{New Article} 1935: This Belongs to You! This Belongs to Me!

Let’s begin our birthday month article-palooza with this one from 1935.

The focus here is that Clark wants a personal life and a professional life and he wants them separate!

No matter how pleasant the impression you get from the finished picture, it represents work, hard work, not only on the part of the director, cameraman, author, electrician, prop man and many others, but work on the part of the actor.

My feeling, therefore, is that we earn our salaries by our work in pictures, and we shouldn’t have to continue working every minute we are away from the studio. Don’t raise your eyes at that remark and say you didn’t know we worked away from the studio! No one will disoute the fact that it is the hardest kind of work to be forever appearing something that you are not. That is what is expected of us. We are never supposed to let down. Of course, there are a few people who play themselves on the screen; but they are in the minority. Lucky persons, they never have to put on any act when they appear in public. For myself, I’m anything but the gay Lothario that I sometimes play in pictures. I’m a plain man, with simple tastes, who doesn’t care for clothes or formal parties.

But the thing you wanted me to talk about today is just what part of our lives belongs to the public, eh? And what part of it belongs to us?

Well, perhaps only Garbo and Leslie Howard will agree with me when I say that only that part of us which is necessary for the making of good pictures belongs to the public. Now, don’t get excited. I’m not going to pull a Garbo on you. I’m not going into retirement and refuse to see interviewers, refuse to pose for pictures, refuse to answer my fan mail, or any other of a dozen things of this sort. I shall probably go right on doing them as long as my position on the screen seems important enough for these things to be desired of me. But you asked me to tell you what I think about it. This is what I am attempting to do.

To elaborate a little what I said about that part of us which belongs to the public: I mean by that, that it is imperative that we keep ourselves in good physical condition, so we can do our best work; that we shall keep our mental outlook as clear as possible, so that we shall approach our work with proper perspective. We should keep ourselves free from entanglements which would cause unfavorable comments and embarrass our producers. If we have built up a following on the screen, and have led our friends to expect a certain quality performance, we should not let them down, as it were. We owe a courteous, friendly consideration to the press who have publicized our good points and minimized our bad ones. We owe the finest possible co-operation to our producers who have given us such wonderful opportunities. But I do want to feel I can live my life like any other individual when I am between pictures!

Clark struggled with the press all of his professional life, kind of a love-hate relationship. He let them in but not TOO close.

To begin with, I have never recovered from my astonishment at the interest people from all over the world have in professional people. This is not just true of America. It is true in almost every country of the globe.

Undoubtedly, if the public never read anything about us, from the time we finished one picture until another was ready for release, they might not be so eager to see the new picture; so we should be, and I am, grateful that they write to know about our soap, our stationary, our books; but in the face of all this, I do want to live my life just as Tom Jones or Bill Smith in Oshkosh might do. Unless I do something that is so flagrantly immoral that decent people are offended, I don’t think my personal habits concern anyone but me.

What would Clark think today, with TMZ and paparazzi drones and Twitter and Facebook tracking every celebrity’s every move? Horrified, I imagine. He’d be one of those handful of celebrities who shuns social media. No Instagram posts of what Clark had for dinner!

One of the things that I am particular about is telling the truth. I was taught it from my youth. My father always said anyone who would lie would steal. Now, when I am asked a lot of personal questions, I feel if I answer them at all, I must answer them truthfully. If I don’t answer, they get the information elsewhere and it looks so little like the facts that it makes me feel I will answer all next time—no matter whom I offend. The space is so limited, a writer never explains all we say and invariably we are misunderstood.

This rang true for his whole life. He often would sidestep questions or just outright refuse. I find that the only “fibs” you see in Clark interviews are in the puff pieces.

You can read the article in its entirety in The Article Archive.