by David Bret
The journey resumes with camaraderie as the passengers belt out ‘The Man On The Flying Trapeze’. Then, when a poor woman flakes out through lack of food, Peter and Ellie give her the last of their money. Here, Gable lives up to his legend that he was suitably distanced from Hollywood’s glitterati not to have been averse to giving a man the shirt off his back, according to journalist Ben Maddox. Then Shapely turns up again. The crook has read in the latest edition that Mr Andrews is offering $100,000 for Ellie’s safe return and he wants to go 50:50 with Peter - either this, or he will tell all to the police. Peter scares him off by pretending to be a mobster - he will loan Shapely a machine-gun, then they will kidnap Ellie, who is worth much more than her father is offering, and maybe bump her off, should he not cough up. Shapely is then warned what will happen if he blabs: Peter will do to Shapely’s kids what he did to his mobster rival. On hearing this, Shapely flees into the night and Peter spits after him. This was the only scene in the film questioned by the Hays Office, when William Haines cracked a joke that Clark was emulating him ‘finishing off’ after giving a blow-job, for the spittle drools down his jacket.
To be on the safe side, Peter tells Ellie they must leave the bus and find an alternative way of getting to New York. Though broke, she refuses to wire her father for help. They spend the night in a haywain and next morning set about hitching a ride. He claims to be an expert, but every passing motorist ignores him. Ellie fares better - walking to the kerb, she hoists her skirt above her thigh to an instant screeching of brakes. The driver is Alan Hale (1892-1950), Errol Flynn’s regular sidekick, who for the few minutes he is on screen never lets us forget that he trained as an opera singer. Almost every line is delivered in a powerful baritone that sets the teeth on edge. He is a con man who drives off with their luggage while they are stretching their legs - no problem for Peter, who sprints after the car, knobbles Hale and returns with it, so they can resume their journey to New York.
The pair find a motel, though they cannot pay the bill - he will figure something out by the time they hit the road again. They are but hours from their destination and Ellie is upset their adventure is almost over and she may never see him again, though Peter appears to be indifferent. From his side of the new Walls of Jericho, he confides that he has never been in love because he has never found the right girl. If he did, he would take her to a Pacific island he knows, where lovers and the moon and the water become one, and where the stars are so close he could reach up and stir them around. This brings her to his side of the sheet, begging him to take her with him because she loves him and can’t envisage life without him. Again, he bows to the edicts of the Hays Office, disappointing her by ordering her back to her own bed.
The next morning, leaving her sleeping, Peter drives into New York, where he pleads with his former editor: the paper will have its scoop for once she has dumped Wesley, Ellie will marry him! She, meanwhile, has been kicked out of the motel for not paying the bill and has finally wired her father for help. He and his police motorcade pass Peter on the road while he is heading back to give her the good news. Ellie thinks he has deserted her, and announces that she will remarry Wesley. Peter feels dejected, but this is a Frank Capra film where happy endings are mandatory. Cut to the eve of the wedding, where Peter and Mr Andrews discuss money: he is not interested in the reward, just the $39.60 it has cost him to sell his effects and get them back to New York. But, the old man demands, does he love her? The response is pure Gable, in keeping with the übermensch image: ‘Any guy that’d fall in love with your daughter ought to have his head examined. . . . What she needs is a guy who’ll take a sock at her once a day, whether it’s coming to her or not!’
The wedding ceremony is underway when Ellie learns how Peter really feels, with Mr Andrews begging her to make him happy by choosing the man she loves. Seeing Peter’s car, she dashes across the lawn, pursued by the guests and press. As the credits roll in this gem of a production - the first truly great Gable movie - we learn that the couple are married, enabling The Walls of Jericho to finally tumble.
Claudette Colbert, never an easy actress for anyone to work with, later claimed that It Happened One Night had been the worst experience of her career and that Clark resented her because he had only been on one-sixth of her salary. Much of his dissension stemmed from the fact that Colbert was a lesbian and therefore not interested in granting him his customary off-set fling. Such resentment does not come across on the screen and several scenes are known to be flunked on account of his practical jokes. In the motel sequence where Elllie begs Peter to take her with him to his Pacific island, Clark had grabbed Colbert’s hand and placed it on his crotch. He had shoved a hammer-shaft inside his trousers and wanted to find out if she really was ‘a strait-laced baritone babe who’d had a humour by-pass’, as legend professed. Her reaction was to let out a piercing scream, grab the shaft and threaten to shove it ‘where the sun never shone’.
Colbert was also against shooting the hitchhiking scene and flashing her thigh in front of Gable, worried that he might want to take advantage of the situation. To placate her, Frank Capra hired a stand-in, but Colbert hit the roof - the stand-in’s legs were too scrawny, she yelled, and this would reflect badly on her. She swore she would never work with the director or Gable again - a few years later she was to revise her opinion about Clark and apparently enjoy the experience much more the second time around.
What was not predicted, when shooting wrapped on Christmas Eve 1933, however, was that It Happened One Night would prove such a monumental success - one of the classic social comedies of the 20th century, no less. So far as Clark was concerned, it had been just another loan-out exercise and he still had to face the daunting task of returning to MGM. On Christmas Day Louis B. Mayer wired him at Columbia with instructions to shave off his moustache and report to the front office before the end of the year. He was immediately put into Men In White with Myrna Loy - another ‘baritone babe’ he had already attempted, but failed, to seduce. Directed by Polish-born Richard Boleslawski, a former student of Stanislavsky and Max Reinhardt, this was filmed in fifteen days so that Clark would be free to travel to New York to promote It Happened One Night, scheduled for a February 1934 release.
Set in a city hospital, Men In White was a pioneering medical drama, brave for its day, and one which spawned countless such movies, though it now comes across as rather dull. Clark played a young intern, torn between graduating and marrying his wealthy sweetheart (Loy) - a move which enabled him to set up his own Park Avenue practice. While deciding, he gets a nurse (Elizabeth Allan) pregnant. Following a botched abortion, she dies as he is operating on her, but this being Clark Gable, he not only gets away with it, but his distraught fiancée forgives him, too.
Gable’s New York trip was without MGM’s blessing. There he was handled not by a Columbia publicist, but by MGM’s Howard Dietz, who made a point of meeting reporters beforehand and vetting their questions. He was then threatened with suspension, should he breathe so much as a word about It Happened One Night, the whole purpose of the trip in the first place! Additionally, he was supplied with a typed-up list of pre-prepared questions that he was asked to learn, as he would any script, and to deliver them off the cuff. But the press saw through the ruse. Remarks such as ‘Parts appeal to me that offer powerful opportunities for definitive characterisation’ were hardly likely to come tripping spontaneously off his tongue.
While shooting Men In White, he had had a fling with Elizabeth Allan, the 24-year-old English actress who trained with the Old Vic, who had recently arrived in Hollywood. The following year she was to become a household name courtesy of David Copperfield. No sooner had the film wrapped than he turned his attentions to a dashing young reporter named Ben Maddox, who appears to have been his very last homosexual conquest. One gets the impression, however, with Maddox’s fearsome lothario reputation, that even though this was essentially little more than another ‘fucks-for-bucks’ exercise, Clark was not the one who did all
the chasing.
Ben Maddox, 32 when he first championed Clark, was a hugely influential freelance reporter, who used sex as a means of acquiring his scoops. A brawny, good-looking six-footer, his trick was to interview subjects over lunch or dinner - always at their homes, where there was less danger of his coming unstuck - and once they had fallen for his seemingly limitless charms, offer himself as dessert. As a cub reporter, one of his earliest conquests had been Rudolph Valentino, back in 1923. ‘I allowed him to ride my favourite Arabian steed around Falcon Lair, and afterwards he rode me,’ Rudy wrote in his diary after Maddox’s first visit to his home. Three years later he had been one of the eight lover-pallbearers at his funeral. Maddox also slept with Jean Harlow in the wake of a slanging match that he equated to foreplay: he had called her a sexless, phoney blonde and Harlow had slapped him and accused him of having a chip on his shoulder.
Some of Maddox’s notes and ‘spiked’ interviews make for interesting reading. In 1933, within the space of one week he had seduced Anita Page, Sidney Fox, Marian Marsh and Sylvie Sydney - the latter in the back of his car in broad daylight - when the editor of Silver Screen commissioned a feature about ‘Hollywood’s bachelor maidens’. The general opinion was that all four were lesbians, but in the arms of the man for obvious reasons referred to by Tallulah Bankhead as ‘Big Ben’, they had become red-blooded tigresses. ‘Every unmarried actress has her own opinions,’ Maddox wrote in his feature, ‘So I started to learn the facts as they appear to some of our charmers who so far have said NO to all altar calls.’ Maddox refused to interview Barbara Stanwyck (but later ‘brunched’ with her husband, Robert Taylor), dismissing her as ‘unglamorous’. Around the time he met Clark, he also spectacularly failed to seduce Marlene Dietrich in her dressing room on the set of The Devil Is A Woman by standing up and boldly indicating that her sultry tones had given him an erection. Marlene told him to take a cold shower! Maddox would, among dozens of others, subsequently ‘get better acquainted’ with Errol Flynn, Phillips Holmes, Ramon Novarro, George O’Brien and Tyrone Power.
Clark is thought to have ‘loaned his meaty charms’ to the incorrigable reporter in exchange for a high-profile interview and public relations exercise. Solely on account of the reporter’s intervention, this would see his salary eventually upped to $3,000 a week - still less than John Gilbert and some of the other Talkies casualties were getting, but a step in the right direction all the same. Likening Gable’s appeal to the ‘Valentino boom of yesteryear’, Maddox penned the most glowing, unashamedly gushing appreciation of ‘his man’. Reading between the lines it is blatantly obvious that he was in love with Clark. Not only this, but he was attempting to camouflage his affection by trying to con his readers into believing the Gables’ marriage was unshakeable while personally aware that it would almost certainly be over before his feature hit the newsstands. This is exactly what happened, making him look rather silly.
Meet Clark Gable today! This He-Man with dimples, this gangster who went heroic by feminine demand! This most desired of current screen lovers! Where does he go from here? Divorce? Nine out of ten great stars let Hollywood spoil their home life. Clark Gable won’t! Here’s one marriage I think we can depend upon. Clark is married to a cultured, charming woman who has the knack of completely satisfying him in every way. His salary is said to be $1,500 a week with bonuses on each film. It obviously isn’t nearly so large as his popularity warrants in comparison with the other stars. Will he last? I think so. He isn’t temperamental and high-strung like John Gilbert, nor sheikisk like Valentino nor complex like Phil Holmes. He has a depth and virility that the juveniles lack. To the woman he’s brought a new brand of love - to us men, a masculine and intelligent movie hero whom we can respect.
The salary increase advocated by Ben Maddox would not come just yet. On 24 February 1934, It Happened One Night opened at New York’s Radio City Music Hall as part of a vaudeville-movie double bill. Such events were commonplace in those days, with the programme changing weekly to avoid favouritism of a particular film or performer. Outside the venue Clark was mobbed, while within the auditorium the screaming from 6,000 fans drowned his introductory speech.
As a contractee of MGM, he was permitted just two visits to Radio City before being seconded to Broadway’s Capitol Theater - not to promote his own film, but The Mystery Of Mr X, starring Robert Montgomery and Elizabeth Allan. This was failing at the box-office and needed a boost its stars could not provide. Clark was briefly reunited with his old flame: she stayed at the Waldorff Astoria, where he had a suite, as did Ben Maddox. Together they presented the film, sometimes as many as five times in one day. In between, Clark augmented the vaudeville programme performing a routine from Dancing Lady with the stage actress, Ruth Matteson.
Initially, It Happened One Night was virtually ignored because the critics were only interested in recording the hysterical scenes at the Capitol Theater. When The Mystery Of Mr X moved on - headed by the ubiquitous Ben Maddox - they picked up on it, the movie magazines plugged it to death and the all-important major studios realised Columbia, aka ‘Siberia’, had hotted up and was now a major force to be reckoned with. Louis B. Mayer dismissed the film’s unexpected success as ‘just another fluke’ and, retaining Clark on the same salary, made no secret of the fact that he despised him no less by assigning him to yet another typical Gable rushed effort, Manhattan Melodrama. Produced by David Selznick, it was directed by W.S.Van Dyke - with ‘One-take Woody’ breezing through Clark’s scenes in just twelve days.
Clark played mobster Blackie Gallagher, who as a child survived the 1904 SS General Slocum disaster, which claimed the lives of over 1,000 New York immigrants, burned alive during a picnicking trip. Blackie’s closest friends, also aboard the ship, are Joe Patrick (Leo Carrillo) - now a priest - and lawyer and aspiring politician Jim Wage (William Powell), though by the time they reach adulthood, the latter is Blackie’s enemy because of his underground activities. The film’s love interest, played by Myrna Loy, is Eleanor - Blackie’s moll, who complicates matters by marrying Jim.
There are echoes of Possessed when Jim hits the campaign trail and his foes try to sabotage his election prospects by digging up his wife’s murky past. Blackie comes to her aid, accidentally kills one of her attackers and with Jim as the prosecuting attorney is sentenced to the electric chair. Jim’s bringing to justice of this arch-criminal wins him his seat, but, when he learns how Blackie only killed the man to protect Eleanor whom he secretly loves, he tries to get the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment only to have Blackie refuse this. He prefers to sacrifice his life so he will never come between the couple again. The film ends with him walking to the execution chamber, comforted by Father Joe.
Manhattan Melodrama was a good film but tailored around the fading talents of 41-year-old William Powell to gain himself and Myrna Loy publicity for The Thin Man, which was about to be released. Recently divorced from Carole Lombard, Powell was now involved with Jean Harlow - separated from Hal Rosson - whose daily visits to the set caused mass disruption. When the extras and technicians wolf-whistled, Harlow would expose her breasts, or if she was feeling especially mischievous, hoist her skirt and flash her ‘platinum snatch’. Today the film is remembered chiefly as the first major production to feature Mickey Rooney - then 12, he played Blackie Gallagher as a boy. It also received unprecedented free publicity when real-life gangster John Dillinger (1903-34) was shot dead by FBI agents while exiting Chicago’s Biograph Cinema after watching it with his girlfriend. She had tipped off the police, it subsequently emerged, and they advised her to wear a red dress so that Dillinger might be recognised and more easily gunned down.
By the time the film wrapped, Louis B. Mayer was at a loss over what to do, not just with Clark, but with Joan Crawford, too. The pair were still rumoured to be an item, but were never seen publicly unless as a foursome with Ria and Franchot Tone, who apparently was still unaware that Clark had tried to out him. Indeed, some believed Franchot was bett
er off not knowing. Despite his meek and mild appearance, he had a fearsome reputation for brawling and could turn nasty when provoked. Joan’s reluctance to marry put Mayer in a quandary. He hit the roof when she told reporter Jimmie Fidler, when asked why she and Franchot Tone were deliberating over tying the knot, ‘You can have your cake and eat it. If you just nibble around the edges, it lasts a little longer!’ Supposing then, with her track record, MGM put Crawford and Tone in a film as love interests, only to have them split before its release? Franchot was no longer involved with Ross Alexander, who had moved on to Errol Flynn - the two were currently shooting Captain Blood - but he had been seen drowning his sorrows in a bar, which suggested to Mayer that all was not well within the Crawford household. As a precaution, Franchot was put into Lives Of A Bengal Lancer, while Mayer played safe, making best use of a probable adulterous situation by assigning Joan and Clark to Chained, to be followed by the screen adaptation of Tallulah Bankhead’s Broadway hit, Forsaking All Others.
Between these two, Clark squeezed in After Office Hours with Constance Bennett, who had just bagged a three-year contract with Myron Selznick for an astonishing $150,000 per picture. He played a wisecracking but unsympathetic newsman in what was supposed to be a screwball comedy - no easy task, he said, with this particular leading lady. Shooting ended with him vowing never to cross her path again. Chained, scripted by John Lee Mahin and directed by Clarence Brown, was just another routine steamboat-goes-to-the-tropics drama. Diane Lovering (Joan, whose character’s name had fans laughing their sides sore) is having an affair with wealthy ship owner Richard Field (Otto Kruger) and would like to marry him, if only his wife would grant him a divorce. She therefore takes a trip to South America, where she embarks on a passionate on-board romance with tough guy Mike Brady - Clark, with his moustache grown back. When she returns to New York, she feels duty-bound to forget Mike and resume her relationship with Richard, whose wife has changed her mind about the divorce. He, however, realises Mike is the better man for her and nobly stands aside: in other words Joan’s and Clark’s fans would never have forgiven her for not choosing Gable to spend the rest of her life with!