Gossip Friday: No Feud in Cargo

From November 1939:

For these many weeks, we’ve been reading items and hearing rumors about Clark Gable and Joan Crawford being so angry at each other the chances are against their ever finishing their current costarring picture.

So we dropped by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer today on the theory that maybe we’d see Gable get his face slapped by an outraged Miss Crawford. On stage 26 was Miss Crawford in tatters, as if somebody had gone after her with a pitchfork. There also was Gable, dirty, sweaty, greasy–and snarling at his leading lady.

“Don’t tap your heart,” she yelled back at him, “it’ll break your finger.”

If ever two movie performers were boiling mad, here were those two. It looked like the reports were true and rumors were fact. Then Frank Borzage, the director, called “Cut!”

The frowns left the faces of his performers and they came over to the sidelines with their arms around each other to rest.

This looked fishy to us. They should have been holding daggers, for back-stabbing purposes. We asked ’em, how come? We said if they had a mad on, they didn’t have to put on any act for home folks like us.

They both laughed. 

We didn’t think the situation, as they explained it, sounded funny, but they didn’t seem to mind.

“What happened was the studio had a story called ‘Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep,'” Gable said. “They sent me the first script. I didn’t like it. It made me seem like a sacrilegious guy and that’s no way to make friends. So I told the head man I wouldn’t do it that way. 

“First thing I knew I was reading in the paper about how I had refused to play in the picture on account of Joan being in it.”

Miss Crawford arranged her tattered skirt as modestly as possible and and interrupted:

“And when I read that Clark was angry with me, that did make me angry, because he didn’t have anything to be angry about. That made it worse.”

Gable resumed: “So they rewrote the script and changed the name of the picture to ‘Strange Cargo,’ and it sounded great. Only I was in bad with Joan, on account of that item. And by then others had appeared.

“I got together with her and we agreed that we still were as good friends as ever. And we are.”

“We are,” agreed Miss Crawford. 

She was a little miffed at the way the gossip writers talk about the personal affairs of movie actors. As she put it:

“They either say you’re fighting with somebody–feuding is the word–or else you’re too friendly. You’re about to marry him. As far as the gossip people are concerned, you’re either in love with somebody or hating him bitterly. I know these people have to find something to write about, but I do wish they’d try to stick to the truth. I guess the real trouble is that the truth is seldom as interesting as the lies.”

And that would seem to take care of the Gable-Crawford fight.