by David Bret
Clark too had fought against going to the circus, as he called it. At the time of Thalberg’s death, the two had not been on speaking terms because Clark had bawled him out for wanting to cast him in what would be his last big budget production, Romeo And Juliet. Rightly pointing out that he was way too old to play the teenage Romeo, he had added, ‘Besides, I don’t do that Shakespeare shit!’ Thalberg cast Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard, 36 and 43 respectively, as the tragic lovers and tried to compensate for his ridiculous choice by ageing up the rest of the cast. The film was lampooned by critics.
Thalberg exited the world at a time when his powers had started to diminish. Rumour persisted that he had been planning to leave MGM to found his own production company and there had been talk of some stars breaking contract to follow him: Norma Shearer, without any doubt; Garbo almost certainly; Gable perhaps with a different attitude towards Thalberg once Louis B. Mayer was no longer part of the equation. Thalberg would serve as a model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon and from 1937 onwards the Motion Picture Industry (MPI) would present a Best Producer award in his memory.
Thalberg’s was Clark and Joan’s second major funeral that year. On 9 January John Gilbert had died of a heart attack, aged 40. Since having his voice sabotaged by Mayer, his career had nose-dived - his one moment of Talkies glory occurred in 1933 when he had starred with Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. 1936 was also the year of the exhaustive search for Scarlett O’Hara - setting in motion a ludicrously costly, confusing machinery of hopes, shattered dreams, ego trips and double-dealing which would involve just about every major Hollywood actress under the age of 40. In the July, David Selznick paid $50,000 for the screen rights to Margaret Mitchell’s only recently completed blockbuster Gone With The Wind. Atlanta born and raised Mitchell (1900-49) had studied for a career in medicine, turned to journalism, and in 1925 started writing her only book. Selznick read the 1,000-pages plus work in galley proofs. After publication it went on to sell over 25 million copies in 30 languages and won Mitchell the Pulitzer Prize. Later, surprised by the fuss her book had caused, she would demand and receive another $50,000 from Selznick.
Selznick (1902-65), married to Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, Irene, had approached Irving Thalberg with the project but his response had been that Civil War pictures had gone out of fashion. This contributed to an almighty bust-up with MGM. Selznick accused Mayer of supporting Thalberg’s persistent favouritism of some stars (chiefly Norma Shearer), directors and scriptwriters over others, but rather than have it out with him personally, Selznick complained to Nicholas Schenck, head of Loew’s Inc, MGM’s parent company. When Schenck refused to support him, Selznick had taken the unusual step of tendering his resignation, announcing that he would only stay on with MGM until he had finished his current schedule (Anna Karenina and A Tale Of Two Cities). Following this he would start up his own production company. His first major film would be A Star Is Born with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, but his biggest production ever would be Gone With The Wind.
Even before Clark was consulted over the role - and Mayer asked for his permission to loan him out - Selznick had decided that only Gable would be playing Rhett Butler, his decision based upon the thousands of letters he had received from fans. Clark’s initial response was that he did not want the part, declaring he would never live up to the general public’s expectations of him, as opposed to those of the fans who would, of course, have accepted him in almost any part. ‘Give it to Ronald Colman,’ he is alleged to have told Selznick. He was, of course, but a pawn in the machinations, being a humble contract player expected to do Mayer’s bidding. Mayer therefore came back to Selznick with his conditions. If Selznick borrowed Clark, then he would be expected to pay his salary, currently fixed at $4,500 a week.
Unhappy with this, Selznick approached Warner Brothers with a view to pairing Clark with their biggest female star, Bette Davis, the fan magazines’ second choice after Tallulah Bankhead. Initially Jack Warner made Selznick an offer that he assumed would be turned down - Bette would only be released from her contract provided Errol Flynn was to play Rhett. Much to everyone’s surprise Selznick favoured the proposal and Bette, never less than a law unto herself, was consulted even though she too was only a contract player - such was the power she wielded, like Garbo she could demand almost anything. Her response was, ‘I will not be working with a man who’s been in every cathouse between here and Timbuktu!’ Not to be outdone, Warner subsequently got his own back on her by casting her opposite Flynn in The Sisters, completed in 1938.
In the meantime, Warner tried to bully Bette by telling her that unless she agreed to play Scarlett O’Hara, she might soon be joining the dole queue. They stirred things up by letting slip what Clark had said about her to Selznick: ‘If you were Rhett Butler, would you want to kiss a mug like hers?’ Yet even he must have been stunned by Bette’s response. Carole Lombard had apparently shared the confidence with her that Clark suffered not just from premature ejaculation, but from acute phimosis - an inability to retract his foreskin that, despite his mania for personal cleanliness, left him with odour problems down below. According to Bette’s biographer, Lawrence J. Quirk (Fasten Your Seatbelts), she hit back literally below the belt by pronouncing, ‘I can’t stand a man who has fake store teeth and doesn’t keep his uncircumcised cock clean under the foreskin. I hear he shoots too soon and messes himself all the time. Great lover? Great fake!’ Quirk also recounts an anecdote relayed to him by the writer Jerry Asher, of how director George Cukor sent Clark a ‘special gift’ in February 1939 for his 38th birthday - a cake of Lifebuoy anti-deodorant soap and a bottle of Listerine. Quirk observed, ‘The accompanying note, according to Jerry, read, “Clark dear - the soap is to clean out the cheese beneath your foreskin and the Listerine is to take away the smell.”’
Which of course begs the question - how did Cukor know this? One doubts that he could have been so enlightened by Carole. Though fond of cracking jokes about Clark’s short-comings in the bedroom (almost certainly untrue, otherwise there would not have been an endless queue of lovers eager not just to test his libido, but also for a repeat performance), she would never have overstepped the mark by divulging such a hugely personal matter. One must therefore assume that Cukor was merely acting with untold bitterness - or speaking from first-hand experience.
Humphrey Bogart’s biographer Darwin Porter also cites an incident around this time when Bogart was standing next to Clark at a men’sroom urinal in a Hollywood club. ‘After doing some pecker-checking, ’ Porter observed, ‘Bogie suggested a helpful surgical alteration for Gable’s penis. Gable was so outraged that he punched Bogart’.
With Bette Davis no longer in the running for the so-called Scarlett Stakes, in near desperation Selznick had gone running back to Louis B. Mayer, no doubt chewing on a sizeable chunk of humble pie. Once more he was told that if he borrowed Gable, he would still have to pay his salary, and MGM would own one-half of the film. Next to step into the affray was Clark’s agent, Phil Berg. If shooting was expected to take 16 weeks, as Selznick forecast, Clark’s total salary would be $72,000 - far less than most of the major stars were receiving when working independently of their studio contracts, and less than half of what RKO were currently paying Carole Lombard. Very reluctantly, Mayer agreed to pay him a $50,000 bonus - a third of which would come from Selznick International.
Mayer also promised to pay Selznick a minimum of $1,250,000 - half of the film’s estimated production costs. MGM and Selznick International would share the profits and Loew’s Inc would receive 15 per cent of the gross for distribution. Because he distrusted his father-in-law, Selznick also drew up a contingency plan: unless Mayer appointed him producer of Gone With The Wind and welcomed him back at MGM as a vice-president, he would strike a similar deal with one of the other studios. When Mayer learned that Warner Brothers were still waiting in the wings with Errol Flynn, just as popular with cinema audiences as Gable, he very quickly capitulated. With Hollywood sti
ll reeling from the shock of Irving Thalberg’s death, most people were of the opinion that Norma Shearer had a divine right to play Scarlett O’Hara - for no other reason than they felt sorry for her. Selznick would not even suffer having her name mentioned in his company for she had been a contributory factor to his leaving MGM in the first place!
Next in line for the part was Tallulah Bankhead - Alabama-born and therefore an authentic Southern belle. Reputations and the Hays Office’s moral turpitude clause did not count so far as the search for Scarlett was concerned, otherwise the audition list might not have been so exhaustive. Selznick had been knocked sideways by Tallulah’s performance in the Broadway production of Reflected Glory, and when the news hit the press, he received thousands of letters supporting his choice: the Governor of Alabama’s telegram read: WHY DON’T YOU GIVE TALLULAH THE PART AND HAVE DONE WITH IT? On 21 December 1936, Tallulah would make two Technicolor screen tests, wearing one of Garbo’s costumes from Camille. These would be filed with tests of other hopefuls - an amazing archive comprising 13,000 feet of colour and 120,000 feet of monochrome which, some years later, would be edited to form the documentary, Search For Scarlett.
Tallulah Bankhead boasted that she was ahead of all the other Scarlett contenders, aside from Joan Crawford and Carole Lombard, in that she had slept with Rhett Butler. Her chances were scuppered, however, when Clark let slip at a reception that he had been the one behind William Haines’ sacking by Louis B. Mayer back in 1933. Tallulah laid into Clark, accusing him of hypocrisy, and she would later suspect him of being behind Louella Parsons’ unnecessary and unprovoked attack in her column. Reminding her readers that one of Tallulah’s closest friends, John Hay Whitney, was part-financing the film while another, George Cukor, would be directing it, Louella concluded, ‘So, I’m afraid she will get the part. If she does, I personally will go home and weep because she is NOT Scarlett O’Hara in any language, and if David Selznick gives her the part he will have to answer to every man, woman and child in America.’
The other Scarlett hopefuls now heading Selznick’s pared-down but still 40-strong list included Joan Crawford, Margaret Sullavan, Paulette Goddard, Claudette Colbert, Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard. Clark shrugged his shoulders and declared he did not care who Selznick chose for the role but he did voice his opinions concerning George Cukor. He never referred to him by name but as ‘that goddam faggot’ - conveniently forgetting that he himself had not been averse to accompanying Cukor and the Haines-Crawford gang on their trips to Pershing Square. As will be seen, Clark’s hypocrisy and homophobic rantings condemned by Tallulah Bankhead would have far-reaching effects.
In the meantime, he pushed for Joan Crawford to appear opposite him in Parnell. This would represent Hollywood’s reading of the last years of Irish Prime Minister Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-91), who had become a thorn in the side of British politics with his campaign for home rule. In 1879, Parnell formed the National Land League to reduce rents and secure for tenants the ownership of their lands from their mostly English landlords - an action that had made him the people’s hero but also landed him in jail. The film, for the better part, concerned itself with Parnell’s involvement with Katie O’Shea, the wife of one of his opponents, which resulted in a messy public divorce, followed by marriage to O’Shea just five months before his death. Three years earlier, Crawford had been panned by the critics for her dreadful English accent in Today We Live and she now declared she would not risk the same fate by attempting an Irish one. Instead the part went to Myrna Loy.
The real Parnell had been described by contemporary sources as ‘frail, shy, sensitive and dull’ - portrayed by Clark, only the latter adjective applied. ‘Gable as the Irish patriot orating for home rule in the House of Commons looked as though he would rather be dodging debris in the ’Frisco earthquake,’ was how John Douglas Eames later summed up this abhorrent mishmash in The MGM Story. There was a display of the now regular Gable histrionics during shooting - this time not because director John Stahl wanted him to weep but because he wanted Clark to don a false beard and at least slightly resemble the real Parnell. He refused, declaring whiskers were dirty, though he had insisted on wearing designer stubble for Call Of The Wild. Stahl got him to compromise by wearing fake sideburns, which made him look rather fetching but did nothing to prevent the film from bombing at the box-office.
On 9 January 1937, exactly one year after John Gilbert’s death, Clark attended the funeral of 29-year-old Ross Alexander, whom he had befriended by way of Franchot Tone. Yet again another fine actor’s demise brought about by Hollywood’s double standards, hypocrisy and greed. Alexander’s body was discovered at his ranch - in a fit of despair, he had shot himself. As had happened with Paul Bern, Jack Warner and the studio police had been first at the scene to search for a suicide note. This time there had been none, so Warner Brothers fabricated the story that Alexander, deeply in debt, had never recovered from the suicide two years earlier of his actress wife, Aleta Freel - additionally, that he had been having problems with his second wife and frequent co-star, Anne Nagel.
The reason for these tall tales was that Jack Warner had unearthed Alexander’s diary, full of his indiscretions and containing a blackmail letter from a young drifter he had picked up for sex during the Christmas holidays. On top of this, the actor had been publicly branded a ‘dirty queer’ by Bette Davis, on learning he had been pencilled in as her next leading man. As a final insult to one of his most gifted stars, Warner had given orders for Alexander’s ranch to be ransacked, to make it appear that he had ‘gone nuts’ before killing himself. His death came as a tremendous shock to the closeted Hollywood gay community and, in the wake of the William Haines débâcle, still fresh in everyone’s minds, Clark was summoned to Louis B. Mayer’s office and issued with the stern warning, ‘There but for the grace of God go you!’
But there was light relief a few weeks later, on 1 February, Clark’s thirty-sixth birthday. Judy Garland, then 15 and two years away from The Wizard Of Oz, was Louis B. Mayer’s ‘golden child’, it is reputed in more ways than one. It is a well-chronicled fact that stardom and perennial protection beckoned for any pubescent girl willing to hop onto The Messiah’s casting couch - and failure for the ones who did not. Under contract to MGM, Judy had had bit parts in just three films, but Mayer was hoping for her to hit the big time with Broadway Melody of 1938, filmed in 1936 but scheduled for release before the end of 1937 to give it longer box-office life. In the meantime, she was compelled to sing at parties thrown for MGM stars and executives. ‘Mayer treated me like the hired help,’ she recalled in a 1963 television interview. ‘I even had to eat in the kitchen with the rest of the staff. The man was a louse.’
For Gable’s birthday, Judy climbed out of a giant cake and sang ‘You Made Me Love You’, the McCarthy-Monaco standard prefaced by Roger Edens’ now legendary ‘Dear Mr Gable’ sequence, which recounts the plight of the teenager with the crush on the movie star that will never be reciprocated. Mayer was so moved to tears that he recalled Judy to the set and had it added to the film. Each year, for the next three years, she was brought in to perform the same routine, with Clark faking a delighted grin but privately cringing and denouncing her ‘a precocious brat’. That was until he learned that Judy had only been doing Mayer’s bidding, and that to have refused him would have caused her more grief than her frail persona could have safely handled, whence they became friends.
Four weeks later Clark, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow and William Powell all attended the Oscars ceremony at the Bilton Hotel. There were no nominations for Clark or Harlow, though Lombard and Powell had been nominated for My Man Godfrey. Clark’s admiration for Spencer Tracy took a temporary nosedive when he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in San Francisco, but none of the quintet won. Powell’s other film that year, The Great Ziegfeld, won Best Film and its leading lady, Luise Rainer, Best Actress. Best Actor award went to Paul Muni for The Story Of Louis Pasteur. In the meantime, the Ross Alexander
tragedy put the fear of God into the Hollywood gay community as news of his ‘secret diary’ spread amongst them. Almost certainly this had been confiscated and destroyed by Jack Warner, but it did not stop the panic: Alexander had been promiscuous and there was no knowing what information he had passed on to lovers in post-coital murmurings. Franchot Tone, more affected than most, hit the bottle with a vengeance and this told on his relationship with Joan Crawford - she started showing up for work wearing more make-up than usual to conceal the bruises inflicted during their latest fight. Had Clark been aware of this, with his track record of providing a strong shoulder to lean on, he would almost certainly have been hammering on the Crawford door. Joan, however, persevered as her marriage careered out of control. She had far too much respect for Clark and Carole, she said, to even think of coming between them.
Hot on the heels of the Alexander tragedy, and immediately preceding an even greater one, a scandal was meticulously orchestrated to reassure anyone who nurtured doubts regarding Clark’s masculinity (in pre-Kinsey days when bisexuality was largely unrecognised) that he was very definitely a ladies’ man. He might have been a disreputable cad perhaps, but unquestionably he was red-blooded. The paternity suit lodged against him in the spring of 1937 was a publicity stunt organised by Louis B. Mayer to kill off the ‘fagelah’ rumours once and for all. Again, the naivety of the general public was such in those days that it was considered inconceivable, if not physically impossible, for a homosexual to father a child. Of course Mayer could have gone to the press with Loretta Young’s baby, currently awaiting collection from the San Diego orphanage, but this would have ruined two financially lucrative careers. Far better then, from his point of view, to fabricate a story and generously reward the parties roped into his nonsensical charade.
The willing and handsomely recompensed scapegoat was Violet Norton, claimed by Howard Strickling to be a 47-year-old Essex woman, who had turned up at MGM, ‘out of the blue’, with a private detective. It was he who demanded $150,000 to prevent his client going to the press with the revelation that, in September 1922, Clark - using the alias Frank Billings - had seduced her in England, resulting in the birth of a daughter, Gwendoline, the following June. Initially, Strickling’s ruse failed when the magistrate he approached decided that if Norton and her lawyer were to be charged with blackmail, the matter would be best settled out of court, as had happened with Josephine Dillon. It took the likes of Hedda, Louella and Ben Maddox all of five minutes - the time it took to call the US Passport Agency - to ascertain that Clark had not been issued with a passport until 1930. MGM had no option but to reconfirm this, additionally that he had never been to England, an admission that should have destroyed the case, had this been a genuine blackmail threat - Norton had already furnished the prosecution with Gwendoline’s birth certificate, dated June 1923. Almost certainly this was a forgery which was supposed to have been dated June 1933. Realising his faux pas, Mayer payed to have the charge amended, resulting in the US Post Office indicting Norton for sending letters of extortion to MGM. None of these were submitted as evidence, quite simply because they did not exist, and there was still the question of preventing Clark from being outed.
