Clark Gable

by David Bret

  Bern had lied to Harlow about being a wealthy man, leaving her a mountain of debts, which his creditors now expected her to honour. Joan Crawford, terrified Harlow might sink her claws into Clark now that she was bereft of her anchor - though there was little chance of this, with Marino Bello guarding her on the set - swooped on him, insisting he move into her rented cottage on Malibu beach. When Clark arrived, he learned that he would have to share her. Francis Lederer was a 26-year-old Czech actor, newly arrived in Hollywood. Though gay, but as had been the case with Clark during his ‘bucks for fucks’ episodes, he was eager to please if that meant furthering his career. Clark stayed but a few days and declined Joan’s request that he join her, Lederer and William Haines on a weekend bender, taking in the gay bars and clubs of downtown Los Angeles. Had he accompanied them, he would have met a certain Carole Lombard, enjoying a similar sojourn with gay pals Cesar Romero and Ricardo Cortez.

  His next cinematic outing was Strange Interlude, based on the play by Eugene O’Neill, a decidedly odd production that had bored Broadway audiences senseless on account of its sheer length. Sprawling across nine acts, it had been staged in two, two-hour sections separated by an hour-long interval which had seen many leave the theatre not to return for the second half. The film version was almost as bad and had the characters speaking their thoughts aloud in lengthy voice-overs that only confused picture-goers. Directed by Robert Z. Leonard, the film was considered shocking for its day. In England the title had to be changed to Strange Interval when one reviewer sarcastically referred to it as ‘Strange Interlewd’. The story tells of a young woman searching for a suitable stud - Clark, aka her doctor - to father a child, which she will convince her impotent husband is his. Such a scenario might have been more credible with a Harlow or Crawford but not squeaky-clean Norma Shearer, who made sure the press informed her fans that she was not in the least like her character in the film. ‘Young women who become intrigued by the sophisticated characterisations of Norma Shearer are advised by the actress not to follow her precept,’ observed Screen Book’s snooty J. Eugene Chrisman, adding that no breath of scandal had ever touched the divinely whiter-than-white Mrs Thalberg. And of the role that had been earmarked for Joan Crawford until Louis B. Mayer was informed that she and Clark were still an item, Shearer scoffed: ‘It’s silly to contend that an actress must have lived and actually acquired a past before she is capable of portraying that type of woman. Of course, there must be intelligent observation, but most of all, all it requires is imagination!’ The public, however, could never imagine a caveman like Gable - sporting his trademark moustache for the first time - getting involved with any woman as lah-di-dah as Norma Shearer, and the film was a flop.

  Clark’s next film, as a loan-out to Paramount, was No Man Of Her Own, a frothy, romantic drama with Dorothy Mackaill and 24-year-old Carole Lombard. He played a renegade gambler married to a small-town librarian (Lombard), who domesticates him to such an extent that he doesn’t mind serving time in jail for his double-dealing so long as he has someone respectable to come home to. So far as is known, this was Gable’s first meeting - despite her own close friendship with William Haines - with the woman who could outcurse any man he knew, and who was proud to call herself ‘The Queen of Fag-Hags’. For the time being, theirs was just another working relationship for Clark was too busy cheating on Ria with Joan Crawford, while seeing Johnny Mack Brown, off and on, mindless of what had happened with Laughing Sinners, and according to press reports, Carole was happily married to William Powell. In fact, by November 1932, their 17-month marriage had hit rock bottom owing to Powell’s acute megalomania.

  Clark resented director Wesley Ruggles’ pandering to Carole Lombard’s constant demands and initially he treated her with disdain. It may well be that in those early days he was actually frightened of her. As William Haines’ confidante, like Joan Crawford she almost certainly would have been told about the incident in the mensroom at the Beverly Wilshire, and with her tendency to shoot her mouth off without always thinking what she was saying, Clark may even have considered her dangerous. Not only this, there was also considerable on-set tension brought about by the forthcoming presidential elections. Inasmuch as studio contractees were instructed how to conduct their personal lives, so they were told how to vote, the theory being that fans would follow suit. Louis B. Mayer was a staunch Republican so it figured that if his stars wanted to stay in his good books, they too would openly support the Republican candidate Herbert Hoover. To make sure they kept their promise, Mayer was not averse to having their ballot papers examined.

  Carole Lombard was a vociferous adherent of Franklin D. Roosevelt on account of his campaign to repeal Prohibition and his promises to alleviate the Depression. She absolutely loathed Hoover and made no secret of the fact. The first time Clark came on set wearing his Hoover badge, she tore it off his jacket in front of reporters and told him, ‘You can go shove this up Louis B. Mayer’s ass!’ She and millions of Americans were therefore delighted when, on 1 November, Roosevelt scored a landslide victory over his opponent. When shooting wrapped on No Man Of Her Own, Clark presented her with a pair of oversized ballet shoes - he said to match her inflated prima donna ego. Unable to be beaten at her own game, she gave him a gift that she said represented his acting abilities - a large ham with his picture on it! Friends of both parties would later claim how this end-of-production sarcasm had set the scene for one of the great love affairs in Hollywood history.

  Ria Gable was well aware that Clark was still seeing Joan Crawford, yet failed to object when, after Clark complained of being harassed by fans and the press, Howard Strickling found them a more secure rented property in Brentwood, but a stone’s throw from Joan’s house. Even so, the occasional reporter inveigled his way through MGM security and Clark, who knew little about discretion, let slip to a reporter questioning him about his youth how he had not seen his father since coming to Hollywood. He was blithely unaware the press would put out an alert, financed by Louis B. Mayer, a powerful advocate for family values. Within the week, William Gable was located working at a gas station in North Dakota. He turned up at the studio gates one afternoon, dirty and dishevelled, and was immediately chauffeured to the house in Brentwood. Had Clark been home, the old man would have been sent packing. He was not, so Ria took him in and called Howard Strickling, who knew the score between Clark and his father, but had to stick to MGM’s family values policy. William was given a complete makeover and a new wardrobe, and Clark was ordered to take care of him. Later, he would shell out $3,500 to buy his father a bungalow in North Hollywood, besides paying him a $500 monthly allowance. Until then, he would live in Brentwood.

  Within days he was up to his old tricks, telling reporters and studio personnel that all actors were sissies and the whole film community sucked. Clark, who had petitioned for the move to Brentwood to get away from the press, was now instructed to invite them into his home to observe him playing happy families with William, Ria and - Ria’s children, Jana and Alfred Lucas. He claimed he could not have adored them more, had they been his own. Yet when he gave an interview to Modern Screen’s Gladys Hall, he could not remember the name of one child and got the others wrong:

  For a time the girl thought she would like to be in pictures. Louis B. Mayer saw a picture of her and offered to have a test made. I said that I’d make it with her, and I did. Clarence Brown directed us. It wasn’t so good, and she gave the idea up. Allen is absolutely anti-movies, and never asks to come to the studio. He takes no interest in me whatsoever as a movie star. I think he forgets most of the time that I am one, so I take him on hunting trips with me. We play ball together and swim and ride . . .

  Next, Clark was cast opposite his unlikeliest leading lady so far. Helen Hayes (1900-93) was the stage actress whose debut feature for MGM, The Sin Of Madeleine Claudet, had recently won her an Oscar and she had just completed A Farewell To Arms with Gary Cooper. The studio therefore had a lot riding on The White Sister, her film with Cla
rk. Directed by Victor Fleming, it was a remake of the 1923 silent starring Lillian Gish and Ronald Colman. Based on the 1909 novel by Francis Marion Crawford, and with the action moved forward to World War I, this was a sorry tale and saw both stars woefully miscast. Clark played Italian airman Giovanni Severa, who falls for the aristocratic Angela Chiaromonte. Her family have arranged for her to marry a man she does not love, so she runs off with Severa and they live in sin until he is called up to fight in the War. Two years pass then Angela receives news that her lover has died in action so she enters a convent. He has actually been captured and sent to a camp in Austria from where he escapes then steals a plane and returns home to reclaim his love. Of course he is too late. She has taken her final vows and shortly after bidding her farewell, he is shot during an air raid. The film ends with him dying in her arms. It was an excellent production, but Gable’s fans stayed away in droves: the last thing they wanted was to sob into their popcorn while their idol expired in front of their eyes.

  In The White Sister, Clark towers over the porcelain fragile Helen Hayes in every scene and she appears terrified of him. There was also speculation whether the two were involved off set, as had happened with most of his co-stars. The critic from a January 1933 issue of Film Daily did not think so, concluding, ‘Contrast Helen Hayes’ role with that of Clark Gable! Spirit warring with the flesh! Christ wins, Clark loses!’

  Towards the end of shooting, MGM held its annual Christmas party, to which absolutely everyone was invited, attendance being mandatory - according to an announcement in Modern Screen - unless one’s name ‘happened to be Garbo, W C Fields, or God’. The twelve-hour bash always began with a speech from Louis B. Mayer, who left immediately afterwards. Though stingy with his employees the rest of the year, for the festive season Mayer always pushed the boat out. His bootlegger contacts provided a seemingly endless supply of booze - there was not a Hays Office spy in sight - stag-films were screened all night in backrooms where clothing was optional. Guests could have sex with whomsoever they liked - so long as it was with a member of the opposite sex. Needless to say, most of the major stars, including Clark, left their spouses at home. That year he turned up with Marion Davies, he wearing his dog collar and she her trapeze outfit from Polly Of The Circus. Unusually, instead of leaving with Mayer, Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer Clark stayed behind and got blind-drunk. The next morning Thalberg woke with a fever and three days later he suffered a near-fatal heart attack.

  The news was kept from the press, who - having learned that Clark, Ria and Jean Harlow had visited their sick friend only to have the door slammed in their faces by an angry Norma - were informed that Thalberg had been laid low with ‘nothing more serious than the flu’. Even so, with his increasingly fragile health, this could easily have carried him off. Later it emerged that even the all-important Boy Wonder had been compelled to supply Mayer with a doctor’s certificate to prove he had not been faking his symptoms, whence Mayer announced that he would be stepping into Thalberg’s shoes until he was fully recovered. By February 1933, he was strong enough to travel to Europe for a rest cure at a clinic in Bad Neuheim, Germany. Norma and a whole retinue of lackeys travelled with him and the press were told that he would be overseas for at least three months. Mayer then set about delegating Thalberg’s astonishingly heavy workload among his executives. These included Harry Rapf, Hunt Stromberg, Walter Wanger and Mayer’s son-in-law David O. Selznick, formerly chief of production with RKO Pictures. Handling Gable’s affairs would be Eddie Mannix (1891-1963), a shady character who some years later would be accused of murdering his first wife. When the inquest re-opened, he was also accused of complicity in the death of Paul Bern besides that of Superman actor George Reeves, with whom his second wife would have an affair. The story, much-Hollywoodised, reached the big screen with Hollywoodland in 2006.

  No sooner had The White Sister wrapped than Gable was rushed into Hold Your Man, his third outing with Jean Harlow, now seemingly over the Bern tragedy, not that MGM had helped by capitalising on this by assigning her to Reckless. In this she played a showgirl, whose husband kills himself after finding out she has been cheating on him. Harlow had taken such contract-enforced intimidation badly. In the wake of the film she had twice been picked up by Whitey Hendry’s vice-squad for kerb crawling - her way of proving, she said, that she had still been a desirable woman with a normal sexual appetite, following the dildo incident with Bern. Currently she was dating her favourite cameraman, Hal Rosson, who had filmed her in Red Dust. They would wed in the September.

  With a fine script by Anita Loos and a shooting schedule of just three weeks, Gable and Harlow were in sparkling form. He played Eddie, a conman hustler who barges into Ruby’s apartment while pursued by the cops. Instantly attracted to him, she gets him to strip to the waist and hides him in her bathtub. He has kept his trousers on, and while these are drying out in the oven, he struts around in her bathrobe, examining the photographs on the wall, trophies of all the men who have been here before him. ‘I got two rules,’ she says. ‘Keep away from couches, and stay on your feet.’ Pretty soon, the two are an item. Eddie addresses Ruby as ‘sweetmeat’, takes her dancing and tells her he will grow on her. ‘Yeah, like a carbuncle,’ she responds. Then he learns he has competition - a wealthy, out-of-town client whom he flattens while pretending to be her brother. From now on, she belongs only to him, and to prove the point he intends making an honest woman out of her. Unfortunately, no sooner has he bought the marriage licence than the cops arrive to arrest him for the man he punched has died. Eddie escapes from Ruby’s apartment, leaving her to take the rap. In the slammer, she discovers she is pregnant. He shows up, still intent on marrying her before their child is born - and in keeping with the morals of the time, all ends well. Eddie’s lawyer gets him off the murder charge and he spends a short time inside before being reunited with his wife and baby son.

  In the wake of the various Harlow scandals, Hays Office spies who had already attempted to shanghai her out of Hollywood infiltrated the set to ensure that she and Gable were behaving themselves. And, of course, with her kind of reputation, Harlow would never have been accepted in any role where her character did not come from the wrong side of the tracks. This was why, immediately after Hold Your Man, Louis B. Mayer cast her as the floosie in Dinner At Eight, produced by David Selznick and directed by George Cukor. Selznick at once agreed that Clark should be in the film, which followed in the Grand Hotel tradition that its stars were promoted as of equal status. In addition, Selznick had lined up John and Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Jean Hersholt, and 64-year-old Marie Dressler

  The official story was that Clark was content with his relatively minor role as a Park Lane doctor, but that Mayer deemed it beneath him and had given the part to Edmund Lowe. The truth is that Gable refused to work with George Cukor, a close friend of William Haines, for reasons which were unclear then, but would become much more so a few years later, as will be seen. It was also during the shooting of Dinner At Eight that Mayer’s esteem plummeted to an all-time low, not just in Clark’s eyes but just about everyone in the know. Inasmuch as Mayer sabotaged the careers of John Gilbert and Johnny Mack Brown to assuage his own greed, so he now played a disgracefully dirty trick on Marie Dressler, adored by all who knew her, and famed for portraying equally loveable harridans. Currently MGM’s top box-office draw after Garbo, she had won an Oscar for Min And Bill, and had recently completed Tugboat Annie, both phenomenally successful partnerships with Wallace Beery.

  When Dressler was taken ill on the set, Mayer had her examined by his personal physician. Incurable cancer was diagnosed, but Mayer kept the news from her to keep her working. When Dressler found out, after collapsing again, Mayer took her into his office, sympathised with her condition and imposed a three-hour working day so as not to over-tire her. He promised her a $100,000 bonus - so long as she promised to hang on until the end of the year and complete the three films for which he had earmarked her. She completed them in t
remendous pain (she would die in July 1934), only to have Mayer go back on his word and pay her just $10,000.

  Clark’s next film, therefore, teaming him up again with Helen Hayes, was Night Flight, based on the story, Vol de nuit, by French aviator-novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44), whose most famous work, The Little Prince, was yet to come. Like Dinner At Eight, the project was handled by David Selznick, who wanted to pitch it against MGM’s other recent blockbusters, Grand Hotel, Queen Christina and Rasputin And The Empress. Bereft of glamour and a decent script, and with virtually no chemistry between the leads, it did not work. Its failing was Selznick’s inability to comprehend Saint-Exupery’s unique sense of poetic philosophy, to which he added an innocent touch of whimsy that did not fit in with the brash Gable persona.