{New Article} 1936: I’ve Lived a Lifetime in Five Years

Clark Gable was humble. This isn’t news to any fan of his, but this was new to those in the 1930’s used to worshipping screen gods put high up on unreachable pedestals. Clark’s “aw shucks” attitude was very different and at first MGM didn’t know how to publicize this kind of guy. Then they decided to go with it, and followed him around, posing him hunting and fishing and looking rugged.

When Clark first touched the fringes of fame, he avoided parties and admitted that he was uncomfortable in dress clothes. He appeared only at the important places where the studio requested him to go. I well remember seeing him at the premier of Grand Hotel in one of his rare personal appearances. During the intermission, Clark was surrounded by eager autograph seekers. He stood in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, flushed and perspiring, his immaculate collar slowly but surely wilting to a shapeless mass. He was a living picture of a man undergoing his most embarrassing and uncomfortable moment.

The Clark Gable of today’s public appearance is a very different person. Even the crowds, which tore the buttons from his clothes and the handkerchiefs from his coat pockets, couldn’t ruffle his calm and sincere charm. Today he talks, he laughs, he answers questions and signs papers without one flush—except the flush of genuine gratitude.

Clark is no longer afraid of the business of making pictures. He takes his work seriously, but not too seriously. It is a job to him, a job which must be done to the best of his ability. He accepts the parts which are given him, without one word of complaint, even when he doesn’t like them. “ ‘The Front Office’ knows what it wants,” he says. “They pay me to work in front of the cameras, not to select the casts of the pictures.”

His tune changed a bit on the subject of “The Front Office” as the years went on, getting sick of being traded like cattle and thrown into the same kind of film over and over.

“The years before Hollywood were a sort of prep school course,” Clark said once, “Hollywood has been my college education. It has taught me to think seriously and I hope, sanely. Before I came into pictures, I didn’t give much thought to the future. I enjoyed gambling with life, living each day as it came along and not worrying about the tomorrows. Something was bound to turn up. It always had.

“But in Hollywood, I began to realize the shortness of the years of success and of youth. Today, you’re on top. Tomorrow, you’re forgotten. So now I am planning for that tomorrow as well as anyone can plan anything in this topsy-turvy world. I know that some day I’ll be washed up in pictures. Then what am I going to do? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

“For a while, in my early Hollywood months, I concentrated on hunting and fishing, roughing it in the wilds away from people and all forms of civilization. Then, suddenly, I began to realize that social contact with other people was a vital and necessary part of living,” Gable said.

Finally, today, he has become himself—a frank, unassuming, honest and vital Clark Gable with the eager enthusiasms of the young Bill Gable of Hopedale, Ohio, and the mellow tolerance of a successful man of the business and social world. In these last, short five years he has completed a lifetime.

It’s so great to me that you can read quotes from Clark in 1932, 1934, 1937, 1945,  1949, 1955….and his answer about success and fame is the same: that he knows it will end some day and he will be prepared for when it does. He was all set to become unpopular and fade into an oblivion. Luckily for us, that never happened.

You can read the article in its entirety in The Article Archive.