One Summer: America, 1927

photographic competition, and quickly became a star. She was universally adored by colleagues. She routinely put in fifteen-hour days, and often went from one movie straight into another. She made fifteen films in 1925 alone, thirty-five altogether between 1925 and 1929. Once she worked on three films at the same time. Her talent as an actress, and no doubt as a person, was an ability to convey an array of emotions, from demure innocence to shameless lust and back again, in a single winsome glance. ‘She danced even when her feet were not moving,’ the studio mogul Adolph Zukor once said of her. ‘Some part of her was always in motion, if only her great rolling eyes. It was an elemental magnetism, an animal vitality, that made her the centre of attraction in any company.’
    Her personal life was rather less successful. She was dazzlinglypromiscuous. According to Wellman, during the filming of Wings Bow had relationships (not all necessarily consummated – but not necessarily not, as it were) with Buddy Rogers, Richard Arlen, a stunt pilot, two pursuit pilots ‘and a panting writer’. At one point in the 1920s, she was engaged to five men in four years. In the same period she had liaisons with many others. Once, according to Roger Kahn, her boyfriend came home and realized there was someone hiding in her bathroom. ‘Come on out so I can knock your teeth out, you yellow son of a bitch!’ the boyfriend yelled. The door opened and out stepped a sheepish Jack Dempsey. She spent much of the summer of 1927 draped like a wet towel over Gary Cooper, whom she had met on the set of Wings , in which he had a small part as a doomed airman.
    Bow was originally billed as the ‘Brooklyn Bonfire’, then as the ‘Hottest Jazz Baby in Films’, but in 1927 she became, and would for evermore remain, ‘the It Girl’. ‘It’ was first a two-part article and then a novel by a flame-haired English novelist named Elinor Glyn who was known for writing juicy romances in which the main characters did a lot of undulating (‘she undulated round and all over him, twined about him like a serpent’) and for being the mistress for some years of Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India. ‘It,’ as Glyn explained, ‘is that quality possessed by some few persons which draws all others with its magnetic life force. With it you win all men if you are a woman – and all women if you are a man.’ Asked by a reporter to name some notable possessors of ‘It’, Glyn cited Rudolph Valentino, John Gilbert and Rex the Wonder Horse. Later she extended the list to include the doorman at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
    It the novel was a story in which the two principal characters – Ava and Larry, both dripping with ‘It’ – look at each other with ‘burning eyes’ and ‘a fierce gleam’ before getting together to ‘vibrate with passion’. As Dorothy Parker summed up the book in the New Yorker , ‘ It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam-launches.’
    The motion picture was completely different. Although Glyn received a screen credit for It , the story as filmed bore no relation to anything she had ever written. All that remained of Glyn’s earlier effort was the title. In the film, Bow played the part of Betty Lou, a lively and good-natured department store salesgirl who decides to woo and win the store’s dishy owner, one Cyrus Waltham.
    The movie was an enormous hit in 1927. With Wings , it confirmed Bow as Hollywood’s leading female star. She received 40,000 letters a week – more than all the people in a fair-sized town. In the summer of 1927, her career seemed set to go on indefinitely. In fact, it was nearly at an end. Winsome and enchanting as she was to behold, her Brooklyn accent was the vocal equivalent of nails on a blackboard, and in the new world of talking pictures, that would never do.
     
    Considering that moving pictures and recorded sound had both independently existed since the 1890s, it took a surprisingly long time for anyone to work out how to put them together. The problem was twofold. First was the matter of sound projection. Nothing existed that would allow clear, natural-sounding speech to be played to an auditorium full of people, particularly in the new cavernous spaces of the 1920s. Equally intractable was the challenge of synchronization. Designing a machine that could match voices and moving lips precisely defeated all attempts at solution. As