1939: Mrs. Goldilocks and The Bears

By Anita Kilore

Screenland magazine, November 1939

Screenland ignores “No Trespassing” sign and takes you to the hideaway of Carole and Clark Gable, Andy Devine “and Company.” Come along!

If you should happen to be in your car, at a point about thirty miles northeast of Hollywood, and if you should turn off the main road to the south and follow a cow track for some two or three hundred yards inland toward a heavily wooded section, you would undoubtedly come face to face with a large “No Trespassing” sign. The sign is a firm one. “No trespassing or you will be prosecuted by law,” and below it are the large bold-faced words: “The Hardrock Land Company.”

Well, there’s nothing unusual in that, you say, but that’s because you don’t know the story behind that sign. Suppose we tell you that The Hardrock Land Company consists of the following: Clark Gable, Carole Lombard Gable, Andy Devine, Phil Harris, and Lum and Abner. Ah! We’ve got something there! That’s right; we have a story.

While everybody else in Hollywood is approaching the Gables with the hopeless hope of getting a story on their little grey home in the west, and “How My Husband Looks Before Breakfast” by Carole Gable, we’ll just skip all that nonsense and tell you a far more authentic and exclusive, story of how the Gables and Andy and the others happened to get all mixed up in this land business. It’s not their little grey house in the west, but it is their little hide-out shack in the woods, and that makes it even closer to their hearts, and to ours—because this is a part of their life which very few people know about.

It all started months ago when Andy Devine, Lum and Abner, Clark and Carole, and Phil Harris kind of struck up a close friendship over hunting and fishing. Sunday mornings, or whenever they had a free dawn, they’d get up at the crack of it, and rig up duck blinds in a marsh some forty miles from town. If the boys got up at five then it’s a sure thing that Carole was up at four, because when they arrived at the appointed meeting place she always had a basket of sandwiches with her, and a thermos of hot coffee, all of which she had prepared herself. If she were anyone but Carole you might figure that that’s why they let her come along—because she could be counted on to look after their hunger. Most women are a darn nuisance on any kind of a man’s expedition like that and are not to be tolerated on ay but that one food-circumstance. But Carole can be tolerated on a dozen scores. In the first place, if she falls, she picks herself up. In the second place, she willingly takes her turn at bird-dogging, scaring up the birds for the shift back there in the duck blinds. Third, she doesn’t complain about mosquitos, and in fact wears her face so full of oil and grease as a protection that you can scarcely tell who she is anyway. We can’t think of all twelve of the scores right now, but anyway she is not only to be tolerated on a hunting spree, she is even to be appreciated.

But even with such harmony, the group was not too happy about its morning expeditions. The bugaboo was this: on entirely too many occasions they ran into “Keep Out” signs, or a farmer with a cross-patch disposition—one of those unpleasant fellows who says, “I don’t care who you are; this is my property. Now get out!” Well, you just can’t imagine what a disappointment it is to get all set to go hunting or fishing someplace—and then to find out you can’t. And the worst of it is that you have to eat your sandwiches just sitting on the running board of a car, when you haven’t even had a chance to work up a hunger. But nobody seemed to know exactly what to do about it, until suddenly one day Andy Devine had an idea. He waited to spring it until they were all gathered one Sunday afternoon at his house in the valley, within a stone’s throw of the Gables’.

They hadn’t gathered formally, or anything like that. At noon Clark and Carole just naturally showed up. Carole had a couple of brown paper sacks under her arms, and she headed right for the kitchen where she found Dogie preparing the lunch for the four Devines, as it was maid’s day out. Dogie is Andy’s wife, and although her real name is Dorothy, Andy has always called her Dogie since the first year of their marriage—because Dorothy, like the dogie calves, was motherless, and had no mother to run to, like other wives have, when the first-year-of-marriage problems come up.

“I’ve got junk here, so don’t get alarmed,” Carole announced as she dumped her bundles on the kitchen table. “I’m going to be chief cook and bottle washer and you just run in and sit down. I have one helper here anyway,” and she smiled down at little Tad Devine, four-going-on-five, who was standing there, gazing up at her with his eyes crinkled a bit, as though he were facing the brightness of the sun. “Hi-yah Tad—what are you looking at me like that for?”

“I just thought of a new name for you,” he said shyly. “From now on, I’m going to call you Goldilocks.”

“Mrs. Goldilocks to you!” Carole called out gaily, since this was shortly after her marriage. “Now come on, Tad, where are the onions and the frying pan, and we’ll get busy!”

When Mrs. Devine apprised Andy and Clark, in the living room, of the new name just then bestowed on Carole, they agreed that it was a good one. “Sure,” said Andy, “Goldilocks and the bears. That reminds me: there are really five bears in this group. Why don’t we call the rest of the gang, and later we can have a game of pitch? Besides, I have something to take up with all you fellows.”

Before the hour had passed, the gang had increased. Lum and Abner arrived, and so did Phil Harris.

“Well,” drawled Andy, after the smoke of the hamburgers had cleared away, “I’ve been thinking about this hunting problem of ours, and why didn’t it the best thing for us just to buy some property of our own someplace?”

“You mean so we can put up ‘No Trespassing’ signs of our own?” Mrs. Goldilocks shrieked delightedly. “Now, that would be something! ‘Keep out, and this means you!’ signed ‘Carole Gable!’ Say, I’d like that!”

“Yours wouldn’t be the only name on the sign, if we all owned it. So stop hogging!” Gable put in, in a genial effort to pipe her down.

“Hey, I’m serious, fellows,” Andy went on. (It’s indicative that Carole is always addressed as part of the “fellows” too.) “I’m so serious that I got a real estate agent to dig us up a property or two. Now there’s a tract of land about thirty miles from here. A hundred and eight acres, and if we incorporate and buy it together, it won’t cost us very much.”

“Oh, you mean we’re going to incorporate!” shrieked Carole again. “Wow! ‘Carole Gable and Company, Inc.’ That sounds marvelous. Who’s going to be president? I nominate Clark Gable.”

“Now, wait a minute!” Clark said. “We ought to pick a name for the company which would look good on freight cars and trucks, in case we ever raise anything on that land, or get into the lumber business, or something. You know, we’ve got to look ahead.” (Practical Gable.)

“Well, what’s the matter with ‘Carole Gable and Company’? I think that would look just darling on a freight car!” she teased.

“Now, fellows, I really am serious,” Andy said again. “Here are pictures of the property, facts and figures on it, now all we have to decide is do we want it or not.”

Well, to put a long and talkative afternoon into a paragraph or two, they decided they did want it, and they also amazingly enough decided on a name under which they should incorporate: The Hardrock Land Company. That was after they had decided to make Abner president, and for some reason or other the others have for a long time called Abner “Hardrock—” nobody knows why, exactly; it’s just his nickname—so the company took that name too. They had discussed several others: The Stars Outlet Company had seemed a humorous possibility for a while, but it was ruled out because it might sound as though they really took themselves seriously as stars, and people might think they were looking for publicity. No, what they wanted was something just plain and simple, so The Hardrock Land Company it became.

The company elections were as follows: Abner, president. Devine, first vice president. Phil Harris, second vice president. Gable, third vice president—and chairman of the board. Goldilocks Gable, treasurer (and cook).

This, then, is the reason you see so many notes in the columns today, about the Andy Devines, Clark and Carole, and the others being so frequently together. Since the formation of the land company it has been rumored that they have struck oil on the property, but like most rumors this is an exaggeration. It is true that these innocents had no idea they were buying land anywhere near an oil venture, but shortly after they bought, a big oil company struck oil on neighboring property, making oil on their land quite a possibility. Three days after The Hardrock Land Company was taken out of escrow the owners were offered three times what they paid for it—and Carole, as treasurer, was greatly elated because she was anxious to have something to be treasurer of besides just a hunk of deeds and papers. But she was voted down on doing anything about it. The property as a hunting and fishing retreat still seems more valuable to them.

One of the nice notes about the property is that there is a two-story cabin which is Carole’s particular pride and joy because she took it as it was, which wasn’t much, and made it what it is today, with the aid of thirty or forty yards of bright chintz. And she has a scarred index finger to show that she did the sewing and the fixing herself. Gay china, gleaming oil lamps, big woolly rungs—the place is a rustic picture. Goldilocks has also seen to it that there is a big chair, just right, neither too soft nor too hard, for each of the bears when they come in with hunting knapsacks, filled, quite ready to relax a little. The only complaint from some of the bears is that Gable has the best.

Every now and then they have a board meeting. They pretend it’s to discuss business (oh, these landed gentry!) but it usually turns into another session of pitch, at which both Andy and Gable are expert cheaters. What is pitch? It’s one of those old-fashioned card games which they play in the backwoods of most anywhere, and which Andy learned in his backwoods youth at Kingman, Arizona, (where he sent Clark and Carole to be married, incidentally.) Gable says he had former experience with the game, too, somewhere in Idaho. They’re kind of an odd pair, sitting there, the screen’s greatest box-office hero and the screen’s burliest clown—yelling and screaming at each other, and cheating like mad. With Carole always hovering around and trying to keep peace between them.

It’s not a very glamorous picture of Clark and Carole, and their friends, but it’s a true one, and delicious for all its simplicity. There is no particular story of how Clark and Andy became friends except that like attracts like, and they are alike, physiques and profiles to the contrary. Both of them are farmer boys; they have the same unalterable love for earth and animals, and everything connected with them. Carole, fortunately, has learned to share this love, and you couldn’t part her from it now for anything. But there is one last amusing antidote about these farmer boys which we’d like to tell.

One day Gable had a day off and was home alone while Carole was working. Andy knew this, and he had a day off from “Geronimo” too, so he thought he’d drop around there to keep Clark company, and to see how he was getting on with his new tractor. Clark had bought it secondhand for several hundred dollars, and to judge by the beam on his face, he was having more fun out of it than he had ever gotten out of his expensive Duesenberg. He was driving it around, turning it here and there, backing it up, and clucking to it as though it were a horse.

“This beats all, Andy!” he shouted, trying to talk through and above the violent shaking of the tractor-beast under him. “The only thing is that after I work on it for a day I’m a wreck. Last night I had to go to bed at six-thirty. Carole couldn’t understand it, but I tell you I ache all over from the shakes this thing has. It takes muscle to handle it—want to try it?”

“Not me! I know,” Andy answered. “It’s more painful than riding a bucking bronc. But you’ll get used to it after a while.”

A little later they were sitting on the steps, still talking about the tractor, when a roadster turned into the drive and two newspapermen got out, one of them with a camera. “Hi, Gable! The rumor’s around that you’re actually doing some farming out here, yourself. Of course, we don’t believe it—that’s just baloney. But if that’s your publicity angle we’ll play along with you. How about getting a picture of you hoisting hay>? You know, with a pitchfork. Jim, here, can tell you which end to hold it by.”

Gable looked at Andy. Andy looked at Gable. Gable groaned.

The newsboys misinterpreted the groan. “Oh, it won’t be so bad; it won’t take a minute. Come on, let’s go down to the barn.”

“Listen,” Gable said wearily, “If I could walk that far I would. But if you had what I have you wouldn’t feel like it either. Come back tomorrow, and you can have all the pictures you want, but honest, I’m kind of indisposed right now. I was just going in and go to bed.”

“What’s the matter with you? Got the flu? Everybody in—”

“No,” Andy spoke up. “Gabe hasn’t got the flu. I don’t know exactly what a doctor would call what he’s got, but we farmers have a name for it. We just call it ‘tractor pains.’” With that he glared at the newsmen, winked at Gable, and the two of them went into the house.

What these newsmen refused to believe may be doubtful too to the rest of the world—that these people, Andy, Clark and Carole and their pals, so successful in the bizarre world of theatrical entertainment, live a life so untheatrical and so simple. But it’s their fun—facing the wind, stirring up a robust hunger, bending to the trail of wild game, tramping over the earth, through the woods, getting the smell and the feel of it. And not the least of their fun is that “No Trespassing” sign which warns the world to keep out.

Not that they want to be snooty, but it’s their realm and they don’t want to see it overrun, not even by oil well workers who might bring them a million. Privacy means more to them than millions. Mrs. Goldilocks and the bears—this is one corporation which you may be sure will never sell out!