by David Bret
At the Hollywood première, Clark was slightly more relaxed but still refused to be seen with Selznick. He and Carole, wearing a gold lamé Travis Banton gown, arrived with Marion Davies and Raoul Walsh. Carole had wanted her father-in-law to share their limousine but William Gable insisted on making his own way to the theatre and flatly refused to wear a tuxedo. None of the Gables attended the New York première, though Clark and Carole did show up at the Oscars ceremony in February 1940.
Gone With The Wind won an unprecedented 10 Academy Awards. Selznick won Best Producer, Vivien Leigh Best Actress, Victor Fleming Best Director, Ernest Haller Best Cinematography, William Cameron Best Production Designer, Hal Kern and James Newcome jointly Best Editors, Lyle Wheeler Best Art Director. Best Supporting Actress went to Hattie McDaniel, the first ever black recipient. Astonishingly, Max Steiner did not win an Oscar for one of the most superlative scores in movie history. Though nominated for Best Actor, Clark was prevented from winning in yet another act of extreme spite from Louis B. Mayer. He pulled the necessary strings to ensure that Robert Donat won for Goodbye Mr Chips. This had not been doing too well at the box-office and with Gone With The Wind breaking all records for takings, Mayer must have felt that his other baby needed the boost in publicity.
No sooner had Clark recovered from doing the rounds with the Selznick film than he was assigned to Boom Town with Spencer Tracy, while Carole completed her third RKO production, They Knew What They Wanted. She is thought to have been suffering from depression - the traditional curse of the comedienne - a combination of not seeing as much of Clark as she would have liked over the last few hectic months and also longing for a child - thought to have been exacerbated by watching the bonding scenes between Rhett Butler and his daughter. Also, despite his fondness for Carole, Clark had never stopped playing away from home. While making Gone With The Wind there had been a fling with Ona Munson, who would never really get over him, as well as the experience of playing a key role in one of the most prestigious movies of all time. With his usual flair for helping friends in their hour of need, Clark would try but fail to get Munson parts in several of his future films - for some reason, MGM were never interested. Her only decent-sized role would be as another whorehouse madam, two years later, in Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture. In February 1955, shortly after calling Clark to wish him a belated happy birthday, she would bring down the curtain with an overdose of pills.
In Boom Town, scripted by John Lee Mahin and directed by Jack Conway, Clark and Spencer Tracy were wildcatters working in the oilfields, a role which must have resurrected horrific memories of Gable’s youth. He played ‘Big John’ McMasters, while Tracy was ‘Square John’ Land. Their first encounter takes place in the street, when they square up to each other over who has the right of way across the wooden planks preventing pedestrians from wading ankle-deep in mud. Both are equally aggressive, their stubbornness zigzagging between friendship and rivalry as they make and lose respective fortunes. This more or less sums up the film, confusing the viewer en route. Square John dreams of settling down with Betsy (Claudette Colbert), the girl he left at home. When she unexpectedly arrives in town, Big John welcomes her and they spend the night together - it is only afterwards that we learn they have married by special licence. Big John accepts the union and only snaps when his prospecting partner cheats on her with his secretary (Hedy Lamarr). All ends well, of course. Big John sees the error of his ways and, happy to be poor again now that he and Square John have been declared bankrupt, they walk off arm-in-arm, with Betsy between them, across the undrilled field that they have every confidence will make them rich again.
There was considerable off-screen rivalry between Gable and Tracy, who later said that he hated making the film because Clark had been given the juiciest part. Clark also insisted on doing his own stunts, refusing the stand-in provided for the punch-up scene with Tracy, which is as hammy as it gets. Tracy’s stand-in smacked him in the mouth (allegedly on purpose, having been told by Tracy to teach him a lesson for trying to act too tough), cutting his lip and chipping his dentures. Shooting was held up for a week while the injury healed and his dentures were repaired - with Louis B. Mayer docking Clark’s pay because he had ‘risked life and limb’ by not using the stand-in. And Tracy swore never to work with him again, though they would soon make up and remain friends for the rest of Gable’s life.
Hedy Lamarr (Hedwig Kiesler, 1913-96) was an exquisitely beautiful Austrian import, who shot to fame in 1932 with a 10-minute full-frontal nude scene in the Czech film, Extase, regarded as pornographic by non-European audiences. Though six-times married and divorced, she never concealed the fact that sexually she preferred women to men. It must have come as a blow to Clark’s macho pride that, despite being on much friendlier terms with Claudette Colbert than the first time around, his female co-stars in Boom Town were more interested in each other than in him. Not that he went without his obligatory fun while shooting Boom Town. It later emerged that among the several movie magazine reporters allowed on to the set were freelancers May Mann and the ubiquitous Ben Maddox. Both spent at least an hour with Clark in his dressing room, with strict instructions that they were not to be disturbed. Mann arrived wearing a cocktail dress, Maddox in his usual grey suit and trilby. Whereas all the usual conclusions were drawn over what Clark might have been getting up to with an attractive woman, in an unenlightened world it was assumed he and Maddox could only have whiled away their time drinking and engaging in buddy talk.
In January 1940 Clark and Carole travelled to Mexico in their new station wagon for what was described in the press as a belated honeymoon. In fact, the trip was part-financed by Photoplay in a deal with MGM to promote the Gables as Hollywood’s No. 1 couple in the wake of the Kirtley Baskette fiasco. It was agreed they should be allowed a week on their own ‘to make a baby’. They would then be joined at the La Grulla Hunting Club in Baja California, some 60 miles south of the border, by Otto Winkler and a Photoplay photographer - along with Baskette or Ben Maddox. The baby that Carole wanted so badly, but Clark was apparently indifferent towards, would never happen. The following year both would undergo fertility tests at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, and be told that there was nothing physically wrong with either of them. The story fed to the press at the time, in an age when male movie stars simply could not be considered incapable of fathering children unless they were gay, was that Clark had been having treatment for a slipped disc following a fall from a horse . . . eight years earlier.
One may be assured that neither Clark nor Carole wanted anything to do with Kirtley Baskette - similarly, that Clark would not have wanted Ben Maddox around during his ‘honeymoon’. He therefore removed himself from temptation - of punching the former’s lights out and succumbing to the latter’s charms - by setting off with Carole for Encenada, on the Pacific Coast. Unfortunately, they forgot to inform Otto Winkler of their revised itinerary and when they drove into a storm and opted to rough it in the back of the station wagon, this sparked off an international alert. Ben Maddox, still in Hollywood, drew the conclusion that the Gables had been kidnapped my Mexican terrorists, which brought a complaint from the Mexican government, who were appalled by Maddox and his colleagues’ published opinion that the country had returned to the lawlessness of the previous century. Louis B. Mayer ordered Winkler to charter a plane and organise a search party - which subsequently found Clarke and Carole shooting duck on the outskirts of Encenada, wondering what all the fuss was about.
For the umpteenth time, Clark avoided suspension by the skin of his teeth - saved this time by the phenomenal box-office success of Boom Town. Because of this, Mayer once more cast him opposite Hedy Lamarr in Comrade X. Directed by King Vidor, this was promoted as a spin-off from Ernst Lubitsch’s sparkling comedy, Ninotchka. A massive hit the year before, it had been promoted with the slogan, ‘GARBO LAUGHS!’ The film saw Clark as an American reporter visiting Russia, who falls for a trolley-bus conductress suspected of be
ing a Communist. It had its moments, but another Ninotchka it was not.
Carole, meanwhile, had just completed what would be hailed the best of her screwball comedies: Mr And Mrs Smith, co-starring Robert Montgomery and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. By all accounts, despite the on-screen clowning around, she was still feeling pretty low. Once shooting wrapped, however, she was apparently back to her old self, playing pranks, going on hunting trips with Clark and his pals - and according to Louella Parsons, ‘Still cussing like it was going out of fashion.’
In February 1941, soon after celebrating his fortieth birthday, Gable began shooting They Met In Bombay with Rosalind Russell, with whom he had made China Seas. Directed by Clarence Brown, this saw them playing rival jewel thieves, who trail an English duchess to the Far East, attempting to outwit each other while trying to steal her diamonds. Eventually they become partners, and naturally they fall in love. Then the story becomes ludicrous with the over-application of the essential Gable gung-ho element. While masquerading as an army officer he is assigned to an offensive against the Japanese, for which he is awarded the Victoria Cross - and a lighter jail sentence when finally apprehended for his crime on account of his heroics.
Carole visited the set each day. She was temporarily out of work because her RKO contract had expired and David Selznick was no longer interested in signing her to a new deal because of Clark’s antagonism towards him during the Gone With The Wind premières. Carole blamed her inactivity on Myron Selznick - out of fear of upsetting his brother, she said, he was ‘sitting on his fat ass, watching the world go by’. Because she had signed a contract with him that would not expire until late 1943, she was unable to look for another agent, therefore she handed the matter over to arbitration. Her victory would be Pyrrhic. Though the court found in her favour and permitted her to drop Myron Selznick, she was forced to pay him $27,000 - the estimated amount the judge worked out she would have had to pay in commission, had Selznick found her work between now and the end of their contract! Several of Selznick’s other clients would leave him out of sympathy for Carole. He was to hit the bottle and would die an embittered alcoholic three years later.
Carole’s new agent was Nat Wolff, one of Clark’s hunting buddies. Within weeks of taking her under his wing he signed her to two comedy dramas - They All Kissed The Bride, to be shot in the spring of 1942, and for now, To Be Or Not To Be, with Jack Benny. One of her finest films, it was directed by Ernst Lubitsch and tells the story of a theatrical group, living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, who attempt to stage a production of Hamlet while being harassed by the Gestapo. Clark, meanwhile, moved on to Honky Tonk, his first cowboy picture since The Painted Desert, co-starring Lana Turner and Claire Trevor. He played trickster Candy Johnson, who rides into a corrupt backwater town and chisels his way into running the place. He falls for a saloon girl (Trevor), only to drop her when the virginal Lucy Cotton (Lana, very much against type!) enters the scenario. They marry, and she attempts to turn him into the good guy - in the process suffering a miscarriage and a near-death experience. Carole visited the set each day, though for different reasons than last time. From the first day of shooting there were rumours that Clark and Lana were having an affair - said to have been Lana’s revenge on Carole for getting her fired from Idiot’s Delight.
Lana certainly was a very busy lady. Recently she had been seen about town with celebrity lawyer Greg Bautzer, almost Ben Maddox’s legal alter ego in that in return for an almost 100 per cent success rate in the courtroom, he was famed for bedding just about every one of his A-list female clients. Bautzer (1911-87) was currently involved with Joan Crawford - indeed, Maddox predicted he would be her next husband. The two had dated before, and Lana had broken up with Bautzer after Joan had asked her around for tea - and warned her to back off, or else! On the rebound, Lana married bandleader Artie Shaw, a serial cheat who had recently made Betty Grable pregnant while two-timing her with Judy Garland. Like Lana, Shaw would make eight trips down the aisle - and Lana had cheated on him with fellow bandleader Tommy Dorsey, drummer Buddy Rich, singer Tony Martin and muscle-bound actor Victor Mature!
News of Turner’s wayward character reached Louis B. Mayer and he threatened her with suspension unless she curbed her ways. Lana compromised by dropping her beaux, divorcing her husband and returning to Greg Bautzer - only to begin an affair with James Stewart, her co-star in Ziegfeld Girl. Needless to say, Carole had grave concern now that Hollywood’s most illustrious tramp had been teamed up with a man who, in her words, ‘didn’t know how to keep it in his pants’. The visit to the set of Idiot’s Delight, she said, had been but a polite warning - this time she intended catching them at it and ‘kicking some ass’.
Louis B. Mayer stepped in and informed security that Carole should not be allowed within 100 yards of her husband when he was working. Her rage only intensified when Clark and Lana were photographed for the cover of Life magazine. The headline read, ‘Today’s Hot New Team!’. Her hackles were further raised by Variety, which reported, ‘Lana Turner clicks with Gable in this lusty Western and makes you wish you were there!’ When she confronted her husband at home, however, he reassured her in his own particular way that if these one-night stands and little love-trysts meant absolutely nothing to him, likewise they should not be taken too seriously by her!
Because of its stars’ reputations, Honky Tonk was completed quickly so that they could be rushed into other projects. Lana was assigned to Johnny Eager with Robert Taylor - enabling Taylor to evade the gay tag once more by boasting that Lana was so hot, any red-blooded male would be willing to risk five years in jail for raping her! The story was fed to the press that, after spending just one night with Lana Turner, Robert Taylor asked Barbara Stanwyck for a divorce. It was all hogwash, but good for the Taylor image. Not so long before, while shooting A Yank At Oxford, a London journalist had marched up to him in a Piccadilly pub and asked, ‘Mr Taylor, are you queer?’ Taylor had unbuttoned his shirt, displayed his hairy chest and responded, ‘Does that look like a queer to you?’ Now, Louis B. Mayer was faced with a dilemma: who to team Lana with next, Taylor or Gable? The superlative reviews for Honky Tonk, with critics begging for more of the torrid Gable-Turner chemistry, decided the toss. Their schedules were cleared and they were immediately put into Somewhere I’ll Find You - which ironically would be directed by Wesley Ruggles, who directed Clark and Carole in No Man Of Her Own.
In the meantime, more and more Hollywood characters began taking an interest in the War. Until now, this had been regarded by many as someone else’s conflict and perhaps not serious enough to lose much sleep over. Pearl Harbor changed this. The unprovoked Japanese attack on the US Pacific naval base in Hawaii on 7 December 1941 - while Japanese envoys were holding so-called peace talks in Washington - brought America into World War II on account of Japan’s AXIS pact with Italy and Germany. Over 2,000 US servicemen were killed and a large section of the Pacific Fleet destroyed. President Roosevelt, anticipating more Japanese attacks, announced on the radio, ‘Yesterday was a date which will live on in infamy: the American people in their righteous might will win through absolute victory’. Speaking to reporters, Carole was more to the point: ‘If it was left to me, I’d go to the pacific and kill those fucking Japs with my bare hands!’
To a certain extent such comments, though interpreted as racist today, in 1941 led to a purge of Japanese workers. At the studios gardeners, seamstresses, technicians and labourers, many of whom had lived in the country for decades, were now branded ‘enemy aliens’. They were laid off until the Government informed the moguls what to do with them. Germans in Hollywood, on the other hand, were not suspect. Marlene Dietrich had long since publicly denounced Hitler and became an American citizen. Most of those who worked during the Weimar Republic had followed suit. Ernst Lubitsch, the director of Carole’s final film To Be Or Not To Be was absolutely beyond reproach - though Carole suspected his German majordom was not all that it seemed. The FBI was brought in to investigate: he was fo
und to be involved with a Nazi espionage ring, arrested and interned.
As had been happening for some time across the Atlantic, major cities in America adopted blackouts and air-raid drills. The stars, too, began offering their services. James Stewart had recently won an Oscar for The Philadelphia Story, but despite his success and the lucrative offers which had come winging his way, he joined the US Navy. Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power and Mickey Rooney had enlisted, prompting Walter Winchell - a Lieutenant-Commander with the Naval Reserve - to observe in the October 1941 issue of Photoplay, ‘How about awarding Oscars, or at least some sort of recognition to other movie men who have traded their make-up kits and megaphones for duffle-bags?’ Robert Montgomery was also with the Naval Reserve. Robert Taylor had joined up, proving to detractors that he was as much a man, if not more so than those who had been excused from military duty citing paltry excuses, chief of which, according to top war-bond saleswomen Carole Lombard and Tallulah Bankhead, was cowardice. Figuring among these ‘lazy sunbathers’ were future president Ronald Reagan, Humphrey Bogart and even the mighty John Wayne.