Clark Gable

by David Bret

  In what is supposed to be a quintessentially English/Colonial scenario, Laughton shows up the entire cast with his impeccable diction. None of the American actors in the production - save Eddie Quinlan, who would hold the record for murdering the Cockney dialect until Dick van Dyke trounced him in Mary Poppins - even try to pronounce their lines in King’s English. This particular Fletcher Christian hails from Cumberland-in-Ohio - not that it deflects from his quite exemplary performance once the viewer becomes involved in the derring-do. Scripted from the trilogy by Charles Nordhorff and James Norman Hall, the film recounts an actual historical event, much hacked about by the scriptwriter to fit in with the actors’ personalities. It had first been filmed in 1933, as In The Wake Of The Bounty, with Errol Flynn (a descendant of Midshipman Young, who does not feature in this one) in the role of Fletcher Christian. The role would be reprised in 1962 by an irritating, positively awful Marlon Brando - and with a more passable Mel Gibson in 1984, though Anthony Hopkins was to portray a mediocre Captain Bligh.

  None of these actors remotely resembled the real Fletcher Christian (1764-93), if contemporary accounts are anything to go by. Hailing from Cockermouth, Cumberand, he had sailed with Bligh prior to the ill-fated voyage on the Bounty. Christian is said to have stood 5-foot 9-inch tall and to have been stocky, bow-legged and tattooed with a star on his chest and buttocks. He was also reputed to have suffered from intense body odour! After the mutiny, he had founded the Pitcairn Island settlement, lived here for a while with his wife and three children and been murdered by Tahitian natives. Clark was 29 when he completed the film, playing Christian between the ages of 22 and 28. Of the other mutineers, only John Adams (aka Alexander Smith, portrayed in the film by Herbert Mundin) survived Christian - receiving a Royal pardon, he lived until 1828.

  The film opens in Portsmouth in December 1787, with the Bounty about to set sail for Tahiti to collect a consignment of breadfruit trees to be transported to the West Indies and replanted to provide cheap sustenance for slave labour. As there is a shortage of volunteer sailors for the perilous mission, the Navy sends out a pressgang, headed by Christian, the ship’s grumbling, no-nonsense second-in-command - though as we get to know him, he emerges as a decent fellow who only turns nasty when confronted with injustice. Christian bonds with the timid Ellison (Quillan) and jovial aristocrat, Roger Byam (Franchot), who augments the crew as a midshipman to compile a Tahitian dictionary for his father. Roger sees the 2-year, 10,000-mile voyage as an adventure, though Bligh only regards midshipmen as ‘the lowest form of animal life in the British Navy’. He is an absolute cretin: cruel, psychotic, a despot whose credo is that only abject fear breeds respect. Even when a man dies before receiving his punishment, he has his corpse flogged. He makes an example of Roger by having him spend his first watch strapped to the top of the mast during a tempest. Others are whipped, beaten, starved and clapped in irons for trivial matters. Bligh’s dictum is that if a man can walk, he can work - even if he drops dead doing so.

  There is light relief when the Bounty reaches Tahiti, and a girl for every sailor - save one, who ends up with a boy, a scene removed from early prints of the film. Christian is not so lucky for Bligh assigns him to surveying the ship’s reconditioning, which means no shore leave. ‘I’ve never known a better sea captain,’ he rants, ‘but as a man he’s a snake. He doesn’t punish for discipline, he likes to see a man crawl. Sometimes I’d like to push his poison down his throat!’

  Following the intervention of the Tahitian chief, Christian is finally permitted ashore, where he and Roger pair up with native girls and introduce us to the film’s unintentionally high-camp element. Clad in loincloths, with Franchot’s leaving little to the imagination in the age of the freeze-frame video, the pair frolic in the waves. Clark is no longer merely handsome and these beach-scenes with Franchot are purposely and flagrantly homoerotic - though whereas Franchot spreads his legs and proudly offers an eyeful, Gable preserves his modesty with a strategically placed thigh. This idyll ends when Bligh summons Christian back to the ship and confiscates the pearls that his girl (Movita Castenada) has given him as a parting gift, declaring these are now Crown property. The last straw occurs when the ailing ship’s doctor falls dead while watching one flogging too many. ‘We’ll be men again, if we hang for it!’ Christian explodes; he takes Bligh prisoner and seizes the ship. He, however, is not a malevolent man and he listens to Roger’s pleas to spare the Captain’s life so that he may be judged when they return to England. The crew are permitted to choose sides, with those supporting Bligh put into a boat with him to fend for themselves. Roger stays he has played no part in the mutiny - ‘Casting me aside, thirty-five hundred miles from a port of call,’ Bligh booms, ‘You’re sending me to my doom, eh? Well, you’re wrong, Christian. I’ll take this boat if she floats to England, if I must. I’ll live to see all of you hanging from the highest yard-arm in the British fleet!’

  The mutineers return to Tahiti, while Bligh and his crew survive against the odds. We see both sides celebrating their respective Christmases - Christian with his baby son and placating the Hays Office by pronouncing, ‘Merry Christmas, Mrs Christian!’ though it is not known if it was the real Christian married or not. Then there is more homoerotic bonding with Roger - the friends, stripped to the waist, gazing into each other’s eyes while eating bananas, are seemingly disappointed when their wives arrive on the scene. The final drama comes when Bligh shows up again - and when Christian once more allows his men the choice of escaping with him, or returning to England, despite the risk of a court martial. Roger plumps for the latter, confident he will not be found guilty because he played no part in the mutiny - while Christian and company set sail for Pitcairn Island, where they destroy the Bounty so that they may never be found, or be able to leave.

  Bligh, however, has one last trick up his sleeve. Under oath he lies that Roger was Christian’s co-plotter and he is sentenced to hang, only to be pardoned when his father petitions the King. The film ends with Roger going back to sea, though no end credit informs us what happened to the mutineers once they reached the settlement. Hollywood had no intention of enlightening picture-goers that Clark Gable’s alter-ego had ended up being butchered by the very people who had befriended him, the theory being that, as history has also proved, the Hollywood system was more than capable of similarly treating its own!

  Though Oscar-nominated for their roles in the film, Clark, Laughton and Franchot did not win: the award for Best Actor went to Victor McLaglen for The Informer, while Paul Muni won Best Supporting Actor for Black Fury. Irving Thalberg collected the award for Best Film, however, and the Mutiny On The Bounty proved the biggest box-office draw for the 1935-6 season, MGM’s biggest grossing production since Ben Hur, ten years previously - which, Louis B. Mayer boasted, had also featured Clark Gable . . . for all of 10 seconds.

  Shooting on Catalina Island dragged on for 88 days, with Clark spending more time with Ben Maddox and Eddie Quillan than with Ria. He and Maddox were almost rumbled by Dorothy Manners, Maddox’s rival, who Clark had threatened for exposing Loretta Young’s pregnancy. Manners, a close friend of Joan Crawford’s who had always held Clark responsible for the break-up of her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr, would have been justified in getting her revenge by outing him. All she suspected initially was that he was involved with someone from the Mutiny On The Bounty cast, but that with this being a ‘man’s picture’ with few candidates for his affection, the obvious person was Movita Castenada.

  Hoping to avenge Joan by catching Clark in the act, so to speak, Manners picked her up at her home and the two set off for Catalina Island. Movita was nowhere to be seen, but they discovered Gable and Maddox lounging, shirtless, on the beach between takes. As Joan had confided in Manners about Franchot’s ‘other life’ with Ross Alexander - and since Maddox’s amorous activities were one of Holywood’s best-kept open secrets, Manners must have had few doubts as to what was going on. Still, she said nothing, and for another 25 years G
able would despise her and make very caustic personal remarks about a highly respected journalist - adding her name to the growing list of people he was terrified might one day let the world in on the secret of his sexuality. Indeed, as a favour to Joan to prevent the truth emerging about Clark and his ‘buddy’, Dorothy Manners set tongues wagging by including a photograph of Clark/Christian and Joan in her subsequent feature. It was snapped on the beach and more than suggested they were still involved - the philosophy being it was better to be suspected of adultery than of being gay.

  When shooting wrapped on Mutiny On The Bounty, Ben Maddox accompanied Clark on a month-long ‘pleasure trip’ to South America. Financed by MGM, and doubling as a publicity exercise, this took in major cities in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. At each stop Gable was met by a studio representative, who fixed him up with a female date to be photographed linking his arm whenever he attended a prearranged function, but far from the prying eyes of the Hollywood gossip columnists he shared a hotel suite with Maddox. Almost certainly they would have been together when he received the telegram informing him of Judy Lewis’s birth.

  They also shared a stateroom aboard the SS Pan America, which conveyed them from Rio de Janeiro back to New York for the Mutiny On The Bounty première. The ‘shipboard romance’ set up by Maddox to fool other reporters was with ‘Mexican Spitfire’ actress Lupe Velez, currently married to Johnny Weissmuller, but cheating on him with Gary Cooper. Clark and Lupe are thought to have spent at least one night together - and as Maddox also slept with her ‘as part of the job’ and since Lupe is also known to have favoured group sex, it was alleged that a threesome took place. She was also renowned for getting her men angry in the bedroom by berating them for their performances, compared with the super-hung Cooper. A few weeks after the trip, Clark called the garage that had supplied Cooper with his custom-built Duesenberg to commission one that was a foot longer.

  Ben Maddox covered the première for Screenland, then stayed on in New York while Clark went to Los Angeles on 18 November. Ria and the children had already moved out of the Brentwood house and into a property he had leased before leaving for South America. ‘Mrs Gable and I are thrilled with our new house,’ Maddox reported Gable as having told him, ‘We’ve had to shop for more to fill the house. And that has been fun!’ Of course Maddox had been in on the ruse that Clark had taken advantage of the trip to remove Ria from his life as much as was possible without actually filing for divorce. Within twenty-four hours, Louella Parsons was on to Clark’s case. Calling Howard Strickling, she threatened to spill the beans - whatever she assumed these to be -unless he gave her an exclusive as to what was transpiring within the Gable household. As usual, Clark and Maddox had covered their tracks: neither had been seen in public unless on the arm of a beautiful woman. Unfortunately, Lupe Velez was famed for blabbing even the most intimate details of her conquests - such as how she had ‘ridden’ Gary Cooper until he had passed out - and some of these anecdotes, if repeated to Louella, would have been sufficient to ring down the curtain on Clark’s career. Strickling therefore issued a statement that he swore had come from Clark. The Gables were not divorcing - they were merely putting a little space between them until they had resolved any differences they might have had. More importantly, he added, no other woman was involved. In a manner of speaking, this was the truth. That same day, Clark moved into a suite at the Beverly Wilshire, where Ben Maddox would later join him.

  Other changes had been effected in Brentwood during Clark’s absence. On 11 October 1935, Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone finally married at Fort Lee, New Jersey, an event that led to another spat with Bette Davis. Dangerous, Bette’s film with Franchot, had just been released and she had coerced Warner Brothers into adding flashes across the posters, saying: ‘Look Out, Franchot Tone! You’re In For The Toughest MUTINY You’ve Ever Faced When BETTE DAVIS Rebels in DANGEROUS!’ Louis B. Mayer called Clark to gloat over his ‘loss’ only to be told by whoever it was that answered the phone (most likely Maddox) that he had moved out of the Beverly Wilshire for a few days to spend time with the newlyweds.

  Clark’s last film, shot in 1935, was Wife vs Secretary, with Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy and James Stewart in an early role. This was a sparkling comedy directed by Clarence Brown. Gable and Loy played a happily married couple - until she suspects him of having an affair with his secretary (Harlow), who pounces on him when Loy packs her bags to leave. Morality prevails, however, when Harlow dumps him for a younger lover (Stewart), so he can go back to his wife. This prompted the question: would Clark ever return to his own wife? ‘Not on your life, buddy,’ he told Ben Maddox.

  Chapter Five

  LOMBARD

  As zany as Jean Harlow and as outrageous as Tallulah Bankhead - though nowhere near as sexually voracious - Carole Lombard was ‘one of the guys’. She was a shoulder to cry on, a confidante who teased but only when assured that her victim would take it in the context in which it was intended; also a hyperactive matchmaker and a party organiser par excellence. An astonishingly lovely woman, whose looks rivalled those of Garbo and Dietrich, she out-cursed the filthiest-mouthed male contemporary yet still bowled over the frostiest individual with her warmth and innate charisma. Lombard was also the practical joker! Gable once said that any other man would have strangled her for some of the tricks she pulled on him - notably the occasion when she announced to the crowd outside Grauman’s Theater that he was not there to leave his handprints in the famous cement but instead ‘an imprint of his uncircumcised cock’! Noel Busch observed in Life magazine, ‘When Carole Lombard talks, her conversation, often brilliant, is punctuated by screeches, laughs, growls, gesticulations - and the expletives of a sailor’s parrot’.

  She was born Jane Alice Peters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on 6 October 1908. Her father, Fred, was a manic depressive, resulting from an accident which had left him lame - he died shortly before Carole met Clark, though he had been well out of her life for some time before then. Unable to cope with his black moods, in 1914 Bessie Peters brought Jane and her two brothers to Los Angeles for a holiday and they had stayed there, renting an apartment off Wilshire Boulevard. In 1921, Jane had been playing baseball with a group of boys in the street outside her home when spotted by Allan Dwan, a Fox director. He cast her as a tomboy in A Perfect Crime. This small part led to a contract with the studio and a name change to Carol Lombard - the ‘e’ would come later when, ignoring pleas from her superstitious mother, she decided that having thirteen letters in her name would only bring her luck.

  Like Joan Crawford, while still in her teens Lombard was an accomplished dancer, competing in speakeasy Charleston contests and later featuring regularly on the bill at the Coconut Grove. Along with Crawford, by 1925 she had been recognised as a ‘promising light’ by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers (WAMPA). With an age ceiling of 22 - which caused a great deal of fibbing - these hopefuls were known as the ‘Wampas Babes’ and emulated New York’s infamous Algonquin Round Table by meeting regularly at Le Montmartre, one of Hollywood’s plushest eateries.

  Years later, Confidential magazine would refer to these young actresses as ‘baritone babes’: the group included Mary Astor, Dolores Del Rio, Janet Gaynor, Dolores Costello and Fay Wray, some of whom entered into lavender marriages to prevent their sexuality becoming public knowledge. Lombard therefore knew from an early age how to recognise these ‘Gillette blades’ who cut both ways - or their beaux, who ‘licked the other side of the stamp’, to use the parlance of the day. By the age of 17 she had already been calling herself ‘fag-hag’ - a derogatory term which she made respectable with her sincerity and loyalty towards her gay friends. Chief among these were William Haines, Rod La Roque, Cesar Romero and the directors Edmund Goulding and George Cukor, friends she shared with Joan Crawford. Joan only became aware of this following a Wampas Babes reunion when newcomer Carole attempted to usurp her place as head of the table one evening at Le Montmartre. On this occasion, she had made ar
rangements to be photographed by Picturegoer. When Joan bawled at her to move, Carole loudly pronounced, ‘Madame, I find your manner most offensive. Now, will you please go and fuck yourself?’ Rather than retaliate, Joan saw the funny side and the two became instant and lifelong friends.

  Lombard’s promising career almost ended as quickly as it had begun when, in 1926, she was out driving with her playboy lover, Henry Cooper, and another car hit them from behind, smashing her face into the windscreen. The injury required 14 stitches, and with typical lack of sympathy, Fox cancelled her contract. Over the next few years, she underwent extensive plastic surgery and was rescued by Mack Sennett, who had taken her on as a $50-a-week bathing belle and put her into 13 of his shorts - again, Carole had looked upon the number as a lucky omen. While working with Sennett she formed a most curious friendship with Madalynne Fields, Sennett’s 6-foot, 240-pound female clown, whom she nicknamed Fieldsie. In 1928, as his slushy, slapstick comedies were starting to go out of fashion, she was signed by Pathé. Two years later, Paramount offered her a 7-year, $375 a week contract.

  At Paramount, Carole had come into her own. Courted by Myron Selznick, who became her agent, and sumptuously gowned by Travis Banton, with her beauty and hourglass figure she was transformed into a homegrown Marlene Dietrich. While filming Man Of The World early in 1931 she had fallen for her co-star, 39-year-old William Powell, some 16 years her senior. The two lived together openly before marrying that June, a union which would end acrimoniously two years later. By this time, Carole had ‘flipped her lid’ over bisexual crooner Russ Columbo, a contemporary of Bing Crosby, hugely popular with his fans, but privately a disturbed, deeply unpleasant individual. Their affair ended tragically on 2 September 1934, when Columbo had a tiff with Lansing Brown, his photographer-lover, who had been showing him his collection of antique pistols. One of these had accidentally gone off and the bullet ricocheted off a table-top and entered Columbo’s eye. He died a few hours later and Carole had assumed the mantle of widow to a man so vain his family thought it appropriate that he should be buried - seven weeks after his death on account of the extended police enquiry - with a mirror inside his coffin.