Clark Gable

by David Bret

  Acting-wise, Van Fleet was superior to everyone, Clark included, in The King And Four Queens. When it was brought to his attention that some of the critics who had seen the rushes were forecasting she had every chance of being Oscar-nominated, he decided to do something about it. Contractually permitted the last say over editing, he had Van Fleet’s most powerful scenes cut from the finished print. The critics exacted their revenge by slating his performance. Time dismissed the film as ‘a tawdry Western’, while Bosley Crowther of the New York Times mocked Clark’s former status by writing it off as ‘a dreary comedown for Hollywood royalty’. Soon after its release, the Russ-Field Gabco partnership was dissolved.

  It was out of the frying pan and into the fire so far as Clark’s next venture was concerned. Warner Brothers assigned him to Band Of Angels, a Civil War drama filmed on location in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with Raoul Walsh at the helm for the third and last time. Jack Warner boasted this would be Clark’s finest film since Gone With The Wind and confidently hired Max Steiner to write the score. The production was also hastily assembled to compete against MGM’s $6 million civil war epic, Raintree County, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, scheduled for release at the end of the year.

  In fact, many consider this to be the worst film Gable ever made. He played plantation owner and former slave-trader Hamish Bond, who rescues octoroon (one-eighth Negro blood) slave Amantha Starr, and against convention falls in love with her. Clark wanted the part to be given to an unspecified black actress, but, where Raoul Walsh and Jack Warner were concerned, interacial relationships were still deemed undesirable, so it went to Yvonne de Carlo. The film was rush-released several months ahead of Raintree County - and bombed spectacularly. ‘Here is a movie so bad that it has to be seen to be disbelieved,’ observed Newsweek.

  In June 1956, Kay Gable suddenly fell ill and doctors at the Cedars of Lebanon diagnosed angina pectoris. This kept her out of action until the October, though even then she was still not well enough to accompany Clark to the première of Giant, at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Incredibly (if not ridiculously), during the early stages of production director George Stevens had considered casting Clark in the central role of Texan millionaire Bick Benedict, eventually played by Rock Hudson, 24 years his junior. Clark was filmed escorting Joan Crawford into the theatre and once more the hacks began speculating. Joan had married Pepsi-Cola chairman Alfred Steele in May 1955, who would later be revealed as the great love of her life after Gable - but she and Clark had never stopped having feelings for one another. Neither went home to their respective partners that night.

  Chapter Ten

  SAFE IN THE ARMS OF MA

  Clark’s next film would prove his best since Mogambo, an exercise in casting caution to the wind by teaming Hollywood’s former romantic hero and still loveable lecher with its perennial virgin, Doris Day. Paramount’s Teacher’s Pet, produced by William Perlberg and George Seaton, and directed by the latter was scripted by husband and wife team Michael and Fay Kanin, who had written Woman Of The Year (1941) for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. It was a gentle sex-comedy, a precursor to the trilogy Doris later made with Rock Hudson. The format is almost the same: Clark the worldly cad assumes another identity to seduce the gullible Doris, who finds him at first reprehensible, then starts to fall in love with him so that by the time his true identity is revealed, she is willing to forgive him anything. There is also the stooge who provides the protagonists with a friendly shoulder to lean upon. In the Day-Hudson films this would be Tony Randall, here it is Gig Young, who was subsequently nominated for an Oscar.

  The idea worked well. Clark and Doris were perfectly matched - she getting laughs with her dotty antics, he for his quirky facial expressions and quick-fire delivery. The film was a smash hit, leaving fans of both stars clamouring for more. Clark (for the first and last time in his career) even agreed to plug it at that year’s Oscars’ ceremony, broadcast live on television in March. He and Doris had been asked to present the award for Best Scriptwriter. The title-track, written by Roy Webb and Joe Lubin and recorded by Doris, stormed into the American charts.

  Far from looking ropy as in his last few films, though this was shot in monochrome to reduce the risk, Clark comes across as cosy and affable as the roguish Jim Gannon, the editor of the New York Chronicle, whose tough exterior is not completely impenetrable. He adopts a fatherly attitude towards errand boy-cub reporter Barney Kovac (Nick Adams), allowing the boy to write the occasional piece that he guides him through in his spare time. Yet, like any caring father, Jim agrees with the boy’s mother that he needs an education, respecting her request to fire him because he knows this is for the best.

  Such is Jim’s reputation for fairness and for writing good stories that Erica Stone (Doris Day), the eminent lecturer in journalism, wants him as guest speaker at one of her university classes. The two have never met, and he is very much against the idea - not only does he dislike female teachers, he firmly believes the journalist can only learn his trade through experience, not books. He sends her a letter explaining in no uncertain terms why he finds such lessons a waste of time. When his boss orders him to go, he assumes the guise of Jim Gallagher, feigning that the only knowledge he has of the trade comes from a reporter friend with whom he plays poker on weekends.

  Upon seeing how pretty she is, Jim falls for Erica and repeats what his ‘friend’ told him: ‘He said you’d be a frustrated old biddy who’d read all the text books and never written a line - how someone like that’s like betting on a three-legged horse!’ Then he squirms when she reads out his letter to her students. Erica gives him his first assignment. He pens a piece about a street killing, purloined from another reporter, which impresses and moves her - the best work any student has ever handed in, she says, and compares what he has written with a recent newspaper headline: ‘BLOOD-CRAZED SEX MANIAC STRIKES AGAIN’ the kind of reporting she hates:

  ERICA: Journalism is so much more then blood and sex . . .

  JIM: You liked my story about that murder. That’s blood, isn’t it?

  ERICA: Now, wait a minute. I didn’t say that I disapproved of blood. It’s just that . . .

  JIM: How do you feel about sex?

  ERICA: Why, I’m all for it” I [shocked by what she has said] . . . Goodbye, Mr Gallagher!

  Jim is hooked, and unable to concentrate on his work. When he should be jotting down notes, he is doodling her picture on his pad. Then jealousy raises its head when he hears Erica talking on the phone to a mysterious Dr Hugo Pine (Gig Young) and learns that these two have been spending a lot of time together. Confident he has more to offer her than the (he assumes) boring, elderly academic, he grabs her and kisses her so passionately that her knees buckle - exactly how Doris Day is said to have reacted when kissed for the first time by Clark Gable.

  Cut to the Bongo Club, where Jim is with his bimbo girlfriend, Peggy (Mamie Van Doren), the resident chanteuse and poor man’s Mae West, whose novelty number, ‘The Girl Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll’, doesn’t match up to the hype it received at the time. Erica is also here with Pine, and because he is youngish and good-looking, Jim realises he has competition: the pair spike each other’s drinks but become friends when Jim learns that Pine is only collaborating with Erica on a book. The scene where Gig Young and Clark are fixing drinks is, however, sad, and would have benefited a retake: Clark is clearly suffering from the shakes, slopping his drink and dropping the ice.

  Now that the way is open for him to pursue her, Jim tells Pine of the effect Erica has had on him: ‘Before, I had contempt for eggheads like her. I was an obstinate, prejudiced, inconsiderate, wholehearted louse, but at least I was something. Now that I’ve come to respect your kind I’m just a big, understanding, remorseful slob - a complete zero!’ There is, however, a temporary rupture in their relationship when Erica visits the newspaper office and finds out who Jim really is. He, likewise, has discovered that her father was a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman, though th
is does not prevent him from opining that Mr Stone’s kind of old-fashioned, non-commercial journalism stinks! Later, Erica goes through some of her father’s features and realises Jim was right. The film ends, maybe a little disappointingly, not with them in each other’s arms, but with Jim agreeing to guest lecture to Erica’s students, which is what she wanted in the first place.

  There are said to have been on-set problems between Doris Day and Mamie Van Doren, and between Clark and Nick Adams. Van Doren, probably peeved that Doris’s reprisal of her ‘showstopper number’ in Teacher’s Pet (while she and Clark are in Erica’s apartment) was considerably better and sexier than hers, later claimed that Doris behaved unpleasantly towards her on the set. This is hard to believe: when one reads contemporary reports of the goings-on at Day’s other films, particularly her trilogy with Rock Hudson, one wonders how the cameraman managed to shoot a frame without cracking up on account of the hilarity and practical jokes. ‘Doris failed in take after take to smile radiantly while watching me dance,’ Van Doren bellyached to Doris’s biographer, Eric Braun, obviously very sure of herself and missing the point completely - the fact that in the film the two women are supposed to be rivals for Jim Gannon’s affections.

  The dilemma with Nick Adams - or rather Clark’s reluctance to work with him - stemmed from Gable’s homophobia, and the young actor’s position among Hollywood’s so-called ‘open-secret’ closeted gay community - the fact that Adams appeared to be aware of all its murky secrets, past and present. Nick Adams (1931-68) had been James Dean’s last lover, and after his death had an affair with Elvis Presley which ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, Elvis’s cash-obsessed manager shelled out a fortune to prevent being revealed in a Confidential exposé. Boastful, predatory and promiscuous, Adams supplied Dean lookalike male whores to big-name actors, Hollywood businessmen and studio personnel - including some of those working on Teacher’s Pet, and he was also involved with one of the actors in the cast. Clark was terrified that Adams, who knew William Haines, might have been filled in about his gay past. Though it does not show in their scenes together, away from the set he was so nasty to Adams that the younger actor wanted to leave the production.

  Doris Day, though almost certainly she would not have been told the real reason for this, was asked to persuade him to stay. Soon afterwards, she invited Adams to join the cast of Pillow Talk, the first of her films with Rock Hudson. He also made Come September with Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. In February 1968, having become a household name by way of the TV series, Saints And Sinners, Nick Adams was found dead of a drugs overdose - and Elvis Presley would suffer a nervous breakdown.

  Teacher’s Pet was made back-to-back with Run Silent, Run Deep, generally regarded as the best submarine movie ever made. It was promoted by United Artists as a cross between Mutiny On The Bounty - on account of the fierce rivalry between the two major characters - and Moby Dick, because of the Gable character’s paranoid obsession with tracking down the Japanese destroyer which sank the last submarine he commanded. The film was the brainchild of established Hollywood beefcake star Burt Lancaster (1913-94). Clark played Richardson, the commander and sole survivor of a World War II submarine in the dreaded Bongo Straits by a Japanese Akikaze destroyer. Such is his desire to blow this to bits that when he gets his next commission aboard the Nerka, he drills his men, Bligh-style, risking all their lives to return to the Straits, against the orders of his superiors, to pursue his quarry. Lancaster is his lieutenant, Bledsoe, who feels that he should have been put in charge of the craft, yet after almost inciting the crew towards mutiny he becomes just as preoccupied with sinking the destroyer as Richardson.

  This change of attitude, however, was not in Edward Beach’s original story: he and scriptwriter John Gay were all for Bledsoe seizing control of the submarine, but Clark protested that the critics, confusing the actor with the part, would interpret this as a sign of his own weakness. ‘Washed-up’ or not, Gable would never accept himself as anything less than the übermensch hero, so the scriptwriter provided him with a terminal illness which, as this worsens, compels him to allow Bledsoe to take over - but only under his personal supervision.

  Though the interiors were filmed aboard real submarines on a Universal backlot, the ocean and aerial locations were shot at the same San Diego US Navy base where Clark had made Hell Divers. Fireworks were anticipated between Gable and Burt Lancaster, another actor with a king-sized ego - and, complicating matters, one third of the Hecht-Hill-Lancaster production company (with Harold Hecht and James Hill), who were financing the project. In fact, the two got along remarkably well. Lancaster had always looked up to Clark, and despite being advised that the ageing star was probably past his best, disagreed to the tune of the $500,000 he offered him to do the film - and to insist that Clark’s name appear above his in the credits. Also, it was only the third Gable film (the others being The White Sister and Parnell) where fans got to watch him die at the end - surviving just long enough to give the final command to sink his enemy.

  In the June, 22-year-old Judy Lewis married television director Joseph Tinney, at the Roman Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd - having just learned who her father really was. Speaking on the BBC’s Living Famously, she explained how, two weeks before the ceremony, she had almost called the whole thing off: ‘I told my fiancé, “I can’t marry you because I don’t know who I am!”’ She added how Tinney had known the truth all along (though she did not say how he had known), and that her priest had advised her against confronting Loretta, declaring she would never open up. She did, but not until 1966. ‘Total strangers knew the story,’ Judy concluded, ‘I was the only one who didn’t.’ As a matter of courtesy, Clark and Kay were invited to the wedding, but declined. He did not even send his daughter a card.

  Meanwhile, on the strength of Teacher’s Pet, he was offered another Perlberg-Seaton comedy, But Not For Me - directed by Walter Lang, the husband of Carole’s best friend, Fieldsie. The two men had fallen out over some trifle soon after Carole’s death, and the film (a remake of Accent On Youth, a hit for Sylvia Sidney in 1935), is supposed to have been Lang offering Clark a long overdue olive branch. His co-stars were Lilli Palmer, Lee J. Cobb - and 27-year-old Carroll Baker, who a few years earlier had shocked Middle America with her portrayal of the mentally retarded teenage sex kitten in Lolita. The story was a familiar one: a middle-aged man (Clark) ditches his wife (Palmer) for a younger model (Baker), then realises the error of his ways and goes back to her. The critics made much of the age gap between the two stars. Life magazine was generous in describing Clark as ‘still the indestructible all-round charmer, even at fifty-seven’ - others were not so sensitive when reminding readers of his double chin, sagging jowls, lived in face and paunch.

  When shooting wrapped, Gable took a well-earned break: he and Kay spent several weeks in Palm Springs, mostly at the Bermuda Dunes Golf Club. They so fell in love with the area that they bought a house nearby, and again there was talk of selling the ranch. But it was only talk: as much as he loved and doted on Kay, Clark was not yet ready to let go of Carole’s spirit. It is now known that he suffered a mild heart attack while golfing at the Bermuda Dunes - almost certainly not his first - and that it was dismissed by himself and Kay as nothing more serious than heartburn. The doctors who treated him, not for the first time, warned him to lay off the cigarettes and booze, and to take things easy for a while. As usual, Clark pleased himself. He had just been contracted to play opposite a sex goddess even younger and more voluptuous than Carroll Baker - 24-year-old Italian beauty, Sophia Loren.

  It Happened In Naples had originally been scripted for British star Gracie Fields, then the Isle of Capri’s most celebrated resident. For several years, visitors to her Canzone del Mare complex, who stopped off at Naples to catch the boat across to the island, had complained of being pestered by the scugnizzi - the local name for the city’s astonishing 50,000 homeless children under the age of 16. Translated literally as ‘spinning tops’ on account of the way the
y operated, these were little more than a decidedly rough army of thugs, thieves, rent-boys and con-merchants. Gracie, along with a local priest, had come to the conclusion that all they needed was somewhere comfortable to sleep and food in their bellies: the two had opened several refuges. As such the film’s producer, Jack Rose, and writer-director Mel Shavelson had created especially for Gracie the role of the eccentric, middle-aged Englishwoman who befriends one of these unfortunate urchins. She, however, had turned it down, claiming the scugnizzi needed helping, not exploiting. Shavelson therefore changed the gender and nationality of the part, and offered it to Clark.

  Even so, the film was fashioned more around Sophia Loren than him. Born Sofia Scicolone in Rome in 1934, but raised near Naples, this illegitimate daughter of an aspiring actress and a Neapolitan peasant had, after several bit-parts, played the lead in Aida in 1953, with her voice dubbed by Renata Tebaldi. Her big break had come the following year in Vittorio De Sica’s L’Oro di Napoli. Five years on, back on home turf, Loren insisted on surrounding herself with as many old colleagues as possible - extras, bit-parts, technicians and De Sica himself - to thank them for helping her back then. Besides Clark, the only non-Italians involved with the production in a major capacity were Jack Rose, Mel Shavelson, and cameraman Robert Surtees, who had worked on Mogambo and recently completed Ben Hur.