by David Bret
Of Gable and Lombard, he further opined:
Carole Lombard is not Clark Gable’s wife, either. Still, she has remodelled her whole Hollywood life for him. She calls him ‘Pappy’, goes hunting with him, makes his interests dominate hers. Whoever heard of a woman in love with a man giving him a gun for Christmas? Or a man, crazy about one of the most glamorous, sophisticated and clever women in the land hanging a gasoline scooter on her Christmas tree? For Clark, Carole stopped almost overnight being a Hollywood playgirl. People are expected to change when they get married. All Clark and Carole did was strike up a Hollywood twosome. Nobody said, ‘I do!’ Clark Gable doesn’t like nightspots or parties, social chit-chat or the frothy pretensions of society. He has endured plenty of it, but it makes him fidget. Carole, quite frankly, used to eat it up. She hosted the most charming and clever parties in town. These things were the caviar and cocktails of Carole Lombard’s life - before she started going with Gable. But look what happened! Clark didn’t like it! Carole has practically abandoned all her Hollywood social contacts. She doesn’t keep up with the girls in gossip as she used to. She doesn’t throw parties that hit the headlines and the picture magazines. She and Clark are all wrapped up in each other’s interests . . . Yes, Carole Lombard is a changed woman since she tied up with Clark Gable, but her name is still Carole Lombard.
Baskette summed up his findings by offering his own self-righteous dictum, particularly as he had never practised what he preached:
Never has domesticity outside the marital state reached such a full flower as in Hollywood. Nowhere are there so many famous unmarried husbands and wives . . . The altar record among Hollywood’s popular twosomes is surprisingly slim. Usually something formidable stands in the way of a marriage certificate when Hollywood stars pair up minus a preacher. In Clark and Carole’s case, of course, there is a very sound barrier. Clark is still officially a married man. Every now and then negotiations for a divorce are started but, until something happens in court, Ria Gable is still the only wife the law of this land allows Clark Gable. Yet nobody, not even Hollywood’s miracle men, has ever improved on the good old-fashioned, satisfying institution of holy matrimony. And, until something better comes along, the best was to hunt happiness when you’re in Hollywood or anywhere else is with a preacher, a marriage license and a bagful of rice.
Louis B. Mayer’s reaction to Kirtley Baskette’s feature - though he must have been relieved that the Gable ‘fagelah’ rumour had been dispensed with once and for all - was to demand a retraction. Otherwise, he declared, no Photoplay reporter would ever set foot on an MGM lot again. All the major studios supported him and their sponsors threatened to withdraw their advertising contracts from the magazine, then the biggest-selling in America. The editor’s response was to call their bluff: if this happened, Baskette, already the victim of several death-threats, would be offered police protection while penning a no-holds barred exposé of Hollywood adultery - something virtually every major star had been culpable of at some time or other. Photoplay further vowed to publish a story about the saintly Norma Shearer and the ‘little scenarios’ which had recently taken place in her trailer-dressing-room with 19-year-old Mickey Rooney - who boasted (as he would again in his autobiography, Life Is Too Short) of how, ‘MGM’s grand lady loved nothing more than copulating, French-style, with Andy Hardy’.
Kirtley Baskette had written of how Virginia Pine had made a man of George Raft by taking him to Watson, one of Hollywood’s most exclusive tailors, who rid him of his flamboyant wardrobe and dressed him more conservatively - in other words, less effete. Louis B. Mayer was distressed about a piece that almost made it to Screenland (bought off by Raft’s studio), accusing Raft and Robert Taylor of ‘impartiality towards intimacy’ with a male producer for career advancement.
Within an hour of Baskette’s feature hitting newsstands the Hays Office went into overdrive. On its day of issue the magazine sold out and within the week, as various stories were explored and enlarged upon by the tabloids and gossip columns, mostly wildly exaggerated though founded on fact, copies of the original were fetching up to $50 on the black market. Will Hays issued a statement claiming he had received over 5,000 letters of complaint from moral-majority organisations such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), the National Catholic League of Decency (NCLD) and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). As a result of this correspondence Hays said that the general consensus was, ‘Get these people to the altar, or we start picketing the theatres!’
George Raft absolved himself in this age of extreme naivety by threatening to ‘rip apart’ any man brave enough to say to his face what they were saying behind his back - to prove the point, he posed for photographs with his fists bunched. Robert Taylor, in a move which would today make him a laughing stock, proved he was ‘a regular guy’ - acquiring permission from the Hays Office, who normally forbade such things - by posing shirtless and displaying his hairy chest, the theory being that nature decreed only heterosexual men could be hirsute! What the press did not know was that Taylor’s chest was hairier than it should have been on account of the hormone injections administered by the studio doctor to cure him of his ‘affliction’. When this failed to curb the gossips, in an extreme measure - one which persists to this day - in the May, Taylor and the equally ‘suspect’ Barbara Stanwyck were given substantial salary increases to marry and keep up the pretence of married bliss. And finally, just in case Baskette did have a follow-up feature in mind, Louis B. Mayer - less interested in Carole Lombard than in his own stars - ordered Joan Crawford to stay away from Clark. About to file for divorce from Franchot Tone, Joan was reputed to be ‘on the prowl’ in search of her next husband.
Mayer and David Selznick were particularly aggrieved over the rumours concerning Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard - she was now the main contender for Scarlett O’Hara. There is no clear evidence as to when, or indeed if, the couple ever married, and Mayer knew he was encroaching on dangerous territory by having Chaplin investigated. Like himself, Chaplin was a connoisseur of under-age girls, who had seduced his second wife, Lita Grey, when she had been just 12, and got her pregnant at 16. Mayer interviewed several journalists who claimed to have been present at a ceremony in April 1934 aboard Chaplin’s yacht. Chaplin confused matters by declaring he had married Goddard ‘some time in 1936’, while she backed him up, adding that the ceremony had been conducted by the Mayor of Catalina - no such person existed. With the shooting of Gone With The Wind just around the corner, the moguls decided to play safe. Paulette Goddard, like everyone else screen-tested for Scarlett, was informed that she was ‘not quite suitable’ - and Selznick resumed his search.
As for Gable and Lombard, Louis B. Mayer dipped into the MGM coffers when Ria refused to grant Clark a divorce unless he coughed up $300,000 - this, her lawyer calculated, equated to half his estimated MGM pension fund. Mayer agreed to loan him the money as an advance on his contract: his current contract had two years to run but Mayer drew up a new one, upping his salary to $7,500 a week. On 14 December 1938, three days after the damning Photoplay feature, Clark interrupted his skiing trip to announce to the press that he was divorcing Ria. She, however, had changed her mind since her original statement. Her demands were exactly the same, but as she was the wronged party, she announced that it was only fair that she should be divorcing Gable, and not the other way around. For the time being, their respected lawyers agreed to a stalemate.
In the meantime, Carole forked out $50,000 for a two-storey house set in 20 acres of land at 4525 Petit Avenue, in Elcino, San Fernando Valley. The property had formerly belonged to director Raoul Walsh and though just 10 miles out of Hollywood it was then such an undeveloped location that it might have been in another world. Walsh’s predecessor had had it partially landscaped, but for the better part this was an uncultured, totally private haven of citrus, plum and eucalyptus groves and alfalfa fields. And within a week of Carole moving in, Clark gave a press statement composed
by Howard Strickling and delivered from Louis B. Mayer’s office so no mistakes would be made in getting the message across to Ria, should she still have genuine cause for grievance:
Mrs Gable and I had a fine life together until the time came that we both realised we could no longer make a go of it. I bitterly regret that a short time ago a story was printed to the effect that I would be seeking a divorce. After years of separation, it is only natural that Mrs Gable should institute proceedings that will assure her freedom.
Ria accepted ‘Clark’s’ apology and announced her intention to leave for Nevada immediately after the Christmas holidays.
On 13 January 1939, less than two weeks before shooting with the major actors began (several of the locations were already underway), David Selznick announced that he had at last found his Scarlett O’Hara: a relatively unknown 25-year-old English actress named Vivien Leigh. One of the most beautiful but fragile women ever to grace the screen, Leigh (Vivian Hartley, 1913-67) had attended RADA and made her film debut in 1934 with Things Are Looking Up. The following year she appeared with Gracie Fields in Look Up And Laugh, but her biggest break occurred in 1937 when, under contract to Alexander Korda, she had made Fire Over England with Laurence Olivier, whom she would later marry.
Leigh was currently visiting Olivier in Hollywood, where he was shooting Wuthering Heights, and her out-of-the-blue acquisition of the most sought-after role in movie history brought resentment from just about every top-liner on Selznick’s long list of Scarlett contenders - none more so than Carole Lombard. She hit the roof on learning Leigh was also represented by her agent, Myron Selznick, David’s younger brother. The official story was that Myron had taken Leigh to the set where David had been filming the burning of Atlanta, and told him, ‘I’d like you to meet Scarlett O’Hara!’ Carole and many others were of the opinion that she had slept with the producer, though there is no evidence to suggest this.
For the rest of her life, Carole would refer to Vivien Leigh as ‘that fucking English bitch!’ Tallulah Bankhead, on the other hand, was surprisingly muted when asked for her opinion, telling Ben Maddox, ‘I’ll go to my grave convinced that I could have drawn the cheers of Beauregard and Robert E. Lee, had I been permitted to wrestle with Rhett Butler.’ Until her early death, Leigh would search in vain to recapture the most glorious moment of her career, coming close only in 1951 with her definitive portrayal of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire - a quest dogged by physical and mental illness.
Though lined up for some time, Selznick signed up the other leads on the same day as Leigh. British star Leslie Howard (Laszlow Horvarth, 1893-1943) had most recently triumphed in The Scarlet Pimpernel, but flopped opposite Norma Shearer in Irving Thalberg’s Romeo And Juliet. Howard, whose plane would be shot down four years later during a wartime flight over the English Channel, initially turned down the role of Ashley Wilkes. Tired of acting, he wanted to direct. He capitulated when Selznick promised he would be able to direct and star in his next film, Intermezzo, with Ingrid Bergman. Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine’s sister, was Errol Flynn’s favourite leading lady (8 times). Hattie McDaniel (1895-1952) was the much-loved black actress, almost always typecast as the lady’s maid and apparently content with such roles. ‘I would rather play a maid than be one,’ she famously said at the time. Thomas Mitchell (1892-1962) would win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in that year’s Stagecoach. Ann Rutherford was best known as the kid’s girlfriend in the Andy Hardy series.
Gone With The Wind began shooting on 23 January 1939, and wrapped on 27 June - $2 million over budget. Though Vivien Leigh complained persistently to Selznick about her co-star’s halitosis, Clark was hostile towards her when they filmed their first scenes on 31 January. To him, like many others still reeling from Kirtley Baskette’s ‘Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands And Wives’ exposé, she was little more than a common tart. Over the last few weeks, much had been made in the press over his involvement with Carole, yet here was a woman virtually no one in Hollywood had heard of until now - a married woman with a child, back in England, cohabiting with a married actor under everybody’s noses!
On top of this, he was fighting Selznick over his differences with George Cukor. His accusing the director of favouritism before the first frame had been canned was but the first in a long list of complaints. Back in the December he had had a bust-up with Selznick over Cukor’s decision that everyone should speak with a Deep South accent - after all, this was where the action was taking place. Cukor denounced Clark’s Ohio-Cumberland twang in Mutiny On The Bounty as ludicrous, and did not want Rhett Butler lampooned by the critics as just another Gable extension. Clark flatly refused to pronounce his lines in any accent but his own - even if it meant walking off the picture, which he said he had never really been bothered about doing in the first place.
Next he grumbled about the script - or lack of it, for all he had to work on were 92 pages of instructions, delivered to his home by motorcycle courier the day before shooting began, detailing how Selznick wanted Rhett to be played. For once, the producer declared, Clark would portray a character exactly as written. Gable turned up for work in a foul mood, intent on having it out with Selznick. Aware of this, Carole tried to cheer him up by having a parcel delivered to his dressing room. Inside was a hand-knitted ‘cock-sock’ and a card which read, ‘Don’t let it get cold. Bring it home hot for me’. Clark calmed down for the moment, but caught up with Selznick later, and this time there was a blazing row over his costumes. Selznick had handed over a cool $150,000 to Gone With The Wind’s costumes department, ordering them to spare no attention to detail - even the extras’ shoes, socks and petticoats had to be authentic because, he believed, they would give better performances knowing they were wearing them. Clark complained that the tight collars he had been given made his neck appear too bull-like, and that his too-short jacket sleeves over-exaggerated his wrists and hands. He also hated wearing tight trousers because they drew attention to his crotch and, he claimed, made him look ‘faggy’.
He was further aggrieved that Selznick spent his every waking hour on the set, breathing down everyone’s necks - and that the producer opted to shoot almost everything out of sequence, beginning with the burning of Atlanta, to get the most arduous scenes out of the way. He was additionally against Selznick’s insistence that all the actors be costumed and on set from the start of the day’s shooting, whether they were required or not. This was a dodge subsequently adopted by Giant director George Stevens, who Clark later admitted he would not have worked alongside for all the money in the world. Years later, while working with Montgomery Clift in The Misfits, he howled with laughter upon hearing how Monty, while shooting Selznick’s Indiscretions Of An American Housewife (1954), had publicly addressed the finicky producer as ‘Interfering Fuck Face’.
Clark could do nothing about Selznick - it was simply a case of grin and bear it - but he was determined Cukor would have to go, unless Selznick wanted to find himself a new Rhett Butler. This, of course, was something the public would never have accepted after all the hype surrounding the current one. His initial excuse for not wishing to work with Cukor was that he regarded him as a ‘woman’s director’, and therefore sure to show favouritism towards Vivien Leigh. To a certain extent, this was true. Cukor had a solid track record for taming temperamental actresses: his success stories in this respect included Harlow, Crawford, Judy Garland and Ingrid Bergman, but most especially Katharine Hepburn, with whom he made nine films.
Clark could have handled the situation more sensibly and diplomatically when petitioning for Cukor’s dismissal. Instead, he marched into Selznick’s office, guns blazing, and bawled, ‘I will not be directed by that fairy, Cukor!’ Until now Selznick had been unaware of Cukor’s sexuality, and had Cukor not been so gentlemanly he might have enlightened Selznick of how, not so very long before, his accuser had been an active participant during his trips to Pershing Square with William Haines, Joan Crawford, et al. Haines had recently decorated
Cukor’s house - Clark and Carole attended the completion party - and visited him several times during the first week of shooting Gone With The Wind. This made Clark edgy because he had seen Haines and Cukor chatting and laughing, and suddenly become paranoid that one of them might let something slip.
The crunch came one morning when Clark cornered Cukor on the set and growled, ‘I only like working with real men!’ - bringing the tarty response, ‘So do I, my dear!’ This resulted in Cukor sending Gable the aforementioned birthday gift of soap and Listerine. Eleven days later, on 12 February, production was suspended when Selznick fired Cukor, and for the time being Clark’s secret stayed safe. But, as Kenneth Anger aptly observed in Hollywood Babylon, ‘One of the great directorial shifts in film history took place in 1939 because of a few blow-jobs given by Bill Haines.’ Unperturbed, Cukor began shooting The Women sooner than scheduled - over the moon, he declared, to be working ‘amongst his own’. And to make up for her disappointment over losing out on Scarlett O’Hara, Paulette Goddard was added to its distinguished cast.
To replace Cukor - again on Gable’s insistence - Selznick brought in Victor Fleming, whom Clark maintained had remained his favourite director since working with him on Red Dust. Fleming had been directing Judy Garland in The Wizard Of Oz, and his departure from this picture inadvertently resulted in its becoming more popular than it might have done, had he stayed. Fleming had been against a sequence containing what would become Judy’s signature song, ‘Over The Rainbow’, which was subsequently filmed by King Vidor.
Victor Fleming (1883-1949) was a gifted director, but when in Gable’s company was a deeply unpleasant individual - as indeed was Clark whenever they were together. Inasmuch as both were ‘gay-friendly’ in the company of homosexual colleagues but viciously homophobic behind their backs, so too were they virulently anti-Semitic, a trait wholly unacceptable and deplored in an environment where the studio hierarchies were predominately Jewish. Having denounced Sidney Howard’s script (according to film buff Gavin Lambert) as ‘no fucking good’, forcing Selznick to commission a new one from Ben Hecht to the tune of $15,000, Fleming next attacked the man behind the camera. Lee Garmes (1898-1978) had been Marlene Dietrich’s favourite photographer - his innovative use of light and shade in von Sternberg’s Morocco and Shanghai Express were truly inspired, and fortunately around one third of Gone With The Wind bears his unmistakable stamp. Shooting was held up for a week while Fleming secured the services of Ernest Haller (1896-1970), another Expressionist genius nevertheless who had recently filmed Jezebel with Bette Davis. Some years later, Haller would capture the anguished glory of James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause.
