by David Bret
In the meantime, there was his divorce. After lodging her petition, Sylvia had left for Honolulu again, hoping he might change his mind about reconciliation. Instead she was contacted by an intermediary and asked to remove her effects from the ranch. When she failed to do this - and Clark was informed by the Blecks that she had every intention of taking him to the cleaners - he decided to act first by applying for a Nevada divorce. This meant taking up a minimum six weeks’ residency within the state, with the law declaring that should he leave the state boundary for more than 23 hours during this period, his application would be null and void.
Closing his California bank accounts so that these could not be seized (one newspaper reported he had stuffed his cash into suitcases and thrown these into the back of his car!) he drove to Nevada. Never one to do things by halves he had rented a ranch in Carson City. Here, with typical aplomb, he fell for young socialite Natalie Thompson, who far from the prying eyes of the press went hunting with him by day and kept his bed warm at night.
Because he was not permitted to leave Nevada, MGM sent work out to him: the terms of his contract offered him script, director, cinematographer and co-star approval and he was visited by producer Arthur Hornblow Jr to discuss his next project, Sometimes I Love You. Clark informed Hornblow that he would do the film with Ava Gardner - then just as quickly changed his mind, declaring he did not want to do it at all because the script was ‘absolute shit’. When Dore Schary threatened him with suspension, his response was that he did not care. George Chasin was negotiating a deal that, if successful, would allow him to work for 18 months in Europe - still under contract to MGM, but tax-free. In fact, this was the studio again being parsimonious because rather than paying Clark from their US assets, his salary would come from MGM’s European holdings, the funds from which could not be transferred back to America due to European currency laws introduced during the War. Similarly, European studio overheads were considerably cheaper than their Hollywood counterparts.
Taking Natalie Thompson with him - the press were fed the line that she was visiting her mother, who lived nearby - Clark returned to Encino for Christmas. The pair stayed together until the New Year but parted amicably. Clark then received word that Sylvia had obtained an injunction on his Nevada divorce - ostensibly because she had filed first - but that Jerry Giesler had drawn up the papers ready for him to sign. The parting of the ways took place on 3 February 1953 - the day after Clark’s fifty-first birthday - in a New York hospital to which Sylvia had been admitted after breaking her leg in a fall. That same evening Clark showed up at Madison Square Garden, where he participated in a Republican rally organised to urge Eisenhower to stand for president in the November elections.
Clark returned to Hollywood - Dore Schary’s executives had persuaded him not to suspend him. There he was presented with the script of Mogambo, a re-hash by John Lee Mahin (with more than a dash of Hemingway!) of his earlier Red Dust. In the wake of the hugely successful Stewart Granger-Deborah Kerr adventure film, King Solomon’s Mines, Granger wanted to make another film with an Africa-based theme, but Schary had other ideas: the new Red Dust could only have Gable as its central figure. His character would be yet another extension of himself - the brash, but impervious to women white hunter let loose in a picturesque Kenya-Uganda setting. He asked for Ava Gardner as his leading lady, and his wish was granted.
Dore Schary tried to persuade Clark to waive the tax-free clause in his contract, which neither Clark nor George Chasin would agree to. Schary backed down, but a codicil was added. Unless given express permission to do so by Schary himself, Clark would be allowed to work in England only Monday through to Friday - his weekends would have to be spent on the Continent on account of the tax laws affecting MGM’s United Kingdom holdings.
Within days of his agreeing to the new deal, Clark received a wire informing him that Sylvia had obtained a provisional divorce, citing the irreconcilable breakdown of their marriage owing to his mood-swings. And, contrary to what he had expected, the settlement drawn up by Jerry Giesler and the court was a reasonable one: Sylvia would receive 10 per cent of Clark’s earnings during the coming year and 7 per cent for each of the next four - a predicted total of around $150,000. This was a mere drop in the ocean for a very wealthy woman who, soon afterwards, would marry the Prince Dimitri Djordjadze and dispense with Douglas Fairbanks’ Rancho Zorro for a staggering $7.5 million.
On 6 May 1952, Clark sailed for France on the Liberté, waved off by 2,000 fans told they would not be seeing him again until the end of the following year. The previous day, he visited Loretta Young and 16-year-old Judy Lewis - the first and last time Judy would meet her father, though she would not find out for some time who he really was.
Judy had every reason to feel bitter. However, when speaking on Living Famously in her autobiography, Uncommon Knowledge, she is surprisingly calm - maybe the years in between had tempered her anger. In the documentary, she explains how she had come home from school and found Clark Gable standing in the living room. Taken aback, she assumed him to be there to see her mother on movie business and had excused herself. Loretta begged her to stay: she and Clark had sat on the couch and talked for over an hour. ‘I was terrified,’ she recalled, adding how warm he had been while questioning her about her life. ‘Then he said it was time to go, and I got up and walked him to the front door. He bent down and kissed me on my forehead - and walked out the front door and out of my life.’
From Le Havre, Clark headed for Paris, where he spent a month in the company of a leggy 27-year-old Frenchwoman named Suzanne Dadolle, a mannequin with Elsa Schiaparelli, and needless to say another Lombard lookalike. How, where and when they met is not on record, but their affair was serious enough for their photograph to appear on the front page of France-Soir, with Dadolle flashing the topaz ‘engagement’ ring Clark had given her. They were also filmed by Paris-Pathé for the French newsreels, dancing in the Place de la Republique on Bastille Day.
Contractually, he was still tied to Sometimes I Love You, but while the script for Mogambo was being polished he made Never Let Me Go, with Gene Tierney and Kenneth More. In this lukewarm anti-Communist drama, something of a poor man’s Ninotchka, he plays a hard-boiled reporter for the umpteenth time, this time falling for a Soviet ballerina. The reviews were appalling. The New Yorker’s John McCarten drew his readers’ attention to Clark’s dimples, which he said now resembled craters on the moon - and concluded by way of a back-handed compliment, ‘Mr Gable, at this point in his career, is grizzled, not withered’. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, comparing this with Clark’s last Russian excursion, observed, ‘This is the same Gable as Comrade X - but a little older, a little fatter, a little shrewder and more cynical.’ For Clark, it would prove his third turkey in a row.
He hated making the film, but said he had loved working with Gene Tierney. His preoccupation at this time, however, had not been attempting to seduce his co-star or wondering what his French girlfriend might be getting up to across the Channel - but with the customised Jaguar he had ordered upon his arrival in London. It was said to be the only one of its kind. The vehicle was delivered to him in Mullion Cove, Cornwall, where the locations were filmed - a region notorious for its narrow roads and sharp, dangerous bends. It was certainly ill suited for driving a monstrosity with a top speed of 100 mph, which Clark at once insisted on taking for a spin.
Never Let Me Go wrapped in the September, and Clark and his Jaguar boarded the boat train for Paris. A few days later he and Suzanne Dadolle set off on what should have been a slow drive to Rome, then Naples. By the time they reached Lake Como, Clark argued that he had driven far enough, and for three weeks they stayed at the Villa d’Este, where he spent virtually every waking moment on the resort’s famous golf course. Dadolle was left to make her own way back to Paris when Clark received the call-to-arms from producer Sam Zimbalist, waiting for him in Rome. Zimbalist, the man responsible for King Solomon’s Mines, was currently a white-hot property
: his Quo Vadis? had just been announced as the highest grossing film since Gone With The Wind.
The locations for Mogambo (the Swahili word for passion) were to be filmed in Kenya, whose political climate was unstable, to say the least. The Mau Mau, the country’s secret militant Kikuyu guerilla movement, had been operating for several months. Its aim was to end colonial rule - a goal achieved 10 years hence with the granting of independence and the election of Jomo Kenyatta. Before this happened, however, colonial government forces would set up a despicable exercise in ethnic cleansing, killing over 10,000 Kikuyu (Kenya’s largest ethnic group), causing the Mau Mau to retaliate with unprecedented brutality. Sam Zimbalist and director John Ford were warned that nowhere in Kenya was guaranteed to be safe and that for everyone’s sake it would be a case of getting in and out of the country as quickly as possible.
Faced with such a tense situation, MGM should of course never have been making the film in the first place. Zimbalist elected to fly everyone into Kenya, as opposed to travelling by the (then) more practical sea-route. This brought fierce protests from Clark, who had sworn never to fly again. For several days he ranted and raved, but on 2 November he, too, boarded the plane for Nairobi. This flew into a hailstorm over North Africa and had to make an emergency landing: several small planes were sent out to rescue the stranded passengers, and Clark is reported to have arrived at his destination looking more than a little green. Three days later he, Ford and the crew flew the 50 miles to the game reserve on the banks of the Kagera River, near Mount Kenya, which would serve as the film’s backdrop. This was a journey which, on account of the Mau Mau’s presence, they would make twice a day rather than staying put. Even so, the stars were afforded every conceivable luxury while shooting: 20 fully upholstered marquees which served as dining and dressing rooms, a movie theatre and fully equipped hospital, and a sports-entertainment centre, all with hot and cold running water in an area where this was in very short supply.
Evenings were spent propping up the bar at Nairobi’s New Stanley Hotel. Clark and John Ford, both heavy drinkers, were matched glass for glass by Ava Gardner and her husband Frank Sinatra - officially accompanying her at her expense to celebrate their first wedding anniversary on 7 November, and her 30th birthday on Christmas Eve. And unofficially there because he wanted to keep an eye on her while she was around Clark for five months. It was here, during a meeting with the British Governor and his wife, that one of Ava’s one-liners, secondary in their vulgarity only to Tallulah Bankhead’s, entered Hollywood folklore. John Ford loathed Sinatra, and asked Ava in front of their distinguished guests what she saw in this ‘120-pound runt’ - bringing the response, ‘Oh, there’s only 10 pounds of Frank, but 110 pounds of cock!’
Sinatra’s sojourn in Africa was brief. Only days after Ava’s outburst he was wired by his agent: Columbia Pictures wanted him to test for Fred Zinnemann’s From Here To Eternity, which he hoped would put his flagging career back on track. He flew back to Hollywood, flunked the test (though the studio would subsequently change their mind and give him the part), and a few weeks later returned to Nairobi. Any hopes of Clark having a fling with Ava during his absence had been scuppered, however, when she was taken ill on the set. As per usual, a malady (amoebic dysentery) was invented for the benefit of the press, and by the time she was reunited with Sinatra, another troublesome pregnancy had been dealt with courtesy of a lightning trip to London’s Chelsea Hospital.
John Ford was never an easy director to work with at the best of times. He had not wanted Clark for the film, and because he could not stand Ava Gardner either, he had pleaded with Sam Zimbalist to get him Maureen O’Hara for the part of Eloise Kelly. Zimbalist overruled him, explaining that of all the actresses he had considered for the part, only Ava was as ‘sympathetically sluttish’ as Jean Harlow had been. Ford, one of the rudest directors of his generation, would wind everyone up by addressing them by their surnames and made an example of Ava by frequently bawling her out in front of the entire unit, deriving sardonic pleasure from the stream of invectives which followed. On one occasion when he was almost kind to her, just to get his back up and feel comfortable with the Ford she had come to hate, Ava ripped off her clothes and ran around the set in the nude! Eventually, when he realised that he would never be able to outcurse her, Ford relaxed his hostile attitude towards her and they became friends.
The film’s third lead, playing anthropologist’s wife Linda Nordley, should have been English rose actress Virginia McKenna, but when she dropped out Zimbalist brought in 24-year-old Grace Kelly, the blonde, Philadelphia-born ice-maiden who had recently starred opposite Gary Cooper in High Noon. After Mogambo she would make just eight more films - most notably Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief (1955), before marrying Prince Rainier of Monaco and retiring from the movies.
Mogambo’s singular advantage over Red Dust is the colour photography and an authentic exotic location, as opposed to leftover sets from an old Tarzan film. Otherwise it lacks the raw sensuality of the original, made at a time when attitudes towards sex were less liberal, resulting in such productions being regarded as revolutionary in their approach to the very subject the Hays Office had been founded to condemn. Ava Gardner’s brassy showgirl is at the same time warm and vibrant, the perfect homage to Harlow’s Vantine. Grace Kelly, on the other hand, undeniably exquisitely beautiful, lacks the innocence of Mary Astor’s earlier characterisation and is so dull, one wonders what white hunter Victor Marswell (Clark) sees in her, though he too looks weather-beaten throughout most of the film. His saving grace is his tough-guy mien and a charisma which all but leaps from the screen.
Victor, who supplies animals for the world’s zoos, arrives home from a hunting trip to find he has an unwelcome visitor - Eloise ‘Honey Bear’ Kelly, who has come here from New York to meet up with a maharajah, only to have missed him. ‘A little trinket that’s dropped from the maaharajah’s turban,’ someone says of her. And now she must stay put until the next boat arrives, the one which will be bringing anthropologist Donald Nordley (Donald Sinden) and his wife, Linda. Victor is tense because he has not seen a white woman in over a year. Even so he is apprehensive about the inarticulate showgirl who mistakes a rhinoceros for a kangaroo. ‘I’ve seen ’em in London, Paris, Rome,’ Victor growls. ‘They start life in a New York nightclub and end up covering the world like a paint advertisement. Not an honest feeling from her kneecap to her neck!’
What Victor does not know is that just weeks after their wedding during the War, Kelly’s fighter-pilot husband was killed in action and that she only turned to the high life in an attempt to blot out the tragedy. He changes his attitude towards her when she ends up in his arms after being frightened by his pet snake - they kiss passionately, and in the next scene she is at his piano crooning ‘Coming Through The Rye’. Despite this heated moment, both feign indifference when the time comes to say goodbye. Victor gives her money to help with the journey ahead, adding that he will brain her if she does not accept it, and that in any case the money is only ‘a 99-year loan’. ‘This is one loan I’ll pay back if I have to live 99 years to pay it back,’ she retorts.
The Nordleys arrive. He is a stuffed shirt, while she is giddy, strait-laced, but devilishly pretty, and Victor loses no time in flirting with her once Kelly is out of the picture. Their relationship speeds up when Donald develops a tropical fever and she lashes out at Victor for the inadequate medical treatment she feels he is getting. ‘What do you expect me to do,’ he asks, ‘Crawl into bed with him and hold his hand?’ His reward is a slap across the face, followed by a show of hysterics. Then Linda decides to go walkabout in the jungle: Victor follows, rescues her from a marauding panther and they get caught in a storm that brings her suppressed feelings to the fore. This is a repeat of the scene in Red Dust, for by now Kelly has returned unexpectedly to the camp after her boat was marooned on a mud-bank.
At first, the two women in Victor’s life are civil towards each other, a situation that disintegrates when
all the protagonists dress formally for dinner, and Kelly quaffs too much wine. Henceforth, the scenario mirrors the earlier film. The men go off on a safari, where Victor intends coming clean about his feelings for Linda - until Donald reveals he dotes on her and that they will be starting a family once they get back to England. As before, the angry Linda pulls a gun and wings him when he confesses he has only been stringing her along, and once more Victor ends up with the strumpet - save that this time he intends making an honest woman out of her.
If Clark was hoping to get fresh with Grace Kelly, once the production moved to its secondary location in Uganda - by arranging a weekend trip to the beach resort of Malindi in the Indian Ocean - he would be disappointed. Aware of his intentions, Grace invited the Sinatras along for company. Then the unit moved to London, to finish off the sound-stage work.
For several weeks Clark stayed at the Connaught Hotel, drinking heavily most of the time and attending parties hosted by other ‘exiled’ Americans who, like himself, were taking advantage of the tax-free situation to work overseas. He forgot about pursuing Grace Kelly once he learned that old flame Lana Turner was in town, minus her husband of several months - Tarzan hunk, Lex Barker. Two years later, America’s most controversial trash-mag ever, Confidential, would report (as was its wont, with little proof) that for a brief period in London, Ava and Lana were an item.
The Mogambo company split in April 1954. Clark travelled to Paris to meet up with Suzanne Dadolle. They drove to Rome, where the press reported their engagement, then just as quickly printed a retraction when Clark told reporters, ‘I am - and so far as I can see - will remain a single guy until the right woman comes along. Unfortunately, she hasn’t come along yet.’ He returned to Paris, holed himself up at the Hotel Raphael for a few weeks and, in the September, completed his ‘tax-exile trilogy’ by travelling to the Netherlands to make Betrayed. This would be his last film with Lana Turner and his last for MGM.