“It’s hell on earth to be heavenly.”

How to break the silent-movie internet? Get Taylor Swift to write about one of the greatest stars of the cinematic jazz age. Better yet, get her to tease the track title ahead of time so that the web can be filled with clickbait speculation and “Everything you need to know” filler articles for weeks in advance of the album’s arrival.

But now, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th studio album, has been released, and we can all brew ourselves a coffee, relax and listen to ‘Clara Bow’.

‘Clara Bow’ is a wistful, downbeat track, keying into the more melancholic associations of the ‘It Girl’ whose public success was marred by private tragedy. “All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing, there’s a feeling of tragedy underneath,” Bow said once. “She’s unhappy and disillusioned, and that’s what people sense.”

It’s a song about fame, about being catapulted from “a small town” to “the lights of Manhattan” or meeting “the suits in LA”, about the longing for success, which comes with its own dangers: “But I think I might die if it happened/Die if it happened to me.”

It’s not really a song about Bow, or it is, but it is also a song about Taylor Swift, and another pop culture icon, Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac (who has written some poetry for the album). It’s a horror story about the life of a woman in the spotlight: “Beauty is a beast that roars down on all fours demanding more/Only when your girlish glow flickers just so/Do they let you know?/It’s hell on earth to be heavenly.”

As much as I treasure Bow’s vivacious performances on film, her bold embodiment of the modern “flapper” archetype, her humour and her flair, her life story is something of a cautionary tale. And this song is clearly about the downsides of getting the overnight success that a young person dreams of.

Brooklyn-born Bow didn’t have to travel far to reach the lights of manhattan, but even there, in the first stage of her career, she had a rough time. After winning a magazine talent contest, and her first movie role, she found it difficult to establish her career. “I wore myself out goin’ from studio t’studio, from agency t’agency, applyin’ for every possible part,” she recalled. “But there was always something. I was too young, or too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat.”

It was in LA, or Hollywood, that Bow made it big, and the films were great, from Dancing Mothers to Mantrap to It to Wings to The Wild Party and more she is a radiance presence on films. But here too actresses were judged harshly: the studio bosses, and their morality clauses, the movie-colony snobs and their sneers, made life hard for a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Gossip turned into something more, and Bow was made to feel ashamed for the sexuality that she projected on screen. Her mental health deteriorated, and she regretted the limits of the work she had been able to make: “I don’t want to be remembered as somebody who couldn’t do nothin’ but take her clothes off.”

It’s fair to say Swift too knows what it is like to judged for one’s private life, for one’s appearance (particularly her weight, as she discussed in Miss Americana), and to be on the wrong side of a contract. And she has channelled the silent era before, in this train tracks mockup in the video for ‘Mean’, a song that is about dreaming of making it big, before the disillusionment sets in: “Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city.”

Swift paints a fairly sorrowful picture, and perhaps she is filled with regrets, though of course we’d hope she’s happier than she sounds on this song. But however she feels about her phenomenal fame and her music career, she has a voice, and a very sharp way of expressing herself. More than that, she has the tools to change the narrative. Everything you hear on her records is “Taylor’s Version”. Conversely Bow’s own version has been, to a certain extent, drowned out by the sensationalism and gossip. By Hollywood Babylon, and Babylon.

“I’m a curiosity in Hollywood,” Bow once said. “I’m a big freak, because I’m myself!” So is Swift, to be honest, and all the better for it.

• My report for the Guardian on Clara Bow and The Pill Pounder is here.
• Read Farran Smith Nehme on Clara Bow’s “overnight success” and Dancing Mothers here.
• A short version of the Clara Bow story here.
• For everything you need to know about Clara Bow, you can’t beat David Stenn’s biography, Runnin’ Wild.
• Silent London will always be free to all readers. If you enjoy checking in with the site, including reports from silent film festivals, features and reviews, please consider shouting me a coffee on my Ko-Fi page.