The Girl Who Had IT

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Clara Bow never found the limelight again. Her comeback efforts—two pictures, a Hollywood cabaret called, embarrassingly, It—all flickered feebly and failed. She retired to live with her husband, Cowboy Actor Rex Bell (later Lieutenant Governor of Nevada), on Bell's 350,000-acre ranch near Searchlight, Nev., and raised their two sons in complete obscurity. She took the fever of the '20s with her. Throughout the next three decades she was in and out of sanatoriums, continually racked with insomnia, often unable to speak coherently or recognize old friends. Every Christmas she wrote to Louella Parsons in a shaky backhand scrawl, "Do you remember me?"

She was seldom heard from again. In 1947 she showed up on TV as Mrs. Hush, the mystery guest on Truth or Consequences. In 1960 she made news by writing Hedda Hopper: "I slip my old crown of It Girl not to Taylor or Bardot but to Monroe."

Last week, still battling sleeplessness, Clara Bow suddenly stiffened and collapsed with a heart attack as she watched television at her home in West Los Angeles. By the time her nurse could summon help, the '20s fever was over.