In a 9.2.22 Vanity Fair piece about Babylon, Rebecca Ford described Margot Robbie‘s character (“Nellie LaRoy”) as “an amalgam of early stars like Clara Bow, Jeanne Eagels, Joan Crawford and Alma Rubens.”
But in a May 2019 draft of Damien Chazelle‘s screenplay, Robbie’s character is flat-out identified as Clara Bow, and right now there doesn’t seem to be much of an effort on Chazelle, Robbie or anyone else’s part to deny that LaRoy is modelled upon this spunky, irrepressible, flapper-type actress who came to represent the wild-ass, bathtub-gin spirit of the 1920s Hollywood.
From “Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Clara Bow, ‘It’ Girl.” by Hairpin‘s Anne Helen Petersen:
“Clara Bow doesn’t look like a relic. She doesn’t look like she belongs in the ’20s, or even in black and white. She looks nothing like the other stars of the silent era, who either seemed frozen in puberty (Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish), outrageously “exotic” (Theda Bara, Pola Negri), or untouchably glamorous (Gloria Swanson). This girl’s got something like whoa.
“Look at her. She looks so…MODERN. Like she could be a star today, right? When I show footage of Bow to my undergraduates, who generally consider the viewing of silent film as the sixth level of hell (trumped only by the viewing of Soviet silent film) they can’t take their eyes off her. It’s her movement, her eyes, the way she flirts with the camera.
“But it’s something else, too – something Billy Wilder once referred to as ‘flesh impact,’ a rare quality shared only with the likes of Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Flesh impact meant having ‘flesh which photographs like flesh,’ flesh you felt you could reach out and touch — or flesh with which you would very much like to have sex.
“That desire made Clara Bow a star, but would also make it easy to tell outrageous stories about her, and for people to believe those outrageous stories. In 1927, she was the No. 1 star in America. When she retired in 1931 amid a tangle of scandals, she was all of 28 years old.”