In January 1929, with no television, internet, or social media, Clara Bow received more than 45,000 fan letters in a single month. This episode looks past the champagne-glass mythology of the roaring twenties to uncover the raw and often tragic story of Hollywood's first major sex symbol, from a brutal Brooklyn childhood marked by poverty, an abusive and absent father, and a mother living with an unmanaged brain injury, epilepsy, and psychotic episodes, to the night her mother held a butcher knife to her throat.

The conversation follows how Bow turned that trauma into on-camera authenticity, winning a magazine acting contest, bluffing her way into her first film role and demanding a raise on the spot, tearing up her contract in front of an executive, and negotiating the removal of the morals clause from her Paramount deal. It covers her 192 ...