1934: Gable Gets a New Deal

By Judith Field

Picture Play, June 1934

A sensation on his personal appearance tour, Clark Gable’s first vacation from Hollywood in four years gives him a fresh and optimistic grip on his career.

All you fans who have been fretting over Clark Gable’s bad breaks, fearing that he was slipping from his place in the cinema sun, may as well stop your worrying right now.

After playing subordinate roles for two years, working four without a vacation, and being seriously ill for months, Clark gets a new deal, a new kind of role, a new contract! And a vacation in New York with a fresh, optimistic lease on life, as well as a firmer grip on his career. Everyone is pleased about it, if one is to judge by the proud but restless press agents who prowled around the publicity office where he was being interviewed; the girls who were described as going gaga over him; the crowds who milled about him wherever he went; the fit and smiling person of Gable himself; and his extraordinary week of personal appearances at the Capitol Theater where he was a greater success than Robert Montgomery, Lionel Barrymore, and Ramon Navarro.

He deserves a new deal if ever an actor did. And should anyone ask you, “Can you name a star who is not a disillusionment?” be sure to report snappily, “Clark Gable!”

That’s the correct reply, all right, for not even a schoolgirl with all sorts of glamorous notions about picture heroes would be disappointed in him.

Yet while talking with him, if one was not positive that his is Clark Gable, whose popularity has been sensationally hailed as “the greatest since Valentino,” it would be impossible to believe it from his easy, friendly manner. You would naturally expect him to bear some small, conscious reflection of all that adulation, but he doesn’t show a trace.

On the contrary, he was almost naively enthusiastic about his new role in the screen version of “Men in White.” That is, if it is permissible to use the word “naive” instead of “boyish” in regard to a tall, well set-up and dashing he-man whose charm falls somewhere between the two. Anyway, it is a good stellar role in a hospital setting.

Clark acknowledged it was the hardest he’s had, but as he leaned back comfortably in a desk chair and pulled out a lower drawer for a foot rest, he confessed, “I enjoyed that role more than any I’ve played in a long time.”

He launched into an account of the psychology of the interne he portrays, describing the tenderness he possessed which lifts him above the other internes and makes him destined for great things, and the humor which makes him real and likable.

As Gable explained, “He’s a man who loves his patients and sympathizes with them when they get the bellyache, but who, when he closes the door of their room, turns his mind to other things.”

Checking up on the distinctions between the stage and the picture version, he questioned me concerning the important scenes of the play, which he had not yet seen. His favorites are the ones in which he saves the life of a child by disobeying the senior physician’s orders, and his last scene with the nurse who has loved him.

He leaned forward in earnest demonstration. It seems there is a close-up taken of his thumb and forefinger—he extended his hand to show me—as he shuts the dead girl’s eyelids. There is another close shot as he turns the spring of the bed—“You know how beds are in the hospital?” he interjected—and, as he head of the girl falls below camera range, due to certain lighting effects, a cross appears.

At my murmured comment that it sounded very dramatic, Clark assured me, “Yes, but it’s not melodramatic. It just scares you.”

Here’s an actor whose roles are real to him. Now that his professional standing is being placed on a stronger basis, he doesn’t mind admitting that the subordination he’s suffered has had its advantages, even though he did play little more than foil for the feminine stars. At least it has given audiences an opportunity to see him in a new light—as an actor, instead of a “great lover.”

At the suggestion that he ever was the latter, he grew vehement—genially vehement, it’s true, but vehement nonetheless. “Oh God, no! I’m not a great lover! I never wanted to be known as a great lover. I don’t know where they got the idea. I think it was just a publicity stunt. When they started all that about me, I was afraid the flare-up was bound to go down.”

Mr. Gable likes to play heavies. He asked casually, “Did you see a picture called ‘Red Dust?’”

He liked that role, also the one in “A Free Soul.” But can you imagine any other Hollywood actor referring to a film in which he played as “a picture” instead of “my picture”? Or, as Gable did in discussing his last production, saying “we” tried to show this, or “we” tried to do that, instead of using the well-know “I”?

That ingratiating modesty isn’t the only trait that sets him apart from the ordinary actor. Before he arrived for the interview, one of the publicity men was quick to denounce Alexander Kirkland’s stage interpretation of the lead in “Men in White” as a hammy performance. Later it was suggested to Clark that he would be more interesting in the part. And do you think he agreed and expanded under the idea, as a great many of our movie males would have done? Not Clark! He merely smiled and went on with what he was saying.

That’s tact for you! And he exhibited more of it in his reaction to the question, “What actress do you admire most?” He gave a wide smile—you know, the devastating one with the dimples—and said he couldn’t answer that because if he named one, the others would be offended.

Just the same, Helen Hayes’ play, “Mary of Scotland,” was one of the first he saw after his arrival in New York, and he thought she was wonderful. So that may be the unofficial answer to an embarrassing inquiry, if you want to look at it that way.

Speaking of New York, Clark found it treated him a great deal better than when he left four years ago. This time three or four hundred people met him at the station.

“It was quite different the last time I left New York,” he recalled humorously, “only my wife saw me off then.”

Clark gives the happy impression of being an enthusiast about everything, even the task of autographing his photos, a duty, by the way, which is supposed to be the bane of the successful actor’s existence. A pile of photographs lay on the desk with typewritten slips clipped to them directing the inscriptions to various Shirleys, Libbys, and Lillys.

The official autographer had suggested in private, “I’ll do those for you, Clark.”

But the offer was hastily turned down with, “Oh, no, I want to do them myself.”

He appears to carry this gallantry to a most considerate degree. During his visits to the company’s publicity offices, the place usually armed with girls from the surrounding offices, who broke rules and marched past those on guard in order to catch glimpses of their idol. There was the startling incident of the girl who was moved to such ecstatic indiscretion by his appearance that she threw her arms around him and kissed him.

To the gasp, “And what did he do?” the answer was, “Why, he kissed her right back.”

Of course, that is all very encouraging, but I doubt whether he meant it to set a precedent. He doesn’t look like the kind of person to be imposed upon. The character that shows in his face is not just a false front—it’s real.

So is his good humor and sincerity. You find yourself relaxing in his presence, cozily content to listen to whatever he says. And he keeps you interested because he has the ability to paint colorful and sure word pictures. His personality does exude force and decision; that’s revealed in all his actions.

There is little dangers of his ever going soft or sitting back to take it easy with his career, no matter how many his comforts or how sure his status. He is as regular a fellow as his reputation has made him, and keen for more “strong sensible parts that audiences can believe in.”