1934: Why I Like To Be Alone

By Jerry Lane

Motion Picture, October 1934

Clark Gable confesses—and denies he is “doing a Garbo.”

“Hollywood is over-civilized! A man could go soft in this place in a month. I had to fight like the devil during the first year or so to keep my perspective. Too much chatter. Too many parties. Too much bunk! That’s why I took to going off the backwoods by myself. I had to do that or go crazy…” This was Clark Gable—the last of Hollywood’s Great Untamed—speaking.

There was a time when John Barrymore sizzled and flashed—until Filmtown got him. Even Lupe (Whoopee) Velez has turned as docile as a spring lamb in clover. Margaret Sullavan has gone so far as to acquire a swimming pool and don dresses, instead of slacks. And even that white hope of the overall brigade, Katharine Hepburn, is learning to jump through Hollywood hoops. But Clark—

He looks you squarely in the eye and says: “The glamour of this town? Hooey! It’s a racket…”And he says it in a tone that means you-can-leave-it-or-lump-it. As a matter of fact, you like it. You pray for more—and you get it! “It’s cock-eyed, that’s all. Sure, it got me—when I first came out. I didn’t know how to relax on the set and I couldn’t relax off of it. It’s like being Exhibit A in a glue factory. You’re stuck! Only I wasn’t going to stay stuck. So, every chance I had, I skipped out.”

He skipped out to the wilds where even rumors couldn’t penetrate: where the Old-Timers could spike a beetle with tobacco juice seven yards away and thought Baby LeRoy was a new menace to Babe Ruth.

Not long ago a famous feminine star, to whose romantic maneuverings Clark had been stone-blind and deaf, asked plaintively: “Would you call him a savage gentleman—or a gentle savage?” Hollywood didn’t know the answer. It can’t understand a chap who wants to be alone occasionally, away from the handclasps and hullabaloo.

Not “Doing a Garbo”

“But,” he points out, “get me straight on this solitude stuff. Old Man Gable isn’t doing a Garbo! If Hollywood mobs like to get out and hunt, why I’d be the ringleader. But Hollywood mobs don’t. They play bridge, they get steamed up over anagrams, they dance. I do a little of it because Mrs. Gable enjoys it, but if I was on my own I’d never show my face at a party. After all, I’m a Pennsylvania Dutchman—did you ever see one who could go in for frills and this lah-dee-dah business?

“I suppose it goes pretty deep with me, this wanting to get away from the crowds. Down to the roots, so to speak. And my roots are right in the ground. Earthy. I was born on a farm. I’ve bummed around a lot—ridden the rails, been a lumberjack, known very little of home life since I was sixteen. But the two things that can give me the darndest homesick feeling are the warm, spicy smell of tomato ketchup cooking and a whiff of damp sagebrush…It must be the rural in me!”

Whatever it is, it has kept Clark strangely unchanged, strangely sane, in a city that has worn many a strong man down.

To me, two pictures of this off-screen Gable stand out in revealing highlights. One is of a steaming hot day shortly after he had made his big hit in “Dance, Fools, Dance.” The scene was the Griffith Park riding stables, where an old cowpuncher had given Clark the workout of his life. Perspiration was streaming down his face. And it was obvious enough that he had hit the ground nearly as much as the saddle. But he grinned widely as he eased himself into his car and shouted, “Y’old horsefeather, I’ll ride the tail off your cayuse tomorrow!”

There was an answering grin on old Jim’s face. He turned to me and rubbed his head thoughtfully. “Would you believe it? He’s one of them movin’ picture folk. But good gosh, he’s—why, say, we could a made a real cowhand out of him back in Wyoming!”

It was the highest tribute I think Clark Gable has ever been paid.

Clark and Pete Were Brothers

Another memory is of a cold, rain-swept night far up in the mountains. We had stopped at a ramshackle all-night stand for coffee—and seated on a high stool, with his legs wrapped around it, hat on the back of his head, was Mr. Gable. He was ceremoniously dunking a doughnut. I knew he had been invited that evening to a swanky Hollywood function where a bevy of screen beauties would have swamped him—and yet, here he was. “Just an urge,” he said, “to see what the desert looked like when it was wet.”

There was humor in his face and something else—a haggard expression, the need to escape. “I’ve got to have some outlet from that buzz-works back there or go nuts,” he explained—and off he drove alone into the drenching night, headed for the Mojave…

Months later I met that same man, surprisingly enough, for the first time on the screen—in “It Happened One Night.” When Pete was showing the heiress the art of dunking, I saw Clark again on that rickety stool.

“Yep,” he admitted when I charged him with it, “that’s the first picture I didn’t have to act in. Because Pete was me—or do I have to say ‘Pete was I?’ He was a big loafer. So am I. I take the path of least resistance every time. Neither of us is exactly what you’d call fastidious. I don’t bother about shaving any more than he did. In fact, when I’m up in the mountains, if I don’t see a razor for a week, it’s all right with me! That’s my little antidote for the fancy ‘dress parade’ periods…”

“And did you notice Pete’s antique headgear? That’s the hat I’ve worn, myself, for ten years. I hate to see old things wear out. They give you such a blamed comfortable feeling. I have my shoes half-soled so I can keep them. Maybe that’s a throwback to the time when I was a kid, though. I had to do it then. I had to be thrifty in a lot of ways. My stepmother taught me to always turn out the lights in a room when I was through, for instance. And now I find myself going around the house and naturally doing the same darned thing…”

There isn’t one Hollywood rule that Clark follows. He caters to no one, asks no favors. But like other reclaimed lost souls, he’s a big softie at heart. For example: he’s dashed off the stage, while he was making “Chained” with Joan Crawford, as soon as the noon whistle blew, grabbed a sandwich, skirted the gate on two wheels and spent his entire lunch hour popping away with a gun at flying discs. It’s called “skeet-shooting” and it’s supposed to perfect your aim for bird-shooting. But does Mr. Gable intend to go after birds? He does not! “Don’t think I could get a kick out of that,” he says. And he’s a sucker for any hard luck story that comes along.

But you couldn’t call Clark a hand-kissing ladies’ man! He’s more likely to tell them where to get off than where to get on. One of the ga-ga girls got to him the other day. She was the kind who thought it would be just “too, too romantic to do Europe on a shoestring and hunt out the quaint old inns.”

“Ever done it?” demanded Gable.

“Why—no.”

“Well, I have. I went to Holland on a tramp freighter a short time before I came out here. I didn’t have enough money to do anything except sit there and guzzle beer all day with the natives. It was about as romantic as a wet sack…And these ‘quaint old inns’. Everyone I’ve found had food as oldish as the atmosphere!”

The ga-ga girl gooed herself away, trembling.

Keeping His Ego Deflated

It’s funny to see this Clark Gable on the set, immaculately groomed and every inch the suave sophisticate. Leave off making torrid love to some character and stroll over to a cameraman. Pretty soon you’ll hear talk like this, “Say, have you tried that 3.06 sporting rifle? It’s swell! Has a sporting telescope sight, you know. I’m taking one with me on the trip next week.”

The “trip” may be to the country in back of Reno. Or to that new spot Wally Beery told him about fifty miles north of the Grand Canyon on Arizona. Or up in Wyoming. Sometimes his pal, Dr. Thorpe of Los Angeles, and his stepson, Alf, accompany him. More often, he goes by himself. And he goes after each picture.

“It’s a stabilizer, a contact with another world,” is the way he sums it up. “Those people in the provinces are as different from the Hollywoodites as a red shirt from pink petticoats. It puts you on your mettle to compete with them. You can’t get soft. It keeps your ego fairly well deflated when you climb a thousand feet and start puffing—and then see the old guide’s face…They rate you as a human being. They treat you like one—not as a star. It gives you a chance to see the two sides of things that way.”

Perhaps the most clannish group of people on earth are those same ranchers in the back mountains. They size you up more carefully that the Navy before you can break in. “Bill” Gable has broken in. And Gable, who could be the lion of any social set in the world, is more proud of that fact that n of anything else, even of stardom. And he comes down from there in a little more unsubdued, with a little more of the punch that makes his pictures big box office.

That’s why every good producer and every good director in Hollywood prays nightly, “Please, Heaven, make Clark Gable a lone wolf! Keep him untamed!”