Bela Lugosi and Clara Bow - Dating, Gossip, News, Photos list. Help us build our profile of Bela Lugosi and Clara Bow!
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"Not much is reliably known of Lugosi’s famous fling with screen siren Clara Bow—famous because a tryst with “Dracula” adds some spice and variety to Bow’s legendary promiscuity.
The activities of Bow, voted most popular screen star about the time she met Lugosi, supplied gossip columns with juicy stories throughout her brief career. Her legend took final form in 1931 when Bow’s secretary Daisy DeVoe sold her recollections to The New York Evening Graphic. DeVoe, then charged and later convicted of embezzling from Bow, trashed her former boss and cited every man Bow ever knew, including Lugosi, as her lover. Given Bow’s reputation, no one doubted DeVoe. The Graphic, the most sordid of tabloids, was published for only eight years, and very few libraries archived it. Literally every copy carrying the DeVoe revelations has been stolen from those archives, and documenting today what DeVoe actually said is all but impossible. Apparently, she only included Lugosi’s name in a long list Bow’s conquests. The Bow-Lugosi affair is dutifully mentioned in every Lugosi biography, every Bow biography, most biographies of any of Bow’s lovers (notably Gary Cooper), as well as in such books as Hollywood Babylon. Dracula-Meets-The-It-Girl is just too juicy for authors to ignore.
Lugosi’s and Bow’s first meeting can be reliably dated. Dracula closed on Broadway on May 19, 1928, and opened with much of the Broadway cast in Los Angeles on June 24, 1928 for an eight-week run. The play received a press ballyhoo that it never got in New York, and Lugosi quickly became a much talked-about celebrity. Hollywood was then beginning the conversion from silent to sound films—an upheaval dreaded by many performers who had no experience with dialogue. Clara Bow, whose voice no audience had yet heard, was particularly intrigued by publicity claims that Lugosi learned his lines phonetically. Bow’s friend, comedian and comic character actor Jack Oakie, recalls in his light-hearted autobiography (Jack Oakie’s Double Takes) Bow’s first meeting with Lugosi:
Suddenly she came running out (to her swimming pool, where she had left friends to take a phone call). “Come on everybody! We’ve got tickets!” she said. “We’re going down to the Biltmore to see Dracula.” She was so excited she didn’t stop to dress. She just threw a great long mink coat over her swimsuit, and we all got into her chauffeur-driven black Packard limousine. Bela Lugosi was starring in Dracula on the stage of the Biltmore Theatre downtown.
Bow had read about it. “I want to meet that man,” she said. “Do you know he doesn’t know how to speak English.” She couldn’t get over the fact that he was on stage for two hours performing in a language he couldn’t speak. Bow kept her mink coat on, and we watched Bela Lugosi in his monstrous makeup with his teeth sticking out, chewing on gals’ necks all evening. Then we went backstage."