Gossip Friday: Don’t Believe Your Hunches

From February 1932:

Playing hunches or other psychic suggestions is not Clark Gable’s way of doing things. “I don’t believe in hunches at all,” he argued. “In fact my experience has been that hunches work out exactly the opposite way. A lot of people kid themselves into believing a hunch made them do this, that or the other thing that panned out well. As a matter of fact, it was either their own good judgement or advice from outside sources that guided them and not a hunch at all. They judt don’t stop to analyze the reasons behind their own decisions and give all the credit to an imaginary hunch.”

When he was working in a rubber factory at Akron, Gable related by way of example, he had a hunch that he should join his father in the oil fields down in Oklahoma; that he belonged there; would find the contentment and happiness he was seeking.

“I was never so miserable in my life,” Gable said. “It was worse than anything I ever went through. Lonesomeness became a gnawing hunger. I felt like a living host. I finally quit my job at good wages to go back to Akron and, eventually, the stage.

“I have had a thousand hunches while driving that I would turn over into a ditch at the next curve. I have actually felt I faced certain disaster. That hunch, or mental suggestion, is always wrong; I have never had any kid of accident.

“Another hunch that certainly went wrong was the one I had when I signed for the gangster role in ‘Dance Fools Dance’ with Joan Crawford. I was glad to get the chance to play so prominent a part but my hunch told me that was as far as I could ever go in pictures. Thenceforth, my hunch told me, I would be a ‘heavy.’ Look at me today, a hero–a minister–if you please!”