by David Bret
By now the press were indifferent towards this genre of film now that they had seen Gable in a comedy. The New York Herald Tribune called it, ‘An earnest treatment of a snappy serial in one of the dressier sex magazines’, while the New York Times dismissed it as ‘just another suspenseless triangle’. The fans were merely grateful to be seeing as much of their favourite top-liners as the Hays Office would allow: both appeared in one scene wearing skimpy bathing costumes and Clark even got away with not shaving his chest! But Forsaking All Others, MGM’s attempt to cash in on the success of It Happened One Night by casting Gable and Crawford in a frothy comedy, did not work. Joan’s admirers liked to watch her suffering for love and hated to see her treating the subject flippantly. And it was Robert Montgomery who got to pronounce the screamer line which became that season’s in-phrase among Hollywood’s closeted gay community - ‘I could build a fire by rubbing two boy scouts together!’
Jeff, Mary and Dill (Clark, Joan, Montgomery) are pals who have been inseparable since childhood. Jeff loves Mary; she loves Dill and the pair plan to marry while Jeff is overseas. He, however, leaves her standing at the altar and elopes with his mistress (Frances Drake), offering Jeff the opportunity to return home and comfort her, while Dill realises his terrible mistake and attempts a reunion with the fiancée he dumped. Not surprisingly, he fails. Mary, like Joan herself off screen, gives every impression of being partial to a little S & M. In one scene, she passes Jeff the hairbrush to deliver the spanking she feels she deserves, a punishment gentlemanly Jeff is loathe to carry out. Therefore Gable and Crawford end up in each other’s arms once more in a vehicle always better suited to the stage than the screen.
Throughout the production of these two films, the press scrutinised the ‘still torrid’ Gable-Crawford situation, which was good for the box-office but disastrous news for Will Hays and his moralist cronies. In an attempt to curb gossips speculating he would divorce Ria and marry Joan - spurred on by Ben Maddox, still keeping Clark company away from home and anxious that this little snippet did not make the headlines - Louis B. Mayer instructed the Gables to give an exclusive to Modern Screen’s catty reporter, Gladys Hall. It was to be featured in the magazine’s December 1934 issue. That a second writer was employed to paraphrase Clark’s meticulously rehearsed replies to Hall’s questions - actually scripted for her by Howard Strickling - is only too obvious when one studies the finished feature.
Hall asked Clark, ‘What kind of a woman do you think an actor should marry?’ To which he responded, ‘The kind of woman I am married to!’ He then went on to discuss various failed Hollywood marriages concluding that those where the husband was the breadwinner always had the better chance of success. He then shot himself in the foot by adding that the best unions were those where both partners were of the same age. According to the Gable-according-to-Strickling doctrine, ego also played a prominent role in marriage, as did good, old-fashioned male chauvinism:
You can’t get away from the fundamental laws separating and governing men and women. Greasepaint on the face does not alter immutable laws. Man is born with a dominant ego - offend that ego, or compete with it in the same field, and if you are a woman you will soon be a divorcee.
It was important, too, that Ria had a life of her own but equally imperative that she should know her place:
I am the star! Ria is my wife, who though not in my profession is in it - for me, not for herself. She has her own interests . . . she doesn’t seize hold of my own life with idle and therefore morbidly curious hands!
And of the rumours that he might divorce Ria and marry someone from his own profession? By telling Clark what to say, Strickling was of course hoping to dispel once and for all the rumour that he might be thinking of marching Joan Crawford up the aisle:
I could not, would not, be married to an actress! In the first place, one professional ego is enough in any home. Two egos of the same stamp would blow the roof off Buckingham Palace. We would have had a bad day, each of us. We would come home with nerves frayed and teeth on edge - and we would want to talk about it. We would want peace and comfort and sympathy. We wouldn’t get it, either one of us, and all hell would break loose. In the course of many times like this, one or both of us would look for comfort and sympathy elsewhere.
And, forgetting his earlier gaff that the best partners were those of one’s own age, he observed of his predilection for older women, while hammering home the point that he did not practise what he preached:
A younger girl could not know what it is all about! A younger girl would be jealous. She would be suspicious, resentful of all the limelight flattery shown me. She would crave the same flattery, the same attention for herself! Things like that do happen! Ria knows how to handle men. If I forget to phone her during the lunch hour, I do not have to spend the rest of the day with the uneasy knowledge that when I get home that night I shall be greeted with tears and reproaches, martyred looks, or suspicious sniffs. I do not have to work on half a cylinder because I fear I’ll get the devil of an evening!
What Clark was effectively saying was that, with Ria, he could get away with his carousing because, as an older woman, she should have been grateful for what she was getting in the bedroom department, even if only occasionally, from one of Hollywood’s acknowledged studs. He then concluded, in what must be the most bare-faced lie he ever told, that there was but one solution for wedded bliss:
No actor should marry a woman to whom he cannot tell the truth, and be believed. Ria knows that I always have and always shall tell her the truth. Marriage is a see-saw. If the balance is an uneven one, one or the other crashes down! Our marriage balances evenly, and on one side is equally important to the other.
His next film, as a loan-out to Fox, was Call Of The Wild. Jack London’s classic tale of one man and his dog, set during the Yukon gold rush, was shot on location at Mount Baker, Washington, during the excessively harsh winter of 1934-5. Weather conditions were so severe - but perfect for the setting - that for weeks the production company was snowed in - in sub-zero temperatures - pushing the budget sky-high. Clark was unusually belligerent towards many of the cast and almost came to blows with director William Wellman - a former World War I aviator nicknamed ‘Wild Bill’, himself a tetchy character. The first time Wellman bawled out Gable for bad timekeeping, following a trip to nearby Bellingham, where he had treated himself and several technicians to a night at a brothel, Clark walked off set and did not return for three days. This, it subsequently emerged, was when he began his affair with co-star Loretta Young.
Loretta Young (1913-2000), who in her later years became a clean-up campaigner, installing holy water stoups all over her Hollywood home and swear-boxes wherever she was working, casually forgot she seldom practised what she often preached to others. Mockingly referred to by colleagues as ‘Saint Loretta’, she castigated them over their lack of morals, as a supposedly devout Catholic. Gretchen Young (Joan Crawford called her ‘Gretch The Wretch’) first stepped out of line at 17, eloping with 26-year-old actor Grant Withers, whom she met on the set of The Second Floor Mystery. A few months later the marriage was annulled, citing Withers’ non-Catholicism as the cause, of which Loretta had of course been well aware of before marrying him.
She was not a very talented actress: much of her success being attributed to her great beauty and fashion sense. The New York Times Bosley Crowther famously opined of her, ‘Whatever it was that this actress never had, she still hasn’t got.’ Her first screen appearance had been as an extra in Valentino’s The Sheik (1921), but she was first noticed alongside Lon Chaney in Laugh, Clown, Laugh in 1928. After completing her film with Clark, Loretta moved to Paramount, where she appeared in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades. Immediately afterwards, Variety was fed the story by Fox that she was retiring for a year, for health reasons. Her cover was almost blown by Photoplay’s Dorothy Manners in a Machiavellian feature which saw the journalist defending Loretta against those detractors she claimed were out to ruin her r
eputation by suggesting she had ‘gone off somewhere to have a secret child’.
In fact, the only detractor was Manners herself, whom Gable somewhat ungallantly threatened to ‘bash senseless’, should he ever get his hands on her. Loretta was pregnant with Clark’s baby - a daughter, Judy, who was born 6 November 1935 at her mother’s Santa Monica beach house. A mutual friend is said to have sent Clark a telegram announcing the news, which he is said to have ripped to shreds and flushed down the toilet. Later, it was claimed, the baby was put up for immediate adoption without Clark seeing her - and the matter should have ended there. On 11 May 1937 the press would report how Loretta had recently returned from a San Diego orphanage, where she had adopted a little girl named Judy, whom she claimed had been born in June 1935. This way, once the gossip columnists began doing their sums, they would realise the child could not have been conceived while Loretta and Clark had been snowed in on Mount Baker. Hedda, Louella et al. could have reminded their readers that it was illegal for single people in the United States to adopt, save none of them believed Judy had been adopted. Loretta’s mother, interior designer Gladys Belzer, had been looking after her in Santa Monica. Loretta then dug herself into a much deeper hole by ‘confiding’ in Louella Parsons - well aware that this would end up in her column - that she had adopted two babies in San Diego, but that the other one had been returned to her birth mother.
Off and on, Loretta would permit Clark to see their daughter, but Judy (who became Judy Lewis when Loretta married advertising executive Tom Lewis in 1940) would not learn the truth about her parentage until 1957. Speaking in the BBC’s Living Famously TV series in November 2002 - and looking the very spit of her father - she explained how she had been told the news by her fiancé on the eve of her wedding. The priest conducting the ceremony advised her not to confront her mother, declaring Loretta would only deny it. Call Of The Wild director William Wellman would add his own amusing, but undignified theory some years later (in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon) that Judy could only have been Gable’s child: ‘When the film was finished, Loretta disappeared for a while and later showed up with a daughter with the biggest ears I ever saw, except on an elephant.’ The ears would later be corrected by surgery.
Shooting wrapped on Call Of The Wild on 23 February 1935, the day the Oscar nominations were announced, days before the ceremony, and the first time these had covered the January-December period - previously, they covered August of one year until July of the next. Clark’s unruly behaviour at Mount Baker had been reported to Louis B. Mayer, and he was saved from suspension only because It Happened One Night had been nominated in a then unprecedented five categories: Best Actor, Actress, Film, Director and Screenplay.
In these pre-television coverage days, the Oscars ceremony was not as hyped and commercially motivated as today - it was not even broadcast on national radio. It was also unheard of for a minor studio, as Columbia was back then, to have been put forward for so many awards. Indeed, MGM monopolised the proceedings: the three nominees for Best Actor were ‘Mayer’s Boys’ - Clark (though the film was not theirs), William Powell (for The Thin Man) and Frank Morgan (for The Affairs Of Cellini). Similarly, Claudette Colbert was up against Norma Shearer (The Barretts of Wimpole Street) and Grace Moore (One Night Of Love). Colbert was so convinced she had no chance of winning that she went ahead with a trip planned to New York. Frank Capra, escorted by a motorcycle cavalcade, fetched her back from the Union Station to the Biltmore Hotel, where she collected her Oscar from wunderkind Shirley Temple. Despite claims that she could not stand Capra, she dedicated the award to him, and he drove her back to the station, where the train had been kept waiting. According to Louella Parsons, after receiving his Oscar, Clark was heard mumbling that the accolade would not go to his head, as had happened with some recipients he could mention, adding, ‘I’m still gonna be wearing the same size hat!’
His award brought Louis B. Mayer to his senses, and assured Clark the salary rise for which Ben Maddox had petitioned - though on $3,000 a week, rising to $4,500 after two years, compared to most of his contemporaries he was still underpaid. His romance with Loretta Young had begun and ended with Call Of The Wild. Joan Crawford had also (temporarily) slammed the door in his face, unable to tolerate his having cheated on her with the ‘Gretch The Wretch’, the only woman in all Hollywood she hated more than Bette Davis. Therefore, with he and Ria on the verge of separation and incapable of meeting without one or both blowing a fuse, Clark turned once more to Ben Maddox, who again covered their tracks by way of his syndicated column.
His next film was China Seas, an action-packed Irving Thalberg production with Jean Harlow, Rosalind Russell - and Wallace Beery, still earning more than he was. According to Ben Maddox’s account to his readers, the director - Tay Garnett - would not have to worry about off-screen shenanigans with this one. Harlow, whose divorce from Hal Rosson would not become final until March 1936, was by now inseparable from William Powell, now divorced from Carole Lombard - and, Maddox reassured everyone, ‘Mr and Mrs Gable could not be happier!’
China Seas was scripted by Jules Furthman, who had recently scripted Shanghai Express for Marlene Dietrich - who got away with playing a prostitute working in the Orient, who falls for a European because she had not been Oriental. Furthman now created a scenario black-pencilled by the Hays Office anti-mixed-race policy - and by Clark himself. Disgraceful as this might seem today, the story of a white sea captain who gets his Chinese wife pregnant was, in the Thirties, perceived as indecent. Therefore in the re-write she becomes China Doll, another Harlow floosie, who helps the captain save his ship from marauding Malaysian pirates. There are shades of the Harlow-Astor Red Dust scenario with the inclusion of wealthy widow Rosalind Russell, who also has her eye on Clark. To incite his jealousy and woo him back, Harlow makes a play for odious pirate leader Wallace Beery, which in real life she claimed would have been less preferable than shoving her head between the jaws of a starving lion!
It was Ben Maddox and Gable’s father (who had recently married Edna, his brother’s widow, the wedding and their new home paid for by Clark), who tried to talk him out of his next film, Mutiny On The Bounty. To be directed by Frank Lloyd, this was Irving Thalberg’s latest pet project, a part of MGM’s blockbusters programme aimed at competing with Warner Brothers’ Captain Blood (Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Ross Alexander) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Alexander, James Cagney). By the end of the year, MGM would have also completed Garbo’s Anna Karenina, David Selznick’s A Tale Of Two Cities with Ronald Colman, The Marx Brothers’ A Night At The Opera and Naughty Marietta, the first of the Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy musicals.
Maddox - whose other ‘fuck-buddy’, Eddie Quillan (1907-90) had been cast in Mutiny On The Bounty as timid mariner Jack Ellison - was convinced neither Clark nor Quillan would be capable of effecting a half-decent English accent. Also that Clark would be completely overshadowed by Charles Laughton, whose name would appear above his in the credits. He also reminded Gable that all the leads in the film (himself, Laughton, Quillan, Franchot Tone, Herbert Mundin, Donald Crisp, and actress Spring Byington) were gay or bisexual, and that Hays Office spies would be hovering around the location like vultures, waiting to swoop on the slightest indiscretion. Nor did it help when William Gable told a reporter that his son would look an even bigger sissy than usual, minus his ‘man’s man moustache’ and in breeches and pigtail.
Irving Thalberg’s pitching together of Gable and Laughton, two decades before the era of Method acting, was a stroke of genius. Clark was never less than loud when declaring his loathing of homosexuals, his way of trying to prevent the truth from emerging about himself. Laughton (1899-1962), on the other hand, did not care what anyone said about the 6-foot 3-inch, 200-pound muscle-bound ‘masseur’ who accompanied him on his travels. He was the latest in a long line of lovers who never balked at the idea of having sex with the unattractive, overweight and generally unpleasant actor because they were being pai
d handsomely to keep him contented.
Thalberg’s theory was that if he could get Gable and Laughton to hate each other off the screen, this would make their character antagonism more authentic. This worked well. As the thoroughly odious Captain Bligh, Laughton is superb and very nearly runs away with the picture. Perpetually sneering through rubbery lips, even in jocular roles such as his definitive, Oscar-winning portrayal of Henry VIII (1933) he was without doubt the greatest English character actor of his generation. The son of a Scarborough hotelier, he had studied at RADA, entered films with Piccadilly in 1929, and more recently triumphed as the despotic father in The Barretts Of Wimpole Street. Both Clark and Franchot Tone came to despise him to such an extent that this led to them forming a close friendship while making the film - much to Joan Crawford’s joy.
