Gossip Friday: Passing of the Crown

As any fan can recall, Clark was selected as “The King of Hollywood”, alongside Myrna Loy as “the Queen” in 1938. The contest continued year after year, with new kings and queens elected. But the king label stuck on Clark and Clark alone (although, unfortunately, the queen label did not stick on Miss Loy), as he is still known as “The King of Hollywood” today. In 1939, Tyrone Power was elected the king and Jeanette MacDonald the queen. Here’s what a columnist had to say in April 1939:

…Take Clark Gable who ran second to Ty in this voting and who won out last year. 1938 Gable had one fine picture, “Test Pilot”, and one so-so picture, “Too Hot to Handle”, but both of them added together did not equal in sheer production value any one of the pictures that Mr. Power has been in. Ty certainly didn’t look much like an eighteenth-century count in “Marie Antoinette” nor a nineteeth-century canal builder in “Suez”; he certainly was made to appear silly in “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” where he lived through some thirty years and didn’t age by so much as one wrinkle. It is very much to his credit that he played these diverse and miscast roles so convincingly that it was only after leaving the theatre that you were able to pick any flaws in them.

Gable was up against a stiffer problem to maintain his popularity than Tyrone Power was, boiled down into essentials “Test Pilot” wasn’t so much of a story and “Too Hot to Handle” was plain goofy and it was the Gable personality (combined with Myrna Loy’s, which is no slouch either) that actually put both pictures across. In other words, his studio didn’t back him up as well as Twentieth Century backed Power.

Yet it is characteristic of that Gable guy, too, that he said of Power’s winning, “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer kid.” which is absolutely true. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer kid unless it happened to Gable himself, who, I bet wasn’t called a kid even at the age of ten, being always too loaded with adult male ummph.