1932: An Open Letter to Clark Gable

By Delight Evans

Screenland, June 1932

Dear Clark:

This is going to hurt me more than it does you.

I like you a lot—just because I’m an editor doesn’t mean I can’t pick my favorites—and I hope you like me, too. (I should think you would after all those nice reviews I’ve given you. But never mind.) In fact, I wish we could be friends—just good friends. Now I’m afraid it isn’t to be. Because I want to take a little crack at you, Clark, and I’m not sure you can take it.

Listen! I know you can’t pick your parts. I know you have to take the roles they give you, like a good boy, and play them and like them. I’m not quarreling with you about “Polly of the Circus.” Maybe you didn’t like playing in it any better than I liked seeing you. But I don’t blame you. Let’s forget it.

No—what I want to talk to you about is something, I think, that you can answer for. It’s just this, Clark—they have you kissing and making up all the time. It isn’t the kissing I mind. It’s the making up. I wish you wouldn’t do it. We don’t want to think of you as an actor in Hollywood, making your face every morning, saying your lines, going through the gestures. You stand for something entirely different. Clean, natural, honest, human things. The big outdoors—yes, and a sock in the eye and a punch on the nose. We picked you out of the Hollywood horde and cried for your pictures because you were different. An actor? We didn’t believe it. A man—more like it!

We don’t care—(I’m speaking for a few thousand young ladies who write me long letters about you—and if your mail about yourself is anything like my mail about you, are you blushing?)—we don’t care whether you’re married or divorced, so much. It’s what you stand for. We go to see you because you’re rugged and real, and there’s never been the slightest suspicion of the ham about you. And then you have to go and make up so that you remind us that, after all, you’re just a darned good actor. We can see the mascara—maybe it’s the lighting, or the camera angles, or the director. Maybe you have to make up—I don’t know. But don’t let us see it. Make up and fool us—we won’t mind. Be tough, big boy, be tough!