Gossip Friday: A Plain Nurse, Please

From April 1940:

There never has been such a contagion of hospitalization among the celbrities of Hollywood as there has been recently. Envious eyes are turned toward the nurses who care of these famous bruised and injured.

“It’s all in a day’s work,” one pretty nurse told [us], “but movie people (especially the men) are harder to nurse than other patients because the never relax from their work and worries for one minute. Joe E. Brown’s nurse had almost to hold him in bed during a big football game. Joe wanted to get out of bed to lead cheers.”

“Director Leo McCarey is the worst of all. He starts at six every morning yelling commands either by phone or by dictating to stenographers. He’s supervising the picture ‘My Favorite Wife’, you know, and doing it right from his bed. Every night, temperature time or no temperature time, his room has to be darkened and a white screen put up where he can view the day’s rushes. What with all the nurses in the hospital finding some excuse or other to be in Mr. McCarey’s room at ‘preview’ time, it’s awful.”

“And what of Clark Gable?” we asked another nurse, when Gable was under treatment for laryngitis.

“Oh,” she said with a pout. “All he demands is a plain, middle-aged nurse who doesn’t care a darn for movie stars. And the rest of us can go hang as far as he’s concerned. But he is wonderful just the same, isn’t he?” she asked.

You can’t beat the Gable charm; even whe he spurns ’em, they go for him.

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New this week:

I started a section for Clark’s lady loves under Info. He had many…and the stories are interesting. To start with, there’s Virginia Grey and Elizabeth Allan.  The Virginia page includes a 1941 article about her. Many more ladies  to come!

TV Listings have been updated through December. Mickey Rooney is TCM’s star of the month for December, so they are showing Manhattan Melodrama. That’s it for us Gable fans, unfortuantely!

The gallery is still down. I am trying my hardest to get it back up!