Clark Gable

by David Bret

  A few days later, he received a personal command from H.H. Arnold, Lieutenant General Chief of the Army Air Forces. As part of a location unit he would be shooting and narrating a propaganda training film about aerial gunners, which the services were having difficulty in recruiting owing to the high mortality rate. On 8 November he and Andrew McIntyre were dispatched to the Tyndall Field Gunnery School, Florida, then on to Fort Wright, Solkane, for training in war photography. On 7 January 1943, feeling morose because it was coming up to the first anniversary of Carole’s death, Clark was cheered somewhat by being awarded his aerial gunner wings - again, the ceremony was captured on celluloid for the newsreels. His smile, however, was forced. He had just declared in a letter to Jean Garceau, ‘I have everyone anyone could want, except one thing. And all I really want is Ma.’

  By 28 January, Clark was seconded to the 508th Squadron of the 351st Heavy Bombardment Group, First Air Division, 8th Air Force. As part of the same exercise - ensuring his exploits were comprehensively recorded and relayed to his real base, MGM - Andrew McIntyre went with him. The pair were relocated to Pueblo, Colorado, to prepare for action in Europe under the command of Colonel William Hatcher: the 351st HBG was nicknamed ‘Hatcher’s Chickens’, which in modern day Hollywood parlance would have a totally different meaning directly in contrast with Clark’s all-important macho image! Clark and McIntyre’s mission would be to chronicle the day-to-day activities of the group and release this as a training film also to be shown between cinema features.

  Effectively, he was given carte blanche with the project, which suggests his rapid promotion through the Air Force ranks had been but honorary. He took liberties assembling his team, which he audaciously named ‘The Little Hollywood Group’. To head his production team he demanded John Lee Mahin, currently assigned to aircraft identification duties with Combat Intelligence, in Mexico. Mahin was one of many who were intent on cracking the Nazi Enigma Code and he was against giving up what he saw as vital work to make what looked like being just another documentary. Hatcher pulled the strings, however, and Mahin was told to fly with Clark to London. Accompanying them, also apparently against their will, were sound technician Howard Voss and cameramen Mario Toti and Robert Boles.

  If Clark was expecting a regal welcome in England, he would be disappointed. As had happened with the OCS, he was initially despised and mistrusted by everyone he came into contact with. London had suffered terribly during the Blitz and thousands of young men were dying at the Front, so the last thing wanted on this side of the Atlantic, where the anti-American motto was, ‘Over-sexed, overpaid and over here!’ was some swaggering Hollywood movie star. Clark may never have stopped reminding everyone that he considered himself no one special, just one of the guys who enjoyed roughing it with the rest of them but each time he did not get his own way, he would become moody and pull celebrity rank. He would always get away with it. It was only when he began putting on displays of bravado and taking risks, as had happened in Miami Beach, that he was shown any respect - though as will be seen, this would be short-lived.

  At the end of April, he was transferred to Polebrook, 80 miles north of London, between Huntingdon and Peterborough, where the 351st HBG would be flying B-17s. Clark got his men on side by offering to ‘design’ the group’s logos for the planes’ fuselages. Actually, he wired MGM’s Cedric Gibbons to send him several designs to choose from, which he passed off as his own work. He also used his celebrity clout to have contraband goods smuggled into the camp - fruit, chocolate and toiletries. Having learned his lesson in London, he asked to be billeted away from the top brass and stayed in the officers’ quarters with John Lee Mahin. Then he spoiled it all by refusing to wear the uniform supplied to him - the one he had stressed during his OCS graduation speech did not matter how it looked - having several made to measure by one of the most expensive tailors in Bond Street.

  Clark’s first aerial mission - supervised by Colonel Hatcher, who went up with him - was almost his last. It took place on 14 May during an attack on Courtrai airfield, in Belgium - against Hatcher’s better judgement, Clark’s way of proving he really was making an effort to fit in. Until now, as had happened back in America, everyone regarded his presence as a publicity stunt. Maybe Clark did have the death wish referred to by Raymond Green. The mission resulted in him being hailed a hero by the British and European press when a German shell pierced the fuselage of the plane, took off the heel of his boot, then ricocheted within an inch of his head.

  From this point on, he really was one of the boys, and for a man reputed to have been tight with his money, did little to stop his colleagues sponging off him. Also, with so many women literally throwing themselves at him, he would pass the ‘spares’ on to his buddies. Formerly ignored, he was invited to join in the fun on leave, accompanying them on charabanc trips to Brighton, Southend and even Blackpool. On one occasion he and a pal rode all the way to the resort on a motorcycle he had bought especially for the occasion. On other leave weekends, Clark hung out with David Niven and his wife, Primula, at their cottage near Windsor. ‘He was caught between two extremes,’ Niven observed, ‘Those who fawned upon him and those who automatically thought he ought to be chopped down.’ Niven also recalled how he was still distraught over losing Carole, how Primula had found him in their garden, hunched over a wheelbarrow, weeping uncontrollably.

  The news of his near-death experience was wired back to Louis B. Mayer, in whose eyes Clark was anything but a hero. As strings had been pulled to get him to Europe, so Mayer would bring him home - dead movie stars, he declared, were no use to anyone. Clark’s response to Howard Strickling - ‘I’m staying put. Tell Mayer to go fuck himself!’ - never reached the mogul, and when he was designated more missions, the Germans put a price on his head. A propagandist tabloid had ‘researched’ the family trees of several major Hollywood stars and determined that ‘Gable’ was a derivation of ‘Goebbels’, a theory which did not sit well with the Nazi Propaganda Minister. When a substantial reward was offered for his capture, Clark confided in David Niven that though his flying missions over Northern Europe terrified him, if push came to shove he would never bale out on account of what Hitler might do to him, should he be captured. ‘That sonofabitch’ll put me in a cage and charge 10 marks a look all over Germany!’ he told Niven. Actually, Hitler is said to have wanted Clark’s ears and overworked genitals in a glass case at the Reichstag!

  The bounty tag proved too much for Clark’s peers - both in the military and back home at MGM. The risks he was persistently taking were too great, not just for him, but for those accompanying him on his flying missions. The fact that in a very short time he had been awarded an Air Medal, a European Campaign Medal and an American Campaign Medal did not impress them. In their eyes he had confused heroism with stupidity: the obsession yet again with asserting his manhood, which had never been questioned in the first place. Clark may have had little or nothing to live for, but his comrades had, and at the end of October, having shot around 50,000 feet of film, the United States War Department summoned him, Mahin and McIntyre to return to Washington, where the farce continued. H.H. Arnold, the man who dispatched Clark to Europe, could not remember why he had done so - and in any case, he responded when Clark enlightened him that the film was no longer required! One of the country’s top directors, William Wyler, had been given a similar commission and had come up with The Memphis Belle, a much more polished production, which had subsequently gone on general release. Therefore, with nothing better for Clark to do, Arnold informed him that he would have to wait until January 1944 before being transferred to the Air Force photography unit at Fort Roach, Culver City, where he and his team would be able to edit the footage which, ostensibly, nobody wanted.

  Few ‘soldiers’ had been awarded quite so many privileges - and promotions - as those heaped upon Clark Gable in a little over a year’s military service. He got away with refusing to work at Culver City, petitioning the man he hated more than any other - Louis B.
Mayer, who halved his pay to $3,750 a week from the day he enlisted - to allow him to work on his project at MGM on full salary. He commuted daily, not from a designated base but from his ranch instead. Mayer renegotiated the contract early in December. The terms were the same: $7,500 a week for 40 weeks of each of the next seven years but a new clause was added to the effect that if Clark so required, he could also be hired to produce or direct his movies. For the aerial film project, Mayer loaned him Blanche Sewell, one of MGM’s most accomplished editors, and John Lee Mahin was retained to write the script. Combat America was panned by the few critics who watched the 60-minute production. It was screened in some cinemas between Gable features, and at the odd war-bonds rally, though within a few months it would be assigned to oblivion whereas William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle still crops up in retrospectives, 60 years on.

  On 15 January 1945 Clark was guest of honour at the launching of the 10,500-ton rescue ship, Carole Lombard, though Louis B. Mayer presided over the ceremony to mark the start of another Hollywood war-bonds campaign. Mayer effected the supreme insult by asking Irene Dunne to perform the christening, and not Clark. Unexpectedly for him, he burst into tears and this public expression of his bottled-up grief gained him considerable respect from some detractors, who were finally seeing him as a flesh-and-blood human being.

  There were now two women in Gable’s life: Virginia Grey, whose relationship with him is still said to have been platonic, and Kay Williams, an MGM contract player 16 years his junior, who he said reminded him of Carole. The characteristics were certainly similar: blonde, petite, witty and suitably filthy-mouthed - like Carole, Kay ‘cursed with class’ and was immediately accepted into her ‘I can say shit because I’m a lady!’ circle by his other lively friend, Tallulah Bankhead. Clark and Kay met the first Christmas after Carole’s death when mutual friends tried but failed to push them together. According to the much-repeated story, Kay passed the Lombard test during their first date when Clark asked her to go upstairs and undress - bringing the tarty response, ‘Why don’t you go shit in your hat?’ Their affair would not amount to much then. Over the next two years she was but one of a half-dozen Gable regulars - but in years to come, she would prove the most important woman in his life after Lombard and Crawford.

  The film project completed and with time on his hands, Clark’s name augmented the rota of the controversial MPA (the more familiar name for the long-winded Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of Ideals Against Fascism and Communism). By the spring of 1944 this was a forerunner for the next decade’s McCarthy witch-hunts, which caused more than its share of unnecessary strife for Hollywood during the last years of the War. The MPA’s dictum was, ‘We refuse to permit the effort of Communist, Fascist and all Totalitarian groups to pervert this powerful medium [the movie industry] into an instrument for the dissemination of un-American ideals’. What it did not promote was any kind of antidote against racism and anti-Semitism by taking on board the likes of Clark, John Wayne and Victor Fleming. Within a month of its formation the MPA was besieged by angry protests from members of the Jewish community - by no means a minority in Hollywood, so much so that the matter was addressed by the Los Angeles Times. MPA chairman James McGuinness counteracted the accusations with a statement far more comprehensible than his organisation’s logo: ‘We are not anti-Semitic in a community where the most active opponents of Communism are the Jewish race.’ Few believed him though his defence was countersigned by Robert Taylor, Ward Bond and Hedda Hopper.

  In May 1944, having done absolutely nothing to earn this, Clark was promoted to Major Gable. In Hollywood, of course, then as now frequently out of touch with the real world, he was fêted for his phoney heroics. However it was a self-hyped bravado brought about by sorrow and self-pity, for with Carole gone and with her the reason for living to his way of thinking during all those aerial missions, death would have come as a merciful release. His rapid scaling of the military ladder proved an acute embarrassment a few weeks later, in the wake of D-Day, when thousands of men gave their lives doing considerably more than filming documentary footage that no one wanted. On 12 June, six days after D-Day, the press were informed in a statement not issued by the War Department, but by MGM, ‘Clark Gable has been relieved from active duty by his own request’. This was pure fabrication. If he had enlisted with the Air Force, according to the original statement, ‘For the duration of the war, plus six months’, then he would not have been permitted to request discharge now unless for health reasons. A more likely theory is that Louis B. Mayer had worked behind the scenes to get him discharged - worried about his investment. Having been rushed through 45 films in 11 years, Clark had not faced a movie camera in the last two, and there was the possibility that his popularity might have been on the wane, threatened by any number of new kids on the block.

  MGM, not wishing such information to be divulged to the press, organised a number of ‘welcome home’ parties - the most important being in Washington, where Clark presented his edited aerial training film to the Pentagon. This was also broadcast to a largely uninterested audience at New York’s famous Stork Club, where the man of the moment, having been introduced to wealthy socialite Dolly O’Brien, eschewed the showing to whisk her back to his hotel suite!

  At 50, Countess (through another marriage) Dolly Hyman Hemingway Fleischmann O’Brien Dorellis was six years Clark’s senior and their affair was almost a repetition of what happened after Ria. His self-confidence had taken a battering in the wake of Carole’s death and the European farce, so he needed a more forceful woman to get him back on track. Dolly was, like Carole and Kay Williams, blonde and witty - though in photographs taken at the time, she wears so much make-up that at times she resembles a drag queen. The daughter of a Philadelphia insurance man, her claim to fame had been her divorce from yeast tycoon Julius Fleischmann. This brought a $5 million settlement, though had she waited a little longer she would have received $66 million following his fatal fall from a polo pony.

  Neither was Dolly particularly interested in Gable, the man. She had always been heavily into toy-boys, but liked to add big-name notches to her bedpost to increase her social standing. Clark believed she was sufficiently smitten to think of their setting up home together, but the nearest they got to this was when he spent two weeks at her Palm Beach villa that December. He returned to Elcino for the festive season to divide his time between Kay Williams and Virginia Grey.

  It was then back to work. In the United States, as in Britain, the War effected drastic changes within the movie industry. Former top-liners Garbo, Shearer, Flynn, Crawford, Dietrich, MacDonald and Eddy - and on the other side of the Atlantic, Gracie Fields and George Formby - had seen a slump in their careers, though most would soon return to fight for their crowns. The public were currently clamouring for the ‘stars of tomorrow’, some of whom were already established: Elizabeth Taylor, David Niven, James Mason, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Stewart Granger, Van Johnson, Greer Garson, and the ubiquitous Lana Turner. Louis B. Mayer, for all his efforts to get Clark out of the military and back onto the lot, did not know what to do with him now. At 44 he was considered too old for a credible romantic lead and not yet suitable for the fatherly and avuncular roles in which the likes of Lionel Barrymore excelled.

  Since that fateful night in January 1942, Clark had substantially increased his liquor consumption. He was also addicted to Dexedrine, a weight-loss drug he had begun taking since returning from England, where he had piled on the pounds on account of the stodgy Air Force diet. This reacted badly with the alcohol, causing him to have the shakes and making close-ups frequently impossible. Neither was he happy with the series of radio dramas lined up by his agent, Phil Berg - at $7,500 a shot, the idea being that being heard but not seen might help him with his nerves. He taped just one before throwing in the towel, playing a submarine commander in Take Her Down.

  Meanwhile, there was a world outside of his movie career. Like Errol Flynn, who had founded the FFF (Flyn
n’s Flying Fuckers) - an adventure group comprising male friends who shared his passion for sex, sailing and drinking - Clark and his director buddy Howard Hawks formed the Morago Spit & Polish Club. This was mostly a middle-aged, racist, anti-Semitic motorcycle gang which convened most weekends at Hawks’ house on Morago Drive, and who would drive out to the Mojave Desert in search of their lost youth, eager to prove themselves as adept on two wheels as the speed-freak younger generation. The gang members included actors Andy Devine, Ward Bond and Keenan Wynn, besides Victor Fleming and several hunting friends.

  For the second time, Louis B. Mayer issued Clark with a warning to stay off motorcycles, but it was his Duesenberg that got him in trouble. On 24 March 1945, on his way home from a party celebrating the US capture of Iwo Jima - drunk and quite possibly driving on the wrong side of the road - Clark crashed into a tree in the middle of a traffic roundabout on Sunset Boulevard and Bristol Avenue. Luckily for him it was around four in the morning and there were no witnesses, so how he arrived at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital remains a mystery.

  The hospital had its own network of well-paid spies lurking to report back to the press on the latest celebrity indiscretion, so MGM chief of police Whitey Hendry stepped in to prevent the inevitable headlines. The story was put out that Clark, who had not touched so much as a drop of liquor all evening, had been driving on his side of the road when he swerved to avoid a drunk-driver speeding towards him on the same side. How Hendry came to the conclusion that the other driver had been drunk, when he had not stopped was of course immaterial. And was it not a coincidence that Clark had crashed not into the roundabout, in Hendry’s version of events, but into the front garden of talent scout Harry Friedman?

  Clark was forcibly subjected to a brief drying-out period before beginning work on Adventure, originally commissioned for former child star Freddie Bartholomew, now 21 and just returned from serving with the Air Force as a real fighter pilot. Bartholomew was to have played the son of the lead characters (Clark and Greer Garson), but dropped out of the production, disapproving of Clark’s ersatz heroics overseas. Though Clark got along famously with his other co-star, 36-year-old Joan Blondell, he took an instant dislike to Greer Garson, accusing her of being sour-faced and devoid of a sense of humour. The cause for this dissension was due to Garson’s lack of amorous interest in him - and Clark’s aversion to Louis B. Mayer’s slogan for the film: ‘Gable’s Back And Garson’s Got Him!’ Additionally, Garson (1903-96) was a favourite of William Wyler, who had directed her in Mrs Miniver, one of the most successful films of the war years - and Wyler had of course gazumped him with the aerial gunner documentary. She had also appeared in Goodbye Mr Chips with Ronald Colman, who had walked off with the Oscar Clark believed he should have received for Gone With The Wind.