Gossip
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Gossip Friday: A Fine for Clark
From April 1959: One rainy, stormy day in Pima, Arizona, a trailer-truck looked out of the midst and headed directly for an approaching car. The driver reacted swiftly, cutting his wheels to the right. With a sudden screech of brakes, both vehicles halted. Clark Gable emerged from his auto unhurt. A patrolman arrived, and finding both men all right, started to write out a ticket for Gable, charging him with ‘illegal passing.’ Clark grumbled something and got back into his car. On the day of the hearing, crowds of newsmen gathered at the courtroom. “Hey,” shouted one, “bet you Gable doesn’t even come himself!” “Yes,” agreed another, “he’ll probably send…
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Gossip Friday: The One That Got Away
From July 1934: Clark Gable, screen actor, can talk about the “one that got away” and without danger. Fishing off the Coronado Islands today from a live bait boat, with Garry Fleischman, Hollywood, a friend, Gable hooked a large barracuda. He had the fish within about 20 feet of the boat when suddenly there was a new tug on his line and it jerked toward nearby rocky cliffs. Gable never saw “the one that got away,” but the bait tank attendant from his more lofty perch, reported it was a large sea lion which had taken Gable’s barracuda.
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Gossip Friday: That Red Dress
From 1945, Hedda Hopper’s memory of the infamous Mayfair Ball in 1936 (my recap of this incident here): Hollywood first got exclusive at the Little Club in the Ambassador where only the bon ton and the elite could cavort and caper on bathtub gin. But I think Hollywood snootiness flowered much later on at the Mayfair dances. Something happened there I’ll never forget. The Mayfair numbered Hollywood’s ultra-smart set. A Hollywood copy of the London West-Enders, of course, and oh, my dear, so formal. For a time its balls made news all over the world and I doubt if there was ever a more publicized and flash-bulbed Peacock Alley anywhere.…
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Gossip Friday: On His Arm
From May 1942, fan letter to magazine: Los Angeles, May 28, 1937. I stood with many thousands at Wrigley Field, as busload of stars pulled in to watch the boxing match that night. I saw a great, handsome man emerge in a tweed coat and trousers, crepe sole shoes, and hat down over one eye, Behind him, his wife, Carole Lombard, dressed almost exactly like him. “Clark Gable!” I whispered, and he immediately pushed his hat back and grinned like only he can. I grabbed his right arm (Carole was on the other) and buried my head so that the police couldn’t see that I didn’t belong there, and walked…
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Gossip Friday: Chief Export
From December 1935: South America had a good shipping year. Their chief exports to the U.S. appear to be coffee, frozen meats, and snapshots of Clark Gable in swim trunks surrounded by various Latin dolls.
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Gossip Friday: Don’t Ask
From February 1937: Interviewers of Carole Lombard are cautioned in advance that they must not mention or ask about Clark Gable. Interviewers of Gable are expected not to mention Miss Lombard. Yet Gable isn’t in the least reticent about telling friends that he hopes to make a picture with Miss Lombard. Not only wants to, but expects to. __ Wants to make ANOTHER picture with Miss Lombard, to be precise. And a shame that never happened.
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Gossip Friday: Doing a Double Take
From October 1940: Clark Gable and the Missus are burned up about the story going round that all is not well between them. Those who are spreading the poison should be squelched by the announcement that the pair intend taking a four-month honeymoon-vacation just as soon as Carole completes “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” Another muffler for the gossip was provided by Clark just a few days ago when he told the following story about the wonderful Lombard sense of humor. It seems a bad case of poison ivy hit Carole recently and swelled her face until it looked like an automobile tire about to pop. A vainer woman would have…
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Gossip Friday: Boom Town Preview Postscripts
From November 1940: Boom Town Preview Postscripts: It required 27 varied location sites and a total of 41 sets to screen this story. Metro buily a boom town of its own for this picture. Clark Gable has been suggesting an oil story for himself for about three years; at the age of 18 he worked as a tool dresser in Bigheart, Oklahoma. Spencer Tracy sets a new record for himself in screen fisticuffs, engaging in five battles; this is the second time he and Gable fight each other in films, although the last time, in “San Francisco,” they wore boxing gloves. Gable is two inches taller in the picture than…
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Gossip Friday: Adding to the Arsenal
From December 1935: While all the talk of divorce and separation was going about, Clark Gable was quietly purchasing himself some new guns. He has a regular arsenal already, numbering nearly two dozen rifles and shotguns. He is an inveterate hunter and a crack shot. At skeet and the traps his is said to be really expert.
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Gossip Friday: Punch Devotees
From August 1934: Clark Gable shuns crowds because he has, more than once, found a fist thrust under his nose and, “Come on and fight you big so-and-so,” bawled at him. And not by drunks either. The roles Clark Gable plays waken the animosity of punch devotees. The actor has a horror of coming out of a crowd with a black eye, a swollen nose, or of being forced to fight his way out of the situation. When he is making a picture, Gable never goes out in public because of this strange difficulty.
