Clark Gable

by David Bret

  It was here that Billy met 23-year-old Earle Larimore, an aspiring actor who worked at the store by day and with the Portland Red Lantern Players by night. Larimore was a good-looking, loquacious young man who developed a crush on the rough-and-ready Billy. His attraction was almost certainly reciprocated when Billy hit on the idea - the theatrical term was ‘fucks for bucks’ - that Larimore might be the one to help him achieve his goal of a career on the stage. Educated at Oregon State University, Larimore boasted a somewhat distinguished thespian connection: his aunt was Laura Hope Crews, the Broadway actress who would one day work with Clark Gable, movie star, in Gone With The Wind.

  For a while, Billy and Earle were inseparable. As a cover for his homosexuality, though this was more or less accepted in theatrical circles, Larimore was dating Peggy Martin, one of the troupe’s actresses, but if he was hoping to have his lover all to himself, he was to be disappointed. Billy, meanwhile, had fallen for one of the other actresses. Tiny, with mousy hair, Franz Dorfler (Frances Dorfler) looked considerably older than her 21 years. Initially, she fought off Billy’s advances. Like Larimore, she was of ambiguous sexuality. Also, at the same time as he became enamoured of her, Billy was suffering from hepatitis, almost certainly contracted from one of the oilfield prostitutes, if not from his promiscuous new friend Earle. But very quickly, Billy won Dorfler over with his primeval charm and became doubly useful as a ‘lavender foil’ employed by her to convince her religious parents into believing that she was going steady. In fact, all Dorfler’s serious relationships were with women and she never married.

  In June 1922 the Astoria Players, a small stock company, breezed into Portland. Headed by Rex Jewell and his actress wife, Rita Cordero, they were recruiting actors for an upcoming summer tour. Franz Dorfler was hired at once, and aware that Billy Gable and Earl Larimore were more than just friends, persuaded Jewell to add them to the line-up - Larimore as one of the troupe’s leading players, Billy as their stage-hand factotum. Jewell’s productions would include such forgettable dross as Polly of the Circus and The Villain Pursued Her - which saw Clark, supposedly paranoid about his sexuality, blacking up his face and putting on a dress to play a maid called Eliza.

  First stop on the road was Astoria, the town of the company’s origin, which they reached via paddle steamer up the Columbia River. Once there, audiences were sparse and tempers permanently flared. When one of the actors left the company, Billy was asked to take his place though it upset him when he got laughs for a supposedly dramatic part because he kept colliding with the scenery.

  Towards the end of her life, Franz Dorfler spoke to Gable’s biographer, Lyn Tornabene, of his mood swings. Claiming Billy had ‘vaulting highs and subterranean lows’, she added, ‘He seemed insecure because of past hardships . . . and had to be reassured that he was liked.’ Whether their relationship was consummated or not is not known, but it is unlikely, bearing in mind the mix of Dorfler’s lesbian tendencies and Billy’s hepatitis, which might have made penetrative sex with a woman out of the question, while allowing him to have non-penetrative fun with Larimore. Besides, as will be seen, in homosexual relationships Gable is believed to have always been the passive partner. Dorfler maintained that she and Billy shared a room, but again this would almost certainly have been to cut down on expenses. Rex Jewell was paying his troupe virtually nothing and if they ate more than once daily it was often courtesy of their resident shoplifter.

  After just a few weeks in Astoria, ticket sales were so bad that Rex Jewell shut shop - for a month, he told everyone - while he gathered funds for the second leg of a tour that had so far taken in one venue. Meanwhile his actors were asked to endure frugality just a little longer. Under normal circumstances, Billy might have moved on. He had, or so he claimed, asked Franz Dorfler to marry him. Her response was to ask him to give her a few months to think about the proposal, after which Dorfler claimed she had turned him down. In any case, when she left for the nearby town of Seaside with another Jewell actress, Lucille Schumann (whose parents lived here), Billy and Earle Larimore tagged along. The Schumanns - possibly suspecting their arrangement - agreed to feed them but refused them admittance to their home so Billy, Dorfler and Larimore were compelled to stay on the beach.

  By the end of the month, the Astoria Players had reformed. They retraced their footsteps to Portland, again via the Columbia River, stopping off at small towns en route. Business was little better than before, however, and rather than use the paddle steamer, again the troupe hitched rides on cargo boats, sleeping on deck regardless of the weather. During this time Laura Hope Crews somehow got a message to Larimore that she had secured her nephew a place with the New York based Jessie Bonselle Stock Company. A few years later, he was to triumph opposite Tallulah Bankhead in Dark Victory. Later, he joined the New York Theater Guild and married one of its leading lights, Selena Royle. Following their divorce, unable to cope with his declining career and the threat of his homosexuality becoming public knowledge, Larimore hit the bottle and died in 1947, aged 48.

  With Larimore gone, and taking with him most of the excitement in Billy’s life, he and Franz Dorfler began to drift apart. With so little theatre work in the offing, much of it unpaid, Billy earned his living wherever he could, lumber-jacking most days so that his evenings would be free to allow him to help out with the Astoria Players. Neither his hepatitis nor his mood swings were getting any better. At the end of her tether, Dorfler returned to Portland. For a few months, she and Billy stayed in touch, exchanging letters and hoping that a temporary separation might help; to no avail. When Billy arrived in Portland in January 1923, Dorfler was gone.

  Over the next few months, Billy worked for The Oregonian as an advertiser’s runner and office factotum. In his spare time he took singing and dancing lessons, the latter in an attempt to cure him of his clumsiness. Then, around June of that year, he heard that actress-turned-teacher Josephine Dillon was in town to start up a drama group. He auditioned and against all odds, for he still could not act, he was taken on. Born in Denver in 1884, the young Josephine Dillon moved to Los Angeles with her parents and later studied at Stanford University at a time when the establishment rarely admitted female students. Rather than follow in her father’s footsteps and go into law, after graduating she opted to tread the boards. Dillon claimed she had had some success on Broadway, but there is no evidence to support this. She had toured in a play with Edward Everett Horton, and said that of all the places they had visited, Portland had been her favourite, hence her decision to settle here.

  Josephine Dillon was another woman of ambiguous sexuality. She always signed herself ‘Joe’, never Jo, and she was on the lookout for a man with whom she could engage in a lavender marriage for the sake of preserving her career. When she first met Billy, she was living with an unnamed actress. The woman in question is quite probably the character she refers to as Beaurien (good-for-nothing) in a novel she subsequently penned. Completed in 1951, untitled, and never published, the book is supposed to be a record of Josephine Dillon’s Svengali-like relationship with the future Clark Gable. As such it is quite far-fetched to the point of being absurd. In her story, she - Julia Hood - falls in love with an actor named Mark Craven. It is so syrupy - if the extracts included in Lyn Tornabene’s biography are to be taken as a guide - that it should not be used as a yardstick to measure Gable and Dillon’s own affair other than to prove that this was ultimately a relationship of convenience for both parties.

  As will be proven later in this book, in his formative years Clark Gable was an opportunist who would sleep with anyone. ‘Anything that had a hole and the promise of a couple of dollars,’ Marlene Dietrich once told me. Dillon, likewise, needed to be seen clinging to the arm of a handsomish, lusty gigolo some sixteen years her junior - not quite so dashing as her Mark Craven, and exercising his lust elsewhere - but sufficient to curb the gossips and prevent further scrutiny of her true persona. If nothing else, Dillon brimmed with self-confidence; she was the mentor who f
illed her protégé’s head with palpable promises of stardom, who would ultimately deliver but at considerable expense to herself. Why she was hellbent on making Billy-Clark a star, aware that he would almost certainly seize the first opportunity to walk out on her, is not entirely clear but may have had something to do with their age difference. Dillon was a maternal figure, one who compares with the next generation mothers of Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor. Having failed to make the grade themselves - more through lack of talent than missed opportunity - they made up for their shortcomings by pushing their offspring into the limelight only to end up being repaid for their efforts by being shunted aside with the onset of fame.

  Josephine managed to have Billy accepted by the Portland-based Forest Taylor Stock Company, which had recently signed Franz Dorfler. With them he played a Chinaman in East Is West, and a family friend in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. Both Broadway hits, they were now riding on the backs of the movie versions. Leaving Billy and Dorfler to brave what must have been an embarrassing situation, Dillon left for Los Angeles - claiming her trip was to find Billy work with one of the studios - but her aim was actually to open a small drama school. At the time she was unknown in Hollywood, and for an inexperienced ham such as Billy at the time, his best chance of being discovered would have been to stand in line with dozens of hopefuls outside one of the studio gates.

  In Hollywood, Dillon rented a small cottage not far from cowboy star Tom Mix’s palatial residence for $20 a week. At least Billy would be able to boast of living in the same street as one of his idols. In November 1922 she sent him $50 to buy new clothes and join her - though if her novel is to believed he turned up dirty and dishevelled, very un-Gablelike, given his phobia for cleanliness. Next, there was the couple’s ‘moral situation’ to contend with. During the last few years Hollywood had been rocked by one scandal after another, with the Fatty Arbuckle rape-or-manslaughter case, several high-profile drug-related suicides, the murder of director William Desmond Taylor and episodes of under-age sex, which had threatened the careers of a number of major stars, including Charlie Chaplin. While homosexuality was widely condemned, lesbianism was less so, simply because in those days most people were too naive to work out what they did in the bedroom. Also, living in sin was definitely not de rigueur.

  Who popped the question is not known, but when Billy arrived in Hollywood in June 1923, Dillon paid for him to stay at a hotel, leaving him free to indulge in whatever sexual activities took his fancy. So that he could be seen to be supporting himself, she found him a job in a local garage and despite her lack of studio contacts, his first bit part in a movie. This was Ernst Lubitsch’s sparkling comedy Forbidden Paradise set in the court of Catherine the Great and starring Pola Negri and Rod La Rocque, then promoted as lovers on and off the screen. But nothing could have been further from the truth. Negri (Apollonia Cahlupec, 1894-1987) - who a few years later would fabricate a story that she and Rudolph Valentino had been lovers at the time of his death - was a self-confessed ‘faghag’ as well as a liar par excellence. While shooting Forbidden Paradise, La Rocque (1896-1968), a 6-foot, 3-inch slab of beefcake, is known to have spent at least one weekend with the young Clark Gable. He was just as macho, if not more so, and the two would remain friends until the intensely homophobic Gable - despite his gay-for-advancement leanings - decided that to be seen in La Rocque’s company might be detrimental to his career. La Rocque’s later movies, though their titles sailed over the heads of general audiences at the time, should have been a clear giveaway: Let Us Be Gay!, What’s Wrong With Women?, The Coming Of Amos . . . and Hi, Gaucho! Forced out of the closet in 1927, he submitted to an enforced lavender marriage with silents’ vamp Vilma Banky. It was a successful partnership that surprised his oppressors by lasting until his death.

  Billy and Josephine Dillon were married, most likely on 13 January 1923, by a Reverend Meadow - by which time he had cast caution to the wind reverting to the name Clark Gable. He added two years to his age, declaring that he was 24, while Dillon deducted six years, claiming on the register that she was 36. Though Clark moved into the cottage with her, he made no secret of the fact that he was sleeping around and so the arguments began. Before leaving the garage, Clark would sometimes rub salt into his wife’s wounds by informing her that he had a date that evening with some hoofer and he would then disappear for days on end. Dillon shrugged her shoulders and allowed him to please himself, bringing him to heel only when she had secured him an audition. Another condition of her allowing him to roam around town like a tomcat was that he should attend some of her acting classes and acquire a speaking voice to match his rugged looks. All his life, Gable was to be criticised by directors on account of his unnaturally high-pitched tone. Like Rock Hudson, years later, Clark spoke with a light tenor, which some found effete. Dillon encouraged him to scream and yell, damaging his vocal cords so that what remained was a drawl which drove female fans wild, while filling their partners with envy.

  Josephine Dillon may also be accredited with teaching Gable how to walk and how to control his long arms and over-sized hands without knocking everything and everyone in sight flying. But what she couldn’t get him to curb was his acute narcissism. Indeed, she encouraged this by paying on the instalment plan for him to have his teeth fixed. Two front ones were rotten and rather than have them pulled, they were gold-capped, and as such would cause him grave problems later on. Dillon then provided him with a matinée idol wardrobe: silk shirts and boxer shorts, monogrammed suits and sweaters, as well as hand-made shoes that she could ill afford. The effect of this was only to add more clout to Gable’s womanising. Nor did females have to be pretty and shapely to attract him: for the time being he was more interested in healthy bank accounts than hourglass figures. Male conquests, on the other hand, had to be big, butch and beefy - and of course influential in their field.

  Like every other Hollywood hopeful, Clark joined the crowds of extras outside the studio gates and on account of his great height (the average American in those days stood at 5 feet 8 inches) was selected for a bit part in White Man. This earned him $150 for ten days’ work. Not long afterwards, on the same daily rate of $15 and in mostly blink-and-miss parts, he appeared in Déclassée, North Star, The Johnstown Flood - and in Ben Hur (completed in 1925), where he can be briefly seen in a shot with Ramon Novarro. His biggest part should have been in Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow, but for some unknown reason the director, scathingly referred to as ‘The Hun’ by just about everyone who worked with him, demoted him to unpaid extra.

  Silent movies, however, held no excitement for a young man who had shouted himself hoarse to perfect his speaking voice and in March 1925 Clark auditioned for an unspecified non-speaking part in Romeo and Juliet. The play was about to tour the West Coast in a production by husband-and-wife team Louis MacLoon and Lillian Albertson, then very much in vogue. The leads were Rollo Peters and actress-playwright Jane Cowl, who had recently triumphed on Broadway with Antony and Cleopatra. Like Erich von Stroheim, the MacLoons initially wanted nothing to do with Gable, which suggests that he was either less talented than Josephine Dillon made him out to be, or possessed with an attitude brought about by her inflating of his ego. But they were overruled by Jane Cowl. Like her movie equivalent Mary Pickford, Cowl refused to believe she would not look ridiculous at almost 40 to be seen to be portraying the teenage heroine.

  Jane Cowl (Grace Bailey, 1886-1950) made her debut in 1903, in the New York production of Sweet Kitty Bellairs. Best described as a cross between Tallulah Bankhead and Margaret Sullavan, with her deep, throaty voice and cool beauty, Cowl was a powerful name in Twenties theatrical circles, accustomed to getting her own way because her performances invariably packed halls to the rafters. To claim she was a nymphomaniac may have been putting it mildly: Cowl had a voracious appetite for young men, the younger the better, and insisted on ‘auditioning’ Clark in her dressing room. This he passed with flying colours but then the MacLoons were offered an ultimatum: un
less Clark joined the cast, they would have to find themselves a new leading lady!

  Romeo and Juliet opened in Los Angeles in May 1925, and from the West Coast took in Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver before returning to New York whence the lovers parted company. Cowl was in search of the next young stud, while Gable was to appear for the MacLoons in Maxwell Anderson’s What Price Beauty?. He auditioned for the sizeable role of Private Kiper but was initially rejected for not being manly enough. Warren G. Harris (Clark Gable, 2002) quotes Lillian Albertson as having said, ‘He looked the hardy, virile type, but he sounded like a pansy when he read the tough and salty dialogue.’ Albertson is thought to have told this to Gable’s face - the supreme insult, given what he had been through with his father - and he must have made a sterling effort to convince her otherwise. Dropping his voice an octave, not only did he get the part but when the tour was reprised a few months later and one of the leads - Hale Hamilton - dropped out, he was promoted to the sought-after role of Sergeant Quirt.

  The Gables’ ‘marriage’ was already beyond repair by the beginning of 1926 when the MacLoons assigned Clark to Madame X. He played the attorney for the prosecution in this subsequently much filmed Alexander Bisson drama of the ‘fallen woman’ whose estranged husband raises their son with the belief that his mother is dead. When she is tried for murder, he turns up as her defence lawyer. In the title role was Pauline Frederick, one of the greatest tragic actresses of her generation, who had appeared in the film version of 1920.

  Pauline Frederick (Pauline Beatrice Libby, 1883-1938) was possessed of all the dramatic qualities of Sarah Bernhardt and the beauty of Greta Garbo, with long brown hair that famously touched the stage when she bowed deeply during curtain calls. Like Garbo she was extremely fussy in her choice of roles and in those days working less on account of failing health. Her near-constant moribund state during her last years, however, never affected her libido - before succumbing to an asthma attack at 55 she had worked her way through five gay or bisexual husbands (one was the playwright Willard Mack, another committed suicide), and, like Jane Cowl, scores of much younger lovers. Her extramarital conquests included several similarly strong-willed women such as Jeanne Eagels, Lilyan Tashman and Joan Crawford.