Clark Gable

by David Bret

  Clark saw the play at the Harris Theater and was so bowled over by Tracy’s portrayal as the leader of a bunch of Death Row prisoners who instigates a breakout that he initially refused the part. But the MacLoons persuaded him otherwise. Then the production hit a snag when Chamberlain Brown, who had negotiated $400 a week for Gable’s last few plays, demanded $500 for this one, which the Macloons could not afford to pay. Ria stepped into the breach: without his knowledge, she made up the difference in Clark’s salary.

  The try-outs in San Francisco were a disaster. Audiences were unmoved, critics never even bothered to put pen to paper. Clark was all for throwing in the towel, but he had signed a contract to travel with the production to Los Angeles, where it opened at the Belasco Theater on 7 June 1930. Here, there was a complete volte-face when he received a standing ovation after the première and the Los Angeles Times’ notoriously hard-to-please drama critic Edwin Schallert enthused, ‘In the role of the convict sentenced to walking that “last mile” to the electric chair, Gable knocked everyone in the audience between the eyes with the fierce, bloodthirsty, vindictive and blasphemous way he tore the part open’.

  Clark so impressed top impressario Minna Wallis (sister of producer Hal) and her partner-lover Ruth Collier that they immediately poached him from Chamberlain Brown. It was Wallis who talked him into returning to the movies. Thus far his contribution to the medium had been virtually nil, so Wallis arguably set her sights too high by pushing for the role of Joe Massara in Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar, about to go into production with Edward G. Robinson in the title role. LeRoy liked what he saw, tested Clark for the part and paid $500 to keep him interested. The response from studio chief Jack Warner, who had also seen Gable in The Last Mile, has entered Hollywood folklore: ‘You fool! You’ve just wasted $500 of my money on a jug-eared oaf with big feet, big hands, and the ugliest face I ever saw!’ Subsequently the part went to Douglas Fairbanks Jr, then in the headlines on account of his ‘fairytale’ marriage to Joan Crawford. Clark would later exact his revenge on Fairbanks for nabbing his part by stealing his wife.

  To compensate for Clark’s loss, Minna Wallis negotiated a somewhat shaky contract with Pathé, which would see him receiving fifth billing in a Western, The Painted Desert. He was offered $750 a week for a one-movie deal, with the possibility of this being extended, and spent several weeks in Arizona, where the locations were to be shot, perfecting his riding skills. He had not been near a horse since working on his father’s farm. The star of the film was William Boyd (1895-1972), soon to become a household name in the Hopalong Cassidy series. Boyd had a pathological loathing of homosexuals, not that this had prevented him from once spending a night with Rudolph Valentino. He took an instant dislike to Gable, whose secret came out when he introduced him to Earle Larimore, who visited the Arizona location during a weekend break from his latest project, the Broadway production of Strange Interlude, which Clark would later film.

  The Painted Desert is dreadful. Were it not for the fact that it introduced Clark Gable to the world, it would long since have deservedly been assigned to oblivion. The sound quality is appalling, even for an early Talkie, with the actors mumbling their lines far from the strategically placed microphones - or, alternatively, bawling so loudly while on top of them that their voices become distorted. There are lengthy gaps between snatches of dialogue too. It is as if these people, most of them relics from the silent age, have forgotten they have progressed to sound.

  Longtime buddies Jeff and Cash (J. Farrell Macdonald, William Farnum) own neighbouring ranches in Arizona’s Painted Desert, but fall out after finding a baby boy at a deserted emigrants’ camp. The argument stems from which of them will raise the child, with Cash assuming the task and naming him Bill, allegedly because William Boyd insisted on this! The boy grows up, becomes a mining engineer and, after discovering tungsten ore on Jeff’s land, hits on the idea of reuniting the two former pals: he decides that he and his father will mine, help Jeff to earn a fortune and all will be well. Complicating matters is Bill’s love interest Mary-Ellen (a wildly over-the-top performance from weepies queen, Helen Twelvetrees), who also happens to be Jeff’s daughter) and Jeff’s thuggish factotum Rance Brett (Clark), who is also sweet on her. It is he who sabotages the mining operation, resulting in one of the hammiest, worst filmed shoot-outs ever seen in a Western.

  The film may have been dire, but Clark’s mad scene was the one that got him noticed. There is something of the handsome, androgynous Apache dancer in his movements, in the way he circles his persecutors when cornered with his crime. His hat falls off and his long, dark hair covers his ears, then flops forwards. In extreme close-up his face is almost feminine in composition, like that of a modern-day Bel Ami gay porn star, almost too beautiful to be true, spitting out his lines with accustomed venom. Yet the only critic who seemed to notice him was William Randolph Hearst’s ace reporter, Adelas Rogers St Johns (1894-1988), who later developed a gushing, some thought unhealthy admiration for Clark Gable. Three years later she would observe in an article for Liberty magazine,

  Clark is the same man on and off the screen, which is true of few stars. He has the same charm which no psychologist has ever explained - but which probably got Eve in the Garden of Eden when she first saw Adam.

  Chapter Two

  CLARK & RIA . . . & JOAN . . . & JOHNNY

  By the time The Painted Desert wrapped, Ria Gable and her children had moved into two adjoining apartments in Ravenswood - one for her and Clark, she said, the other for Jana and Albert Jr so that they would not interfere with hers and Clark’s extended love-making sessions. There were apparently few of these, though, when he returned from Arizona: on location difficulties with William Boyd had left him moody and depressed. Not only this but a dynamiting sequence rehearsal had gone wrong, leaving one extra dead and another maimed for life. He was in no hurry, he said, to face the cameras again.

  Minna Wallis persuaded Clark to change his mind. Outraged by Jack Warner’s outburst regarding her client’s personal appearance, she marched into the mogul’s office - career suicide in those days, though being the sister of one of the studio’s top executives did give her a certain clout - and bawled him out, demanding Clark be given a chance. Warner capitulated, offering him the part of the sadistic chauffeur in William Wellman’s Night Nurse. This featured new recruit Barbara Stanwyck as the nurse-companion of wealthy widow Joan Blondell, who the Gable character plans to marry, then murder! His hair sleeked back and wearing a dark, high-collared uniform, and with his feline features, Gable resembles a young Conrad Veidt and could easily have passed himself off as a Nazi.

  Clark objected to the scene in the film where he had to smack Barbara Stanwyck in the mouth, having discovered she was on to his plan. Again, had this got back to Jack Warner, he would have been fired. Preview notices, however, dictated that for the foreseeable future he would be typecast as creeps, such as gangland killer Louis Blanco, who gets to battle with a corrupt journalist (Richard Barthelmess) in The Finger Points. The film was little better than The Painted Desert, but led to himself and Minna Wallis being invited to a party hosted by MGM’s ‘Boy Wonder’ producer Irving Thalberg and his actress wife Norma Shearer.

  New York-born Thalberg (1899-1936) started out as a secretary to Universal’s Carl Laemmle and slowly worked his way through the ranks to producer status, joining forces with Louis B. Mayer in 1923, helping him to found MGM the following year. Mayer appointed him studio vice-president and, more than any of his other executives, he relied on his tact and experience though the two never really got along despite Thalberg’s gift of turning everything he touched into box-office gold. Thalberg was the archetypal Mama’s boy and suffered extremely delicate health on account of a heart defect. Therefore he was allowed far too much of his own way. Minna Wallis had organised with him a screen test for Clark - the re-enactment of the closing scene from The Last Mile. Thalberg was not overly impressed, but his sexually repressed wife was. Also, it was brought to
his attention that Clark was being courted by RKO Pictures’ Pandro S. Berman. His first films may have been mediocre but this had largely been down to poor direction. Both Thalberg and Berman told Wallis that, though rough around the edges and undisciplined in front of the camera, somewhere within Gable’s brawny frame a half-decent actor was fighting to get out.

  Thus it was that early on in his career, Clark was of insufficient importance to meet the head of MGM - the tyrannical Mayer, scathingly referred to as ‘The Messiah’ - but Thalberg railroaded him into offering him a twelve-month probationary contract. This would net him $650 a week, $100 a week less than he had earned with Pathé, though the potential was limitless, should he gain Mayer’s approval after his debut film for MGM. Mayer, having been forewarned of Gable’s reputation - though almost certainly he knew nothing of his homosexuality otherwise he would never have considered taking him on - never expected him to make the grade and added an extra clause to his contract:

  The artist agrees to conduct himself with due regard to public conventions and morals, and agrees that he will not do or commit any act that will degrade him in society, or bring him into public hatred, contempt, scorn, ridicule - or [any act] that will shock, insult, offend the community, or ridicule public morals or decency, or prejudice the Motion Picture industry in general.

  Before putting him to work, MGM effected a few essential changes to the Gable bodywork. Considered scraggy should he be expected to remove his shirt, he was over his hepatitis but was not yet back to his regular weight. Clark was sent to a gymnasium and ordered to work out with weights. The studio make-up department plucked and reshaped his shaggy eyebrows and he was given a new hairstyle - the one with the kiss-curl dangling over his right eye. In the days before corrective surgery nothing could be done about his ears, so cameramen would have to work around the problem by not photographing him face on, or full on from behind. Little was done about his teeth for the time being other than to coat them with gleam paste immediately before a take - and in any case, as the villain in every film he was put into, no one expected him to smile much.

  Gable’s first MGM film was The Easiest Way, starring Constance Bennett as a working girl kept by a sneering Adolphe Menjou, who secretly loves smoothy reporter Robert Montgomery. In a bit part, Clark was Niki Feliki, the sinister laundryman, who marries Bennett’s sister, played by Anita Page. It set a precedent for his being offered slightly unhinged Ordinary Joe roles, usually the tougher and cruder the better. Inasmuch as the majority of working-class female picture-goers liked their heroines to identify with them - thus Joan Crawford, as opposed to Garbo, Dietrich and Shearer, became the darling of shop and factory workers - so they liked their men hard-bitten and cynical. The likes of Robert Montgomery may have looked good enough to eat, but these women liked to fantasise about their movie heroes rough-handling them as a prelude to sex, as they had the previous decade while watching Rudolph Valentino preparing to ‘ravage’ Agnes Ayres in The Sheik.

  The Easiest Way was shot early in 1931, days after the première of The Painted Desert. By the end of that year, 12 Clark Gable films would be on general release - some with him pronouncing a few lines, others which saw him sharing equal billing with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. A workaholic, and eager to earn as much as he could in case it all turned pear-shaped, Clark was on the set seven days a week, churning movies out at a rate of one or two a month. In February of that year, having proved his worth to MGM, he was handed over to ace publicity man Howard Strickling so that a suitable biography could be assembled for distribution among the movie magazines. Many stars hated Strickling for the way in which he reinvented their pasts. One doubts, however, Joan Crawford would have wanted fans to know that her first celluloid appearance had seen her fellating a Chicago plumber in a stag film. No more than José Ramon Samaniegos, the musclebound star of Ben Hur, would have admitted acquiring his more famous sobriquet because a male producer-lover likened his hirsute buttocks to the Novarro Valley. Over the coming years, Gable and Strickling would offer one another such extraneously sickly praise that one might be excused for not mistaking them as lovers. Clark would tell a press-conference, ‘If it weren’t for my old buddy Howard, I’d still be driving a truck some place,’ - while Strickling would opine, ‘If I ever loved another man, it was Mr Gable!’

  Strickling (1894-1982) had been working as a newspaper runner in 1919 when he was spotted by Adela Rogers St Johns, as previously explained a connoisseur of sexually ambiguous young men, who had then been hired to find a press agent for director Rex Ingram. Strickling’s first job had been handling Valentino: Adela and Ingram offered him the position, advising him to knock several years off his age, naively believing the priapic Latin lover would not attempt to seduce a young man under the age of 21. Whether or not he did has never been established though Strickling certainly carried a torch for Valentino - and Gable - for the rest of his life. ‘I thought, gee whizz, what a tremendous guy, what a hell of a man!’ he gushed half a century later to biographer Lyn Tornabene. Adding as an afterthought as if by way of an excuse to camouflage his true feelings should these be misconstrued: ‘There was nothing effeminate about him, nothing actorish.’

  Strickling’s repackaging of Clark Gable was effectively his creating his own ideal man, using the key ingredients already there. Clark was presented to the gullible public - who had already been hoodwinked into believing Tasmanian rogue Errol Flynn was an Irish boxer and that the odious Wallace Beery was a ‘loveable soul’ - as the archetypal he-man. What he didn’t have at the time were other interests away from work and sex, so Strickling invented a few. In the time that his secretary took to type out two sheets of A4, Clark was transformed into an experienced outdoors type who loved nothing more than to hunt, shoot and fish - pastimes he had once engaged in with his father, but ignored since arriving in Hollywood. Strickling had him photographed pretending to enjoy these hobbies, suitably clad and usually posed next to his Roadster. What is amazing is that the more Gable feigned such interests, the more interested in them he became.

  Howard Strickling was one of the few studio ‘big shots’ with whom Clark regularly socialised. Most of his colleagues, he declared (and often to their faces), were hypocrites and not the kind of people he wanted to have in his home. His true friends were men like himself, who at least pretended to be unaffected by the schmaltz and artificiality of Tinseltown. They were extras, technicians, canteen staff, security guards and the like, to whom he did not have to pretend, or bow and scrape while wondering when they were going to stab him in the back as invariably happened. And Louis B. Mayer being the worst culprit of all. These buddies were, Strickling maintained in interviews, just like Gable - men’s men who nurtured an innate repulsion for the homosexuals crowding the backlots, offices and smart houses in Beverly Hills and Brentwood. Clark and his cronies scathingly referred to these as ‘fluffs’ - lily-livered, effeminate individuals who made the flesh creep - or so they said. In those days this was how all gays were perceived: as precursors to the likes of Liberace. To Clark’s way of thinking a ‘fluff’ was a degenerate while ‘regular guys’ like himself - and almost certainly Howard Strickling - had sex with other real men such as Rod La Rocque and William Haines. They did not mince, lisp or draw attention to themselves and were but extensions of their favourite sports and pastimes.

  This was effectively locker-room horseplay with that little bit extra: machismo fun. Gable represented the archetypal repressed bisexual, the hallmarks of which were clearly evident in his early years: his marriages to strong, significantly older women frequently of Sapphic orientation. Like Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, Randolph Scott and a host of other ‘he-men’, he would quite unnecessarily overplay the machismo and take immense pains to conceal a feminine side that if brought to the fore would have made him a great actor instead of an inordinately good one.

  Clark’s next film - Dance, Fools, Dance - was his first to fall foul of the Hays Office, though one wonders today what all the fuss
was about. Former Postmaster General Will Hays (1879-1954) set up his code in conjunction with the Bank of America and the Catholic Church in 1922. To clean up Hollywood, Hays prescribed a powerful censorship law prohibiting ‘immoral’ on-screen activities such as open-mouth kissing, violence, sexual innuendo, drinking, gambling, substance abuse and the displaying of navels and chest hair. Additionally, the Hays Code dictated how stars and studio employees should conduct themselves away from the set, including how they treated their families.

  Hays - described by Kenneth Anger in his Hollywood Babylon as ‘a prim-faced, bat-eared, mealy-mouthed political chiseler’ - compiled a ‘Doom Book’ containing the names of 117 movie stars - Joan Crawford, Clark’s co-star in the new film, coming close to the top of the list - whom he deemed guilty of ‘moral turpitude’. Pretty soon Gable’s name would be added to this illustrious roster. If Clark, Haines, La Rocque et al. preferred their men rough and ready, platonically or otherwise, then so did Joan Crawford, who was by now clinging to her marriage to mild-mannered Douglas Fairbanks Jr by a slender thread. She too had been playing the field to spice up what she described as a ‘conventional, missionary position only’ sex life. The film’s title, nothing whatsoever to do with the scenario, alluded to Joan’s flapper image. Unintentionally camp, as in The Painted Desert, the supports are remnants of the pre-Talkies era who still act as if they are in a silent movie. The fake accents, additionally, are dreadful, particularly each time someone pronounces the word ‘you’. Only the dancing saves the day - Joan and Lester Vail’s step-by-step emulation of the Argentinian Tango previously performed by Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse is spellbinding.