Clark Gable

by David Bret

  The action takes place in Chicago in the wake of the 1929 St Valentine’s Day Massacre. Rich kids Bonnie and Roddy Jordan (Crawford, William Blakewell) have dropped out of school to engage in a hedonistic lifestyle, such as the party taking place aboard their yacht in the opening sequence. This ends with Bonnie and her millionaire lover Bob Townsend (Vail) encouraging the other Bright Young Things to cool off with a midnight dip in the ocean. With not enough costumes to go around, the lights dim and everyone strips down to their underwear - a scene that barely got past the Hays Office censor on account of ‘Mr Vail’s flagrant display of under-arm hair’. This idyllic life ends when the Jordans’ fortune is wiped out by the Wall Street Crash. Forced to leave their mansion, Bonnie and Roddy share a tawdry apartment. She, wishing to remain independent, rejects Bob’s marriage offer and gets a job as a reporter with The Star, while Roddy secretly works as a bootlegger and getaway driver for mobster Jake Luva. Clark looks rather silly in suits that are too small, the too-short sleeves making his hands appear even more shovel-like than usual.

  Roddy is a bumbling weakling but invaluable to the churlish Jake because of his society connections - one of which is Bob Townsend, in whom Roddy develops an unhealthy interest. ‘You’ll come here again, won’t you, Bob?’ he pleads. ‘I’m living here alone at the club and I’ll be glad to see you any time!’ When Jake’s rival and six of his gang are mowed down by the Luva mob, Roddy gets sick at the wheel - having expected to be involved in nothing more serious than a hijacking. When he accidentally blabs to The Star’s ace reporter, Scranton (Cliff Edwards), he is given the task of eliminating him. Should he fail, Jake’s men will kill them both.

  The murder takes place and, to obtain a scoop, Bonnie infiltrates the Luva gang and becomes Jake’s moll, though she finds him odious. She charms him into giving her a job dancing the shimmy at his club, where Roddy is hiding. When she answers the phone in Jake’s apartment and hears Roddy’s voice, she immediately susses out that he is the killer she is looking for. He goes to pieces when she confronts him, from which point Dance, Fools, Dance takes on some of the elements of a bad Keystone Cops dénouement, only marginally better than the one in The Painted Desert. Having worked out that Bonnie is a plant, Jake plans to have her and Roddy executed, but in the ham-fisted shoot-out Luva and Roddy both take the bullet, the young man expiring beautifully in his sister’s arms while she kisses him on the mouth. And, rather than make up the story that Jake killed Scranton now that no one is alive to prove otherwise, Bonnie portrays the martyr by grassing up Roddy - so impressing Bob that he asks her to marry him again, this time bringing a positive reply.

  Though Crawford had asked to work with Clark, no doubt to find out first-hand what all the fuss was about, she confessed to having some reservations during the run-up to the shooting. In the wake of the Talkies boom, when so many stars were falling by the wayside, the major critics generally regarded stage actors as being superior to movie stars. Similarly, Clark dreaded working with her, believing that she would look down on him for his lack of experience. His comments upon meeting her are not on record. Joan wrote of her first impression of him, ‘He represented Man at his most primeval - virile, rough-and-ready, with the instincts of a wild beast, absolutely no airs and graces. Gable had more balls than any man I’ve ever known.’ Exactly when the two became intimately involved is not known, though the likeliest date appears to be around May 1931, at a pre-première party for their film. Ria was fond of showing off her toy-boy husband, who at their shindigs thought nothing of excusing himself and heading for the shrubbery with whoever might have taken his fancy that night. On this particular evening, it just happened to be Joan.

  Five years younger than Clark, Joan Crawford had gone round the block many times. While still in her teens she fled Kansas City and a martinet mother to work as a dancer and amateur porn star. She appeared on Broadway with Mistinguett and had dozens of lovers of both sexes - resulting in at least two abortions - before marrying the snobbish Douglas Fairbanks Jr in 1929. Most of her men had appealed to her by way of their softer side. Clark, meanwhile, constantly kept himself in check as if terrified of divulging some terrible secret other than his homosexual tendencies. But unlike Clark’s other lovers and wives, who would not even scratch the surface to find out what kind of man he really was, Crawford already knew through her close friendship with William Haines.

  During the early weeks of his relationship with Joan, Clark still saw a lot of Haines - as Joan’s ‘soul-sister confidante’, he came as part of the package. It was courtesy of Haines that Clark was given a part in The Secret Six starring Johnny Mack Brown, Wallace Beery and Jean Harlow. Clark played a member of a group fighting against mob rule, who pretends to be a reporter in order to trap their leader, Slaughterhouse (Beery), and bring him and his cronies to justice. Again, there are shades of Conrad Veidt, this time deliberately engineered by director George Hill, an ardent admirer of the early German cinema. By the time the film reached the screen, however, most of the key scenes had been trimmed because the Hays Office deemed it too brutal. In some US states it was completely banned following a spate of copycat shootings involving children - a twist on the usual Cowboys and Injuns playground games when, in New Jersey, one boy used a real gun belonging to his father.

  Most of those involved with the film expected Gable to make a play for Jean Harlow - the platinum bombshell who had recently caused a sensation in Hell’s Angels - this time playing Beery’s moll and Clark’s girlfriend. He was more interested, however, in Johnny Mack Brown, William Haines’ fuck-buddy, whose screen debut four years earlier had been in Haines’ baseball movie, Slide, Kelly, Slide. A big hunk of a man, Alabama-born Brown (1904-75) was the former all-American halfback who scored the winning touchdown for the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide team in the 1926 NCAA Division Rose Bowl final. This led to his picture appearing on Wheaties cereal boxes as well as a Hollywood contract since which time he had partnered Norma Shearer, committed suicide in Garbo’s A Woman Of Affairs and The Single Standard and appeared with Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters and Montana Moon. Her leading men had been Nils Asther and Ricardo Cortez. Husky-voiced Brown pipped her to the post by bedding both.

  Johnny Mack Brown was also a close friend of Humphrey Bogart, then starting to make his name. Indeed, unlikely as this seems, the two may even have been lovers. Bogart (1899-1957) is known to have been very gay friendly, and according to one of his biographers (Darwin Porter: The Secret Like Of Humphrey Bogart, The Georgia Literary Association, 2003), enjoyed oral sex with men and acted as some kind of benevolent pimp for the gay acting fraternity. In his book Porter claims Johnny Mack Brown also had an affair with the equally gung-ho Spencer Tracy and that Brown and former silent star George O’Brien were procured by Bogart to have sex with tycoon Howard Hughes - Brown solely for career advancement. Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, Errol Flynn, Randolph Scott and Cary Grant would all follow suit. One assumes therefore that Clark, as had happened with Larimore, La Rocque and Haines, was hoping Brown might put in a word for him with his friends in high places.

  Joan Crawford’s chance to have Brown to herself for a little while at least came immediately after The Secret Six wrapped, when they were assigned to Complete Surrender. Her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr was by now beyond repair and it must have given her some kind of kinky satisfaction to know both her current lovers were also sleeping with each other. Clark, meanwhile, was put into A Free Soul with Norma Shearer - a move that would almost destroy Johnny Mack Brown’s career, while simultaneously setting Gable on the path towards Hollywood immortality.

  A Free Soul was based on a story by Gable worshipper Adela Rogers St Johns, who clearly saw herself as Shearer’s rich girl, who enjoys getting roughed up by Gable’s uncompromising gangster - his interpretation of foreplay. She has fallen for this lout, breaking the heart of her wimpish fiancé (Leslie Howard), but promising her alcoholic lawyer father (Lionel Barrymore) that she will break up with him if he lays
off the bottle. Then she goes back on her word, taunting her thug in ermine and pearls, screaming that he is a nobody until he finally snaps. ‘Sit down and take it - and like it!’ he growls, shoving her into a chair when she tries to get away. ‘You’re an idiot, a spoiled little brat that needs a hairbrush every now and then!’ Then in a fit of rage the fiancé kills him. Realising the error of her ways, Shearer gets her father to defend him at his trial - with Barrymore delivering such an impassioned speech that he drops down dead of a heart attack!

  Clearly, the fact that Norma Shearer was the boss’s wife made the shooting all the more interesting from Clark’s point of view. Irving Thalberg, though only two years his senior, was on account of his failing health incapable of ‘rising to the occasion’, a problem Gable had seemingly never encountered. Casually observing of his leading lady, ‘She kisses like a whore on heat’, adding that during one of their love scenes she had been ‘naked down below and wet as October’ under her dress, Brown repeated this to Thalberg, causing him to have an attack of the vapours. Naturally, from the Boy Wonder’s point of view, it was therefore fitting that his ‘rival’ should die in the film, his and the Hays Office’s theory that good invariably triumphs over evil - save that in this instance they were wrong. Many sexually repressed women watching A Free Soul only wished they could have changed places with Norma Shearer and maybe get a little of what they naively believed she was getting from Clark Gable once the cameras stopped rolling! Yet so far as the critics were concerned, the only scene in the movie worthy of mention was the final one with Lionel Barrymore, which won him an Academy Award.

  By the time Clark finished the film, most of Johnny Mack Brown’s scenes with Joan Crawford in Complete Surrender had been canned, with media visitors to the set predicting this would be her biggest hit to date and elevate Brown to major star status. Unlike many of his tough-guy contemporaries, Brown’s sexy Southern drawl transcribed well to sound; he looked good and was possessed of tremendous on-screen charisma. Louis B. Mayer, however, was far less interested in loyalty than he was in making money. He had liked Crawford and Gable in Dance, Fools, Dance - though on a personal level he could stand neither, a feeling which was mutual, and was anxious to pair them again ahead of several other projects already in the pipeline. Inexcusably he fired Brown from the production, brought in Clark and the film began shooting from scratch. To monopolise on the rumours that he and Joan were having an affair - though so far nothing had appeared in the press - the title was changed to Laughing Sinners.

  Of the eight films Gable and Crawford made together, Laughing Sinners is by far their least effective. Mayer told Clark to his face that he was ‘too elephant-eared and unattractive’ to play anything but the heavy. Irving Thalberg, however, had been made aware of the ‘dirty thoughts’ going through some female picture-goers’ minds while watching Clark menacing his suitors and disagreed with Mayer’s opinion of him. Unattractive or not, Clark also appealed to the men in the audience in a way that his nearest predecessor, Valentino, had not.

  Supporting Thalberg was Adela Rogers St Johns, who some years later compared the two actors’ cult status in Channel 4’s Hollywood TV series, saying, ‘Every American man was perfectly willing that his wife should be in love with Gable, because Gable is like what he’d liked to have been. But they were not willing that their wives should have been in love with this foreigner, this dago!’ Thalberg himself was also a despicable hypocrite, who not so long before had proclaimed Johnny Mack Brown to be the new Valentino. To prove the point he had been instrumental in Brown acquiring the title role in King Vidor’s Billy The Kid, MGM’s first major Talkie Western which, years ahead of The Robe, had been shot in widescreen. Thalberg was very wrong to cast the uncultured Clark Gable as a supposedly sensitive Salvation Army officer, a role Johnny Mack Brown would have portrayed much more convincingly.

  Ivy Stevens (Joan Crawford) is a chanteuse in a greasy-spoon who, when dumped by her lover, Howard, (Neil Hamilton) tries to drown herself. She is saved by Carl (Clark) and he sets out to transform this very rough diamond into a decent, God-fearing citizen. Under his Svengali-like influence she dons the Army uniform, preaches from street corners and is almost reformed when she encounters Howard once again in a seedy boarding house. They are about to make love when Carl storms in: very un-Salvation Army-like he socks Howard in the jaw, spouts a passage from the Bible, forgives Ivy her sins and returns their situation to the way it was.

  Laughing Sinners caused a furore with the Hays Office. Salvation Army people did not go around punching people’s lights out! Joan was also criticised for the scene where she appears on a table - banging her tambourine but still wearing her infamous ‘Fuck me’ ankle strap shoes that remind onlookers of what she used to be. Today one wonders what all the fuss was about - more importantly, was it worth pushing the production way over budget, re-shooting Johnny Mack Brown’s scenes with an actor who, for this genre of film, was artistically inferior. Billy The Kid was released around the same time and whereas this was a box-office smash, Laughing Sinners barely recovered its costs. As for Brown, from this point on his career would amount to little more than B-Westerns, over 100 of these over the next 35 years. Clark Gable, the lover-turned-rival had, along with Mayer’s and Thalberg’s greed, inadvertently sabotaged his career.

  No sooner had the film wrapped than Joan Crawford was offered Possessed and demanded Clark as her co-star. This was put on ice until he had cleared his busy schedule and Joan, having tired of Johnny Mack Brown, became amorously involved with the co-star of her next film, This Modern Age - Pauline Frederick - who had reputedly taught Clark the staying power for which he was renowned. Ironically, Gable’s next film came courtesy of the ex-Mr Frederick - Willard Mack, who scripted Sporting Blood to tie in with the Gable ‘biography’ fabricated by Howard Strickling. This was the first movie to have his name heading the credits, and with no big name playing his love interest - Madge Evans was a former child star coming to the end of her career, though she would live on until 1981. Clark played a gambler who wins a thoroughbred in a wager and despite the attempts of sabotaging rivals trains the horse to win the Kentucky Derby.

  Halfway through shooting, he was told that Possessed had been postponed for several months and that his next venture, Susan Lenox, Her Rise And Fall, would see him cast opposite not just his most prestigious co-star, but one who would never be eclipsed: Greta Garbo. He hit the roof, knowing that as had happened with her every move, no matter how high-ranking her leading man, the world would only ever be interested in Garbo. To soften the blow, Louis B. Mayer extended Clark’s contract by another year and upped his salary to $1,100 a week, but a fraction of what he was paying Garbo.

  In the meantime, Clark was ordered to clean up his personal life. Unless he had been cut off from the outside world over the last few months, Mayer cannot have been unaware of Gable’s involvement with Joan Crawford. He certainly must have been ignorant of his still-strong liaison with Johnny Mack Brown, otherwise both stars would have been hounded out of Hollywood. What Mayer was specifically referring to in this instance, however, was the rumour circulating that Clark and Ria Langham may not have been legally married. If this was the case, under the terms of the Hays Office Code, Clark was guilty of moral turpitude, leaving MGM with no option but to terminate his contract and officially blacklist him so no other studio would be permitted to employ him.

  Mayer had had the matter thoroughly investigated. It emerged the ceremony, which had almost certainly taken place in New York in March 1931, was not recognised under California law. The press had to be told something so Howard Strickling fabricated the story that the couple had married, but that in his eagerness to make Ria his wife, Clark had forgotten his divorce from Josephine Dillon had not been finalised!

  To rectify the situation, Strickling personally arranged a quickie ceremony to take place on 19 June of the same year at the Santa Ana Courthouse, Orange County. Clark registered under the name William C. Gable, and he and Stric
kling tried to hoodwink the press that this was his brother when everyone knew from Strickling’s biography that he was an only child. What most people did not know, a fact conveniently omitted by Strickling, was that Clark had been married to begin with. Like Josephine Dillon, humiliated by his carousing, Ria always hovered in the background whenever he had made a public appearance. Therefore, instead of a quiet ceremony the couple were subjected to a media circus. The press had a field day. Louis B. Mayer had ordered for the register to be put on display to prove this marriage truly was authentic, and attention was drawn to the 17-year age gap, scandalous in those days. Though the word gigolo did not appear in the various columns, it was still hinted at. After reading what had been written about her - the snide comments about her age and wealth, not to mention that she was tying her new husband down with a ready-made family - Ria vowed never to attend another public function with her husband.

  Clark then made matters infinitely worse by telling reporters that Ria’s age and bank balance were, so far as he was concerned, not part of the equation. Ria, was his salvation, he declared - she alone was responsible for his success in Hollywood. Josephine Dillon, who for the last few years had been quietly concentrating on her drama school, took this badly. Claiming she had launched Clark Gable - that was more or less true - she petitioned the press, who very quickly sided with her as the wronged first wife. Stories appeared of how she had given Clark her last few dollars in the hope of making him a star, only to end up on the breadline herself. What the press didn’t know was that Dillon was attempting to extort money not just from Clark, but from MGM too.