Gossip
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Gossip Friday: Carole Out, Jean In
From October 1936: Carole Lombard in a screen romance with Clark Gable–would that spell box office? I am asking you. Either one of these two alone is sufficient to lure the customers into the theater, but the two of them together would bring in enough shekels to pay the rent and keep the wolf far, far away. That is why, come next year, Carole will be co-starred with Clark in “Saratoga.” Yes, I know it was intended for Joan Crawford, but I am told there are other plans for La Crawford. When Carole finishes “Morning, Noon and Night” for Paramount she’ll move to Metro for this one picture. And that…
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Gossip Friday: Helping a Friend
From February 1937: Clark Gable’s influenza attack has helped indirectly to furnish Myrna Loy’s new home. The two co-stars of “Parnell” haven’t worked for a week, because Clark wasn’t well enough to appear on the set. So Myrna used the time to go shopping. Her chief purchases were pots and pans for the house she is building with her husband, producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr.
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Gossip Friday: Bosom Pals
From 1952: Word has it that the lobby of London’s Savoy Hotel this summer looked like the Beverly Hills and the Bel Air hotels combined. Old home week all the time. Errol Flynn and Clark Gable became practically bosom pals overseas. They had never really had time to get to know each other in Hollywood. Errol rented a London town house for his picture sojourn there and Gable was a frequent “Man Who Came to Dinner.”
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Gossip Friday: The Turkey Star
From August 1931: The hunt for male stars–always a desperate one in Hollywood, is on with added fervor this season. if rival producers do not find a male star with sufficient sex appeal to offset the charms of Clark Gable, one studio will have captured the best bet since Valentino and the box office record of that lot will soar. From present indications Clark Gable is the man of the moment. I haven’t heard any of the masculine element tearing their heats out over him–but how the women do talk! A local wit has named him the “Turkey” star–because the women go Gable-Gable-Gable all day. A still more potent indication…
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Gossip Friday: Better Be Home Soon
From 1955: When Clark Gable returned from making “The Tall Men” in Durango, Mexico, he brought Kay Spreckels a gold monogrammed ring. Every local columnist insisted it was a wedding ring–but here’s the inside story. The crew of the picture is crazy about Kay, so they pooled their cash and sent the ring to Kay via “The King.” He did call the beautiful blonde every day while he was away. And Kay’s maid summed up the situation, saying “That man better come home soon or he’ll be too broke to marry you!”
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Gossip Friday: Off the Hinges
From December 1939: Carole Lombard visited the set of the untitled Clark Gable-Joan Crawford picture when some of the early scenes of his escape from a Guinea prison were being filmed. One brief shot showed him running down a corridor and through a door which slammed behind him. But Gable did it so violently that an end section of wall, presumably made of stone, rocked dangerously, and a hinge was torn from the door. Whooped Miss Lombard: “He’s just like that at home!”
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Gossip Friday: Don’t Set Your Watch To It
From November 1933: Studio bound, Clark Gable always sets his watch by a clock on Hollywood Boulevard. And the other day he learned that the clock had been stopped for weeks at 9:30.
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Gossip Friday: No Visitors
From February 1937: Dr. Franklyn Thorpe (Mary Astor’s ex-husband) has made an isolation ward of the swanky suite in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where Clark Gable is nursing a heavy cold. All visitors are barred. Gable growls, however, that he’ll be back at work in a day or two.
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Gossip Friday: Please Sign My Cake
From November 1933: An autograph nut hunted up Clark Gable at the auto station in downtown Los Angeles where he and Claudette Colbert are making scenes for Columbia’s “Midnight Bus,” and asked Gable to autograph his birthday cake. the fan brought along an icing-writing device, much To Gable’s amazement and amusement. The mob that hung around the bus depot so complicated work that Director Frank Capra thought up two devices to thin the crowd. He had studio carpenters bring saw horses and planking enough to fit a banquet table for 200, then had the studio put on a free feed for that many. In the meantime, the same carpenters put…
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Gossip Friday: Not a Diva
From October 1936: Clark Gable is in the Metro commissary eating lunch. He sits at the long table reserved for the writers and the directors. There is only one other actor, Spencer Tracy, who ever sits at this table and mingles with the boys. Seldom do the tourists glimpse the stars dining in the Metro commissary. Robert Taylor may be seen there, but I have never seen Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, William Powell, etc. Gable, finishing his lunch, gets up and walks to the sound stage where he is working. This particular day he happens to be working in the flicker “Love on the Run.” On the way to the…