1934: What’s Happened, Gable?
What’s Happened, Gable?
By Walter Ramsey
Modern Screen, April 1934
“What’s happened is just this. I’m fed up. Something has taken away all the kick I used to get out of my work—and taken my ambition with it. If my option lapsed tomorrow, I wouldn’t lift a hand to get another movie job for at least a year. All the thrill and the fun of the game are temporarily over for me and I don’t know that I shall ever get them back. In my present frame of mind, the movies are just a job, a job that has developed into as much drudgery as that which bends the backs of tired bookkeepers, grown rusty at their benches. If my mental attitude is beginning to show in my work, I’m sorry. But that’s the way I feel.”
The words and music are by Clark Gable. The little paragraph above is the answer to the current Hollywood question: “What’s happened to put out the light of personal and vital magnetism that used to sine in Clark Gable’s eyes?” And in the frankest, most abruptly honest statement ever made by a motion picture star, he spoke his piece.
Alibis? There isn’t one, not one in the make-up of this guy who comes so close to being the Prince of Hollywood Good Fellows that you can skip the difference. Kicks against uncongenial roles and bad pictures? Nothing like it! Let the others hide behind the excuse of “bad casting” and “studio mismanagement.” They can pass the buck for their mistakes if they will. Those don’t happen to be Gable’s methods. He hasn’t a single squawk against Hollywood. In one way, he is grateful for everything Hollywood has done for him.
“The fault lies purely with myself,” he said. “I thought I wanted something, something I find I don’t want at all. I was not meant to be a motion picture actor—or any actor. But in the beginning I didn’t realize that I thought I wanted acting fame more than anything in the world. How, then, can Hollywood be blamed for giving me what I wanted and discovered I didn’t?”
“I know it sounds damned ungrateful to my producers and to the fans who have made me what I am, whatever I am. But you asked me a frank question and I want to answer you honestly.
“I mean it when I say that I was not born to be a movie star. I was born close to the soil and should have stayed close to it. Silence, the great privacy of nature and the joy of earning one’s bread by the sweat of the brow—these are my rightful heritage. That is the kind of man I am. That is the fundamental me.
“It is foolhardy for a man to go contrary to the instincts of his nature. And that is exactly what I have done in seeking an acting career for myself. When my stage career developed into a movie career, the contrast was even greater. For Hollywood is a glittering bubble. In place of quiet, it is a Babylon. Its only privacy is a clique and each night bring a fatigue that isn’t physical, but pure nerve exhaustion.
“Of course, in the very beginning, that didn’t seem to matter. I got a tremendous kick out of it—all the backslapping, the recognition, the loud plaudits and even having my buttons torn. It was the same artificial kick a man got when he was drunk. Only it lasts a little longer. The thing that has happened to me is that my hangover of fame drunkenness is wearing off. I’m sobering up after a two years bat on Fame Champagne.”
We were almost alone on the porch of the studio café, The “Men in White” company, which affords Clark his latest starring role, had called luncheon later than usual. Most of the others in their masks of yellow grease paint had long since returned to their sets. I thought Gable looked tired and considerably thinner. He had just returned from the Columbia lot after completing “It Happened One Night.”
I said, “Clark, you’ve worked hard these past four ears. You’ve been desperately ill this last year. Don’t you think that if you had a chance to rest this mood would vanish?”
He smiled. “That’s a nice, logical excuse. And it’s true, I am tired. This is what has happened to me in the last four years. I’ve had a good dose of Hollywood movie fame, three hunting trips and three severe illnesses. Maybe the ledger is balanced. But when I was lying there in the hospital it seemed to me that the root was deeper than that. Oh, I guess I’m the proverbial square-peg-in-the-round-hole.
“I know talk like this has a tendency to anger people who think, ‘Oh, these movie stars! They have everything in the world. They’re paid ten times what they’re worth and still they kick. They don’t know what real trouble is.’
“I have a little statement for those particular people. I used to want fame. I got it. Now I find that I have sacrificed something a great deal more important—peace. I once could go to a picture show, watch the crowds at theatre time, walk down the street oblivious to everything. I gave that up for this! Let me assure you that I lost in the trade.
“The philosophy about how much money we make is okay if you happen to be one of those people to whom money is really important. I’ve had so much fun on so little—that I guess my perspective has been ruined. The things that I have to do in Hollywood and the money I am forced to spend does not buy me the pleasures I am longing for. And what’s more, they leave me not much more than you when I am through.
“Lately I’ve begun to give up a few of the forced things. I’m starting to leave off the ‘front’ that every actor must have. I’m trying to get some of the things I want and they cost so precious little when you come to thin of it. Yes, I enjoyed driving my twelve-cylinder car, but I sold it the other day and I bought a Ford roadster. Now I can actually drive down Hollywood Boulevard without so much as a single finger pointing me out.
“The troubled days of my life were no when I was on the bottom of the heap. I didn’t have a care in the world then. Honestly, if I had it to do over again, I’d never have sought fame or money in the movies or out of them.
“Another trouble with me in Hollywood is the fact that I’ve never been social-minded. I’m too innately independent to fit smoothly into the grooves of the right things to do and the right people to do them with. I like to do as I please when I please. Any person who achieves fame in the motion picture world forfeits all claims to independence. I cannot plan to go on a fishing trip because I must be handy in case there are retakes on a picture. I couldn’t even get away to see my own horse run at Caliente the other day.
I cannot go slouching around in old clothes, because of something vaguely referred to as my “position.” I can’t slide up to a drug store counter and have a good old-fashioned chin with the soda jerker, because he subconsciously yeses me. I can’t go shopping for a present for my wife because I find I have suddenly become a public spectacle. The manager of the store wants to know if I’ll autograph a few articles in the book department. I daresay I should be more than grateful to the fans who attempt to snip buttons off my clothes for souvenirs. They made me, didn’t they? But I can’t feel that way. I try to grin and bear it but something inside me rebels. I really appreciate their reason, but I don’t like it.
“I think the only thing that will cure me of my violent attack of Hollywood-itis is to go on a good, old-fashioned bum-bat for about a year. I mean I’d like to hop the next tramp steamer out of San Pedro and set off for God knows where. I’d like to lie on a warm deck and let the sun saturate my whole being until I felt I had completely regained my health and steadied my nerves. Then, after a year or two, I might want to come back to Hollywood. I’d like to come back with the idea of starting all over again.
“I’d like to be able to say to them, ‘Let’s forget all this great lover stuff. Let me get back to the rough, tough roles I played when I first started out.’ I like to play those guys. I get a kick out of them. I don’t care whether it’s a starring part or merely a small role.
“You see, I know I haven’t fooled the public with these dinner-jacket parts I’ve been playing for the past year or more. What’s more, I don’t like to fool them even if I could. I’d like to get back to Gable-the-roughneck and forget Gable-the-gentleman. I guess what I really want more than anything else is a chance to be myself again, both on and off the screen.”