With her performance in the 1927 silent movie, It, rising film star Clara Bow transformed herself almost overnight into the Jazz Age icon called "the 'It' Girl." The movie's record-breaking popularity turned the single word "It" into a national euphemism for sex appeal, and helped make Bow, two years later, the highest paid female actor in Hollywood. Writer and Hollywood trendsetter, Elinor Glyn, first coined the expression in her novella, It, then selected Bow as its embodiment in the role of Betty Lou Spence. As "the 'It' Girl," Bow became the dominant sex symbol of the 1920s and 1930s, and a singular identity within Hollywood history as the first wholly American vision of erotic appeal. Before Bow, depictions of bold female sexuality were associated with foreignness, as in the career of the 1910s' star, Theda Bara, whose studio-manufactured image feigned Arabic heritage. Bow's portrayals expressed...