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{New Article} 1941: The Gags of the Gables–Like Crazy!

Carole Lombard Clark Gable

This is a fun article detailing a lot of the pranks and gags Clark and Carole were notorious for pulling on each other.

It all began, this frenzied funning, on the night Mammy and Pappy had their first date. They went to the Mayfair Ball on this history-making occasion. Clark, at that time, was living at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. Carole had her home in Brentwood. At the Ball, they had their first fight. Carole went home with friends. Clark, presumably, went home alone. Came the Dawn and Mr. G. was awakened by a loud and furry cooing. He opened his big, still-dreaming eyes and there were seven white doves flying around his room. Carole had sent them—Doves of Peace!

It is not generally known but I have found out that, ever since that morning, the dove industry in Hollywood and environs has done a thriving business. For let a single disputatious word be spoken by Mammy to Pappy or vice versa and the next morning a dove appears, an olive branch clenched between its “teeth.”

It was also during the Before Marriage era that a fan sent What-A-Man a 300-pound statue of himself as Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty. A day or so later, Carole awoke one morning to find 300 pounds of stone Gable on her front lawn, a garland of forget-me-nots twined around its throat, a red rose behind each ear. Mammy got on the hot wire and, an hour later, five men and a truck appeared to tote Pappy’s effigy to the City Dump Heap.

Not that marriage has sobered this Jack Pudding and his spouse. For not long ago, when the twain took a trip to Mexico, in their station-wagon (equipped for light housekeeping against heavy odds), Clark had a birthday. In the midst of a driving rainstorm, with silt and wind and pieces of ‘dobe sloshing around the car, Carole insisted upon baking her pappy a cake. Furthermore, she insisted upon his eating it. Pappy ate it. And returned to town. And went through a series of fluoroscopes and X-rays. Chickens can eat gravel, as Pappy, not unreasonably, pointed out, but men…

And just after they were married, just as they were crossing the state line on their return from the parson, a patrolman stopped them at the border, as per routine. He inquired, “Any fruits in there?” Carole looked thoughtfully at her Mister. Then, sweetly reassuring, she turned to the officer and said, “No sir, just hams.”

On their first wedding anniversary, Pappy was booming it up in Boom Town with Hedy Lamarr and Spencer Tracy. Mammy came over to lunch with her one-year bridegroom in his portable dressing room. She fixed his dressing room all pretty, with yards and yards of white satin ribbon, tulle and flowers. In one corner she arranged a huge nest. In the center of the nest she deposited one enormous egg with the word “PARNELL” painted across it, in big, red letters.

Out at the farm, Gable proudly and by hand, raised some special, blue-blooded chicks in hopes of winning a Blue Ribbon at the Pomona Fair. Every husband has a right to keep a few chickens to himself, so Pappy didn’t tell Mammy about his blooded babies.

One fine day, Pappy went off to work with his lunch-pail and Mammy was left alone with Satan finding mischief for her idle hands to do. She fixed up the house a little, then wandered out to the chicken-runs where it was borne in upon her sense of thrift that they were getting an awful lot of chicks. Too many chicks, she decided, for one family, with a world in need.

So, in a sunburst of humanitarianism, radiant with Sweet Charity, Girl-Scout Lombard called the substitute hired-man, who was temporarily replacing the regular Fred, who would have known better, told him to kill “the bunch in the little, separate pen,” fix up some boxes them and deliver them for a radius of twenty miles among the poor children in the valley.

When Pappy came home that night, he found a few feathers where his White Hopes had been. Mammy told him, shining-eyed, of her Good Deed for the day. Pappy was extraordinarily apathetic. The next morning, there were FIFTY doves circling the Gable-Lombard ranch! 

When Carole was in the hospital, following her appendectomy, Clark went over to pay her his noon-day visit. He walked into her room, bent lover-like over the bed, only to behold a strange woman with dilated brown eyes, signs of blood pressure mounting dangerously, staring at him!

Her expression was that of one who believes she has died and, all undeservedly, gone to heaven! Clark scuttled, went to the desk and asked where the hell his wife had gone. A few seconds later a floor nurse came along, laughing fit to kill, and explained that the brown-eyed woman’s husband had waylaid her in the hall, white-faced and shaking…”Nurse,” he gasped, “Nurse, my wife is delirious—guess what? When I went in there a minute ago, she told me ‘I just saw Clark Gable! He was standing right over my bed and—he almost kissed me!’”

When Carole was tracked down, in the room right next to that of the woman with the brown eyes, she had nothing to say concerning the matter except that the nurses must have made a mistake and wheeled the wrong patients into the wrong rooms. Hospital efficiency being what it is, no such error had ever occurred before, as the Superintendent carefully explained. Pappy didn’t express his thoughts. After all, you have to be quiet in a hospital!

When Carole started to work in RKO’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith the company used the studio in Culver City for several days work. A Little Bird apprised Pappy of this fact. A Little Bird has to apprise Pappy of what Mammy is doing in the movies, and vice versa, on account of how the Gableses have stuck to their pre-matrimonial resolve to never “talk shop” at home. They never do. Mammy didn’t even know that Pappy had signed his new MGM contract until she read about it in the papers. Pappy swears he doesn’t know whether Mammy has got a contract or not.

Be that as it may, on the day Carole arrived in Culver City for her first day’s work there, she was greeted, as she crossed the city line, by a huge sound-truck, the sides and top and back of which were pasted over with twenty-four sheets announcing, “CULVER CITY WELCOMES MRS. RHETT BUTLER!” Mounted on the sound-truck, dressed in a cutaway coat, tall silk hat, Smith Bros. beard, a cauliflower in his button-hole, as “Mayor” of Culver City, sat Lew Smith, Clark’s stand-in and good friend. As Carole’s car started to cross the city line, the “Mayor” halted her car and, with a flourishing bow, presented her with a huge bouquet of onions, leeks, parsley, with a very old artichoke as the corsage’s centerpiece. Carole took one good look at the “Mayor”, yanked off his beard and said, “You’ve got more ham in you than Pappy!”

I don’t know what went on in the mind of Mr. Smith (Bob Montgomery) during the making of this picture but I can vouch for it that Mrs. Smith was not exactly concentrating on her work. She was overheard muttering lines not in the script, such as “You tell my old man I’ll pay him off for this!” and “Pappy, you’ll rue the day!”

Many of those have been told time and time again, but they are so cute. I have heard the story of the 300lb statue of Clark before and I have always wondered what kind of psycho fan made that and had it sent! Can you imagine!

Kay Williams Gable, Clark’s widow, said in her book that she wrote after his death, “Clark Gable: A Personal Portrait”: “It has been reported that Clark loved pratical jokes. This was definitely not true, at least not during the years I knew him. Clark hated them.”

I have always found that statement rather poignant–I don’t think there is much doubt that if he did indeed “hate” pratical jokes later in life it was because they reminded him of Carole and their years together. Perhaps a world without Carole just wasn’t as much fun.

Read the article in its entirety in The Article Archive.

2 Comments

  • Katie

    What a cute series of anecdotes! I wouldn’t like practical jokes after her death either if I were Clark. It seems only certain people can make them fun.

    Thanks for all the work you do to make this site fun! 🙂

  • Coco B

    I never ever got the impression Gable would be a joker. He always had a serious look about him. Even before Carole. But I guess there is that one special person who you can tolerate in a special way. Carole was that person for him. I don’t think she could do anything wrong in his eyes. But I always give huge credit to Kay, she made him come alive again.

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