INVENTING THE IT GIRL
How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood
By Hilary A. Hallett
Illustrated. 448 pages. Liveright. $32.50.
More than half a century before Stephen King’s “It” seized little children, Elinor Glyn’s “It” seized adult imaginations.
Shorthand for a mysterious magnetism or charisma, “It” was the title of a novella by Glyn that was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine and became the vague basis for a silent movie in 1927 starring Clara Bow (and her bobbed haircut). This once very successful author’s name is largely forgotten, but the idea of the “it girl,” jiggling her leg in celebrity’s waiting room, has endured, albeit often in the less exciting form of the influencer.
A new biography of Glyn, “Inventing the It Girl,” by Hilary A. Hallett, restores her to the pantheon of history with great thoughtfulness and taste. But like a too-tight flapper headband, the title doesn’t quite fit. For one thing, Glyn, a British aristo (who also advised Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino), and Bow, who was from Brooklyn, don’t meet until well into the book’s third section, when both are storming early Hollywood. For another, Glyn’s concept of “it,” developed during a long career writing transgressive romance novels and having affairs with various lords, featured a powerful middle-aged man, not an on-the-verge ingénue.
