Gossip Friday: Ten Years Later

From March 1941:

This is anniversary week for Clark Gable. It marks his tenth year as a recognized screen performer. And he’s celebrating it in the true Gable manner–by doing absolutely nothing about it.

Where will Gable be ten years hence? Some say Clark will be directing pictures. Our guess is he’ll be well out of movies and living the life of a rancher on some 50,000-acres (or larger) place in Arizona. He’s fed up on the glitter and tinsel and gossip of Hollywood–has been for a long time.

And once he gets away they’ll never drag him back–not even for that proposed sequel to “Gone with the Wind.”

Our files show it was ten years ago, almost to the day, that MGM released Joan Crawford’s “Dance, Fools, Dance.” A gangster story centered about a newspaper girl caught up in the underworld maelstrom, it was a chuckling, swaggering, wide-eared bootlegger whose name wasn’t even in the cast credits that stole the show. The fellow was so brutally nice about tormenting poor Joan that feminine hearts everywhere set up a new kind of flutter. Those flutters haven’t been stilled since and they are reaching a palpitating climax nowadays with the general release of “Gone with the Wind.”

Although Gable didn’t get billing in “Dance, Fools, Dance,” his name and photographs were dressing newspaper roto sections and billboards within a few weeks. By the end of that year–it was 1931–fandom had stormed MGM with such determination that Gable was playing leading man opposite the studio’s best pair of feminine bets–Crawford and Garbo. Right then he was off to the races.

Since 1931, Gable has earned a select spot on every annual “Ten Best Money-Making Stars” tabulation–a record unique in itself. He has earned a small fortune for MGM and its stockholders and is getting along nicely himself these days on $6,000 a week. His wife, Carole Lombard, is still working, too. With the occasional $150,000 she collects for each of her pictures and by sharp figuring, Gable is managing well.