Clark Gable

by David Bret

  Throughout the proceedings Clark sat motionless - between his father and stepmother - and revealed no outward emotion. Even in the wake of such a colossal tragedy the macho man within prevented him from shedding tears. The storm would break later when Carole’s secretary, Jean Garceau, handed him the last of her billets-doux, the contents of which were never revealed. ‘That was just too much,’ Garceau told Gable’s biographer Lyn Tornabene. ‘He’d borne up so well to that point, but when he read Carole’s last note he just went to pieces and broke down. And that’s pretty hard to watch in a big man.’ Otto Winkler was buried the next day, with Clark personally escorting his widow, Jill, to the ceremony.

  Carole Lombard’s death was a national tragedy - not as all consuming and hysterically received as Valentino’s, 16 years earlier, but almost on the same scale as that of Marilyn Monroe, 20 years hence. As had happened with Jean Harlow, the studios held two-minute silences and closed down for the day. Louis B. Mayer had not been one of Carole’s favourite people: when asked by a foreign reporter if she knew what the ‘B’ in his name stood for, she had retorted, ‘Bastard!’ She therefore would not have appreciated his hypocrisy - placing a black-edged advertisement in several Hollywood trade papers depicting a still from her last film - below which was a cartoon of the MGM lion, black-clad and holding a wreath.

  More reverent, but bizarre, was the magazine, Carole Lombard’s Life Story, which appeared unexpectedly, bearing neither the name of its publisher nor any of the contributors. We now know it was financed by William Randolph Hearst and those paying tribute included Marion Davies, Adela Rogers St Johns and Ben Maddox, who had not wanted the world to accuse them of making a fast buck. In fact, the proceeds were donated to the Red Cross. The publication contained over a dozen stunning photographs, and to reassure his readers that the Gables’ marriage had been the strongest and happiest in Hollywood, Hearst made up the story of how Clark had seen Carole for the last time when kissing her goodbye at Union Station. Ernst Lubitsch, who burst into tears upon hearing of Carole’s death, recalled the ‘tastelessness’ of rush releasing Jean Harlow’s last film, and persuaded United Artists to postpone the première of To Be Or Not To Be by a month. One of its lines was cut - in the scene where the actors are plotting their escape from Poland and Carole asks Jack Benny, ‘What can happen in a plane?’

  Not everyone was pleased with the massive attention paid to Carole’s death, though. A powerful detractor was CBS Radio’s Elmer Davis, who became embroiled in a syndicated column row with Walter Winchell over whose deaths had been the more tragic - Carole, her mother and Otto Winkler, or the 15 military personnel and 4 crew members who died with them.

  From the American nation’s point of view, everyone had known Carole Lombard, while comparatively few had heard of the others apart from friends, families and colleagues - an undisputed fact, but no less distressing for the ones they had left behind. ‘There is plenty of evidence that newspaper headlines misrepresent the feelings of the public,’ Davis argued. ‘It is a very sad reflection of our times that the death of an artist however distinguished and popular could be regarded as more important to the future of a nation than the loss of a group of trained men upon whom the country had depended for its victory.’ Winchell’s response was a curt, insensitive but truthful, ‘We can train 15 more pilots, dreadful as their loss was. But could you dredge Hollywood from one end to the other and find another girl who could get out there and sell so many war-bonds?’

  The inquest into the crash, conducted by the Civil Aeronautics Board, was primarily concerned with determining what had happened to its own, and if Carole’s actions had had any part in this. They had been tipped off that the plane might have been sabotaged by the Japanese, following comments made by Carole over what she would do to them, in the wake of Pearl Harbor. One eyewitness claimed to have seen the plane exploding into flames before hitting the mountain, but a Western Airlines pilot, deemed more reliable, swore under oath that he had seen it hit the rock face. He was supported by Dan Yanish, a watchman at a diamond mine near Las Vegas, who told the inquest, ‘The plane cracked in two like a piece of kindling wood.’

  The findings laid the blame on the pilot, Wayne Williams, citing his ‘inability to make proper use of his navigational facilities’. Williams diverted the plane a second time after leaving Las Vegas to make up for the time he had already lost and had been flying too low. Had he survived, he would almost certainly have been charged with reckless piloting, if not actual manslaughter. It subsequently emerged that he had been disciplined several times in recent months for failing to observe flight instructions.

  Chapter Eight

  DEATH WISH IN THE CLOUDS

  For Clark, Carole’s death was the beginning of the end - a protracted, agonising 18-year decline. He would laugh again, love again but he would never really be happy bereft of his beloved ‘Ma’. Also, he was consumed with guilt (as indeed was Howard Dietz, who blamed himself for setting up the war-bonds tour in the first place) for assigning his wife to her fateful mission. And if the decision to eschew the train for the plane had been Carole’s alone, he could not alter the fact that her eagerness to get back to him, for whatever reason, had cost her her life.

  This does not mean to say that, had she lived, the Gables’ already-shaky marriage would have survived. One instinctively recalls the ‘great loves’ of French chanteuse Edith Piaf (boxing champion Marcel Cerdan) and Elizabeth Taylor (showman Mike Todd), which would not have remained so, had they not perished in similar air disasters to the one which claimed Carole. The fact that these tremendously passionate but stormy affairs ended so tragically while at their zenith made them greater than they would have been. Given the track records of all the participants, they would almost certainly have petered out, like every one of their predecessors and those following in their wake.

  Clark Gable was a serial adulterer. For him it was almost a mental condition that Carole may or may not have tolerated indefinitely. He was not an especially attractive man in his post-Lombard years, and neither was he overtly charismatic - many have called him surly at times, even boring. His impatience and halitosis are reputed to have got worse. But he was Clark Gable, a magnet for women of all shapes, ages and sizes. Absolutely no one would have refused his advances: all he had to do was snap his fingers and the most faithful or prudish female would have offered herself to him on a plate.

  The Gables’ referring to each other as ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’ had been sincere, offering proof of a couple contented with their lot. Similarly, from the cynic’s point of view, the appellations might just have easily have been contrived to give an impression of contentment. This is something we shall never know. Though Carole tended to be open with her feelings, often towards the point of humiliating her husband, Clark kept his well under wraps - his father’s bullying had seen to that - so whatever he and Carole were really like as a couple is anybody’s guess.

  His friends and supporters all agreed that the best way of getting him to even try to come to terms with his loss would be to help him get his life back on track by going back to work. Louis B. Mayer may have appeared outwardly sympathetic, but Mrs Gable had not been on his payroll and now his prime concern was less for Clark’s welfare and fragile state of mind, but that Somewhere I’ll Find You should not run overbudget. Not wishing to feel beholden to Mayer, Clark had refused his paychecks for the five weeks the film had been held up. Naturally, Mayer had not put up a fight.

  In the film, Gable and newcomer Robert Sterling played war correspondent brothers who fall for the same girl - cub reporter Lana Turner who, after being promoted to the Foreign Desk, is dispatched to Indo-China, where she disappears. The brothers go off in search of her and find her working in Bataan as a nurse with the Red Cross on the eve of the Japanese invasion. It being unthinkable that Clark Gable should not get the girl in the last reel, the scriptwriter assigned to Sterling a hero’s death. The title of the film alone, coming so soon after Carole’s death and the fact that
this was supposed to be a semi-comedy, could not have helped Clark’s neurasthenia. MGM pretended to help by changing the title to Red Light, but as soon as shooting was over it was switched back again. It was, however, a huge success.

  With his customary lack of tact, Louis B. Mayer contacted Joan Crawford before Carole’s funeral and ordered her to stay away from Clark - while Lana Turner, whom Joan and a good many more held indirectly responsible for the tragedy, was encouraged to offer him a friendly shoulder to cry on. It was Joan, however, who did all the comforting: in her memoirs she claims Gable dropped in for dinner most evenings after leaving the set of Somewhere I’ll Find You, and there seems no reason not to believe her. Joan had adored Carole and was deeply hurt that she and William Haines were not invited to her funeral. Of course Mayer had exercised complete control over the invitations and in his eyes Crawford and Haines were social pariahs.

  Snubbed by Mayer for what would be the last time now that her MGM contract was coming to a close, Joan decided the best tribute she could pay to her late friend would be to play tough-talking businesswoman Margaret Drew in They All Kissed The Bride, whether or not Mayer approved of her loan-out to Columbia. He certainly voiced his disapproval when producer Edward Kaufman informed Joan that the part was hers - but stepped down from his podium when she told the press that she would be donating her entire $125,000 fee to Carole’s charity, the Red Cross. Later, when she learned that her agent, Mike Levell, had deducted his usual 10 per cent, she fired him!

  While Joan might have wanted Clark as her co-star once more, to cast him opposite the stand-in for his deceased wife would have been unthinkable. Therefore the part of her love interest in the film went to Melvyn Douglas. At the time fans and the general public must have found it inconceivable to even imagine melodrama queen Joan Crawford attempting screwball comedy, yet she handles herself admirably, dropping her voice half a tone in the way Carole did, but never emulating her. Carole could not have wished for a finer tribute.

  Joan had recently adopted a child - Christina, who immediately after her death would attempt but fail to trash her name by penning Mommie Dearest - and was in the process of adopting another with the help of lawyer lover Greg Bautzer, still two-timing her with Lana Turner. In the meantime, she was so eager to introduce a father figure into her children’s lives that she began auditioning candidates for the role. There were just two stipulations: the man had to be handsome and lusty, but also exempted from military service because she did not wish to be widowed unnecessarily and end up raising her brood herself. Clark headed her list, and of course passed the test - a few hours playing with Christina, and a night in the sack with her mother - but turned her down, claiming he had no intention of ever marrying again. Among the other contenders were Glenn Ford, John Wayne and Gable lookalike James Craig, who recently failed to woo Marlene Dietrich while shooting Seven Sinners. Eventually, Joan plumped for 33-year-old Philip Terry, a little-known actor she claimed was Clark’s exact size in every anatomical detail and who, like him, had acquired his beefcake physique working alongside his father in the oilfields. The pair were married in July 1942.

  After completing Somewhere I’ll Find You, for a while Clark lost himself at his ranch, spending much of his time tending his horses or wandering about the fields and orchards, as he had with Carole. Shortly before her death they had been thinking of selling the place (of late they had been pestered by intrusive fans and press). Now he had no intention of moving: as long as he lived in Encino, he said, Carole’s spirit would stay with him. Whenever he spoke of her to friends, it was always as ‘Ma’, always in the present tense. He bought a huge motorcycle and roared around the surrounding neighbourhood, earning himself a roasting from Louis B. Mayer who, though he disliked the man, did not wish to see one of his biggest investments ‘wrapping himself round a tree and breaking his stupid neck’.

  Carole had left around $600,000 in her estate aside from modest trust funds to her brothers, the bulk going to Clark. The ranch, it emerged, she had bought in his name. There was also her collection of furs, valued at $25,000, and around $30,000 worth of jewellery, riding and sports equipment, and guns. Clark would eventually give most of these items to friends for keepsakes. Until then, for several months the house became a mausoleum: everything stayed exactly as Carole had left it, even down to the powder spilt on her dressing-table and the ashtrays containing cigarette stubs with traces of her lipstick.

  It is now known that on 23 January, just seven days after Carole’s death when Clark had been feeling truly suicidal, his scriptwriter friend Sy Bartlett, now a captain in the US Army, cabled him at MGM regarding a position he had found for him in the Air Corps. The cable had bypassed Louis B. Mayer, but ended up in the hands of Howard Strickling. Rather than get in touch with Clark, Strickling conspired with Mayer to get him into another picture as quickly as possible. From the studio’s point of view, Bartlett was informed, Clark was doing more for the war effort as a movie star than he ever could as a soldier. For 10 years he had figured in the Box-Office Top Ten, therefore it was essential he should remain in Hollywood to entertain his own ‘troops’ - in other words, cinema-goers ploughing money into the MGM coffers, a mercenary attitude destined for failure when the stooge was Clark Gable.

  Strickling announced that Clark would be joining the Air Corps - fictitiously, on the set of Shadow Of The Wing, to be directed by Victor Fleming. Clark himself counteracted this by telling Mayer to his face that he would be making no more films at all until after the War. Initially, Mayer threatened him with suspension, though he soon capitulated: to take such action at a time when other stars were enlisting would have earned him few plaudits with the patriotic press. Mayer then decided to go along with ‘Gable’s foible’, as he called it. He would allow him to enlist, but work behind the scenes to zip him through the ranks as quickly as possible, then recall him once he had got the urge to fight out of his system.

  On 11 August 1942, leaving the ranch in the capable hands of Jean Garceau, Clark joined the queue at an Air Corps recruiting office in downtown Los Angeles. Normally, so as not to cause a media frenzy, movie stars were given private appointments, but this had been orchestrated as a publicity stunt by Howard Strickling. He was sworn in as Private Gable, Serial No. 191-257-41 and left that same day for the Officers Candidate School in Miami, Florida. His training schedule lasted 13 weeks and proved an ordeal, bearing in mind that he was a good 20 years older than most of the other recruits. Miami Beach had been seconded to the forces and transformed into a base, its plush hotels now doubling as barracks. Much of the time the temperature was over 100 degrees, and no leeway was initially given towards him for being a celebrity - quite the reverse, for as the other men rightly guessed his presence was just for show, he was resented. What made matters worse was that despite only being a private, he had been assigned his own batman - cameraman Andrew McIntyre, whose first task was filming him having his moustache shaved off. Neither did he gain many friends when, in a short space of time, he was rapidly promoted through the ranks - Sy Bartlett’s theory being that the public would never accept Clark Gable as a ‘low-ranker’.

  Attitudes changed somewhat when he knuckled down to training. Inasmuch as he preferred the company of technicians and the like in Hollywood, so he professed to enjoy the ‘anonymity’ of Air Force life. He struggled with the physical aspects of the training, but coped well with the written work - years of working with scripts had given him a photographic memory, and in his final exams he was reported to have finished ‘a third-way down the line of about 3,000’.

  However, Clark did suffer from periods of black depression, brought about by the other men’s persistent chattering about their wives, mothers and girlfriends, when he had no one but Jean Garceau to write home to. Lyn Tornabene quotes one soldier, Philadelphia radio executive Raymond Green, as saying, ‘Sometimes I wondered if he had a death wish. He never talked at all about what he would do when the War was over. He had a cut-off point in his mind.’ Green
recalled how, with Miami Beach constantly under threat of attack from German submarines, he and Clark formed part of the nightly patrol and that on one occasion a lifeguard station within yards of them had been struck by lightning. ‘I told him I was going to get him relieved from guard duty,’ Green added. ‘He wouldn’t let me. I said, “You’re carrying a rifle, you could get killed.” He said, “So?”. He had no fear of death, and he didn’t seem to care. If he died, he died.’

  On 27 October, Clark left the OCS as Second Lieutenant Gable and delivered his graduation speech - very definitely a scripted publicity exercise that was filmed by Andrew McIntyre and shown in newsreels across the country in the hope of boosting morale. It could just as easily have been a scene from one of his movies:

  I’ve worked with you, scrubbed with you, marched with you, worried with you whether this day would ever come. The important thing, the proud thing I’ve learned is that we are men. Soon we will wear the uniforms of officers. How we look in them is not important. How we wear them is a lot more important. The job is to stay on the beam until in victory we get the command! Fall out!