Clark Gable
Page 13
At the inquest a witness had come forward, testifying that he had heard Columbo and Brown arguing, but the coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death. For another ten years, news of Columbo’s death would be kept from his ailing mother, with Carole forging his signature and arranging for postcards to be sent to her from wherever he was ‘touring’. It was alleged that Carole’s brother, Stuart, one of the pallbearers at his funeral, had also been involved with him. ‘I loved Russ, not only as a man, but as a mother loves a child,’ Carole told one journalist, a remark that would pretty much sum up her relationship with Clark Gable, too.
In 1934, on the rebound, she became involved with George Raft, allegedly another of Columbo’s lovers and a no-less unsavoury character with mobster connections, as well as being her co-star in Bolero. Next, she had a fling with It Happened One Night scriptwriter Robert Riskin, another bisexual man she ‘borrowed’ from Fay Wray. He had also been seen escorted around town with Cesar Romero, so flagrantly effeminate that with her caustic humour Carole dubbed him, ‘The queens’ queen’. The fact that Columbo, Riskin and Romero spent much of their time chasing other men begs the question, taking into account the circles in which he frequently moved in: did she assume the same of Clark?
So far as is known, Lombard had no same-sex relationships herself, though with her anything would have been possible. After divorcing William Powell she moved Fieldsie into her house - Louella Parsons gatecrashed the welcoming party in search of a scoop, but found none. In 1934 Carole championed the tennis player Alice Marble (1913-90), who had recently been hospitalised with tuberculosis and severe acne. She had paid for her treatment and - after hearing her singing in the shower - had sent her for singing lessons. Marble’s career as a café-chanteuse was short-lived, however, and she soon returned to tennis, to be crowned four-times US champion before winning Wimbledon in 1939.
It was inevitable, with the company he kept since arriving in Hollywood - Haines and Shields, Rod La Rocque, Johnny Mack Brown, Ben Maddox and Eddie Quillan - that Clark had become, whether he admitted it or not, a fully fledged member of the movie world’s lavender set. As such, it was also inevitable that he should eventually become involved, platonically or otherwise, with Carole Lombard. Their relationship received a kick-start on 25 January 1936 at the Victor Hugo restaurant in Beverly Hills, the occasion being a Mayfair Club dinner-dance organised by Carole herself. Clark and studio date Edie Adams arrived with Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, and were greeted in the foyer by Carole and her ‘date’, Cesar Romero. Her first words to him since working together on No Man Of Her Own were, ‘Hi, baby - I’m in charge of this fucking party!’
She had instructed her guests to wear white to match the decor and flowers - and to ‘compliment’ the lavender gathering, which included Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, Janet Gaynor, Claudette Colbert, Dolores Del Rio and Rod La Rocque. Jeannette MacDonald - whose singing Carole likened to a cat being roasted alive on a griddle - turned up uninvited, wearing a mauve dress which Carole told her matched her face. She had not wanted Norma Shearer there either, but was overruled by David Selznick, who financed the event. Deliberately ignoring the dress code, Norma swanned into the Victor Hugo wearing a scarlet gown, then proceeded to look down her nose at the other guests. According to David Niven (Bring On The Empty Horses) this had brought the very loud and acid observation from Carole, ‘Who the fuck does Norma think she is - the house madam?’
It was not her only vulgar outburst that evening. Purely out of devilment, she invited Loretta Young to the bash, in what would be her first outing since having Clark’s baby, suggesting Carole may also have known the truth. And if this was not enough, she invited Ria, who turned up with her lawyer, enabling Carole to spread the rumour that they were an item because the lawyer was ‘better hung’ than Gable. When Clark acknowledged his estranged wife, Carole barked, ‘Who’s the old bag?’ And if all this was not enough to humiliate him, while she and Clark were dancing, she grabbed herself a handful and pronounced, ‘So, Pa’s got a hard on!’ The nickname - their characters had addressed each other as ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’ in No Man Of Her Own - would stick. Legend persists that Gable became so turned on, dancing with Lombard, that they slipped away from the party and went for a spin in his Duesenberg - and that Carole snubbed him when he tried to get her to go back with him to his suite at the Beverly Wilshire. This seems unlikely. As hostess she would have been missed, and not even Clark would surely have taken such a risk right under the noses of his wife, Selznick, and a whole gaggle of gossip-columnists.
One guest who definitely knew what was going on was Clark’s old stalker, Adela Rogers St Johns, who rushed out the news of the Gables’ split - though they had not given any official announcement - in the February 1936 issue of Photoplay. The feature was gushing, even by Adela’s standards:
The parting of the Gables makes my heart ache a little. Why did it have to happen? Why did two such swell people, both of them real, both of them deserving of happiness, have to come to the end of what seemed to all of us who knew them well, who’d been close friends, an ideal marriage? I’ve been sitting here looking out at trees that are bare, but that will be green again in the Spring, at lilac bushes that today are brown twigs, but that in April will be fragrance and colour once more, and trying to figure it out. You see, it was like this with the Gables. You felt a wholeness of self when they were together. They weren’t sentimental or gushing. They were too modern for that. But your heart felt a little warmer because they were joined in their own way, and the world is often a lonely place and men and women were meant to be one, so that loneliness would roll back like a wave and stand trembling at the command of love . . . So the world, and fame, and all its petty trials and tribulations caught up with them. The very virility that had won Rhea [sic] in the beginning tortured her. The very elegance and charm that had won Clark began to smother him. And beauty drifted away and left hunger on both sides, a hunger that had sent them out to begin all over again.
Carole is reputed to have shouted for someone to fetch her a bucket while reading Adela’s lament. Yet she was in no hurry to see Gable again after humiliating him in full view of Hollywood’s elite. When he called her a few weeks after the Mayfair Club party and asked her out on a date, she told him to get lost - or words to that effect - though later events suggest she was playing hard to get. Clark, therefore, shrugged his shoulders and made a play for another beauty with whom he had danced at the Victor Hugo - Merle Oberon.
Born in Tasmania but raised in India, Merle Oberon (Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson, 1911-79) had been working as an extra in 1932 when Alexander Korda cast her as Anne Boleyn opposite Charles Laughton in The Private Life Of Henry VIII. She subsequently married Korda, but engaged in a number of highly publicised affairs with United Artists’ Joseph Schenck, Maurice Chevalier and newcomer David Niven just to get herself noticed and inch her way up the Hollywood ladder. Rumour persisted (proven after her death) that she had Asian blood, which, had Clark but known, would have kept him at bay. Much as he adored black people, for some reason he detested Orientals and Asians. Nor did their affair get very far, once Carole got wind of it.
At the end of February, Clark and Oberon were guests at a party at the mansion of millionaire entrepreneur John Hay Whitney - another Who’s Who of Hollywood gathering in honour of the wife of scriptwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. It was to celebrate, of all things, her recovery from a nervous breakdown brought about by his carousing. Halfway through the proceedings, an ambulance turned up, its siren screaming - with the driver claiming there had been a fatal accident down the road and that he and his paramedic assistant needed somewhere to ‘park the stiff’ until the police arrived. This was stretchered into Whitney’s living room and promptly sat bolt upright. It was none other than Carole, wearing a shroud over her Travis Banton gown and gatecrashing the event to save Clark from a fate worse than death. Exit, Merle Oberon!
The zaniness continued weeks later w
hen Carole began shooting The Princess Comes Across, with Fred MacMurray - she boasted to flabbergasted reporters that a sequel was on the cards: Gable Comes Across . . . Lombard’s Tits! She had actually been assigned to My Man Godfrey, with ex-husband William Powell. One of the finest rich-versus-poor movies ever made, this tells of the eccentric heiress, who takes in a vagrant, makes him her butler and subsequently learns he is just as upper-crust as she is. Once this wrapped, she provided a crutch for Clark during his ‘two months of purgatory’ - working on San Francisco with Jeanette MacDonald and Spencer Tracy. Though he would always have tremendous admiration for Tracy, Gable could not stand MacDonald, and initially told Irving Thalberg the last thing he wanted to do, short of jumping off a cliff, was to ‘stand there like a dummy’ while MacDonald sang at him. Louis B. Mayer, for whom the feisty diva could do no wrong, stepped into the affray with the old chestnut: Clark would do the film, keep his complaints to himself, or suffer suspension without pay until the film had been completed with his replacement. His dislike of MacDonald was nothing like her loathing of him - believed to have stemmed from one of Clark’s ‘fag-hating’ periods when he made a few cutting remarks about her singing partner, Nelson Eddy. MacDonald certainly made life very unpleasant for him on the set, chewing raw garlic every time she had to kiss him and telling director Woody Van Dyke that this was the only thing she could eat to make her breath smell worse than Clark’s!
The snooty, strait-laced MacDonald also objected to Carole visiting the San Francisco set. To her way of thinking, decent young women did not use words like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ in every sentence when addressing a priest, even if this was only Spencer Tracy’s alter-ego in the film. Clark’s gung-ho buddies and all the technicians, on the other hand, adored her: Carole was one of them and they did not have to mind their language when she was around. For Jeanette MacDonald, the last straw came when Carole and Tallulah Bankhead - a dangerous combination if ever there was one - arrived with Clark at a post-wrap party armed with their own plates. These were steel bedpans, which they proceeded to fill at the buffet table, to the horror of MacDonald’s society friends.
In San Francisco, Gable played his third Blackie - Blackie Norton, owner of a seedy Barbary Coast saloon, who employs up-coming opera singer Mary Blake (MacDonald). Naturally, he treats her rough and after coercing her to show her legs, he barks, allegedly not scripted, ‘You’re a little thin down there, but you’ve a fair set of pipes!’ There are shades of Manhattan Melodrama with Blackie and the Tracy character - childhood pal Father Mullin, who in adulthood turned against him on account of his dodgy dealings. It is he who tries to stop the virginal Mary from falling into Blackie’s clutches and getting corrupted. The true star of the film is the 20-minute sequence towards the end, re-creating the 1906 earthquake that devastated the city, claiming 452 lives. In the wake of this, Mary sits amid the ruins and sings the title-song. Years later this would be reprised as Judy Garland’s secondary anthem and open with the line which always made audiences titter: ‘I never will forget . . . Jeanette MacDonald!’
One aspect of the shooting schedule that caused Clark to blow a fuse would be repeated a few years later while he was making Gone With The Wind. This was when he was expected to cry during the final scene, when Blackie learns that his beloved Mary has survived the carnage. But he refused. Tears, he declared, were for women and ‘fluffs’ - effeminate homosexuals. Director Woody Van Dyke offered a compromise: Gable would turn his back to the camera, pretend to cry, and drawl the film’s most camp line, ‘Thanks God - I really mean it!’
Scarcely pausing to catch his breath, or so it seemed, Gable was loaned out to Warner Brothers for his second film with Marion Davies: like Polly Of The Circus, Cain And Mabel was based on another Cosmopolitan short story. William Randolph Hearst had transferred loyalties, along with Cosmopolitan Pictures, to the studio because Irving Thalberg had just cast Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette, a coveted role pencilled in for Davies. Instead of playing the doomed queen, Davies got to hoof it up as musical comedy star Mable O’Dare - opposite Clark, hamming as prizefighter Joe Cain. The film opens with the pair playing/sparring to a half-empty auditorium and despite the fact that they cannot stand each other, they submit to a fake romance to bolster their flagging careers.
Camp does not begin to describe this mishmash of slapstick and musical mayhem. Clark’s plum line comes when he rounds on Davies with, ‘If the galloping you do is dancing, I’ve seen better ballet in a horse show!’ She slaps him; he empties a bucket of ice-cubes over her head. And, of course, the loathing turns to love. Hearst, who spent $500,000 of his own money on the 10-minute wedding day finale, had wanted this to be choreographed by Busby Berkeley, but had to settle for the less illustrious Bobby Connolly, who merely emulates the great master. Having transported the cast to Venice, Camelot and Versailles, the film ends with a 100-foot high pipe organ bursting apart and releasing 150 bridesmaid chorus girls grinning like Cheshire cats and wailing, ‘I’ll Sing You A Thousand Love Songs’.
On 1 June 1936, Clark took time off from Cain And Mabel to make his radio debut in The Legionnaire And The Lady with Marlene Dietrich, an adaptation of Morocco, her first American film, in which she starred with Gary Cooper. He was paid $5,000, Dietrich thrice this amount, and a staggering 35 million listeners tuned in to the Lux Radio Theater production, broadcast live from Hollywood’s Music Box Theater and introduced by Cecil B. DeMille. That same week, Marion Davies downed tools and, accompanied by Joan Crawford, rushed to the aid of their friend William Haines. Since his enforced ‘retirement’ from the movies, Haines and Jimmie Shields had gone through some kind of marriage commitment ceremony and retreated to a beach house in El Porto, south of Manhattan Beach. Clark and Carole had visited them here many times. On the evening of 3 June, Haines and Shields were entertaining a group of male friends when they were subjected to a vicious gay bashing. ‘It was a perfectly harmless and peaceful pocket of poofs,’ Kenneth Anger later observed in Hollywood Babylon, ‘Nothing like the full-scale suck-and-fuck gay communities in latter day Fire Island. Children were not molested, local husbands were not seduced.’
The attacks had been organised by the White Legion, a vigilante force not unlike the Ku Klux Klan in their hatred of homosexuals. Haines called the cops, but rather than arrest or even question the guilty party - a neighbour - they made a few homophobic comments of their own and left. Terrified of these thugs showing up again, Haines had called Joan Crawford, in the midst of entertaining Hearst and Davies. They had driven to El Porto, collected Haines and Jimmie, and brought them back to San Simeon, then the most fortified home of any Hollywood star. Clark and Carole dropped by to offer moral support - publicly, however, to reassure the press that he was not thus inclined, Clark condemned the couple for courting trouble by being gay in the first place. His action earned him his first verbal warning from the intensely gay-friendly Joan.
The incident brought about Crawford and Gable’s first film together for some time, Love On The Run, directed by W.S. Van Dyke. The script was another typical John Lee Mahin racy drama. Joan played socialite heiress Sally Parker, who is about to marry the dashing Prince Igor (Ivan Lebedeff) when she realises she does not love him as much as he wants her to. Drafted in to cover the story are rivals Michael Anthony and Barnaby Pells (Clark, Franchot Tone). Initially, Sally does not suspect them of working for the press, which she despises, and uses Michael as a foil-lover to get out of marrying Igor. Soon they are skydiving over Europe in a stolen plane, then travelling to the most unexpected locations - sometimes in a flashy car, sometimes by horse and cart, always with Barnaby tagging along, secretly working on another assignment to track down an international spy. The unlikely trio are menaced by enemy agents, ending up in the equally incredulous setting of the Palais de Fontainebleu - with Sally and Michael being mistaken for the ghosts of Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon! They also fall in love, and after dealing with the crooks and despite Sally’s hatred of reporters they marry.
On 14 September, not unexpectedly, Irving Thalberg died, aged 37, and the whole of Hollywood went into shock - some genuinely grieving, many pretending. A few weeks earlier, a simple cold had developed into lobar pneumonia. Clark and Douglas Fairbanks Jr were ushers at his funeral at the B’nai B’rith Temple on Wilshire Boulevard and everyone who was anyone was there to pay their respects - or disrespects, depending on how they had got along with MGM’s precocious Boy Wonder. Only the crowd-shy Greta Garbo, heavily involved with Thalberg’s Camille, was permitted not to attend, and she sent her condolences with a huge wreath. Joan Crawford showed up against her will - she had hated Thalberg for always giving the choicest roles to Norma Shearer.