Clark Gable

by David Bret

  In the film, Clark played a womanising merchant sailor whose ship is torpedoed by the Japanese. He and his men are rescued when an Irish tar prays for a miracle - which comes in the form of stuffy librarian Garson, for whom he falls while having a doxy (Blondell) on the side for the sex he may not be getting from Garson. They wed, and when the marriage fails, he goes back to sea. He then sees the error of his ways just as Garson is about to have the baby she never told him about. The child is stillborn, so this time he prays for a miracle, and the child comes back to life! The film was absolute nonsense, attracting more bad reviews than good. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, the most influential critic of his day, bemoaned the lack of nuclear fusion expected from two stars as potent as Gable and Garson, concluding, ‘What should have been a bombshell is about as explosive as a slightly ancient egg’. Even the usually Gable-friendly Photoplay was puzzled by it all, observing, ‘What we can’t understand is the vociferous and he-mannish Mr Gable consenting to mouth the innocuous, and at times whimsical dialogue that means just nothing’.

  Despite such panning, Adventure did well at the box-office, though largely because fans flocked to the cinemas to see if it really was as bad as the critics were making out. MGM released the film two weeks before Christmas, in time to catch the end-of-year Oscar nominations. It was completely overlooked, though Greer Garson was put forward for Best Actress for her other film of that year, The Valley Of Decision. Clark publicly gunned for one of the other contenders, Joan Crawford, and must have been thrilled when she won for Mildred Pierce. Best Actor went to Ray Milland for his portrayal of an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend - playing his brother was Joan’s new husband, Phillip Terry.

  Because of the success of the film, Louis B. Mayer considered a Gable-Garson re-match which neither wanted. He was therefore offered The Hucksters with Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner. Initially he refused the part of brash advertising executive Victor Norman, declaring he had left his years as Crawford and Shearer’s hardbitten foils behind him - that from now on he wanted only intelligent and sophisticated roles similar to the ones the studios were offering Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy. Mayer’s response was that he was still a contract player, obliged to obey orders. Temporarily, the great Gable was losing his swaying power, though he brazenly demanded a screen test with ‘unknown quantity’ Deborah Kerr before agreeing to work with her. The Scots-born actress, then 24, had started out with the Sadlers Wells Ballet Company before turning to acting. Her film debut, Contraband, had been with Conrad Veidt in 1940, though her scenes have been deleted from the final print. The following year she triumphed in Major Barbara, released shortly before she was informed that she would be working with Clark. Mayer went along with the screen test, but it was only to humour him.

  Ava Gardner (1922-90), one of the last of the screen’s truly great love goddesses, had just scored her first success with The Killers. By pitching her opposite Gable, Mayer was hoping to spawn a partnership as hot as the ones with Harlow, Crawford and Shearer. Like the former two, Ava had had lovers galore before marrying Mickey Rooney in 1942, then divorcing him the following year. Her marriage to Lana Turner ‘reject’ Artie Shaw had been similarly short-lived: they filed for divorce within weeks of her landing the part in The Hucksters. Yet even with the presence of these distinguished leading ladies and the gargantuan Sydney Greenstreet, the film was no great shakes. Even so, fans flocked to see it to find out, as promised, if the Gable-Gardner pairing matched up to the others, and its success returned Clark to the Box-Office Top Ten.

  At this time, Clark was seeing a lot of David and Primula Niven and their two small children at their rented home in Beverly Hills. He had not had much to do with Niven while married to Carole, who for some reason had disliked him. Niven recalled in his memoirs how she had called him ‘a pain in the ass’, but only, he believed, because she had been unable to stand anyone who could shoot and fish more efficiently than herself. Clark and the Nivens went on hunting trips, played golf and partied, a brief but idyllic period which ended in tragedy on 20 May 1946 when the trio were invited to a pool party chez Tyrone Power. While playing hide-and-seek, 28-year-old Primula climbed into what she believed was a closet - and fell headlong down a steep flight of stone steps leading to the basement and fracturing her skull. She never regained consciousness and died the next day.

  Primula’s body was flown back to England and interred in the churchyard at Huish in Wiltshire, where she and Niven had been married. Clark wanted to accompany his friend, but Louis B. Mayer prevented this - worried he might not come back. Even so, when Niven returned to Hollywood, for two weeks Clark never left his side. Niven recalled, ‘During that long period of utter despair, Clark was endlessly thoughtful and helpful, and he checked constantly to see if I was all right. Without me realising it he was drawing on his own awful experience to steer me through mine.’

  Gable next swallowed a huge chunk of humble pie in an attempt to heal the rift he had opened between himself and David Selznick, apparently fulfilling a promise (quoted by his biographer Lyn Tornabene) made to a colleague while on one of his flying missions: ‘What did the guy ever do to me except force me to be in the most important film I ever made? If I get out of here alive, I’m going to apologise!’ And he had much to apologise for - his snubbing of Selznick during the Gone With The Wind premières, his personal and prejudiced remarks. But there was a sound reason for his grovelling: Selznick was about to re-release the film, which had been removed from theatre bills in the wake of Pearl Harbor, on account of its distressing aftermath-of-war scenes being considered ‘inappropriate’ for those millions across the world touched by the real war.

  Naturally, the re-release would catapult Clark back into the limelight, but also alert everyone to the fact that the roles he was currently being offered paled to almost nothing compared with that of Rhett Butler. This he did not mind, for Selznick (who had sold his share of the original production for $500,000 to help keep his company afloat) now had high hopes of there being a sequel. It is said that Margaret Mitchell was asked to begin working on this, but as it had taken her 10 years to complete the first book, few were surprised when the project fizzled out. Nor was Selznick in a forgiving mood so far as Clark was concerned, though there was an unexpected bonus when, after gatecrashing one of the mogul’s parties, he was introduced to 30-year-old Anita Colby, the former actress-model now employed as a $100,000 a year consultant for Selznick Productions.

  Clark was still seeing a non-sexual partner (Virginia Grey), an older woman (Dolly O’Brien) and numerous others. Now, in a throwback to his pre-fame days he latched onto the sexually ambiguous Colby (Anita Counihan, 1914-92) ostensibly in the hope that her influence on Selznick might rectify the slump in his career. The producer was still not buying, so Clark ditched Colby to concentrate on Kay Williams - too late, it turned out, for she was about to become the fifth wife of millionaire Alfred Spreckles. On the rebound, Clark took up with thrice-married Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers, a woman possessed of characteristics that define her as being at least partially insane.

  Around Clark’s age, Rogers, a champion of Red Indian rights, would turn up for their dates wearing authentic costume - on one occasion as a squaw, on another as the Madame de Pompadour. When Gable tried to end their relationship after one red face too many, she began stalking him, tipping waiters so that she could sit at an adjacent table when he was entertaining other lady friends. Having finally driven home the message that it really was over between them, Rogers wrote him a farewell letter - forwarding a copy to Hedda Hopper, which of course ended up in her column:

  You’re a perfectionist, as am I. I followed you last night as you took your young friend home. I’m glad that you kissed and that I saw you kiss, because now I know that you have someone close to you and that you’ll have enough warmth beside you. God bless you, my most darling darling! Be gentle with yourself! Allow yourself happiness!

  On account of Millicent Rogers’ hounding, and to offer h
imself breathing space from the press, Clark secretly rented a suite at the Bel Air Hotel - with its own driveway and entrance down a side-street, so that he could come and go, hopefully without being seen. His neighbour was fellow serial cheat Greg Bautzer, who had been living there at his refuge for dodging spurned lovers and their angry partners, off and on for the past decade. Surprisingly the two became friends - for years they had been rivals over Joan Crawford and Lana Turner. Occasionally they would go for long drives into the desert and swap anecdotes in Clark’s latest ‘baby’ - an expensive Jaguar XK- 120, top speed 130 mph.

  In the midst of this bed-hopping confusion, Clark made Homecoming with Lana Turner, Anne Baxter and John Hodiak - a potential recipe for disaster if ever there was. Since last working with Gable, Lana had wed and divorced actor Stephen Crane, an unsavoury character with mobster connections - they had had a daughter, Cheryl. Hodiak (1914-55) was a volatile individual who had recently emerged emotionally scarred from a torrid affair with Tallulah Bankhead on the set of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat - to take up with Lana while shooting the ironically mistitled Marriage Is A Private Affair, and all while married to Anne Baxter. On the rebound, Lana ended up in the arms of Tyrone Power, separated from his French actress wife, Anabella - and also involved with Cesar Romero, who had recently ended a relationship with John Hodiak! Salvation of sorts had kept the outing brigade from Power’s door when Lana had fallen pregnant - though she had subsequently had an abortion, by no means her first - and to ‘prove’ he was not gay, Power had moved on to 16-year-old starlet Linda Christian.

  Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, the publicity slogan for this one was, ‘THE TEAM THAT GENERATES STEAM!’. Clark played Ulysses Johnson, a Park Avenue doctor serving with the medical corps in North Africa during World War II, who has an adulterous affair with an army nurse, played by Lana; 25-year-old Anne Baxter played his long-suffering wife, a union criticised by moralists because of the great age difference at a time when such things were unacceptable. Morality also wins the day when Ulysses returns to her, heartbroken, after Lana dies of injuries sustained during the ‘Battle of the Bulge’. Generally, the film was a lacklustre affair with rival stud John Hodiak running rings around Clark in every scene they shared.

  ‘Battle of the Bulge’ was a term used by several critics to describe Gable’s rounded appearance and he was further ridiculed when the press were given ‘privileged’ information that he had begun applying haemorrhoid ointment to reduce the bags under his eyes. He went into a sulk, and disappeared for three weeks on a fishing expedition.

  Only slightly better was Command Decision, directed by Sam Wood, an all-male production which had no love interest other than the not inadvertent admiring stares exchanged between John Hodiak and Van Johnson. Many Gable detractors thought he had a nerve playing a US Air Force commander who sent his men on suicide missions, flying B-17s over Germany to bomb munitions factories. In real life, he had zipped through the ranks basically for being Clark Gable - and now here he had been promoted to Brigadier General.

  On 4 August 1948, William Gable, who had never really got over the death of his wife, Edna, the previous year, died of a heart attack. The press stated his age to be 78, but this was merely guesswork. Clark was holidaying in Europe with Dolly O’Brien at the time, having sailed to Le Havre on the Queen Mary on 12 July. After spending a few days in Deauville with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, he and Dolly drove to Paris to attend one of Elsa Maxwell’s ‘multicultural’ society parties. They then went on to Dolly’s villa in Cannes, and finally back to Paris where Howard Strickling’s wire had caught up with him. Clark pretended to be devastated for the sake of the press, but in truth he was relieved. The pair had never really got along and despite the money and attention he had lavished on the old man, his taunts over Clark’s supposed lack of manliness had made his younger life a misery.

  Clark made no effort to hurry home. After leaving the Air Force he had sworn never to take another plane, a vow he would keep until 1952. He wired Strickling with the instruction to have his father placed in cold storage and boarded the next available liner for New York. Publicly, he had displayed very little grief over the death of his wife so it was hardly likely that he would be caught weeping for a father he secretly despised. For this reason, MGM played down William’s demise, releasing only the basic facts to the press. It was essential for the world to be informed though, according to the brief obituary notice in the Los Angeles Times, paid for by the studio, that Clark was deeply distressed after losing the father he had worshipped. After the funeral he set about removing every trace of his father from his life. He threw away William’s clothes, gave away his possessions and sold the bunglow he had bought for him and Edna at a loss.

  On 6 January 1949, Victor Fleming died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 65. This time Clark was genuinely devastated. Fleming had hunted, fished and roughed it with him in the most adverse conditions and had been regarded as invincible. The fact that he had not been ill - or if he had, no one had known - not only made his death harder to bear, but it forced Clark, in light of his own excesses, to become terrifyingly aware of his own mortality.

  Chapter Nine

  STRANGE INTERLUDE

  In the aftermath of World War II, MGM, like all the major studios, started to feel the pinch. One report revealed the studio to be over $6 million in the red. Hoping to combat the dilemma, Louis B. Mayer brought in 43-year-old Dore Schary, with whom he had always had a shaky relationship. Born in New Jersey, Schary worked as a stock actor, then as a scriptwriter for Columbia, joining MGM in 1937 to work on Spencer Tracy’s Boys Town and Edison The Man. Six years later he had fallen foul of Mayer’s unpredictable temper, and left to produce for Vanguard and RKO.

  Politically opinionated and a close friend of David Selznick, Mayer figured Dore Schary would never get along with Clark Gable, who loathed him from the start and never shied away from telling him to his face. Sparks started flying when Schary - well aware of Clark’s paranoia over his machismo - suggested him for the role of centurion Marcus Vinicius in the Roman epic, Quo Vadis?, the script of which had been gathering dust in MGM’s archives for some time. Clark roared that he ‘would not be seen dead in a fucking skirt!’ - and that was that. Nor was he happy when Schary commissioned Any Number Can Play especially for him: he wanted to do Nothing Wrong, scripted by Preston Sturgess. Schary informed him, as Mayer had done innumerable times, that as a contract player he would stick to the rules.

  Clark dismissed the film, a throwback from his formative years directed by Mervyn LeRoy, as ‘second-rate crap’. He played alcoholic, chain-smoking casino owner Charley King, whose marriage is on the rocks, and whose teenage son (Darryl Hickman) hates him. To cap it all, Charley has a heart-condition and eventually loses his business in a card game.

  No sooner had he recovered from this dreary fare than Schary put him into Robert Riley Crutcher’s romantic comedy, Key To The City, of which the less said the better. This saw him working with Loretta Young again, and proved a less pleasurable experience than their first outing, 15 years before. Since then, Loretta had borne Tom Lewis two children in the space of two years, and was pregnant again. Judy still did not know her real father’s identity, but her husband is thought to have suspected something.

  In the new film, Clark and Loretta played rival contenders in a small town mayoral election campaign. He is a hard-bitten, chauvinistic ex-stevedore, she a frigid spinster that he, of course, thaws out, and to tie in with Clark’s machismo and celebrity, he is the one who gets to be mayor, while she gives up her career to become his wife and skivvy for him. The by-now obligatory slogan for this one - dreamed up by Dore Schary, who was aware of past history - was, ‘THEY CLICK LIKE A KEY IN A LOCK!’ Some of the components of this particular lock, however, were decidedly rusty! In some scenes, despite just a 12-year age gap, Clark looks old enough to be Loretta’s father.

  The production was blighted by a series of problems. John Wayne regularly visited the set in his offic
ial capacity as an MPA agent tracking down a Communist said to have infiltrated Schary’s staff. The subsequent investigation - silly but upsetting for the man in question - proved clean. Halfway through shooting, Loretta Young collapsed and was rushed to hospital, where she suffered a miscarriage. Then, in the September, a few days after the film wrapped and two hours after playing golf with Clark, 59-year-old Frank Morgan - his friend who plays the fire chief in the film - succumbed to a fatal heart attack. Clark was a pallbearer at his funeral.

  So far as is known, Clark had first met ‘Lady’ Sylvia Ashley in December 1939, shortly after the death of her third husband, Douglas Fairbanks. He and Carole had taken time out from their hectic Gone With The Wind promotional drive to console the widow at her Santa Monica mansion, though why they had done this when they hardly knew Fairbanks, or her, is baffling. The two met again in April 1949 at New York’s Park Sheraton Hotel, at a fundraiser ball organised by Elsa Maxwell, introduced by Lady Cavendish - aka Adele Astaire, Fred’s sister whose husband had died during the War, leaving her extremely wealthy. A few weeks later Clark showed up at Sylvia’s home and the press, with Maxwell leading the charge, soon reported them as going steady.