune Contest of 1921 in the Motion Picture Classic magazine. The photographs made directly from negative by Muray’s widow after his death.
Her Fame and Fortune Contest victory was Clara’s chance of a lifetime, and she could not renounce it despite her mother’s damnations. Meanwhile the Brewster organization whisked her to the Greenwich Village studio of Nickolas Muray for a portrait to replace the cheap photos she had submitted. Muray shot Clara in two standard ingenue “attitudes”: playful, with her thumb hooked jauntily beneath the rim of her red tam, and pensive, gazing off camera with an arm draped modestly over her breasts.
Dissatisfied, Muray ordered an additional setup. This time his subject stared directly into the camera, her hair swept across her forehead, her lips locked together, her face half-shadowed, and her eyes haunted. Here was the real Clara, and though she had never looked as lovely, the image is harrowing. It was hardly what the Brewster organization wanted, so the January, 1922 issue of Motion Picture Classic featured the photo of Clara and her tam. The article announcing her victory was entitled “A Dream Come True.”
“I hadn’t dressed up because I had nothing to dress up in,” she described the audition in the Photoplay article. “I had never had a manicure nor a pair of chiffon stockings in my life. I had never even been close to the scent of such perfumes as filled that room. I wore the one and only thing I owned. A little plain wool dress, a sweater, and a woolly red tam. I hadn’t thought much of that angle. I had only looked at my face, and that was disappointment enough.”
Bow won the contest, but the bit part in a movie that was the prize was cut out of the final version. “Things weren’t breaking for me at all,” she told Photoplay. “Winning the contest hadn’t seemed to mean a thing. I wore myself out trying to find work, going from studio to studio, from agency to agency, applying for every possible part. But there was always something. I was too young, or too little, or too fat. Usually, I was too fat. When I told them that I’d won this contest, they only laughed. They said the woods were full of girls who’d won some bum beauty contest and they were mostly dumb or they wouldn’t have been in any beauty contest in the first place. Which I guess maybe was right.”
Bow broke through in the film Down to the Sea in Ships released in 1922 which garnered positive reviews for her despite her tenth-billed appearance. After a handful more supporting roles, she moved to Hollywood and signed a contract with Preferred Pictures, which was run by B.P. Schulberg. She was paid $200 a week and put to work at once, sometimes working on several films at once, sometimes loaned out to other studios, making 31 movies in less than three years.
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