Clark Gable

by David Bret

  His agent, George Chasin, had flown to London at the studio’s expense to personally hand him the script for the new film - and to inform him that, because of recent low box-office receipts, MGM were no longer interested in negotiating the new long-term contract they had discussed with him back in the States. As a compromise, Chasin added, the studio were willing to extend his current contract by two years. Clark refused to discuss the matter, and his stubbornness was interpreted - and welcomed - by Dore Schary as tantamount to him handing in his notice.

  The locations for Betrayed were filmed in Amsterdam and Arnhem, and much was made of the fact that this was the first ever all-American production to be made in the country - though most of the supports were British. Directed by Gottfried Reinhardt, it was photographed by Freddie Young, who used the new Eastmancolor process to emulate the dark hues favoured by the Dutch masters. As such, it is a grim, pretty depressing affair. Set during the Nazi occupation, Clark played a Dutch intelligence officer and Lana dyed her hair dark to appear more convincing - according to the publicity - as a spy. Newsweek summed it up perfectly as ‘a clumsy, overslow piece of melodrama’.

  In the December, Clark returned to Hollywood, $500,000 richer, but unsure of his future, regretting his attitude towards MGM over his contract, but too proud to meet up with Dore Schary with a view to resolving the matter. He had ‘compared notes’ with old (and still occasionally burning) flame Joan Crawford, whose massively successful 16-year partnership with MGM had ended acrimoniously with her marching into Louis B. Mayer’s office in June 1943 and announcing that she had had enough. Privately, she had hoped that Mayer might plead with her to stay and offer her a better deal with the studio than the one she already had, but he had called her bluff and demanded $50,000 to release her from her contract! Clark therefore knew that he would only be wasting his time talking to Schary, who was far more pig-headed than Mayer had ever been. Like Joan he left quietly, collecting his belongings from his dressing room, shaking a few hands and driving literally into the sunset to demolish a bottle of Scotch.

  Reading some of the grossly exaggerated reports of his exit from MGM, one visualises the penultimate scene in Queen Christina. Following her abdication (a few years before Garbo’s own departure), the much-loved Swedish monarch weaves her way through her tearful courtiers, who plead with her to stay and touch her gown as if it is some holy relic. There were no tears when Gable walked out of MGM for the last time, simply because no one knew he was leaving until he had passed through the front gates. Neither were the press entirely sympathetic. Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper would never forgive Clark for not giving them an indication - not to mention an exclusive - of his plans. Ben Maddox was no longer interested in speaking to him because at a press gathering Clark cracked one ‘fag’ joke too many. Indeed, Maddox had been approached with a view to writing a piece for Confidential, who offered him a huge fee in exchange for a story that might have involved any one of the scores of actors and actresses he had serviced ‘in the line of duty’. He had chivalrously declined the offer and it was therefore left to arch-enemy Dorothy Manners, who had had an axe to grind since Clark had threatened to punch her, to let the world know that he had been fired. This was not because his last few films had bombed but simply because he had gotten too big for his boots. According to Dore Schary, he was unworthy of the $500,000-plus MGM had been paying him, too.

  Howard Strickilng, who would remain a close friend until the end, defended Clark vociferously: Gable was the most popular star MGM had ever had on their roster and everyone had adored him, from the executives down. This was what Strickling believed - but he had left out the most powerful executive of them all, Dore Schary. Ironically, had Schary waited a little longer - until after Mogambo’s release - things might have been different. The film opened to rave reviews and was a huge hit around the world. Offers of work flooded in from every major studio now that Clark was freelancing, offering massive fees, but he rejected them all. He needed to relax, he said, with the new woman in his life - or rather an old flame with whom he had recently become reacquainted, Betty Chisolm. A widow, another Lombard lookalike, and the extremely wealthy heiress to the Jones Meat-packing Company, she first met Clark in 1947 when he had been ‘juggle-dating’ with Anita Colby, Virginia Grey, Kay Williams and a few others.

  There also appears to have been a fling with Grace Kelly, who had rejected Clark’s advances before. They met again at the 1954 Oscars ceremony, where Grace had been nominated Best Supporting Actress for Mogambo - she lost to Donna Reed for From Here To Eternity (one of the film’s eight awards), for which Frank Sinatra won Best Supporting Actor for his comeback role. Ava Gardner, nominated for Best Actress for Mogambo, lost out to Audrey Hepburn, who won for Roman Holiday.

  A few days after the ceremony, Grace turned up at the Elcino ranch and presented Clark with a burro (a tiny Mexican packhorse) and it was his trysts with her that encouraged him in his latest eccentricity - emulating his white hunter character in their film. He bought a jeep, which he customised with zebra-skin seats and big-game hunting stickers. For weeks he drove around in full safari-suit and pith helmet, rifle across the dashboard, until reporters began hinting he may have been slightly mad. He even wore the get-up when summoned to script meetings, the first of which was with MGM editor Sam Marx - sent by Dore Schary to woo him back to the studio, only weeks after giving him his marching orders. Clark pretended to be interested in a project yet to be revealed, getting Schary to keep upping his fee - then telling him to shove his offer ‘up his ass’.

  It was Twentieth Century-Fox’s Darryl F. Zannuck who eventually coaxed Clark out of ‘retirement’, assigning him to two films: Soldier Of Fortune and The Tall Men. The money was more than he had ever dreamed of earning with MGM - $400,000 per film, plus 10 per cent of the gross. For the first time in his career, he would be a millionaire. In the meantime, he decided to sort out his complicated love life. Betty Chisolm and Dolly O’Brien were, he declared, good pals who kept him company on outdoor jaunts, and fine for the odd tumble in the sack. What he really needed, he said, was the kind of stability he had had with Carole. Many of his friends were taking bets that the next Mrs Gable would be Grace Kelly, with Betty Chisolm sitting on the reserve bench. But Clark surprised everyone by announcing that his next wife would be another blast from the past.

  Like himself Kay Williams was no shrinking violet. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in August 1916, she had married a local college student and the pair had relocated to New York, where she had worked for a while as a photographic model. Courtesy of a magazine photospread, she had met the Argentinian playboy millionaire, Martin de Alzaga Unzue, more familiarly known as Macoco. Kay divorced her husband, wed Macoco and the marriage had lasted all of 10 days. Next, she latched on to sugar tycoon Adolph Spreckels - often referred to as Adolph Hitler on account of his Nazi tendencies and psychotic streak.

  Kay had married Spreckels in 1945, despite being warned by friends that he was a thoroughly bad lot. His first four wives all divorced him because he had bashed them senseless. A dancer with whom he had had a fling sued him for maiming her during a drunken rage, then trying to set her alight! His sixth wife (the one after Kay) would put up with him for a month, then have him arrested for breaking both her arms. Even after their divorce, Kay would not be safe from this obnoxious beast: during an argument over custody of their children, he kicked her unconscious and for his pains received a 30-day prison sentence. Few would be surprised when he came to a sticky end, in 1961, of a brain haemorrhage sustained by an unexplained blow to the head.

  Already wealthy following the Unzue settlement, divorcing Spreckels in 1953 had left Kay $700,000 richer, with properties in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Her children with Spreckels - 3-year-old Joan and 5-year-old Adolph Jr, nicknamed Bunker after the location of Hitler’s suicide - had each been set up with a $1 million trust fund by Spreckels’ mother to make up for the harm her son had inflicted on Kay. At their divorce hearing, Kay testified t
hat she had hardly ever seen her husband sober during the first three years of their marriage - that he frequently punished her by beating her with his shoe and once had come at her with an axe.

  This second time around, to make her more his own, Clark addressed her only as Kathleen. The couple were inseparable until November 1954, when he flew to the Far East to make Soldier Of Fortune, a film almost doomed by way of the very manner in which it was assembled. Clark played Mike Lee, an exiled American trickster who smuggles counterfeit goods out of China into British-ruled Hong Kong. His co-star was Susan Hayward, recently divorced and the mother of 9-year-old twin boys she wanted to take with her on location. Fearing he might never see his sons again, her ex-husband obtained a court order preventing this, so Hayward felt she had no choice but to stay in Hollywood. Therefore all of her Hong Kong scenes were shot with a double, and the critics, weary of trying to work out who was who in the rear/disguise shots, gave the production a thumbs-down.

  The Tall Men, with Jane Russell, fared little better. Directed by Raoul Walsh, this told of the rivalry between two cowpokes, Clark and Robert Ryan, on the Texas-Montana cattle drive (but filmed in Mexico). Naturally, Russell is the trophy they fight over, and there were no prizes for guessing whom she ended up with.

  No sooner had Clark and Kay announced their marriage plans than, courtesy of an ‘exclusive’ in Confidential magazine, Josephine Dillon re-entered the Gable arena. The most feared scandal-rag of its day - selling upwards of 4 million copies per issue and with its motto, ‘Tells The Truth And Names The Names’ on the cover beneath the title, it had been launched by Robert Harrison in 1952. Its purpose, according to him, was to explore the nucleus of America’s so-called den of iniquity - Hollywood - and flush out its corruption, though few were more corrupt than Harrison himself.

  The gullible American public lapped up every word. While the more orthodox tittle-tattlers Hopper, Parsons and Maxwell checked the authenticity of their stories before publishing Harrison and his team employed devious methods to obtain their ‘exclusives’. Whores of both sexes were paid to coerce stars into compromising positions, while a tiny machine, concealed in the bedroom, whirred away recording the evidence. For ‘special’ cases such as Elvis Presley and Rock Hudson (homosexuality), Lana Turner (sharing lovers) and Errol Flynn (two-way mirrors) Harrison supplied his ‘detectives’ with tiny, sophisticated infra-red cameras. ‘We all read it,’ Marlene Dietrich told me. ‘Not because it was any good - it was rubbish, worse even than some of the garbage you get on newsstands nowadays - but to find out if we were in it. Sometimes you never got an inkling until it was too late.’

  In its July 1955 issue, Confidential ran the headline, ‘The Wife Clark Gable Forgot’. He appeared on the cover looking every inch the movie star - next to his picture was a shot of a downtrodden Josephine Dillon. Robert Harrison had forked out $3,000 for a tour of her home, a run-down two-roomed house in North Hollywood. The accompanying feature did not specify the location, though it did print Clark’s address for the benefit of those fans and reporters who had not pestered him thus far. The gist of the piece was to inform the world how mercenary he had become since finding fame, courtesy of this unfortunate woman. What it did not add was that he had bought the property for Dillon some years before, was also paying for its upkeep, but that Dillon had deliberately allowed the place to fall into a state of disrepair in the hope of shaming him some day.

  Clark’s agent, George Chasin, advised him to sue the magazine, but he was forced to adopt the same stance of many of Harrison’s other victims. Though most of his exclusives were hugely, if not entirely fabricated, Clark knew there was always the danger that Harrison or one of his cronies might some day hit the jackpot. He, along with Rock Hudson, James Dean, and a good many others were terrified of their gay affairs being made public. Therefore he allowed Dillon to have her say, in the hope that Harrison would leave him alone and pick on someone else.

  In fact, the double-dealing Harrison had no intention of running an exposé on any suspected homosexual star. Ben Maddox, along with the actor who was living with Rock Hudson, were at the same time as Josephine Dillon offered large amounts of money for their stories, but only so that Harrison could inform the studios and entice them into paying him even more not to publish. It was all very well, he knew, to run detailed stories about thieves, gangsters, bluebeards and stars who were promiscuous with members of the opposite sex, but homosexuals were part of an alien group of individuals whose activities were taboo. Seven years after the Kinsey Report revealed that one in ten American men actually enjoyed having sex with other men and concluded that this should not be considered abnormal, few of even Confidential’s liberated regulars would have wanted to acknowledge their existence by reading about them.

  James Dean played Harrison at his own game, announcing to all and sundry, ‘I’ve had my cock sucked by five of the biggest names in Hollywood, all of them guys!’ And within weeks of being menaced by the magazine, both Clark and Rock Hudson would marry, though Clark does not appear to have rushed into matrimony for any other reason than he was in love. Robert Harrison would get his comeuppance in 1957, in the so-called ‘Trial of 100 Stars’ spearheaded by Dorothy Dandridge and Liberace. Collectively they would sue him out of business, though by then Clark would be past caring what the scandalmongers had to say about him.

  Clark and Kay were married in Minden, Nevada, on 11 July 1955: Al Menasco and Kay’s sister, Elizabeth, were witnesses. The honeymoon took place at Menasco’s estate in California’s Napa Valley. Then began the process of Kay attempting to compromise while fitting into Clark’s home environment. Behind her was Carole’s ghost, the yardstick against which every subsequent woman in his life had been measured. Carole’s foibles and imperfections had died with her, and it was a case of would-be successors contenting themselves with walking in the shadow of her sun. Then there was the danger of treading on eggshells, trying not to make the same mistakes as the dreaded Sylvia. ‘When I married that one, I must have been pissed out of my head,’ Clark told a British reporter, adding that within a week of Sylvia’s departure, Carole’s room had been restored to its former shrine.

  Kay reminded Clark of Carole, physically, and on account of her lively spirit and colourful vocabulary. She also occasionally called him ‘Pa’, but that is as far as it went. When they married, he volunteered to sell the ranch so that she would not be constantly reminded of her predecessor. She refused to let him do this, demanding just one concession: she asked that Carole’s gun collection be taken off display and that Clark’s gun-room be kept locked so that the children would not get their hands on them.

  Changes were effected to both of their lives. There were fewer parties at Elcino and social outings were restricted to official showbusiness or studio events. They never stayed out late, protesting they had to get back to the family. And Clark, whose libido had remained sky-high since he learned what it was for, told friends that from now on he would never look at another woman. This he would find impossible, of course. Some outsiders regarded the revised existence as a little too idyllic. In an interview with The American Weekly, Kay described a typical day in the life of the Gables to a gullible young female reporter. The family always rose early, she said, and once the children had been collected for school, Clark would disappear outside to help his groundsmen with whatever manual tasks were scheduled for that day - even the toughest jobs were not a problem for him. Lunch would be eaten next to the pool, and in the afternoon Clark and his agent would discuss business matters while she worked her way through the house re-arranging the flowers. Later, they would sip cocktails while watching the children eat their dinner, and afterwards Kay would pick up her needlepoint and maybe embroider some meaningful little motif on her husband’s favourite slippers. Sometimes the whole family would gather around the colour television - or play bingo. On special occasions, Clark would set up the projector and they would watch one of his old movies: he had copies of them all except for Gone With The W
ind. Then, when the children had been put to bed, they would drink champagne until the early hours and reminisce over times long gone.

  In September 1955, the press reported that Kay was pregnant - some hinting that conception had taken place before her marriage, which was true. Yet no sooner had Hedda, Louella et al. begun sharpening their claws for the attack than Kay was hospitalised with a viral infection which caused her to miscarry. To help her recover, Clark took her on an extended cruise, then embarked on his next project. Tired, he said, of accepting second-rate scripts that were guaranteed to end up as box-office flops, he formed his own production company, Russ-Field Gabco, with Jane Russell and her husband Bob Waterfield.

  Russell and Waterfield had acquired the rights to Margaret Fitt’s Western story, The Last Man In Wagon Round. This was deemed an unsuitable title for a Gable film, so as a tribute to Clark’s standing in the Hollywood community it was changed to the even less appropriate The King And Four Queens. Cynics in the know might have thought this alluded to the Haines-LaRocque-Brown-Maddox episodes in his life that he was desperately trying to forget, particularly with Confidential reporters snooping around the set.

  The ‘queens’ of course were a quartet of attractive females: Jean Willes, Barbara Nichols, Sara Shane and Eleanor Parker. These are the only inhabitants, along with their stalwart mother-in-law, in a ghost town where a stash of gold is hidden by the four bandit brothers they were married to and now believed to be dead. Only one of the ladies knows the exact location, and as Clark is after the gold he seduces them one by one until he gets his answer - then he marries Eleanor Parker and we are led to believe they live happily ever after.

  Clark was disappointed when Jane Russell declined to play the feisty matriarch, offering the role to Jo Van Fleet - the previous year, in her first screen role (aged just 35), she had portrayed James Dean’s mother in East Of Eden and won an Oscar. Jimmy visited her on the set, taking time off from Giant, which he was filming with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. Then, on Saturday 1 October, director Raoul Walsh sent everyone home early and production closed down for the day: news had come in of 24-year-old Jimmy’s death, the previous evening in a car crash near Salinas.