Clara Bow was born in poverty to a hard-drinking, often unemployed father who sexually abused her and a mentally unstable mother who once tried to kill her.

The Turner Classic Movies (TCM) cable network will reveal how a girl raised in the slum tenements of Brooklyn went on to become Hollywoodís hottest sex symbol in the world premiere of Clara Bow: Discovering the ìItî Girl, narrated by singer/actress and fellow rebel Courtney Love on June 14 at 8 p.m. (ET).

The premiere of the 1-hour original documentary kicks off Clara Bow Night and is followed by a triple feature of Bowís films following Clara Bow: Discovering the ìItî Girl, including her most famous role in IT (1927, 9 p.m.) and the world television premieres of her first talkie, THE WILD PARTY (1929, 11:30 p.m.), and DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS (1922, , 1 a.m.), her release debut.

Clara Bow: Discovering the ìItî Girl features archival film footage, rare stills, home movies and interviews with Bowís family, friends and co-workers. They describe her childhood of poverty; her rise to fame as the screenís greatest embodiment of the sexual liberation of the ë20s; and her fall from the limelight as a result of scandal, poor career management and the personal demons that drove her to a mental institution and finally, life as a recluse.

Movies featured in the special include such rarities as Bowís first feature, Beyond the Rainbow (1922), from which her supporting role was originally cut, only to be restored after she achieved stardom; Empty Hearts (1924), a film long thought lost until its re-discovery and restoration in 1991; and her final film, Hoopla (1933), along with an outtake in which Bow reacts good-naturedly after blowing her lines. Also featured are never-before-heard tape recordings Bow made of herself reading poetry and Shakespeare years after her retirement.

Prominent among the interview subjects are her son, Rex Bell, Jr.; Paramount head B.P. Schulbergís son, Budd Schulberg, who questions the accuracy of many of the scandals attached to Bow's name; and David Stenn, author of Clara Bow: Runniní Wild. Other interview subjects include Bowís Brooklyn schoolmate from 1916, Catherine Mulligan Bowles; Diana Serra Cary, who as child star Baby Peggy co-starred with Bow in Helenís Babies (1925); actress Marion Shilling Cook, whose father knew Bela Lugosi during the DRACULA starís affair with Bow; Paramount producer A.C. Lyles; co-star Charles ìBuddyî Rogers; Marge Marshall Sandquist, whose husband was foreman at the ranch where Bow lived for several years with her husband, cowboy star Rex Bell; and film critic Leonard Maltin. The documentary from Timeline Films was produced by Elaina B. Archer and Hugh Munro Neely and directed by Neely, and executive-produced by Hugh Hefner.

In the Roaring í20s, Bow brought a quality to the screen that nobody had seen before. She was a sex symbol who enjoyed the game, a one-woman revolution who shattered social and sexual taboos. According to writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, ìThis girl was the real thing, someone to stir every pulse in the nation.î Her one female director, Dorothy Arzner (THE WILD PARTY and GET YOUR MAN), hailed her emotional responsiveness, saying, ìIt was like a dancing flame on the screen.î The most famous endorsement of her talent came from romance novelist Elinor Glyn, who said Bow was one of the only woman in Hollywood to have ìit,î which she defined as ìthat strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. ëItí is a purely virile quality, belonging to a strong character. He or she must be entirely unself-conscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others.î

Bow got into films by winning a movie magazineís personality contest and quickly rose to popularity in a series of flapper roles culminating with IT (1927), a comic romance that made her Hollywoodís top female star. Despite her popularity, however, Bow was consistently underpaid and underrated. She also was condemned publicly for immoral behavior ranging from allegations that she had staged an orgy with the USC football team to her notorious affairs with actors Gilbert Roland, Gary Cooper and Bela Lugosi, and Gone with the Wind director Victor Fleming. Although Bow adapted to the coming of sound, continuing scandal and her own nervous problems ended her career by the time she was 26. After that, she lived largely in seclusion, often hospitalized for mental problems, until her death in 1965.

In recent years, Bow's reputation as a star and an actress has been revitalized thanks to the restoration of many of her films and the work of film historians like David Stenn. Clara Bow: Discovering the ìItî Girl contributes to this effort through a combination of film clips displaying Bow at the height of her powers as an actress and interviews that attempt to set the record straight.

Turner Classic Movies, currently seen in more than 32 million homes, is a 24-hour cable network from Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. that presents the greatest motion pictures of all time from the largest film library in the world, the combined Time Warner and Turner film libraries, from the ë20s through the ë80s, commercial-free and without interruption. For more information, please visit the TCM website at http://TCM.turner.com.