{New Article} 1933: Get Well Soon, Clark Gable!

This article, from 1933, is all about Clark Gable’s recent tragic illness. Now, it is quite true that Clark became very ill as he started production on Dancing Lady. But this piece really exaggerates:

There were many in the film colony who were quick to say, “Gable is leaving the cast of Joan Crawford’s ‘Dancing Lady’ because he doesn’t like his role. That business about being ‘sick’ is just a stall!” But it wasn’t a stall! Clark Gable isn’t bluffing—not this time. He is still dangerously ill at the moment this is being written….

Those who saw him hobble about the MGM lot a few days ago, in a painful effort to say goodbye for a long vacational recuperation, were all too well aware of his condition. The trouble, which at first attacked his back, has now spread to his legs and leaves him almost paralyzed.

It all started on a recent hunting expedition in the High Sierras. As you all know, Gable is a great lover of outdoor sports. Every moment he is free from the studio, he plans an outing trip, either hunting or fishing. Generally, these little vacations have turned into parties, with sometimes Wally Beery and his wife, Dr. Franklin Thorpe and his wife, Mary Astor, and many others going along with Clark and Mrs. Gable.

But on this particular expedition, Clark and Dr. Thorpe decided to go alone.

Clark has often said to me, “Sometime, I’m going on one of those hunting jaunts with just a pal—with no women to tell us to ‘be careful, to keep away from deep gullies and steep cliffs, to keep our socks dry’—and generally treat us as if we were a couple of small kids on a lark.” This, then, was to be the great chance—just Clark and the doctor alone.

It was great stuff, the first few days. No one to remind them to do this, and that, no one to watch them. They had quite a lark just doing the things they had always wanted to do—get up when they got ready, stay out hunting as far into the night as they cared to, and to the devil with the “dry socks” and all the other feminine last words!

One day, after a particularly hectic hunt, they returned to their camp dead tired. They had waded across streams and were steaming with perspiration—and they were tired. So tired, in fact, that they lay down to take a little nap—without changing their damp clothing. They slept for hours. Night came on. When the men awoke it had already turned cold. They “came to” with a sharp feeling of cold and dampness. But after the fashion of men, away from the influence of the Little Women, they paid scant attention to a slight cough, a cough that got deeper and deeper, obviously foretelling a cold in the lungs. “What was a cold?” they asked each other. But when another day dawned, and they were in no condition to resume their hunting, they decided to return to Hollywood—recover quickly—and come back for another tussle with the mountain lions.

By the time Clark reached home, he was suffering from severe pains in the back. He went to bed. The pains struck lower and lower. By the next day his legs were in such bad condition that it was almost impossible for him to move them.

A cold from sleeping in damp clothes led to near paralysis??? No. What was wrong with him then? I’ll let Clark himself tell you, from this fabulous 1957 interview:

{Clark Gable]: “For two years after MGM put me under contract, I pulled guns on people or hit women in the face. Then MGM assigned me to do a bad part in Dancing Lady with Joan Crawford—a picture I didn’t like. But as bad as the part was, it wasn’t as bad as my health.”

“What was wrong with you?” I asked.

“I’d lost a lot of weight. They’d been working me hard and I was tired. I told myself, ‘If I have a few operations, that will take care of my health and the part in Dancing Lady too.’ I had my appendix and tonsils out, but it didn’t take care of everything, for MGM was mad at me. For some strange reason they thought I’d taken evasive action to avoid their picture. They bided their time during the eight or nine weeks I was in the hospital. Then the very day after I got out they called me in and said, ‘We’re sending you over to Columbia Pictures on a loan-out.’”

What Clark doesn’t mention is that along with appendicitis, it was determined he had pyorrhea, from his rotting teeth and gums, that was starting to spread throughout his body. Almost all of his teeth were removed and then he had to wait for two weeks for his gums to heal before he could be fitted with dentures. They shot all the scenes in Dancing Lady without him and then production was shut down waiting for him to return. Clark finally returned after six weeks, only to nearly collapse on the set and have to be rushed back to the hospital. When he was fully healed and returned again on October 20, he had been absent from the set since June 12 and the film was $150,000 over budget because of the delay.

Not paralyzed…just a bad appendix and bad teeth.

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

(#10 Article posted in 2019)