The ink had barely dried on Owen Johnson’s novel Children of Divorce when Paramount bought the rights. Its transfer to film was fraught, and the script was tinkered over by no less than five writers. The resulting plot stayed faithful to the novel while transforming it into a quintessential silent screen melodrama. Its love triangle concerns the virtuous and wealthy Jean Waddington (Esther Ralston), her suitor Ted Larrabee (Gary Cooper), and Jean’s fortune-hunting friend Kitty Flanders (Clara Bow). Jean loves Ted, but Kitty has her eyes on him as well. Years pass, hearts are broken and mended, and joy is mixed with tragedy. The pointed message that divorce can devastate children well into adulthood is forcefully made.
At the time of Children of Divorce, Clara Bow had already been dubbed the ‘It’ girl and was a primary exemplar of the Jazz Age flapper. She had the clout to influence the casting of the third lead, and she wanted Gary Cooper. He was little known but had met her playing small roles in It (1927) and Wings (1927), two films in which she had recently starred. Her lobbying had less to do with her belief in his fitness for the part and more to do with their hot romance. This, not surprisingly, displeased Bow’s fiancé Victor Fleming.
Production began on November 26, 1926, with locations in Del Monte and Pasadena standing in for the French Riviera. Cooper had done mostly westerns before Children of Divorce and wasn’t prepared to play an idle rich man. By all reports his first days on the set were dire. He revealed a shocking ignorance of what was expected of him as a handsome film actor, claiming it was indecent to have a camera peering at him while he made love to a girl he’d just met.
Cooper’s inexperience was agonizing to witness, according to Hedda Hopper, who had a supporting role as Kitty’s many-times-married neglectful mother. (Hopper was an actress before she became the influential gossip columnist). “The set was my swank Park Avenue apartment,” she recalled decades later. “The characters were super- sophisticated Manhattan youths merrily going to hell. The scene was a cocktail party and Gary’s job, of all things, was to breeze into the room and make the rounds from one flapper to another, sipping champagne out of their glasses, cadging a nonchalant puff from their cigarettes, and tossing sophisticated wisecracks as he strolled …. He was a New York man about town, the script read, yet only a few months before he’d been riding the range in Montana.”
When Cooper failed to adequately complete a stunt with a horse after twenty-three takes, director Frank Lloyd fired him, with Douglas Gilmore stepping in. But Gilmore lasted just one day before Cooper was rehired at Bow’s urging. Was Gilmore that bad, or was there some inkling that the awkward, miscast neophyte Cooper had the makings of a major star? Paramount head of production B.P. Schulberg told Ralston, “I know he can’t act now, but I am sure he’s got a face—something unusual. He just needs experience. If you’d just work with him, Esther, be nice to him, make a friend of him.” Cooper improved with renewed faith in his abilities.
Ralston never forgot the shooting of Bow’s death scene, writing in her 1985 autobiography: “I was kneeling beside her bed, prepared to cry buckets of tears in a big close-up. The prop man was dripping drops of glycerine on Clara’s face to simulate the ‘dew of death.’ Clara, as usual, was chewing nosily and energetically on a big wad of chewing gum. When [director Lloyd] called, ‘Action, camera,’ Clara removed the gum from her mouth, tucked it behind her ear, and promptly … died! This performance struck me as so funny that I had literally to pinch myself to start the flow of my mourning tears.”
Schulberg was displeased with a rough edit of the film. He summoned Josef von Sternberg to have a look, initially engaging the director-screenwriter to rewrite the intertitles. Sternberg had scant directing experience in 1926, yet he felt the film needed a more thorough overhaul. He wrote in his autobiography: “This one was a sad affair, containing mock theatricals … no skill of mine could restore life to the film by injecting text into the mouths of the players.”
Sternberg recommended scenes be reshot and Schulberg agreed, giving him two days to prepare and three days to reshoot. Sets were either brought out of storage and reassembled or new scenes were filmed in a makeshift tent. Heavy rain interfered as droplets seeped through the canvas and fell onto the scene below. Sternberg powered through the hasty assignment by imitating Lloyd’s style while striving to improve the results. The busy stars adjusted their schedules to film at night. “The poor actors that I had mercilessly put through their new paces had to take a prolonged rest cure when I had finished with them,” said Sternberg.
Somewhat miraculously, Children of Divorce wrapped on time on January 15, 1927. Neither Sternberg nor his cinematographer James Wong Howe received credit. But Schulberg faced an unusual dilemma in a film with two leading actresses. Ralston was being groomed for stardom, while Children of Divorce was a vehicle for the already very popular Bow. According to Ralston, Schulberg flipped a coin into the corner of his office to decide. He then picked it up and declared, “Well, well, I see it will be Clara Bow and Esther Ralston in Children of Divorce, supported by Gary Cooper!”
With various off-camera crises plaguing Children of Divorce, a failed product might be expected, but Schulberg’s attentiveness paid off. The completed film, if not a masterpiece, has much to appreciate. The production values are excellent, with sets and lighting often evocative of German Expressionism. Editor E. Lloyd Sheldon keeps its seventy minutes well-paced, while Lloyd (or Sternberg?) enlivens it with a deft mix of close-ups, two-shots, and tracking shots that exemplify the best of late silent-era filmmaking.
Cooper overcame his insecurities and turned in a credible performance, as did the beauteous Ralston. Bow faced the greatest acting challenge, as her effervescent screen presence was at odds with a morally repulsive character. Cooper, whose romance with Bow flickered and died soon after the film’s completion, had nothing but praise for her performance. After completing Children of Divorce, his final film with her, Cooper said, “You couldn’t steal scenes from Clara Bow. Nobody could. She doesn’t ‘mug’ the camera. Never that. She just naturally walks away with every scene she’s in. She’s marvelous. She has everything.”
Released on April 2, Children of Divorce became a solid box-office hit. For his phantom directing, Sternberg was rewarded with Underworld, a 1927 gangster drama that began his remarkable tenure at Paramount. A successful director by any measure up until this point, Lloyd had directed Norma Talmadge four times and founded his own production company where he made the massive 1924 hit The Sea Hawk. He won the Best Director Academy Award for The Divine Lady (1929) and Cavalcade (1933), but had his most enduring success with Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).
Children of Divorce displays its share of outmoded acting styles, with plenty of hand-wringing, furrowed brows, and bulging eyes. There are multiple scenes of departure and reunion, with trembling emotions brought on by the passage of time, desires unmet, and devastating betrayals. But the corrosive effects of divorce and parental neglect remain in primary focus throughout. Children of Divorce contains the essential ingredients common to so many of the dramas of marital catastrophe to come. The themes readily carry forward into weepies of the subsequent decades, all the way through to modern takes on the consequences of divorce like Boyhood (2014), Carol (2015), Marriage Story (2019), The Lost Daughter (2021), American Fiction (2023), and The Holdovers (2023), among so many more. Perhaps Children of Divorce isn’t so old-fashioned after all.
Presented at ADoS 2025 with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra