Clark Gable

by David Bret

  Alongside Myrna Loy, Robert Montgomery, and John and Lionel Barrymore (in their last film together), Clark played aviator Jules Fabian. He spends too much of his time up in the air, looping the loop over the Andes (actually the Canadian Rockies) - and not enough bonding with his stay-at-home wife (Hayes) to present any semblance of a romance between them. Even his hero’s death while delivering serum to a typhoid-ravaged Rio de Janeiro is uninspired. Clark hated the film, but not nearly so much as he hated Selznick for putting him in it in the first place. He might have had more fun making Dancing Lady - his first outing with Joan Crawford since Louis B. Mayer ordered them to cool things eighteen months previously - had it not been for the new man in her life, whom she now insisted should appear in it as her leading man.

  Franchot Tone (1905-68) was the well-heeled son of the president of the Carborundum Company. His mother, Gertrude Franchot Tone, was the political activist who caused a scandal by having an open relationship with the writer Dorothy Thompson. Educated at Cornell, Franchot had spent some time in Paris before taking up acting, first with the Buffalo Stock Company and then with the New Playwrights Theater in New York. With the great actress Katherine Cornell he subsequently founded the Group Theater. He was undoubtedly Joan’s most sophisticated man since Douglas Fairbanks Jr, though not as snobbish. From the moment they met, introduced not by Joan but by their mutual friend, Jane Cowl, Clark hated him. Again this was hatred by way of fear. Franchot was living with a man, and as Cowl had always been aware of Clark’s sexuality, he assumed she would have passed the news on to Franchot, who was not known for his discretion.

  Initially, Franchot rejected a movie contract from MGM, declaring he did not want to be bossed around by the likes of Louis B. Mayer. Neither could he condone the movie hierarchy’s loathing of homosexuals, who had always been tolerated in the legitimate theatre. Then in 1932 he decided to ‘give it a go’ for one year, with the proviso that if it didn’t work out, he would return to the stage. His first film had been The Wiser Sex, during the shooting of which he became involved with its star, Ross Alexander, said to have been the great love of his life. Inasmuch as she had turned a blind eye to Clark’s carousing with William Haines and Johnny Mack Brown, so Joan accepted the fact that Franchot and Ross Alexander (1907-37) looked like being in it for the long haul. What she could not contend with, however, was Douglas Fairbanks Jr coming across all self-righteous when his own extramarital schedule was just as hectic. When Joan learned that Fairbanks had hired a private detective to follow her around, she waited until he was away filming an overnight location before packing his belongings and sending them to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Then, setting a precedent for the future, she had the locks changed at her Brentwood home, changed her phone number - sent messages to friends that her ‘lodger’ had moved out - and for good measure changed all the toilet seats! Adding insult to injury, she informed the press of her impending divorce (this would be granted on 13 May 1933) before Fairbanks himself was given the news.

  Dancing Lady was a big-budget musical directed by Robert Z. Leonard, shot over a gruelling 65-day schedule - Clark’s longest to date. Today it is less remembered for his, Joan’s and Franchot Tone’s contribution than for being the first film to feature Fred Astaire (1899-1987), who, for some time, had been working the theatre-dancehall circuit with his sister, Adele. Until now he had been reluctant to tackle the movies, believing his equine features non-photogenic in close-up. In their Bavarian scene, while Joan looks fabulous in traditional costume and braided blonde wig, Astaire appears ludicrous with his long, bony legs protruding from his lederhosen - certainly not a sight for the squeamish!

  Shooting was a complicated process. Franchot claimed his relationship with Joan was still platonic - he was still very much in love with Ross Alexander, albeit cheating on him with Bette Davis, his co-star in Ex-Lady. She herself only showed interest in him in the first place because she could not stand the thought of him being with Joan. Ex-Lady was the first Bette Davis film to feature her name above the credits and Warner Brothers pulled strings to ensure her maximum press coverage only to have her knocked off the front pages by the Crawford-Fairbanks divorce. This sparked off a rivalry between the two actresses to end only with Joan’s death in 1977.

  Clark’s health problems only added to the drama of Dancing Lady. Shortly after shooting began during the early summer of 1933, he developed agonising abdominal pains, which he attributed to appendicitis. The actual cause was his rotting teeth: pyorrhoea had developed in his gums and entered his bloodstream. To help numb the pain, he swigged whisky, while many on the set complained to Robert Z. Leonard of how his halitosis was so acute that it made them retch to stand close to him. His malady also made him foul-tempered and he fell out with his agent - Minna Wallis - but was snapped up by the Bern-Allenberg Agency, who were used to grumpy stars: they also managed Wallace Beery. Matters were exacerbated when Josephine Dillon resurfaced, short of cash once more. When Clark refused to cough up, she attempted to rubbish him in a series of ‘open letters’ to him, which were published in several movie magazines. In the meantime, Howard Strickling arranged for him to be examined by MGM medic Edward B. Jones - the man known for examining menstruating actresses to ensure they were not pulling a fast one when asking for sick notes. Jones prescribed painkillers and referred him to George Hollenbach, one of Hollywood’s leading dental surgeons.

  Clark’s teeth, Hollenbach stressed, would all have to come out and he would have to be fitted with dentures. He was further advised that the procedure would take at least a month to allow his gums to heal. While he was recuperating, there was an unpleasant incident concerning his ex-lover and supposed friend, William Haines, precipitated by Clark hitting the roof on being told that Franchot Tone’s name would be appearing above his own in the credits for Dancing Lady. The news sent him into one of his not infrequent ‘faghating’ phases. Via Howard Strickling, he complained to Louis B. Mayer of how he was sick of seeing Joan Crawford squired around town by ‘that goddamn fairy’. It was jealousy, pure and simple - spiteful and hypocritical, too, considering his own secret agenda, and wholly unforgivable for what happened next. Mayer assumed the ‘goddamn fairy’ could only have been Haines, and sought to rectify the situation by feeding the story to the press that Haines - still a sizeable box-office draw - had been contracted to make a film with his ‘lover’, Pola Negri.

  Negri knew there was no such film, but was paid handsomely to go along with the charade. Mayer’s spies informed him whenever Haines attended a party so that the Polish siren could gatecrash and ‘surprise’ him. She was photographed with tears in her eyes, kissing him goodnight after a ‘date’. Haines was snapped buying a king-sized bed in a Hollywood department store, which the accompanying editorial declared would not, naturally, be delivered until after the nuptials. He actually purchased this for Joan Crawford, whose house he was helping to refurbish as part of her process of removing all traces of the departed Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

  For Haines, who had never been in the closet, the last straw came when he read in a newspaper that he and Pola Negri were about to host their engagement party. Barging into Mayer’s office unannounced, he told the mogul exactly what he thought of him, allegedly with more expletives than he had heard in his life. Not wishing to upset Haines further and have him walk off the set of his latest film, Mayer kept his cool. As soon as it wrapped, however, he had the actor trailed to one of his favourite haunts near Pershing Square. When he was observed entering a YMCA hostel with a 20-year-old marine he had picked up in a bar, Mayer’s agent alerted the vice-squad and the pair was arrested.

  This sort of thing had happened before, once when Haines and the director George Cukor hit this part of town in search of rough trade: MGM’s chief of police, Whitey Hendry, stepped into the breach. Money was handed over to the vice-squad and the matter dropped. Now, to teach Haines a lesson while still keeping the incident out of the press, Mayer had given instructions for the marine’s bail to be posted, whi
le Haines was dragged off to jail. Permitted the customary telephone call, he rang Joan Crawford and it was she who put up his bail. Haines was driven to San Simeon, where he and lover Jimmie Shields were taken in by Marion Davies. This time Mayer gave Haines an ultimatum: ditch Jimmie and marry anyone, or get out of the movies for good. Haines turned on Mayer with a ‘Fuck you!’, and walked out of his office, slamming the door behind him. MGM could not have chosen a more ironic title for his swansong: The Marines Are Coming!

  Crawford never found out that Gable’s hypocrisy, albeit inadvertently, contributed to the destruction of her best friend’s career, though regarding Haines’ work as an interior designer, as will be seen, he and Mayer had done him a favour. To teach Clark a lesson, Mayer put him on suspension - the official reason for this, the press were told, was that he had checked himself into a clinic without obtaining the studio’s permission - a sackable offence at the time. This, Mayer hoped, would bring him to heel without his having to reveal that MGM’s top male star was a ‘raving fagelah’, and of course without affecting the box-office. For his part, Clark was ordered to stick to women from now on - so far as is known, with one exception, this is what he did. He apologised for his ‘mistake’, promised to ‘get well’ as soon as possible and told the press he had ‘atoned’ for the sin of letting the studio down by joining the Freemasons! Even so, the suspension stayed, without pay, until the end of August of that year. Mayer also added Gable’s name to MGM’s Delinquents List, which included those of William Haines and Tallulah Bankhead.

  Meanwhile, on the set of Dancing Lady, Robert Z. Leonard shot around Clark’s scenes. Yet no sooner had he returned to work than he collapsed and had to be rushed to hospital: the infection which had started off in his gums had reached his gall-bladder and the prognosis was not good. He underwent an emergency operation, astonished the doctors by recovering quickly and within two weeks was back on the set, allowing the film to be completed just six weeks behind schedule, but $150,000 over budget on account of the delays.

  In Dancing Lady, Joan Crawford plays Janie, a feisty burlesque queen, whose ambition is to appear in a sell-out Broadway musical. Unlike most of her contemporaries she is a decent girl and declares her intention to stay chaste until her wedding night - which had Crawford detractors and fans howling. When millionaire entrepreneur Tod Newton (Tone) offers her a bit part in a revue and proposes marriage, Janie proves no pushover - she accepts the part but informs Newton, whom she loathes, that she will marry him only if the show bombs. He, who welcomes losing money if such is to be his reward, sets out to sabotage his own production. What he hasn’t reckoned with is dance director, Patch Gallagher (Clark), a no-nonsense, Billy Rose type, who also has his eye on Janie. As real-life Rose did with his wife Fanny Brice, Gallagher bullies her into shape, and doesn’t care who is present when he lays into her. Little by little, Janie stands up to him and when she helps him through a last-minute hitch with the show, they fall in love. Janie is an instant hit with the public and Newton does the honourable thing by letting her go.

  But Clark had not learned his lesson with Louis B. Mayer, and when shooting wrapped he bawled him out over the roles he was being offered. Claiming he had hated every moment of Dancing Lady, he told Mayer that after his next film - Soviet had been set up some time before by Irving Thalberg with Crawford as his leading lady - he would only accept roles which pleased him, otherwise he would leave Hollywood. Garbo, he added by way of argument, had been making similar threats for years and getting away with it because, like himself, she knew exactly what kind of roles suited her best. Mayer reminded him that a star like Garbo was irreplaceable whereas actors like himself were two-a-penny. Pointing through his office window, he declared he could pick any tall, good-looking man off the streets, turn him into the next Gable, then send the real one back to Ohio, from whence he came.

  Mayer then announced that, with Irving Thalberg still far from well (he had returned from Europe in the August), he was in complete charge at MGM and that, rather than putting Clark into Soviet, he would send him to ‘Siberia’. This was Mayer’s nickname for Columbia Pictures, the ‘poverty row’ studio to which contractees were frequently loaned out if they stepped out of line. Mayer believed that a spell at Columbia, with its Spartan conditions in those days, would soon have miscreants appreciating how fortunate they had been in working for him.

  Chapter Four

  BEN & LORETTA

  Clark’s film as a loan-out to Columbia was to be Night Bus, based on a Cosmopolitan magazine story by Samuel Hopkins Adams, and it was to be directed by Frank Capra, loathed by Louis B. Mayer as much as he loathed Clark. Because Cosmopolitan was owned by Mayer’s ally, William Randolph Hearst, MGM had been given first refusal of the project, but turned it down. Of late there had been a glut of ‘bus’ movies: MGM’s Fugitive Lovers, with Robert Montgomery in the role of an escaped convict, had only recently bombed at the box-office. The fact that Columbia’s chief, Harry Cohn, paid just $5,000 for the screen rights suggested to everyone in the know that the end result would almost certainly be a flop. And to Mayer’s warped way of thinking, if Gable’s next film turned out to be a turkey, this would give him a legitimate excuse not to renew his contract.

  The first good news Mayer received was that no one else wanted to be in the film: Margaret Sullavan, Constance Bennett, Miriam Hopkins and Myrna Loy had all rejected the female lead of the headstrong heiress who runs off with a bohemian artist. To fit in with Clark’s character, his occupation had been changed to a hard-bitten reporter. The situation was saved by Paramount’s Claudette Colbert. Like Clark, she had ruffled a few feathers along the route to success by declaring she would never be bossed around by studio big-wigs.

  Born Claudette Cauchoin in Paris, Colbert (1905-96) had come to Hollywood as a child, worked on Broadway during the early Twenties and made her film debut in 1927. For The Love Of Mike, directed by Frank Capra, had flopped but four years later Colbert ascended the ladder with Ernst Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant, alongside Maurice Chevalier, as well as appearing in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign Of The Cross. She was about to go on vacation for four weeks and imperiously announced that she was not interested in working with anyone, least of all a director with whom she had already shared one miserable experience, and an actor who was unable to keep his pants buttoned. Assuming he would show her the door, she swanned into Harry Cohn’s office and told him that if she did the film, she would work on it for exactly four weeks and not one moment more, and that she would not work for less than $50,000 - twice her regular salary. Cohn, in a fix, stunned her by agreeing to her terms.

  Frank Capra (1897-1991) was another feisty European, a genius who spent his whole career championing the ordinary Joe, who through moral determination and conscience triumphs over adversity to beat the odds in feel-good movies. Born in Sicily, like Colbert he had moved to California while still young. In 1925, Mack Sennett employed him to write gags for Harry Langdon, who subsequently hired him as his personal director. Later, Capra moved to Columbia, and in 1931 he teamed up in what would prove a phenomenally successful partnership with Robert Riskin (1897- 1955), already a well-known playwright and married to Fay Wray. The pair scripted The Miracle Woman, adapted from Riskin’s play. Among other triumphs were Mr Deeds Goes To Town and Lost Horizon.

  Capra always maintained that when he presented Clark with the script for Night Bus and offered to go through it with him, Gable’s inebriated response had been, ‘Buddy, I don’t give a fuck what you do with it!’ Later, after taking it home and reading it, he revised his opinion - and somewhere along the way its title changed to It Happened One Night. The film opens with spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews (Colbert) going berserk after her millionaire father (Walter Connelly, still only 45, but looking much older) annuls her marriage to opportunist King Wesley (Jameson Thomas), who she only married in the first place because her father told her not to. Aboard their yacht in Miami the pair argue, and when the old man slaps her, Ellie dives overboa
rd and swims ashore. Next we see her boarding the night bus to join Wesley in New York, about to meet rebellious hot head hack, Peter Warne (Clark), who has just been fired. ‘All hail the King,’ his buddies chant as they walk him to the bus, using his famous nickname for the first time. This is the new-look Gable that men across America emulated: wisecracking, wearing a belted trench coat and smoking a pipe, his hat tilted at a rakish angle, still snarling like the Gable of old. And not least at the stuck-up girl who enters his life by purloining his seat while he is having a set-to with the driver - future Wagon Train star Ward Bond, in an uncredited role.

  Ellie and Peter bond during a stopover at Jacksonville, when the suitcase containing her money is stolen, though when she sees the newspaper headline reporting her disappearance, all he is interested in is penning the exclusive he hopes will get him his job back. Initially, Ellie tries to buy his silence, promising him a hefty pay-off when they reach New York. But this gets him mad, for he hates rich folk who feel any problem can be resolved by dipping into their wallets rather than facing up to it. During the next leg of the journey he changes his tune when she is menaced by an unscrupulous shyster named Shapely (Roscoe Karns). Peter rescues her by pretending to be her husband - a ruse he continues to save on their virtually non-existent funds - when bad weather forces the bus to pull in for the night at a cheap motel. He has no intention of taking advantage of her, however, and puts up ‘The Walls of Jericho’ - a sheet slung over the washing-line that divides the room. ‘If you’re nursing any silly notion that I’m interested in you, forget it,’ he drawls. ‘You’re just a headline to me!’

  Nevertheless he taunts her, loaning her his pyjamas, then showing her how a real man undresses, with Gable once more stripping off his shirt to reveal he is not wearing an under vest. This causes Ellie to rush behind the sheet as he sings, ‘Who’s Afraid Of The Big, Bad Wolf?’ while unbuttoning his trousers. Then, when he gets into his bed and she sits upon hers, we observe that she is falling for his brutish charms. Only now does she ask his name, bringing the response, ‘I’m the whip-poor-will that cries in the night; I’m the soft morning breeze that caresses your lovely face!’ The next morning, this virile hunk that uses women, fixes her breakfast - interpreted by fans as Gable ‘going soft’. He teaches her the art of dunking donuts before, for the first time in her silver-spooned existence, she faces the harshness of an outdoor shower. When detectives hired by her father turn up, Peter and Ellie throw them off the scent by having their first marital tiff, yelling at each other in Deep South accents - the funniest of several hilarious scenes in this film.