When it was announced, in early February, that one of the songs on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department would be called “Clara Bow,” entertainment writers and Swift fans sprang to action with the alacrity of roaring-twenties newshounds leaping to their typewriters. The simplest assumption to make was that Bow, one of the biggest movie stars of the 1920s, had inspired Swift because she too was a radically independent and ambitious woman, as well as a hugely successful star whose private life had received undue scrutiny.