Gossip Friday: Boom Town Pranks

From August 1940:

You may have read about Clark Gable getting a split lip in a fight scene for “Boom Town” and how the studio had to give him a few days to let it heal. Here’s the sequel to the story, which contains a typical Hollywood chuckle. Gable was called on for the closeups after the fight some time later, and after a fake blow at close quarters, when the scene was in the can, he grinned and carelessly spit out a tooth! Everyone saw the blank space in his front row of teeth and consternation reigned. When Clark had enjoyed his joke, he revealed that he had painted out a tooth. What they won’t do in this town for a laugh!

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New this week:

Film page for Night Flight

A 1990 Architectual Digest article about the ranch house (Thank you, Gabi)

A rather personal and interesting article from 1942 about the ranch and  some of Clark’s personal likes and dislikes. A snippet:

Clark’s immediate household consists of himself, Carole, Fred the ranch hand, Jessie the cook, Florence the maid, a flock of ring-neck pheasants, a few hundred chickens, two cows, eight horses, three dogs and one alley cat.

The Gable animal population has a varied and interesting history. It started with one cow, which became two when a ranch hand’s wife had a baby and milk became important. Chickens came next and Clark’s poultry pride reached its zenith when he groomed a certain flock for the Los Angeles County Fair. Visions of blue ribbons at Pomona danced in the country squire’s head.  Then rudely, they vanished. On the eve of the big event, wife Carole discovered some poor people down the road who didn’t have enough to eat. She had a batch of ranch chickens killed and sent over. They turned out to be Clark’s pet contenders.

His canine crew consists of two dogs, “Bob”, his pointer and hunting companion, and “Commissioner”, a dachshund, named after Clark’s friend, a Santa Monica fire commissioner.

There are right horses on the Gable ranch today, including Clark’s two saddle favorites, “Buck”, a sorrel, “Comanche”, a grey. Carole’s is a Tennessee Walker. Clark has always been a great horse lover and constant rider although, except for his late and inglorious bangtail, Beverly Hills (who cost Clark a pretty penny and cured him or racing), none of them are prize-winners. A while back Clark invested in a wild, spirited steed, a bad actor. He thought it would be exciting to train and tame him. One day, with Clark in the saddle, the stallion dashed out of control, clattering across a road under repair. There he stumbled, tossing Gable smack in a puddle of newly ladled asphalt. Clark yanked himself up from the sticky stuff, looking like a tar baby, led the horse home and put him up for sale that day. He figured there was no use asking for a broken neck.

Probably the most annoying but beloved member of the Gable ménage is a nameless cat. Clark and Carole ran on to the derelict puss one night before they were married. They’d been out on a date and heard the kitten mewing dismally from a barrel in an alley. They promptly adopted him as an advance member of the family. The cat repays by climbing nightly up the house and scratching on the screen of Clark’s bedroom window. He doesn’t do this until after midnight, so it’s always a cause of nocturnal cursing as Clark rouses himself out of the hay and lets the tabby inside.

What is very sad is that this article was published in March 1942 but obviously it went to press before Carole’s death in January.