by David Bret
Photoplay, Picturegoer and Modern Screen and several lesser publications courted Dillon to dish the dirt on her marriage, and she prepared an exclusive which, she claimed, would ‘blow the lid clean off the Gable myth’. Whether she was specifically referring to Clark’s involvement with Earl Larimore is unclear, though she must have been aware of this - similarly, of his relationship with numerous ‘baritone babes’. Rather than court the highest bidder, however, Dillon contacted Louis B. Mayer, assured him her version of The Clark Gable Story was unsparing of even the most intimate details of his personal life - and that this would wreck not just his reputation, but that of the studio as well. Then she got to the point: the only way MGM could prevent the story from being published would be to buy it from her. Additionally, Mayer was requested to issue a press release acknowledging Dillon’s important role in Clark’s rapid rise to fame.
Mayer bought the story for an unspecified sum, but only after forcing Dillon to sign a document wherein she would not be permitted to write or speak about Clark during his lifetime. The Messiah was assuming that owing to the considerable difference in their ages, Gable would outlive her. This would not be the case, though strangely the kiss-and-tell has never surfaced. For Dillon, this was not enough. She asked Mayer for a job as a voice-coach! It emerged then that ‘in silent and anonymous gratitude’, Clark had been sending her a monthly cheque with whatever he could afford since signing his first contract with Pathé. Those payments now stopped.
Clark had been right about Garbo. Susan Lenox, directed by Robert Z Leonard, was her film, though he acted extremely well opposite her, holding his own most of the time, if not a little star-struck. He is more handsome in this film than in any of its predecessors, but struggles to play the tough guy. Indeed, who could play tough in front of Garbo, unless they were protecting her? When the film opens, Garbo is Helga, raised by her uncle following the death in childbirth of her unmarried mother. The uncle treats her like a skivvy and eventually expects her to marry his odious friend Mondstrum (Alan Hale). When he drunkenly tries to rape her, she rushes out into the storm and hides in the garage of mining engineer Rodney Spencer (Clark). Only now does she speak for the first time.
Helga and Rodney fall in love. She cooks him breakfast, he takes her on a fishing trip - a scene insisted on by Howard Strickling to tie in with Clark’s new image. He then has to go away for a few days and leaves her alone in the house - cue the arrival of Mondstrum and her uncle, whose attempts to kidnap her fail when she steals their horse and trap and heads for the railway station at Lenoxville. Boarding a carriage occupied by a circus troupe, she becomes Susan Lenox. The circus is run by Burlingham (John Miljan) - an ageing pervert who agrees to protect her from the pursuing Mondstrum so long as she becomes his mistress and takes to the stage as Fatima, a phoney Sultan’s ex-favourite. Secretly, she writes to Rodney, who catches up with the show, chins Burlingham and says he never wants to see Helga again. When she pleads she does not know how she will survive without him, he snarls, ‘I’ll tell you what’ll become of you. You’ll go from one man to another, just like every other woman in the gutter!’ Her response is that if this is what he thinks, she will make it a worthwhile gutter!
Helga travels with the circus, finding a new man in every town and ending up the mistress of crooked New York politician Mike Kelly (Hale Hamilton), while Rodney loses his job after causing a mining accident and hits the bottle because he cannot stop thinking about Helga. When she learns this, Helga cons a friend into coercing Rodney into attending a society party she is hosting on the pretext this friend might offer him work. Their reunion is short-lived when they insult each other over the dinner table. Rodney leaves. Helga hits the road to search for him but he is now a bum working for a construction gang and it is he who finds her, working in a sleazy dancehall in Puerto Sacate.
Helga has by now hooked up with a sea captain, who wants to marry her and show her the world, though she could never love him because her heart belongs to Rodney, who treats her as he would any whore until he realises that she is sincere. ‘Since I last saw you,’ she purrs, ‘no man has had a minute of me, not even a second,’ adding that she would love nothing more than to cook, clean and slave over him in the dump they will have to live in because they are both broke. Effectively, Garbo was offering to fulfil the dream of every female Gable fan! When a genuine whore propositions him in the middle of this conversation, Rodney promptly tosses her over the balcony! Then comes the repartee, pronounced to the strains of ‘La Golondrina’. While going over the heads of the general public, this caused closet gays everywhere to whoop with delight at a time when homosexuality was regarded by many - not least of all studio moguls - as an affliction:
HELGA: We’re just two cripples - twisted! Only together can we ever become straight!
RODNEY: You have a queer way of looking at things . . .
In Britain, Susan Lenox immediately ran into trouble with the censor. David Graham Phillips (1867-1911), upon whose posthumous novel the screenplay was based, was a women’s rights activist shot dead by a lunatic accusing him of promoting female moral depravity. Initially the film was banned, but following a petition from MGM’s London representative, 125 feet was cut from the finished print and the film was given a new title. Irving Thalberg wanted to call it The Stain, but when a shocked censor argued that critics would begin speculating over what kind of stain this was referring to, everyone settled on The Rise Of Helga.
Halfway through shooting Susan Lenox, Clark received word that Thalberg had earmarked him for a role that in retrospect would have proved the most ridiculous of his entire career. In 1929 Thalberg dispatched director W.S. Van Dyke - the infamous ‘One-Take Woody’ - whose planning of scenes was so meticulous that this was usually all it took to get them in the can, and principals Duncan Renaldo and Edwina Booth into the African jungle to shoot Trader Horn. Booth had fallen ill with dysentery, while Van Dyke spent several months hitting the bottle and had driven everyone to distraction shooting thousands of feet of extra footage which had ended up on the cutting-room floor, though the end result proved a tremendous success.
Watching Gable and Garbo in the closing mock-tropical setting for Susan Lenox had given Thalberg a brainwave. Recently he had acquired the screen rights for Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan Of The Apes, which he planned on shooting on an MGM back lot, using leftover footage from Trader Horn. And as the tree-swinging hero, he wanted Clark Gable!
Clark, never happy about stripping for the camera, is known to have submitted to a screen test, though any footage of him in a loincloth has long since disappeared. Tested at the same time was a 27-year-old Romanian-born, American-raised swimming champion by the name of Janos Weissmuller. Tall, powerfully built and good-looking, Weissmuller had won five gold medals at the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Games. When Thalberg screened both tests for his executives’ approval, their decision was unanimous: all that was required was a little plastic surgery to Weissmuller’s nose, and a slight change of first name, and the most famous Tarzan of them all was born. He went on to yodel and swing away through 12 phenomenally successful movies as popular today as they were then. Clark is said to have been immensely relieved!
By now, he and Ria had vacated the Ravenswood apartments and moved into a rented house on San Ysidro in Beverly Hills - a stone’s throw from Pickfair, the palatial home of Joan Crawford’s snooty in-laws, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. The Gables were frequently invited here, along with Joan and Douglas Jr, enabling Clark to observe at close hand how strained Joan’s marriage had become. Matters would intensify over the next few weeks when Possessed finally went into production. Adela Rogers St Johns, still obsessed with Clark, followed him everywhere - not just in the hope of an exclusive of the Gable-Crawford romance, but to get her claws into Clark himself. This caused him to remark to one friend, ‘Maybe I should just fuck Adela and put her out of her misery!’
There have always been rumours that Clark did just this, and got her pregnant. When ques
tioned about the subject in March 1975 on The Merv Griffin Show, Adela was giving nothing away when she told the host, ‘What woman would deny that Clark Gable was the father of her child?’ She later recalled seeing Clark and Joan ‘necking behind the bandstand’ at the Coconut Grove, adding that she had refrained from reporting this in her column to preserve her idol’s dignity. Even so, this did not prevent her from gossiping about the pair to friends, resulting in the affair becoming, like Clark’s sexuality, Hollywood’s best-kept open secret.
Possessed is a wonderful film, largely because so much of the scenario resembles the rags-to-riches Joan Crawford story. Howard Strickling’s fabricated biography tactics had been wasted on her: Joan never held back when discussing her background and her fans adored her all the more for this. Whenever they wanted to know more about her private life, much to Louis B. Mayer’s chagrin, all they had to do was ask. The film was so ‘torrid’ in parts that, like Susan Lenox, it had the censors in a spin. And because of their affair, Clark and Joan were on equal terms in this one.
Joan played Marian Marker, a factory worker in a hick town where nothing happens. She has a sweetheart of sorts - labourer Al Manning (Wallace Ford) - but finds his attentions dull because they are so predictable: marriage, running his own business, getting rich. Until then, he says, they will have to make do with what they have. ‘Buying happiness on the instalments plan,’ she scoffs, ‘And some day a fella comes and takes it all away! All I’ve got’s my looks and my youth, and whatever it is the fellas like. Do you think I’m gonna trade that in for a chance that’s never come?’ Later she calls Al ‘turnip’ - Hollywood slang for a man with underdeveloped genitals. On her way home from work, Marian has been held up at the railway crossing when the train for New York pulls in. Through the carriage windows she has seen how the other half live, and has been offered her first champagne by drunken toff, Wally (Skeets Gallagher). Hearing of her aspirations, Wally tells her to look him up, should she ever visit the city. Next, we see her inside his plush Park Avenue pad - though now that he is sober, Wally does not feel obliged to help, claiming the East River is full of girls who took advice from him. Then she bumps into his friend, society lawyer Mark Whitney - Clark, looking even more striking than in his film with Garbo.
For Marian, it is love at first sight, especially when she learns of Mark’s wealth and political ambitions. When he tells her that he is very rich, she pulls no punches by replying, ‘That’s nice. You see, I wouldn’t waste my time with you if you weren’t!’ Three years pass. Mark is in politics, Marian his mistress, who in order to prevent a scandal has reinvented herself as respectable widow Mrs Moreland. Mark would like to marry her, but dare not as one wife has already taken him to the cleaners. There are echoes of Oscar Wilde when he tells a friend, ‘Losing a sweetheart is a private misfortune - losing a wife is a public scandal.’ While they are dressing, and she puts on jewellery he has bought her for each of their anniversaries, he asks if she has any regrets. The response comes from Crawford’s autobiography: ‘I left school when I was only 12 - never learned how to spell regret.’ At the subsequent party she sits at the piano and accompanies herself to a stunning three-language version of ‘How Long Will This Last?’ Her answer comes when Al turns up unexpectedly. Wealthy in his own right, he is now on the verge of signing a major construction deal which he hopes will be aided by Mark’s political clout.
For Al’s benefit, Marian demotes Mark to a mere acquaintance and is distressed to learn that Al only wants the money so that he can marry her and keep her in the style to which she has become accustomed. Her relationship with Mark edges towards disaster when Mark announces that he is standing for Governor. Now he is obliged to choose between his kept woman and his public duties. Marian overhears a colleague asking him, ‘What’s a woman compared to a career?’ while another levels, ‘It’s a sad thing to see you give up a brilliant future for a woman like that.’ But Mark believes he can have both and asks Marian to marry him. Naturally, this being a Crawford ‘martyr’ movie, she turns him down, saying she has never loved him and that she is going to marry Al. What follows referred directly to Joan’s own floundering marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr - on account of Clark Gable making her aware that she needed to be with her own kind, a man who like herself in the quest for fame had sold himself for sex, as opposed to Fairbanks, whose fame had been handed to him on a plate courtesy of his celebrity parents:
MARK: I don’t believe it. No woman could have pretended to love a man as you loved me.
MARIAN: Oh yes, she could, if that was the way she earned her living. Even if I do say it myself, I think I’ve made a pretty good job of it. Now that I’ve got my little pile tucked away, I’m ready to sit back, take off my shoes and relax. It’s been a strain [flicking cigarette ash on the floor] being a lady!
MARK: You can’t mean what you’re saying? It’s unbelievable . . . MARIAN: Unbelievable? Because of three years of your priceless schooling and guidance I’m walking out on you? Well, all the schooling you’ve hammered into me, all the clothes and perfume you’ve put on me, all the jewellery you’ve hung on me didn’t change me. Inside, I’m exactly what I was when you found me - a factory girl, smelling of sweat and glue. Common, that’s what I am! Common! And I like it!
MARK [slapping her] You little tramp! Get out! You might have given me two weeks’ notice. My cook does that!
Across America fans applauded - Joan’s shop girls and Clark’s repressed females, who wished they could have been in her shoes as she suffered in splendour at the hands of this neanderthal before rushing outside and going to pieces! What they did not know was that the scene had been rehearsed time and time again during the 27-day shooting schedule - in hotel rooms, or in Clark’s trailer as a prelude to the rough sex Joan liked, and he was not averse to delivering.
All ends well, of course, so this suffering has not been in vain. Al learns the truth, declares he does not want second-hand goods from a woman who is no better than a streetwalker. Then the scene shifts to Mark’s electoral campaign, where his opponents attempt to discredit him by dropping leaflets on the audience to expose the scandal. It is therefore up to Marian to defend them both. She announces that she was his mistress, that their affair is over and that he now belongs to the people, and as such has no right to be judged by hypocrites when his only crime was falling in love. Then, for a second time, Marian exits tears, rushing out into the pouring rain - where Mark catches up with her. For the first time in his life he has got his priorities right. ‘I don’t care what they do to me back there,’ he says, taking her in his arms, ‘If I win it’ll be with you, and if I lose it’ll be with you!’ Magnificent!
The critics compared the Gable-Crawford on-screen chemistry with that of Garbo and John Gilbert in Flesh And The Devil (1926). The gossip columnists hinted that the pair were no different off set. In Portrait Of Joan, published two years after Clark’s death, Crawford observed:
I knew that I was falling into a trap that I had warned young girls about - not to fall in love with leading men or take romantic scenes seriously. Leave the set and forget about it because that marvellous feeling would pass. Boy, I had to eat those words, but they tasted very sweet!
During the summer of 1931, Douglas Fairbanks Jr threatened to have Joan trailed by a private detective - anxious that when, rather than if they divorced, his wife would be perceived as the guilty party. Well aware Fairbanks was cheating on her, she dared him so much as to try. Instead, he went to see Louis B. Mayer, who naturally hit the roof. Joan was about to be offered her most important role to date: Flaemmchen - in an all-star production of Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel. Mayer therefore offered her an ultimatum: Clark, or her career. Gable pleaded with Mayer on her behalf, promising to divorce Ria so that he and Joan could marry. Mayer’s response was that if Clark continued seeing ‘the washerwoman’s tramp daughter’, he would dispatch a memo to every studio in Hollywood ensuring neither of them ever worked again. Crossing their fingers behind their backs, Clar
k and Joan agreed to cool things.
Ria Gable also contacted Mayer and between them they formulated a plan: so long as Mayer put up the money, she would prove once and for all to the American public that their marriage was stronger than ever. It all sounds silly today, and with a less gullible press it would not have worked. Taking her youngest two children with her, Ria embarked on a train-trip to New York - stopping off at every station en route, where an MGM publicist assured her a riotous welcome, having announced that Clark would be with her. Each time Ria told the same story: work commitments prevented Clark from leaving Hollywood, though they spoke on the phone several times every day and he was just as heartbroken as she that they were apart. No one asked Ria why she was going to New York - nor why she had left Clark in the first place if it was causing them both such anguish.
Clark’s work commitment was Hell Divers, with Wallace Beery - just signed to play Joan Crawford’s creepy employer in Grand Hotel. Filmed on location at a naval base near San Diego, this was a tale of naval aviators, their triumphs and tragedies, and of course their romantic exploits. Clark’s love interest was Marie Prevost, who was as lacklustre as the film itself. Shooting was a miserable experience. Clark’s name may have been second billing, but he was on only one-eighth of Beery’s salary. As for Prevost, she had only been offered the part out of pity. Very beautiful and a huge name during the silent era, her ‘Bronx honk’ proved disastrous with the advent of sound, and by the time she worked with Clark in this film and Sporting Blood she was a hopeless alcoholic. In 1937, her body would be discovered in her Cahuenga Boulevard apartment - partly devoured by her dog in one of the worst cases of malnutrition ever recorded in America.
After Hell Divers Clark asked Louis B. Mayer for a pay rise and this was refused. The Messiah informed him that his ‘incentive’ for his next film, Polly Of The Circus - the horror in which he had appeared with the Astoria Players - would be a $10,000 car which would be presented to him in a ceremony by Adela Rogers St Johns’ boss, William Randolph Hearst. The newspaper magnate owned Cosmopolitan Pictures (released through MGM), most of whose productions showcased the now limited talents of his mistress, Marion Davies, with whom he lived at Saint Simeon, their magnificent mountain retreat between Holywood and San Francisco. Davies also owned a sumptuous 120-room beachside mansion in Santa Monica - and to ensure that she had every comfort while working, Hearst commissioned a 15-room villa-dressing room at MGM.