Gossip Friday: Christmas with Classic Stars (Part 1)

Excerpt from an article entitled “Santa is a Headache” from the January 1940 issue of Hollywood magazine:

Claudette Colbert is one who started her shopping last August–with a notebook. Each time she found out what someone wanted, she wrote it down. Then she weny out and shopped. She put into the giving much of her own time and thought, which makes her gifts worthwhile. Joan Crawford will be doing the same thing. Jewelry, clothing, and countless other gifts will be selected and wrapped by Joan herself. Hearty Clark Gable will be shopping these days with Carole Lombard for three things: Gags, personal gifts and a large stock of liquid cheer for those with whom he works. And Warner Baxter will be getting ready to be host to the entire Twentieth Century Fox lot on a sound stage. Plenty of Christmas cheer for all.

These bills will run into the thousands.

Carole Lombard’s arms will be loaded with gifts. Everyone on the set will first get some silly thing, ranging from a bullwhip for the assistant director who summons her before the camera to a dollar alarm clock for her secretary, Fieldsie, who gets her up in the morning to go to work. After that will come the real gifts.

“I got the gag habit,” Carole tells me, “when I was a youngster in Fort Wayne, Indiana. My mother used to walk into the front room with a basket full of gags, designed to be a mild rebuke and to give a laugh to those who received them. The real Christmas came afterwards.”

Lombard will go miles for a gag. She shopped all over Los Angeles once to find a carriage for Clark’s race horse, Beverly Hills, and had it delivered to him Christmas morning with a note:

“That horse will never win a race. You’d better just hitch him to this.”

Marion Marx recived a four-dollar mule from her–she raises race horses–and found it on her front lawn with a sign, “Pride of the Marwyck Stables.” Complete with a bale of hay.

To Mitchell Leisen, director, goes a bow for having the greatest directorial Christmas spirit. He scatters thoughtfully bought presents amounting to thousands. No one on the set is forgotten when “Mitch”  loots a sports shop which he owns jointly. He wraps the packages himself. At noon Christmas Eve he stops filming and starts handing out tokens of his appreciation to those who help in at the studio.

At Metro Goldwyn Mayer, you may rest assured that Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Myrna Loy, Bill Powell, Hedy Lamarr, Director Woody Van Dyke and Bob Montgomery will give set parties. They’ve never missed. There’ll be drinks and gifts and general merrymaking.

The other day, to give an example of the far-reaching Christmas influence of Myrna and her husband, Arthur Hornblow, a cop on the beat said wistfully, “Gee, I’d sure like to meet Hornblow and Miss Loy. For several years–ever since they’ve been in Hollywood and Beverly Hills–I’ve had a gift from them. But I’ve never seen them.”

Marlene Dietrich and Kay Francis frequently  have given automobiles to those who have worked with them–Marlene’s gif to Dot Ponedel, hair dresser, was delivered on the set wrapped in cellophane–and the exotic foreign star distributed, one year, bottles of champagne with $20 gold peices wrapped against them.

You can depend on it, also, that although Marion davies hasn’t made a picture for some time, she’ll find a place to give a party for those five hundred crippled children and their friends and relatives. A real party. And, as each family departs, there’ll be a Christmas basket. When Marion sees September come around, she sends for a representative of Cartier’s, in New York City, to bring jewelry to the coast and make selections for her friends.