by David Bret
We do not get to see the lovers in bed: John Huston believed audiences would have been shocked on account of the 25-year age gap. Instead, we see Gay awaken her with a kiss the next morning. For the first time in his life he has cooked breakfast for a woman and he makes a gentle point of reminding her that this is a one-off! The scene was shot several times. Marilyn is completely naked beneath the sheets and Huston was all for going back on his moral stance for including a shot in the finished print where she exposed her breasts. The censor, of course, would not hear of this. This domesticity continues when Roslyn transforms the half-built house into a home (something Marilyn could never have done), even down to sticking up pin-ups of herself behind the cupboard door. Gay tells her about his failed marriage and his two grown-up children, whom he says look up to him and regularly turn up at the rodeo - actually, they are ashamed of what he has become. The two go horse riding: the camera zooms in on Roslyn’s shapely derrière and there is the obligatory swimsuit scene when she emerges from the sea. Also, there is the anticipated display of Gable aggression when he yells at her for getting upset when he is about to kill a rabbit for raiding their lettuce-patch. Their idyll is interrupted when Guido shows up in his plane. He has quit his mechanic’s job and wants Gay to go ‘mustanging’ with him to earn some badly needed cash. As they will require another man to help with the lassooing they elect to pick one up at the Dayton rodeo.
Cue for punch-drunk cowboy Perce Howland (Monty) to make his entrance, 45 minutes into the film, and more actor-character blending. Perce has just been left at the roadside after a hitchhike went wrong, and has spent his last $2 calling his mother. ‘I haven’t been in the hospital since I talked to you,’ he tells her, then asks, ‘Ma, what would I want to get married for?’ He concludes, ‘My face is fine. It’s all healed up, just as good as new!’ He is supposed to be referring to a recent rodeo mishap, but the critics and fans knew differently: Arthur Miller sadistically opted for more realism by hinting at Monty’s homosexuality and his 1956 car accident. And the tone of the telephone conversation suggests that, like Gay’s own family, Perce’s care little for his welfare.
Perce enters the rodeo, first riding a horse and then a bull, which throws him once he has mastered it. Gay rushes into the arena and saves him from serious injury. Perce only suffers a cut nose and mild concussion, but Roslyn is nevertheless distraught:
ROSLYN: But what if he’d died? That’d be terrible . . .
GAY: But honey, we’ve all gotta go some time, reason or no reason. Dying’s as natural as living. A man who’s too afraid to die is too afraid to live!
Fanciful journalists later drew the conclusion that after shooting this scene, Marilyn had gone home, pondered over Clark’s words, and decided to end it all. This is untrue: the suicide attempt, as previously explained, had taken place after a bust-up with Arthur Miller.
Henceforth the four protagonists proceed to fall to pieces. Guido appears unsure who he loves the most - Roslyn or Gay - and becomes increasingly resentful towards them both. Eli Wallach took exception to the fact that his character may have been bisexual, complained to John Huston and shooting was held up for two days while Arthur Miller was asked to clarify the situation by rewriting some of Guido’s dialogue. He refused, and Huston told the press, ‘Who cares if he’s homosexual or not, so long as he’s something?’
Perce gets hooked on the morphine prescribed for his injury - no problem for Monty, Method actor, who had a quantity of the drug, along with dozens of others, in the large doctor’s bag he kept in his car. ‘Here’s to my buddy - old, elderly Gay,’ he pronounces when the quartet hit the bar to celebrate his success in the rodeo, bringing the response from Roslyn (added to the script by Marilyn herself), ‘Gay’s not old!’ Then comes the famous scene, shot on 8 September in a rare (for Marilyn) single take, where she and Perce go outside and she sits nursing his head on her lap, two dreadfully mixed-up, lost souls. ‘Don’t say anything,’ she murmurs, summing up both their lives. ‘Just be still. I don’t know where I belong... maybe this is just the next thing that happens. Maybe you’re not supposed to remember anybody’s promises.’
Perce has finally blurted out that he loves her, when Gay interrupts them. His children are here, he says, over the moon to see him, and he wants his friends to meet them. Again, he is kidding himself. Like Ria Langham’s offspring (which was in effect what Arthur Miller was saying), they want nothing to do with him and when he returns to the bar they are gone. In a drunken rage of emotion he climbs onto the roof of a car, breaks down completely and rolls onto the hood before hitting the pavement. This remains Clark’s most impassioned scene ever, and no matter how many times one watches it, it still brings a lump to the throat. Later, after Roslyn gets back to the house and he has almost recovered from his breakdown, he confesses, and with her in mind as its mother, says, ‘If I had a new kid, I’d know just how to be with him, just how to do.’ Ironically, Kay had just announced that she was pregnant, giving the exclusive to Louella Parsons. Their closest friends, including John Huston and Monty Clift, had known for several weeks, but kept the news to themselves on account of Kay’s age (44) and the fact that she had been terrified of putting a jinx on herself and miscarrying as before.
Back to the film, and the next morning the friends head for the mountains, which meant the production unit uprooting from the scorching, 110-degrees desert to a dry lake, 4,000 feet above sea-level, 50 miles from Reno. Here, the silt-dust formed choking clouds every time the wind blew and some of the technicians went down with chest infections. Additionally, the timekeeping went haywire. Clark would arrive on set at 8.45 precisely, but because Marilyn had set a precedent by turning up several hours late every single day, the rest of the cast followed suit, figuring no scenes could be filmed in any case without her. Even John Huston stumbled in the worse for wear most afternoons after losing a fortune at one of the Reno casinos - then took it out on the actors. Clark spent much of his wasted time reading, chatting to the technicians, or taking them for a spin around the desert in his new Mercedes.
A Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner would have fired Marilyn on the spot and not cared two hoots whether or not she carried out one of her many threats to kill herself unless she got it all her own way. She had become, however, the mollycoddled child, fiercely defended by Clark, nursed back to near as possible normality by Monty after each vomiting episode or fit of pique - and the main source of interest for the scores of journalists who manned the set day and night. For United Artists to have got rid of her now would have spelled financial disaster, so everyone soldiered on, putting on brave faces and trying to make the best of a dire situation.
In the desert, tempers flare as the men realise the futility of their mission: it was bad enough expecting to rope just the 15 mustangs Perce claims he has seen, but actually there are only six. The roping scenes, where the horses are lassooed and tied to tyres so they cannot run far before collapsing from exhaustion, are very unsettling to watch. Again, such scenes would not be accepted today. Monty, adding a touch of Method, rejected a stunt-double and refused to wear gloves - the rope burns he ends up with are for real. Clark too insisted on doing his own stunts and John Huston was suitably dissatisfied with the first takes that he ordered them time and time again just for the sheer hell of watching everyone suffer, with Marilyn/Roslyn reacting back then to the blatant cruelty as most people would today.
She first hits out at Guido, whose wartime exploits have left him so hard-bitten that he did nothing to save his dying wife. ‘You could blow up the world and all you’d feel sorry for is yourself!’ she cries. Then Gay attacks her for being over-sensitive in offering to pay for the horses’ freedom: his theory is that nothing can live unless something dies - though after watching her fit of hysterics - ‘Killers! Murderers!’ she screams - he realises she is right, and he and Perce cut the horses loose, save for the feisty stallion. This he pursues, getting dragged through the dust until he brings it under control - Clark’s final display o
f asserting his manhood in front of a woman he loves. ‘I just gotta find another way to live, if there is one,’ laments Gay, before Guido leaves in a huff, and Perce mutters a tearful farewell. Then Gay and Roslyn jump into his truck and head for wherever, assuring us that these two psychologically bruised misfits may have a future together. ‘How do you find your way back in the dark?’ she asks him, not just referring to the night, but to their state of mind and wellbeing after a lifetime of emotional abuse, bringing the optimistic response, ‘Just head for that big star straight on. The highway’s under it. It’ll take us right home!’
These were the very last words Clark Gable would pronounce on the big screen. On 17 October, he and Monty Clift drove to the Christmas Tree Inn, on the outskirts of Reno, where John Huston threw a party for Monty’s fortieth birthday. Here, Monty proved there was at least one man in the world capable of drinking Clark under the table. The next day the unit returned to Los Angeles to complete the interiors. And here, on 4 November, coinciding with the announcement that The Misfits had gone $500,000 over budget largely on account of Marilyn’s indisposition, the final scene with Clark was shot again.
The next morning, Saturday, Clark, John Huston and producer Frank Taylor sat through the rushes. Taylor later recalled how Clark told him, ‘I now have two things to be proud of in my career - Gone With The Wind, and this one.’ There seems little doubt that Taylor was according himself a moment of glory that, with Gable no longer around to back the statement up, would remain undisputed. There had been many proud moments in his life, but The Misfits was not one of them - on the contrary, the film would result in him paying the ultimate sacrifice. Huston was displeased with the scene where the characters meet up at the Dayton rodeo and persuaded Arthur Miller to rewrite five pages of script. Monty, Eli Wallach and Marilyn may have been willing to shoot the scene again, but Clark had had enough.
That same evening, he complained of feeling unwell. He told Kay he thought he was coming down with the flu and went to bed early. The following afternoon he was changing a tyre on his jeep when he doubled up with severe chest pains - now known to have been another heart attack. Dismissing this as nothing more serious than indigestion, he again retired early. The next morning, Monday, around 7.30am, he suffered another heart attack and this time Kay summoned his doctor, Fred Cerini, who for some reason rang through to the local Fire Department for oxygen and then called an ambulance. He and Kay would be subsequently accused of neglect.
Clark was admitted to the Presbyterian Hospital, where doctors confirmed he had suffered at least one major coronary thrombosis. He was hooked up to a heart monitor, given anti-coagulants and Kay was told that the next 48 hours would prove crucial towards his pulling through. During this period, she slept on a trucklebed in his room. Gable received thousands of cards, letters and telegrams from well-wishers - one, it was rumoured, from President Eisenhower, delivered to the hospital on the evening of 7 November after one of Clark’s friends telephoned the White House with news of his illness. The telegram is reputed to have read, ‘Be a good boy, Clark, and do as the doctors tell you. Ike.’ Like the conversation with Frank Taylor, it is but part of the Gable myth: there had been no telephone call, Clark and the President had not been on first-name terms; there was no telegram. The first Eisenhower heard of Clark’s illness had been that morning, while going through the newspapers with his secretary - before he had been admitted to hospital. Eisenhower’s secretary dispatched a half-formal letter to Elcino during the afternoon and this had been taken to the hospital. Even so, though there would be no further comment from the White House, the gesture would almost certainly have been appreciated.
Dear Mr Gable. I have learned from the paper this morning that you have suffered a mild coronary thrombosis. I trust that your recovery will be rapid and complete . . . I advise you to follow the instructions of your doctors meticulously. I have found this fairly easy to do, except for the one item on which they seem to place the greatest stress, which is ‘don’t worry and never get angry’. However, I am learning - and in recent weeks I have had lots of opportunities to practice! With all the best, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
One week into his hospitalisation, Clark’s specialist instructed he be taken off the heart monitor and the administrator, B.J. Caldwell, confidently announced that he was over the worst. Howard Strickling dropped in for a visit, as did former agent Minna Wallis. On the evening of 16 November 1960, Gable was reported by B.J. Caldwell to be sitting up in bed reading. Kay kissed him goodnight just after 10pm - she was no longer using the trucklebed - and returned to her own room to rest. According to the nurse who was tending him, at 10.50pm, quietly and still reading, Clark leaned back against his pillows, yawned and slipped away.
EPILOGUE
‘The King is dead!’ proclaimed the New York Times, adding somewhat unfairly that though Clark Gable had not been blessed with the acting talents of post-war British stars such as David Niven and Stewart Granger, he had possessed a rarer quality - a truly masculine personality. Other obituaries touched on this, as opposed to his achievements, while the women in his life were conspicuously reticent when it came to speaking to the press about his alleged prowess in the bedroom. Adela Rogers St Johns, who we now know had shared his bed, commented on his ‘ordinariness’ and recalled him once telling her, ‘I’m no Adonis, but I’m as American as the telephone poles I used to climb to make a living. Other men see me making love to Harlow, Shearer and Crawford on the screen. They say that if I can do it, so can they, and they go right home and make love to their wives.’
Though Clark had disapproved of Carole Lombard having a military funeral and he had wanted no fuss over his own, the US military deemed otherwise. It no longer mattered that his wartime activities had been little more than an elaborate publicity stunt, all this was left behind on 19 November 1960 for the ceremony at Forest Lawn’s Church of the Recessional, where 18 years earlier he had bid farewell to Carole.
The nine pallbearers included Spencer Tracy, Al Menasco, James Stewart, Robert Taylor, Howard Strickling and Eddie Mannix. Among the celebrities were Keenan Wynn, Ann Sothern, Frank Capra, Van Johnson, Mervyn LeRoy, Robert Stack - and Jack Oakie, who treated the occasion like a première, pausing to sign autographs and getting mobbed by fans. ‘Such a pity they didn’t bury him instead!’ Joan Crawford is reputed to have said. Only two of Gable’s leading ladies were present: Marion Davies and Norma Shearer, who told reporters, ‘Now he is on the right side of eternity. Bless him.’ Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell and Lana Turner offered no excuses for not attending. Marilyn Monroe was reported as being too distressed to leave her bedroom but sent a wreath from herself and her soon to be ex-husband - she would obtain a Mexican divorce from Arthur Miller on 20 January 1961, the day John F. Kennedy was inaugurated president. Loretta Young and Judy Lewis did not attend for obvious reasons - Judy’s daughter, Maria, had celebrated her first birthday on the day Clark died.
Joan Crawford, who had continued her love affair with Clark almost until the end, wished to avoid Kay at all costs. She held her at least partly responsible for his death - for having him examined by the studio doctor rather than getting him to the hospital when he had his first heart attack. But if she only privately criticised her for neglecting him, she (along with Kay) publicly condemned Marilyn for keeping him waiting for hours in the Nevada desert while shooting The Misfits. She would mourn her greatest love for over a year, shunning all offers of work until working on what would be her last truly great film, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962).
Clark had requested that his casket should remain closed after his death and that not even Kay should be permitted to see him. He had also asked for no eulogies. The 15-minute service was conducted by Johnson West, an Episcopalian chaplain with the Air Force. There were a few short readings from the Bible, including Psalms 46 and 121 - and instead of hymns, a medley of Strauss waltzes, regarded by some as Clark having a last laugh at Hollywood from beyond the grave. Because renov
ations were taking place within the Great Mausoleum, his casket was returned to cold storage. Four days later, attended by Kay and a handful of close friends, he was interred in the vault he had purchased back in 1942, between Carole and her mother.
The Misfits was released on 1 February 1961, what would have been Clark’s 60th birthday - a deliberate ploy by United Artists to cash in on the publicity and to hopefully acquire for him (and more box-office revenue for themselves) the movie industry’s very first posthumous Oscar. Warner Brothers had already tried this tactic with James Dean after Giant, and failed. Though the film did well enough at the box-office Clark’s recent demise did not sway the selection committee.
The actual value of his estate was never revealed, but is estimated to have been in the region of $5 million including the Encino ranch and the property in Bermuda Dunes. His will, redrafted in September 1955, two months after he married Kay, was unusually benevolent towards Josephine Dillon, considering the problems she had caused him since their divorce. The house in North Hollywood, which she had purposely allowed to fall into disrepair for the benefit of the Confidential feature, was to be hers for life. Despite failing health, Dillon continued teaching and died in a sanatorium in 1971, aged 87. The remainder of his estate was bequeathed to Kay, and a special clause had been added to his will - owing to the inordinate number of affairs he had had and any possible progeny coming forward - that all paternity-suit claimants should be wholly disregarded. He had obviously been thinking about Judy Lewis.