{New Article} 1935: I’m No Ladies Man, Says Clark Gable

Next up–Clark Gable declares he is no ladies man! (Yeah right)

“Most boys learn about women from their mothers,” he says. “They unconsciously form their image of the girl they hope to marry someday by patterning their ideal after the one woman they know best. However, my mother died when I was only seven months old.”

Isn’t that rather sad! Actually he was ten months old when his mother died, but whatever…

“Naturally, after such a life as mine, I’m more at home with men than I am with women. But I think most men are. They talk the same language. When a man says anything, no matter whether he’s a millionaire or a truck-driver, he means just one thing. But I’ve learned that when a woman makes a remark, she may mean a dozen things! I can pretty nearly figure out how any man I’ve ever met will act under certain circumstances, but I can never tell what a woman will do!

“I’ve met more women in the five years since I’ve been in Hollywood, than I ever knew in the other twenty-nine, and I’ve learned something of course. I’ve learned that all women have a quality of the mother in them. This makes them heavenly kind in trying to help a fellow along. I’d never be where I am today, if it hadn’t been for six women who were willing to take time from successful lives to encourage and comfort and teach a struggling young actor. I’ve learned how to talk to women, too, and say—more or less—what I’m expected to say. I believe they call it ‘making conversation.’ Men alone don’t feel the necessity of talking unless they have something real to say. I’ve worked for days in a factory, shoulder to shoulder with other fellows, without exchanging a word. Evenings in the mountains—where I go between pictures for shooting and camping—I can spend around a fire with a guide and a couple of other natives—whittling, cleaning guns, and speaking only now and then with long silences between.

“Women don’t give me stage fright as much as they did once. Women in general, I mean, but I still feel self-conscious and sort of wary with ‘em. I guess I’m just not a ladies man!”

Clark Gable is the one screen star who can talk to a woman as though she were a man, an intimate friend at the studio once told me. After that, I watched him—and eavesdropped—while he conversed with a lady-interviewer, a script girl, a beautiful screen star, a publicity woman. He told the interviewer—who was trying to get him to talk about “Marriage”—the correct way to play a trout. He and the script girl got into a discussion about skeet shooting at which they both practiced every lunch hour. The star, noted for her silken boudoir appeal, was regaled with a dissertation on the cleaning of a carburetor—with pencil illustrations on the back of one of her new photographs! To the publicity woman, who had been sent to get his vote on the Ten Most Attractive Women Stars of the Screen fir a newspaper syndicate, he told a long anecdote about a duck-shooting trip from which he had just returned.

“I tell you frankly,” Clark grinned, “I haven’t the hang of this interview business yet. I still feel sort of silly talking about my feelings, and giving my ideas on every subject, but I know it’s part of the business—the strangest business in the world for a man to be in. Nothing will make me a social light, I guess. I’d rather sit around a garage discussing motors with the mechanics than get into a white tie and tails and spend an evening making conversation as the dinner partner of some beautiful woman star!

“I go to a few parties, to the polo games, the fights and to the races at Santa Anita. But my idea of a grand time is—now and always—to pile camping equipment and guns into my car and start out.”

I love this little interview, he’s so humble and sweet.

“I haven’t been in the big salary class very long, and so I won’t miss it so much when it stops coming. A man who’s chivvied huge logs down flumes for his living has a different notion of money from that of most actors. To me the money you earn by the sweat of your brow is more real somehow than Hollywood salaries. I’ve had to gauge my spending by that sort of earning so long that I haven’t acquired expensive tastes. And, I guess, now it’s too late to begin. I don’t suppose that I’d want to live again the way I’ve been forced to live at times, but my ideas of a good income are ridiculously far below Hollywood’s.

“And, among the things I won’t miss when I leave Hollywood (as all screen stars do sooner or later) is the necessity of living up to the public’s idea of how a movie actor should look and act—and talk!”

That’s the way Clark put it. And that was just what he meant!

He said this so many times–how one day he would leave Hollywood behind. Never happened–died just days after completing his final film.

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