Skip to main contentSkip to navigation

Got It?

Clara Bow was the original It girl - hedonistic, warm, earthy, working class. So how did we end up with Lady Victoria Hervey? Lindsay Baker on sex, money - and what It tells us about the spirit of the times

You might think, judging by the current crop, that to be an "It" girl you need to be born in Belgravia with a Cartier spoon in your mouth. Not so. It was a barmaid and a shop assistant who were the notably un-posh, earliest embodiments of "It". Back then, class was beside the point. The point was sex.

Rudyard Kipling, generally regarded as a particularly strait-laced Edwardian imperialist, was the first to use the "It" word in relation to feminine allure. In Mrs Bathhurst, his short story of 1904, Kipling referred to the "special quality" of the eponymous barmaid. "Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some women'll stay in a man's memory once they walk down the street." For Kipling, "It" was a euphemism for sex appeal. Meanwhile, in the US at the beginning of the century, to be "it" was to be "the ultimate", hinting at the hip, right-time-right-place connotations the phrase went on to evoke.

The romantic novelist Elinor Glyn merged the definitions, actually entitling one of her short novels, It. "To have 'It', the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. 'It' is a purely virile quality, belonging to a strong character... There must be physical attraction, but beauty is unnecessary." In the 1927 Paramount movie based on Glyn's book, - also called, simply, It - a department store owner becomes infatuated with one of his "pert and unabashed" employees (played by Clara Bow), a possessor of "It". The imperious Madame Glyn, who appeared in the film as herself, displayed some of the It-girl tendencies that she espoused: she became famous in Hollywood for tea parties where she received guests in silk pyjamas and read them poetry while reclining on a tiger skin.

Clara Bow had already established herself as the flapper par excellence. She had, said F Scott Fitzgerald, "something to stir every pulse in the nation". Whatever the role, she was warm, flirtatious and always vivacious. It was before the Hays Code brought the censors to the cutting room, and Bow was Hollywood's first sex symbol, outselling contemporaries Greta Garbo and Lillian Gish at the box office, and paving the way for the likes of Jean Harlow and Mae West.

The movie took America by storm. The actress and the role became inseparable in the public imagination, and Bow became known as the "It girl". She was the epitome of the Jazz Age - a million miles from the society gels who gained It status in subsequent decades. She was born in a run-down Brooklyn tenement, and her break came when she won a movie magazine's beauty contest; the prize was a film role. At the age of 18, she landed a contract in Hollywood. She famously swore like a trooper in her strong Brooklyn accent - and was completely without airs, graces or any particular regard for etiquette. She was not part of the smart Hollywood set, preferring to play all-night poker with her chauffeur, cook and maid. In her roles as manicurists, waitresses, usherettes, dance hall hostesses and shop girls, she exuded warmth and humour - her public felt that she was one of them. She was an unstoppable exhibitionist, dyed her hair flame red, and was often to be seen driving down Sunset Boulevard in a bright red Packard with her pet chow dyed to match.

If it is the essence of the It girl that she encapsulates the spirit of her times, then Bow was the perfect flighty, hedonistic emblem for the postwar, pre-depression era. A touch too hedonistic and fast living, as it turned out. Society may well be mesmerised by racy, bad-girl beauties, but can, in equal measure, be self-righteously appalled by them. Bow was to provide the blueprint for many an It-girl downfall.

Trouble started when she was cited in a divorce case, by the wife of Dr William Earl Pearson. Then, Daisy DeVoe, Bow's former best friend, went to the press with lurid tales of the star's alleged booze- and drug-fuelled sexual antics. Though most of the rumours proved unfounded, and DeVoe ended up in jail, the mud stuck to Bow. It was the beginning of the end and, with the arrival of the Talkies, she was finished. A nervous breakdown ensued. The first victim of It-girl burnout, her career over at the age of 28, she withdrew to a ranch in Nevada, eventually dying a recluse at the age of 60.

There were other candidates for the title of It girl in the 20s, among them the British "Brunette Bombshell" Chili Bouchier; the sultry Theda Bara; the hard-partying, Algonquin-attending Tallulah Bankhead; hostess-with-the-mostest Nancy Cunard and fashion doyenne Daisy Fellowes. But, as Kenneth Anger put it in his anthology of movie scandal Hollywood Babylon, "The eclipse of Clara Bow, who had been for an entire generation Flaming Youth personified, clinched Holly-wood's reputation as the Place Where Girls Go Wrong."

Over in Britain at the start of the 30s, the famous-for-being-famous phenomenon was emerging, and among the new It-girls were Mona Bismarck, Rose Bingham and Brenda Frazier - so famous that a new word, "celebutante", was coined to describe them. For this new breed, the designer to be seen in was Schiaparelli, with shoes by Ferragamo, and the must-have accessory, a cigarette case by Cartier. Debutante frenzy was at its zenith; as the economic slump deepened, so society sought escapism, fantasy, glamour. The most celebrated deb of them all was Margaret Whigham, whom the public took unresentfully to their hearts.

Born the daughter of a Glasgow apprentice who had made himself a millionaire, Whigham was Debutante of the Year at the age of 18 in 1931. She was engaged to the Earl of Warwick at 20, but instead married the American golfer Charles Sweeney. She was widely acknowledged as one of the world's greatest beauties, and even featured in the Cole Porter song You're The Top, in which "Mrs Sweeney" is singled out along with such examples of human achievement as the Louvre, the Mona Lisa and the sonnets of Shakespeare.

The 30s were her heyday but, in 1963, with her divorce from second husband the Duke of Argyll - the longest and most sensational divorce to occur in Britain - Whigham, now the Duchess of Argyll, entered folklore in a different light. Part of the duke's evidence was two Polaroid photographs, one showing his wife engaged in fellatio. The picture did not show the man's face, and the identity of the "headless man" remained a mystery for years (recently it was confirmed that he was in fact the then Conservative cabinet minister Duncan Sandys; the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr featured in the second photograph, also headless). The character assassination of the duchess by the judge was merciless.

The duchess lost the admiration of the public and was cast into social purgatory. It was not just her reputation that the divorce cost her, but much of her fortune. She died in 1993 in a nursing home, a few years after being sued over a £20,000 overdraft.

A number of American society girls - Gloria Guinness and Millicent Rogers among them - took up the baton. Babe Paley, along with Daisy Fellowes, remains one of fashion's most revered It girls. Her confidant Truman Capote once commented, "Babe Paley had only one fault: she was perfect; otherwise, she was perfect." Paley was neither outrageous nor controversial, but her influence on fashion has been enduring: her look combined simple clothes (trouser suits, to-the-knee skirts, crisp shirts) and a pristine, obsessive neatness that somehow contrived to look effortless. She was for a time an editor on US Vogue, and the fashion press adored her, running a story every time she so much as changed her hat. Beauty, perfect manners and kindness were the qualities most commonly attributed to her. She was born Barbara Cushing, and though not "of society" she and her two sisters were groomed by their mother to marry wealthy men. Her sisters chose a Rockefeller and an Astor, Babe chose an oil tycoon, Stanley Mortimer. They soon divorced, and Babe married again - this time to William S Paley, chairman of CBS television. The pair were avid art collectors and lived in a bubble of perfection with their several impeccable houses and their yacht, on which Babe lounged picturesquely.

Paley often confided in her friend Capote, a frequent house guest and a regular at their many parties. He was a good listener, and Paley shared with him intimate secrets about her marriage. But Capote betrayed her and many of his other society friends, telling their stories - thinly disguised - in his book Answered Prayers. The book caused a scandal, though in this instance the It girl Paley was not the one who paid the price. The incident united the ranks of New York society against a regretful Capote, and his banishment was believed to be a contributory factor in his later death from chronic alcoholism.

The brand of flamboyant, high-maintenance narcissism that became the trademark of the 90s It girl first took hold of Britain in the 50s. It was an opportune moment: glitz and excess were in short supply, and the royal family, after the prewar abdication, were, with the possible exception of Princess Margaret, cultivating homely ways. Into the breech stepped the models Fiona Campbell-Walter and Barbara Goalen who, when she married, attracted hundreds of spectators at Caxton Hall. The look of the 50s It girl was luxurious and showy: diamonds, mink, show-stopping strapless evening gowns, pearls, evening gloves up to the elbow.

The British public again showed its weakness for a title, and it was Lady Docker, famous for her gold-plated, zebra-upholstered Daimler, who rose to true It-girl status. Known in the press as "naughty Nora", she was exuberant and extravagant. She and Sir Bernard - her third millionaire husband and a chairman of 50 companies, including Daimler - were constantly in the headlines, notably in the summer of 1954, when they threw a party on their 863-tonne luxury yacht for 45 Leeds coalminers. A Daily Mirror columnist reportedly "failed completely" to "squeeze a sneer from these colliers, suddenly cast into circumstances of the most appalling luxury".

Naughty Nora's plain-speaking approach endeared her to the public. When the Monaco royal family omitted the Dockers' son from their invitation to the christening of Prince Albert, an almighty row ensued, culminating in Nora publicly tearing up the principality's flag. She was banned from the country. Much of Lady Docker's appeal lay in her "common touch", an important quality for any successful It girl. She was from a working-class Derby background, and became a hostess at London's Cafe de Paris before her succession of marriages.

Lady Docker faded from the headlines in the 60s, a decade she never much took to. When the Beatles received their MBEs, she commented that it was the end of Britain's "age of elegance". It was also the end, for the time being, of the British preoccupation with blue blood. The new fluidity of the class structure in the Swinging London era meant that the 60s It girl was more democratically elected. Wildly diverse types, such as working-class Christine Keeler, Oscar-winning Julie Christie, model Jean Shrimpton and aristocratic Jane Ormsby-Gore were all granted It status. Each brought her own trademark to the era - kinky boots (Keeler), pale lipstick (Christie), elfin look (Shrimpton), antique dresses (Ormsby-Gore) - which, along with the Mary Quant miniskirts, false eyelashes and gamine fringes sported by other Its, were emulated by thousands.

There was a wildness to the 60s It girls that was new. They were a spontaneous, risk-taking, hedonistic bunch: qualities, it must be said, that make the more recent It girls - every outing planned for optimum exposure - look contrived, and, well, rather bland. But like their flapper predecessor Clara Bow, many of the 60s Its paid a price for their racy behaviour - and the nation's alternating admiration and censoriousness.

The diamond-and-mink-clad It girls of the 30s and 50s prized a titled consort above any other. In the decade that followed, a Jack-Daniel's drinking, acid-dropping rock star was the boyfriend of choice. Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull, the girlfriends of Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, respectively, were the quintessential rock chick It girls. If anyone defined the mood of the decade it was Faithfull, especially with her leather-jump-suited film role in Girl On A Motorcycle.

The bad-girl fantasy was all very well, but when the public deemed it too close to reality, moral panic ensued. In the police drug bust at Richards's house in 1967, the headlines focused on Faithfull and a colourful myth involving a sexual act and a Mars bar circulated. By the tail end of the decade, she was perceived as the embodiment of 60s excess, and laid low by heroin addiction. In 1979 she re-emerged, with a dark, husky-voiced album Broken English, a million miles from her 1964 folky pop hit As Tears Go By. "Life has used me as its personal punch bag," she said.

It was bad-girl allure that also drew the press and public to Keeler, another victim of the double-edged nature of It status. In a recent television interview, Keeler said she was "not unlike an It girl in my day.

I mean I was out to have a good time." Although at the time, Mandy Rice-Davies was the folk heroine of the Profumo trial, it was Keeler whose It-girl status endured. The famous photograph of Keeler astride an Arne Jacobsen chair, taken in 1963, did much to imprint her image on the nation's psyche. The photographer, Lewis Morley, recalls a wide-eyed, rather naive woman. Yet the photograph conveys something else - it became an icon of defiance and sexual liberation, parodied by Joe Orton, reconstructed in ads, lads' mags, copied by Kylie Minogue and the Spice Girls. Life wasn't generous to Keeler after the trial. A nine-month stretch in Holloway for perjury and two divorces led to decades of poverty on a run-down council estate."I took on the sins of everybody," she said in the recent interview. "Of a generation, really."

The70s proved incapable of producing a British It girl. Bianca Jagger was, for a time, famous for being famous, and for looking fabulous in Saint Laurent tuxedos and Halston frocks, but she retreated to New York to become the queen of nightclub Studio 54. The 80s, too, were a fallow period for the Brit It girl.

In the mid-90s, however, she was back - with a vengeance. In 1995, not one, but five young women appeared on the cover of Tatler magazine under the It-girl banner. They were all young ladies of "good pedigree", little visible means of income and vast designer wardrobes. In fact, one of the five, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was already well on her way to It-girl status due to her column in the Sunday Times Style section. Jeremy Langmead, then editor of Style (now editor of Nova), hired her on the strength of an interview she gave to promote Ray-Ban sunglasses. As a friend of the royals and with a propensity for self-mockery, Palmer-Tomkinson was, says Langmead, the perfect candidate for a society gossip column. The column was "heavily edited", as he phrases it. "As Tara always said, she lived the column, which was far more important than writing it." And the readers loved her, he says. "Tara was quite happy to make herself a comedy figure, rather than just blowing her own trumpet. She had the common touch. Because she was genuinely upper class, she didn't have to pretend, she had no airs and graces."

When Palmer-Tomkinson checked into rehab, "the bubble burst", he says. "Suddenly people realised that it wasn't all as glossy and glamorous as it looked, and that it was cocaine that was fuelling that wonderful lifestyle." It should, in theory, have ended there. But just when it looked as if the latest crop of It girls had had their day, and had become the "Post-it"girls, another one cropped up - Lady Victoria Hervey, who has taken over the Tara slot at the Sunday Times.

The fact that It-dom has, in the past few years, once again become a preserve of the upper classes, may seem a bizarrely old-fashioned state of affairs. It was a backlash to a backlash. The early 90s, in contrast to the "me decade" that had gone before, saw a preoccupation in fashion circles with a gritty, grungey realism. "There wasn't much laughing or smiling going on," Langmead recalls. This peculiarly down-at-heel aesthetic crept from the fashion press into the mainstream, and was dubbed heroin chic. "It was uncool to be posh," says Langmead. Essex girls such as Denise van Outen were the stars of the time. Upper-class Notting Hill types slumming it, but on daddy's trust fund, became known as Trustafarians, and public school boys were putting on mockney accents.

Before long, though, the austere sensibility of the early 90s gave way to an economic boom and the re-emergence of party-going. The groomed and unapologetically posh good-time girls Tara, Tamara Beckwith and Normandie Keith were, as Langmead points out, "a reaction to what had come before". As the Gucci/Prada frenzy began to take hold in the glossy mags, it was inevitable that the new It girls would be an incarnation of privilege. Ultimately, the 90s were every bit as obsessed with conspicuous wealth, unabashed luxury and "designer" lifestyles as the 80s had been. The girls soon made it from the pages of the glossies and Hello! into the tabloids, via London's Met Bar - outside which paparazzi gathered night after night. Before long, it wasn't just the fashion houses who embraced the new gang of Its - jeans companies, hosiery brands, high street chains, all clamoured to enlist them.

Now that It-girl saturation has set in, however, Hervey begins to look like an It girl too far. She did herself no favours in a recent Guardian interview, on the one hand boasting of the freebies she receives, and on the other deriding those who get their handouts courtesy of the state. Even the Daily Mail was moved to comment, with its own slant (that she was letting down her class): "Most of us would be hard-put to see the moral distinction between the undeserving poor and the undeserving rich." Hervey is the career It girl par excellence - her clothing boutique Akademi has prospered in line with her rise to fame - and she is not so much a good-time girl, as a party girl with a purpose, the purpose being publicity.

Never before has It been such a money-spinner. With their sponsorship and advertising deals and newspaper columns, Hervey and her ilk are the first Its to have profited so directly from their status. And who can blame them? Even when their It-ness fades, they diversify: Keith has become the beauty editor of a Sunday newspaper; even the beleaguered, post rehab Tara is now a director of a hotel group. None of them is liable to end up destitute - unlike some of their crash-and-burn predecessors.

But somehow it seems improbable that the It girls of the turn of the millennium will be remembered in quite the same way. For all their flaws and all their narcissism, the earlier Its were not cynical or calculating. Cashing in would quite simply have been deemed non-It. They never worked at being It, but rather had It-ness thrust upon them. Like Elinor Glyn's fictional It heroine, Lady Victoria Hervey is a shop girl, of sorts - but the similarity ends there. As Glyn wrote in her It-girl definition: "She must be entirely unselfconscious... indifferent to the effect she is producing. Self-consciousness destroys 'It' immediately."