The Great Gable Part 5

The Great Gable

Part 5–His Ears Take Lots of Bending

By Jess Stearn

New York Daily News

July 16, 1955

Like reigning royalty, King Gable’s problem through the years has been one of standing alone. Hollywood’s greatest breadwinner finds it virtually impossible to get disinterested advice when he seeks it.

Not since the death before the war of MGM’s guiding genius, the late Irving Thalberg, has Gable had an advisor who could help him pick a good picture.

“Clark’s great trouble,” says a friend, “is that old one of being surrounded by sycophants who knock themselves out agreeing with him, not realizing that he is actually turning to them for help. Either that or they’re afraid to stick their necks out.

“And it doesn’t do any good to get brutally frank and say, ‘Gabe, you’d stink in that.’ Gable is the kind of guy with a cool, logical mind, who has to have a reason. Show him a reason, as Thalberg did with ‘Mutiny on the Bounty,’ and he’ll go along.”

Gable acknowledges good-naturedly that two of his greatest hits, “It Happened One Night,” which got him an Oscar, and “Mutiny,” were practically forced on him.

“MGM thought it was punishing me when it pushed ‘It Happened One Night’ at me,” Gable recalled with a grin, “and I thought so too.

“It Wasn’t so much the picture itself, I hadn’t seen the script. But I was loaned out to Columbia, and in those days Columbia was considered the wrong side of the tracks in the picture business.

“I’d been making ‘Dancing Lady’ with Joan Crawford, and had been down with appendicitis. It bothered me for eight or nine weeks, but I guess the studio thought I was stalling. So they were going to show me how well off I was.

“Eddie Mannix (MGM executive) called me in and said, ‘We’re sending you to Columbia’—just like that. I was so sore I turned on my heel and slammed the door as though I was trying to jam it through the frame.

“I was still sore when I got a call to go over and see Frank Capra, who was going to direct the picture for Columbia. I belted down a couple of fast drinks and marched into Capra’s office. He knew I wasn’t happy, and he sat there with the script in his hand trying to be tactful. Frank is a gentle guy.

“’Sit down, Clark,’ he said, drawing a chair, ‘I want to tell you about the script.’

“I was still hopping mad. I jerked the script out of his hand and said: ‘Never mind, I’ll tell you.’

“Frank only smiled and said, ‘I know how you feel, Clark, but read the script—it was written just for you.’

“I started reading it and got interested in spite of myself, but it was comedy and I hadn’t done comedy for the movies before and didn’t know whether I could. Frank didn’t think I’d have any trouble, but I wasn’t sure.”

The King Makes a Deal And Grinds Out The Film

“’I’ll tell you what,’ I said, ‘I’ll make a deal. We’ll shoot four or five days, look at the rushes, and then if you want to get out of it, you can.’

“I didn’t know how well or how badly I was doing, and when we saw the rushes, I still couldn’t tell. I told Frank, ‘All right, what do you want me to do now?’

“Capra smiled and said, “Just keep going.’

“I could hardly believe him, but he repeated it, and we went along.”

Gable rebelled again, at making “Mutiny on the Bounty,” now one of his favorites. He couldn’t see himself running around in Bermuda shorts, and thought the English movie-going public might not like seeing an American in the lead.

“After all,” he recalls, “it was essentially a true story, with Fletcher Christian a historical character. There was an English director, Frank Lloyd, and the entire cast would be English with the exception of Franchot Tone and myself.

“I thought they might resent an American and I didn’t know how I’d square off as an Englishman against such fine English actors as Charles Laughton and the rest.”

But Gable let Thalberg talk him into it, and today it is one of his few pictures that he enjoys showing at home.

He is boyishly pleased by the response of his friends to whom he loans the film for private showings.

“I let this fellow, who isn’t much of a moviegoer, borrow it several weeks ago,” Gable said, “and he keeps calling me to say how much he enjoyed it. He can’t seem to get over his surprise.”

A drama of the South Seas had a lot to do with the Gable career. Gable was 16, a rawboned farm boy from Ravenna, Ohio, when he went to Akron, landed a job in a rubber factory, and was captivated at seeing his first play, “Bird of Paradise.”

Got No Pay, But Right To Snooze Backstage

It decided him on being an actor. He took a job as a call boy, working without pay, but permitted the privilege of sleeping on a cot backstage. He was spared starvation by handouts from sympathetic actors.

Clark’s father, William Gable, a widowed farmer turned oil driller, was appalled by his son’s ambition, and took him off to the Oklahoma oilfields.

Gable fondly remembers his father, who died in 1948. : I don’t think my father paid too much attention to my talk of being an actor,” Gable recalled. “I guess he thought I was going through a phase and would get over it.

“When we went down to Bigheart, Okla., he put me to work as his assistant. My job, 12 hours a day, was swinging a 16-pound sledgehammer. He wasn’t a big man, not as big as I am, but he was powerful and had hands as big as mine.

“I did this for about two years. I was a tall, rangy kind, weighing 165 pounds when I started, and when I finished I weighed 205. It developed my chest, shoulders and arms. What strength I have, I suppose I gained in those years.”

When he was 19, Gable, tired of drilling for somebody else’s oil, jumped at an opportunity to join a group of touring players, and got in a couple years experience before the troupe was stranded someplace in Montana.

He did anything he could to keep going. “In those days I was a telephone lineman, a lumberjack, tool dresser. I even sold neckties, but all the while I was looking around for acting parts.

“They had stock companies all over the country and I got a break young actors don’t have these days. I worked as a stage hand, prop boy, callboy, anything for a change to get on the stage.

“Because I was big and strong, I suspect they sometimes have me acting bits so they’d have someone with a broad back for the heavy work backstage. I never thought of the movies. The stage was my only interest.

“In Los Angeles, later, I was working for Lionel Barrymore in ‘The Copperhead’ and he thought I might be worth a screen test, I doubted t but went along. I couldn’t see what the movies needed me for, but Lionel pointed out that with talkies, Hollywood would need actors who could talk.”

Gable, with Barrymore’s sponsorship, finally got his screen test—in “Bird of Paradise.”

Gable laughs whenever he thinks about it. “They put me in something like a leotard,” he related, “gave me a knife, put a hibiscus over my ear and turned me loose. It must have been wonderous to behold. King Vidor, the director, took one look and yelled, ‘Get that thing out of here!’

“That seemed to settle my movie career. But somebody persuaded Jack Warner to take a look at me. He looked, thought my ears were too big, and that was the end of that.”

Gable went on getting solid dramatic experience, dong stock in Houston for 37 weeks, and finally getting bids to Broadway, where he worked in several plays for producers Arthur Hopkins, Al Woods, George Cohan and Belasco. “I might not have been any great shakes,” he said, “but I was learning and getting confidence.”

Then came a break. “I was offered the Killer Mears spot in ‘The Last Mile,’ in Los Angeles. It was running in New York where a fellow by the name of Spencer Tracy had the part.

“I went to see it, and decided I couldn’t take it after watching Spence. I told the producer I didn’t think I was good enough. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he told me, ‘You don’t have to be so good in Los Angeles.’

“Surprisingly, it turned out all right. Though back in Hollywood, I still wasn’t thinking in terms of the movies. Al Woods, in New York, had a pretty fair play going by a pretty good writer that he thought would be right for me. It was ‘Farewell to Arms,’ by Ernest Hemingway. I signed for it, and was sitting around waiting to go East for rehearsal, when I was offered a part by the old Pathe studio in ‘The Painted Desert.’ I guess Killer Mears had done that for me.

“They offered me $750 a week. I never knew there was that much money around. I couldn’t believe it. The shooting didn’t figure to take long, and I could still go East for Woods. But there was a delay in starting the picture. I laid around three weeks, being paid all that salary, and then there was another two weeks on location not doing anything.

“I had an Actors Equity contract with Woods. Failure to keep it could have been serious, but meanwhile I was committed to the movie and didn’t know when I’d ever be making that kind of money again.

“I called Woods and explained everything. He said, ‘go ahead and stay with your picture and I’ll telegraph your release in the morning. Lots of luck.’”

On the strength of “The Painted Desert,” in which he was typed as a heavy, Gable signed on to a two-year contract with MGM, beginning his long relationship with that studio.

In his first year with MGM, the star worked in 12 pictures, including “The Easiest Way,” with Constance Bennett, and “Dance Fools Dance” with Joan Crawford. But it wasn’t until “A Free Soul,” with Norma Shearer, Boss Thalberg’s wife, that he scored a great personal triumph.

On Set He Was Like a Hungry Dempsey

Walking on the MGM set, Lionel Barrymore was struck by the way the comparative unknown held the great Shearer in his arms. “He was like a lean and hungry Jack Dempsey,” Barrymore said, “only the quarry was prettier.”

Miss Shearer was impressed, too. “He was the most despicable of heavies,” she said, “but even when he slapped my face (picture-wise), you couldn’t help liking him.”

Gable’s fame kept rocketing with each new picture—“It Happened One Night,” “Manhattan Melodrama,” “China Seas,” “Test Pilot,” “Boom Town,” “San Francisco,” and, of course, “Gone With the Wind,” his supreme triumph, which, still running, makes him new fans the world over.

But with Thalberg no longer around to guide him, he was thrown into a succession of poor pictures after the war. Although they made money on the strength of his box office magic, they led last year to his breakup with MGM.

Gable himself likes only one his postwar pictures, “Mogambo,” a remake of the movie “Red Dust,” which he had done 21 years before with Jean Harlow.

“It was a struggle,” he said, “but I finally got one good picture out of them before I go out of there— ‘Mogambo.’ I only wish I could have had a share of it. I understand it’s headed for an $11,000,000 gross.”

Under his present percentage deal, making pictures as a free agent, this would have meant more than a million for the actor.

Not the man to look over his shoulder, the newlywed Gable is busily planning new pictures, new vacations. He feels he has done pretty well, better than he had any right to expect. “if they ever get around to writing my epitaph,” he says, “let them make it, ‘This guy was lucky—and he knew it.’”