Gossip Friday: She Knows a Flop When She Sees It

From May 1938:

It was Carole Lombard who first tipped me off to the movie star’s definition of a flop. Carole didn’t go to the recent preview of “Fools for Scandal” in which she co-starred with Fernand Gravet. The picture has just been released at this writing and there are no figures yet from Kansas and the Bronx, much less from Afghanistan and Latvia, but Carole has a pretty good hunch that the picture is a “flop.” It seems that the day following the preview in Hollywood her friends called her up, as is the custom after a preview. “Darling, you looked simply divine last night! I have never seen you photographed so beautifully!” gurgled the friends. “But how was the picture?” asked Carole. “Darling,” they screamed, “you never looked lovelier!”

When a star’s best friends tell her that she “never looked lovelier” in a picture she can be rather certain that she has a “flop” on her hands. It’s as good a definition of a “flop” as I know.

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Well “Fools for Scandal” was one of the biggest flops of Carole’s career, so it seems she knew what she was talking about…