1931: Do Women Love Cave Men?
By Mary Sharon
Silver Screen, November 1931
When Clark Gable Got Rough His Fan Mail Got All Perfumed Up
Do women love cave-men? Well, they did once upon a time according to the latest fossil disclosures and Fannie Ward’s memories. But women have changed and well, anyway—what brought the question up was Clark Gable who seems to carry a prehistoric club in his eyes at any rate.
We were walking together down past the dressing room on the MGM lot, an actress (I won’t tell you her name because she is separating from her husband, and this isn’t her story anyway) and I mentioned Mr. Gable, as who doesn’t these days.
“I don’t know what it is, but he certainly gets under my skin,” she told me. And then whom should we meet face-to-face but Clark himself. He hailed us cheerily. The actress was aflutter like a sixteen-year-old. Her hands flew to her throat and then to her hair. And Clark, seemingly unmindful of the inner commotion he was causing, smiled and passed on. My curiosity got out of bounds.
“What is it about him that gets you so—that way?” I demanded.
“It’s not his dimples. And it certainly isn’t his good looks. I’ve seen more handsome men. I think it is the suggestion of brutality about his eyes and mouth. And that cave-mannish way he has of looking you up and down and tossing you aside. He makes you feel instinctively that no woman would ever be too important to him.”
And that is that.
Ivan Lebedeff says: “A woman loves the man she loves, whatever he is. Love to a woman is something, the reason for which can never be explained. The most beautiful women often give themselves to ugly and sometimes even invalid men. And women of fine intellectual and spiritual development sometimes give themselves to absolute dumbbells.
“But there’s a physical side to all women. They are all thrilled or attracted more or less by cave-men or he-men. Not so much on account of their obvious brutality and roughness, but because of something primitive and unconquerable, suggestive of a fine animal inside. Such men, even though they win the woman in a mild-enough manner, after they have conquered her physical self, display a peculiar mixture of indifference and ownership. This type of man is always popular with females. The best example of a strong, virile male, who has been able to remain very close to the nature of a cave-man without becoming affected with a complicated psychological twist is Clark Gable. I would commend him to anyone as a sweetheart or comrade, although I have never met him personally.
“A more refined specimen of the same group was Valentino. Unfortunately, he loved women with his mind and soul also. Which made him weaker from the standpoint of a lover than Clark Gable is.”
From which, I inferred that Ivan doesn’t think Clark loves women with his mind and soul. And perhaps he doesn’t. Who cares? It certainly doesn’t lower him in the estimation of the ladies to be considered a cave-man.
In fact, he established himself originally in a menace role.
Women like to be made to do things they don’t want to do. Or prevented from doing this they do want to do. It’s a little hang-over from centuries of being ordered around, I suppose. I remember when I was a very young girl, that I enjoyed being bossed around by a big, handsome cave-man, who had been junior champion boxer of the navy. And who used to make me hike miles and miles with him through snow-storms when I particularly wanted to sit by the fire and read. And who used to make me sit indoors and listen to reams of poetry when I really wanted to swim in the surf. I shudder now, when I think how nearly I came to marrying that man. He was something like Clark Gable, only not so much so.
Personally, I’ve usually preferred boys like Robert Montgomery to the lads with sex-appeal. But Clark Gable is different. I confess that the first time I lunch with him, I got all jittery myself. And now I’m a rabid Gable fan. He’s got what it takes. And he’ll go a long way yet. This has been said so many times now, that it is trite. But it is likewise true.
I tried for three weeks to see Clark to ask him what he thought of the status of cave-men where women were concerned. But unhappily for me, he went deer hunting about fifteen minutes before I received my assignment. And when he returned from the mountains with his trophies. He took only enough time to change his clothes and collect his wife and baggage and the hied himself to Palm Springs. Days lengthened into days and he did not return. I made up my mind that he had taken up a permanent abode in Palm Springs and I drove down intent on getting the interview and getting it at once. Luck was against me. Clark passed me somewhere on the road. I suspect a big blue car that looked like nothing so much as a streak of lightning. By the time I returned to Hollywood I had assumed the psychological twist of an Evangeline. I could see myself going down the corridors of time, notebook in hand, hearing always that Clark had been here and there and had gone.
And then it happened. Out of a blue sky. Rather in the Brown Derby. I went inside for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. I was wearing an Empress Eugenie hat pulled low over my right eye and I would never have seen him if he hadn’t called to me. At the sound of his voice I whirled around and there he sat, inviting me to lunch with him. Just like that. And that is when I got all jittery, but can you blame me? It was upsetting enough to be lunching with Clark Gable, but twice so when you consider how I had been running all over the country trying to find him.
I was all primed for an interview and I wasted no time.
“Tell me, doesn’t it set you up to know that all the women in the world are hot and bothered about you?” I demanded.
“This must be a case of mistaken identity,” he countered. “You know me. Just a Hollywood ham, trying to get along.”
I allowed him to struggle over his steak for a moment.
“Do women love cave-men?” I interrupted at last.
“They do and they don’t,” he elucidated. “A cave-man may be nice to have around where he has his own jungle cave and run-way. That is the ideal condition, of course. He might be a great lover under those circumstances and get away with it.”
“Is there an if to your answer?” I demanded.
“Sherlockian, aren’t you?” he taunted.
I got all jittery again when he looked that way at me, and I busied myself with my salad to hide my confusion.
“Here’s the point I was trying to make,” he explained. “A cave-man may be all right in his natural habitat. He may be satisfactory and thrilling and exactly right for every woman given the right conditions. But take him under ordinary conditions. Does a woman love a man who occasionally takes chunks out of the grand piano to wreck the buffet with? I doubt it. A cave-man is about as useful and necessary to the modern woman as a bull in a china shop.”
I acknowledged that I hadn’t thought of that. Then, I saw the twinkle in his eye, and knew that he was deliberately and with malice aforethought getting my goat.
“But seriously, what is the status of the cave-man as a lover?” I persisted.
“Brutes always have been loved,” he amended. “You can see this by the popularity of such pictures as Bancroft’s and the philandering Sergeant played by Eddie Lowe in ‘What Price Glory.’ This characterization built Lowe into a box-office power because the brute in it appealed to the women fans. Women have everything so absolutely their own way that they crave being bullied now more than ever because of the novelty of the situation. This is a women’s world, run for, by and of women. They have advanced more in the last ten years than they have in the last thousand. And this very thing has caused them to yearn for the man who can dominate them, force them to do his bidding.”
He suppressed a chuckle.
“Out with it,” I ordered.
“I was about to say, let a man try and do it and see what happens.”
“What happens?” I persisted.
“Plenty.” There were volumes in the word.
So on the authority of a man of force and power, I would advise you boys to refrain from the impulse to get forceful and brutish. Don’t go too far with the little woman. Or else.
What is one man’s meat is another man’s poison. You can’t all of you be Clark Gables, you know. And I think Clark is probably right about the answer to the question “Do women love cave-men?”
They do. And they don’t.