Gone with the Wednesday: The Gift of Rhett

Turns out Clark REALLY liked the sketch that Photoplay magazine did of him as Rhett Butler, that we posted last week. A few issues later, Ruth Waterbury, Photoplay‘s editor, wrote:

…it was nothing to be photographed with Mr. Gable…though suffering with Mr. Gable is not actually the worst of all human agony…

Clark had asked for that Vincentini portrait of himself as Rhett Butler that we ran in our October issue and though I was more than delighted to have him have it I had to see that PHOTOPLAY got something out of it too…so I asked that we get a shot of him receiving the drawing and they decided to count me in…

Now it so happens I hadn’t seen Clark for six months..and as terrible as I knew the Gable uumph to be I had nonetheless forgotten just how immediately it acted upon you…that is I had overlooked it until they got the camera focused and Clark by the way of devilling me turned on that look that he sometimes gives to his heroines in a love scene…it didn’t mean a thing to him…that was all too apparent from the way his eyes were twinkling…it was just trying to see what that look could do…but after being just a hard-working editor all month long…to glance up and see that mocking look lavished upon you, even though you knew it was all by the way of laughing at you…well, the next time one of Clark’s leading ladies tells me that in her scenes with Mr. G. she is merely thinking about her income tax…I’ll know what to call her…

For there is another truth there…personality is the main motive anywhere in the world…and here was the most possessed, charming and sane man in the motion picture star firmament having his own joke and being so grand about it that even though you knew you were being mercilessly teased you were grateful for it…

And where is that sketch now? Framed and hanging in the Marietta Gone with the Wind Museum!