In 1927, Clara Bow starred in a film called It. Nearly a century later, one story follows her name: that she had sex with an entire college football team, the University of Southern California’s.

Trivia books and tour guides have told it, often as fact. Snopes rates it false. Some books even move football into a 1931 courtroom, the theft trial of Bow’s secretary. In the trial coverage we could search, football never comes up.

So where did the story come from? We went looking for it in print, and followed it forward from the earliest link we could find.

Tea with the team

The earliest link we found between Bow and the team is harmless. In December 1927, newspapers reported that Bow had the USC team over for tea, and that a demonstration play knocked her off her feet. The Los Angeles Times headlined it “Actress Gets Run Down by Trojan Herd.”

From 1928 to 1931, fan magazines and a 1929 United Press column named football players among her boyfriends, among them USC captain Morley Drury and USC tackle Jess Hibbs.

Drury later described his own evening out with her to biographer David Stenn. “Nothing happened,” he said. “We were too damn innocent.”

Stenn’s biography, Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, places the rumor itself, as gossip, in the fall of 1927. We found no printed version of it from that time.

The coach’s order

In 1929, Liberty magazine added a twist. Adela Rogers St. Johns wrote that USC’s coach had ordered his players to stay away from Bow. It was played as a joke. Decades later, one of those players, Lowry McCaslin, disputed it, telling Stenn the coach “had nothing to do with it.”

We found no newspaper report of a coach banning players from her house between 1927 and 1932. The one paper said to have printed it, the Los Angeles Evening Record, is not digitized anywhere we could search.

The secretary

Then, in 1930, came a court case. That fall Bow let go of her secretary, Daisy DeVoe. Asked why, she said only that it was “for a personal reason.”

The district attorney’s investigators opened DeVoe’s safe-deposit box and recovered a $22,000 cashier’s check of Bow’s, along with Bow’s papers. A Los Angeles County grand jury indicted DeVoe on 37 counts of grand theft. Theft only: no extortion charge appears in the court record or the coverage we read. At the trial, Bow’s lawyer testified that DeVoe had demanded $125,000 for Bow’s telegrams and letters. DeVoe denied it on the stand.

Who is on trial

The trial opened on January 12, 1931, before Judge William C. Doran. Love telegrams to Bow were read into the record, and DeVoe’s statement, read to the jury, named several men as Bow’s “boy friends.”

The judge said no criminal trial should become a “mud-slinging carnival.” As the Associated Press reported it, he added that from the newspaper accounts, “the public might well be in doubt as to who is on trial.”

Thirty-five counts went to the jury. It convicted DeVoe on one, an $825 check she used to buy a fur coat, and acquitted her on the other 34. Before sentencing, Bow wrote to District Attorney Buron Fitts asking that “mercy be shown to Daisy De Voe.” She had gone to his office, she wrote, only because DeVoe “threatened me.”

DeVoe was placed on five years’ probation, the first 18 months in the county jail. Her appeal failed, and she walked out in April 1933.

What the trial coverage we searched never mentions

In the 1930 and 1931 coverage of the DeVoe case that we could search, including the Los Angeles Examiner and Daily News in the California Digital Newspaper Collection, football never comes up.

That search has limits. We have not seen the trial transcript. We could not search the 1931 Los Angeles Times, the city’s evening papers, or New York’s Evening Graphic, which in December 1930 advertised a series billed as the “confessions” of Bow’s secretary. We could not learn whether that series ran, what it said, or who supplied it.

The tabloid

In the spring of 1931, a small Los Angeles weekly, the Coast Reporter, ran a series over four issues, billed as Bow’s “love life” and presented as coming from her former secretary.

Its publisher, Frederic Girnau, claimed the stories came from DeVoe’s sworn affidavits. One Los Angeles paper told its readers it was “now believed” the tabloid printed what DeVoe had not been allowed to say in court. DeVoe denied giving him affidavits, though one wire report said she had promised to tell him “intimate details.” She sued him for $100,000, calling the statements about Bow “wholly and grossly false and untrue.”

On April 22, 1931, federal officers arrested Girnau for sending obscene matter through the mail. A federal jury convicted him on two counts and acquitted him on four. The trial was about what he mailed, not whether any of it was true, and the judge told the jury so. Neither Bow nor DeVoe testified. Variety made the same point after the verdict.

We could not see the tabloid itself. The 1931 reports about it that we found say little about what it printed. None of them mentions football.

Leaving Paramount

In January 1931, during DeVoe’s trial, Paramount took Bow off her next picture, saying her doctor had advised a month’s rest. In May she collapsed and entered a sanitarium. Her doctor blamed the strain, including “those attacks by the Coast Reporter.”

Paramount’s production chief, B. P. Schulberg, told reporters in Denver that she was “the victim of her friends,” and that she might never make another picture. “It was Clara Bow,” he was quoted as saying, “who was tried in that case.” He later said the report exaggerated, if not misquoted, him.

In June 1931 Paramount released her “by mutual consent,” with only months left on her contract. The trade papers had reported that Paramount was trying to buy her out, and Variety linked the settlement to weak box office. The next year, in a magazine series published under her name, Bow wrote that when she was asked to pay to keep statements about her out of print, she knew them “to be entire fabrications.”

The joke grows

Meanwhile, the football story was growing in print. In April 1931, fan magazine writer Marquis Busby quipped in Silver Screen that “Clara Bow entertains football teams,” in a run of one-liners about Hollywood society.

Late that year, Movie Mirror joked that Bow “took the boys right away from Alma Mater,” listing the USC team alongside men it named as her romances. It is the earliest print we found presenting the whole team that way. It alleges no sexual act.

By 1933 and 1934, newspapers were telling it as the whole team: a four a.m. football game on her lawn, a coach’s order that the entire USC team stay away from her. None of it described a sexual act. Through 1959, the retellings we found still described none: parties, a coach’s complaint, a party that ended early because the players were in training. In 1957, Paul Sann’s popular history The Lawless Decade described the team’s visits as “brawling backyard parties.”

The book

Then came Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. It was published in French in 1959. A full-text search of a 1977 French reprint, which matches the original’s page numbers where we could test them, turns up no football story.

The earliest explicitly sexual version we could find is in a 1965 American paperback of the book. Its passage shares a run of phrases with Sann’s 1957 history. Unlike Sann, the paperback makes the story sexual. And even that book calls the allegations “unsupported and denied by most of the principals.”

That is the earliest we found, not proof of a first. According to his biographer, Anger later blamed the paperback’s publisher for its crudest language. Around 1990, Anger said he had “recorded it as a legend, a rumour,” and insisted he had not made it up.

Enter John Wayne

In 1975, Anger’s own authorized edition changed the story. John Wayne is not in the 1965 paperback we examined. He appears in the 1975 edition, named as Marion Morrison, later known as John Wayne. That edition also drops the line calling the allegations unsupported.

The 1975 text does not say which season. USC’s El Rodeo yearbooks show Marion Morrison on the 1926 squad, but not on the 1927 squad.

After 1975, some books moved football into that 1931 courtroom, where the trial coverage we read never mentions it. Anger said the story had been reported in the papers. In the newspapers we could search, the team stories we found from before 1965 describe no sexual act.

The record, as far as we could search it

In 1927, newspapers reported that the USC team came to tea. From 1929, magazines joked about Bow and the team. By 1933, newspapers were telling it as the whole team. The earliest explicitly sexual version we found was printed in 1965, in a book that called the allegations unsupported.

The trial ended in 1931. In the coverage we could search, football never came up. The story kept growing in print for decades, and it is still told today.

Evidence limits

This account does not claim that no earlier sexual version was ever printed. It reports the earliest we found. The pages we could not read include the New York Evening Graphic’s advertised 1930 series, the 1931 Los Angeles Times, the 1930 and 1931 Los Angeles evening papers, the Coast Reporter itself and the DeVoe trial transcript. We saw the 1959 French edition of Hollywood Babylon only through a later reprint’s search index.

In Chronicling America, pages were scored by a classifier and we read the flagged windows; we did not read every page. DeVoe’s conviction on one count is not evidence for or against any allegation about Bow, and Girnau’s federal conviction concerned what he mailed, not whether it was true. Newspaper and magazine pages shown in the video illustrate what was printed and when.

Selected sources

The video’s narration uses a synthetic channel voice. No AI-generated pictures are used. Film excerpts are from Bow’s features of 1926 to 1930, picture only.

Corrections

Hollywood Case File separates documented claims from reported context. If you have a primary record that changes or clarifies this account, especially an earlier printed version of the story with its date and publication, use the site’s corrections and contact route. A published correction should identify what changed, why it changed, the date, and the supporting evidence.