What Do We Know About Clara Bow?

The literary and historical references in Taylor Swift’s songwriting often spark a dialogue among her fans, but her latest mention of movie star Clara Bow holds a special significance for Southern Nevada.

As the home of several historical photographs and oral histories pertaining to Bow and her husband, Rex Bell, there’s nowhere better to learn about the subject of Swift’s latest muse than UNLV Special Collections & Archives. Here are just a few pieces of our collections.

The Oral History of Rex Bell Jr.

As part of the Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project, Oral History Research Center Director Claytee White sat down for an interview with Bow’s son, Rex Bell Jr.

Bell’s oral history interview reminisces about his movie star parents and his growing up at Walking Box Ranch, a property just an hour south of Las Vegas.  

In his interview, Bell told us that his mother “came up in somewhat poverty” in Brooklyn, New York. When she was 15, she received the opportunity to audition for a movie role and was brought out to Hollywood at 16.

In 1927, Bow starred in the film, It, which led to her becoming the original “It Girl” as we’re reminded by so many other oral histories in our collection (see the oral histories of Sally Halko or Sigrid Capel).

Despite her fame though, Bell’s oral history reminds us that Bow was just as much of a parent as she was famous. “Mother was mother. I didn’t look at mother as a movie star,” he said.

Clara Bow baking in the kitchen of Walking Box Ranch. (UNLV Special Collections & Archives)

After starring in several dozen films, Bow and her husband, Rex Bell, fled Hollywood for the desert. The ranch became the home of Bow and Bell in 1931 until the two separated in the mid-1940s.

The Walking Box Ranch is now co-managed by UNLV and the Bureau of Land Management. Since 2004, the UNLV public history program has worked to preserve and interpret the ranch and its collections.  

The photograph collection of the ranch is stored at UNLV Special Collections & Archives and contains images of everyday life, including this one of Bow baking in the kitchen. The collection is almost entirely digitized and can be viewed in the  Libraries' portal. Other artifacts from the ranch remain at the site. 

Clara Bow in a German tank during a trip through Europe after WWI (UNLV Special Collections & Archives)

While many of the photographs in the Walking Box Ranch photograph collection show the Bell family in the desert, the Bell Family Scrapbook includes images of Bow and Bell both on the sets of their films and traveling around Europe. 

Rex Bell and Clara Bow kiss at a German train station during a trip through Europe after World War I (UNLV Special Collections & Archives)

The relationship between Bow and Bell is certainly one of the most heavily discussed aspects of her life. Within our collections, there are images of the two sharing romantic moments but oral history quotes portray their relationship otherwise.

According to an oral history found in former UNLV history professor Ralph Roske's interview collection, Stephen La Thair Hawley — a mechanic who lived his entire life in Nevada since his birth in the 1930s — stated, “She was the movie star. She was the person behind Rex Bell. She had the money, she had the class. Rex had a horse.”

These photographs and oral histories are just a few of the pieces stored in our archive. If Swift's new song in Bow's honor sparks your curiosity, we invite you to stop by Special Collections & Archives to learn more.