“The Misfits” through the lens of Eve Arnold
It was on November 4, 1960, 53 years ago today, that Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe filmed what would be their final scene ever onscreen. Sitting in the cab of a pick-up truck and gazing at the night sky as they traveled through the desert, Marilyn inquires, “How do you find your way back in the dark?” Clark, in a grainy and rather husky tone, responds, “Just head for that big star straight on. The highway’s under it, it’ll take us right home.” The music swells, the screen fades to black, and two stars are gone from us.
I’ve had many a Clark Gable fan say to me that they can’t bear to watch The Misfits because Clark looks so sickly. I agree that he does. It has always puzzled me how his widow, Kay, and others have been quoted as saying he was in perfect health at the time and what a shock his heart attack was. He looks nearly like a skeleton, it’s rather haunting. Maybe when you’re that close, you just don’t see what others on the outside see. Decades and decades of heavy smoking and drinking and taken their toll and instead of looking like his actual age of 59, Clark looks more like 70.
Declining appearance nothwithstanding, we have Magnum photographer Eve Arnold to thank for the iconic images taken on the Reno set of the film. Arnold, easily one of the most prolific female photographers of the century, lived to be 99, dying just last year. In her obituaries, she is labeled over and over as the woman who took some of the best pictures of Marilyn Monroe. Arnold had a decades-long friendship with Monroe, and ultimately photographed her from her early starlet days until her early demise. Arnold was much more than a Monroe photographer, however. She took breathtaking shots of everyone from poor migrant workers and the homeless to JFK and Queen Elizabeth II. Of this varied career, Eve said, “I don’t see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary; I see them simply as people in front of my lens.”
Eve’s work on The Misfits would be considered gorgeous regardless, but the fact that we are gazing at a man who was in the very last days of his life makes it even more haunting. Monroe would live for a while longer, dying in 1962, but The Misfits was her final finished film.
View some of Eve’s work below.
5 Comments
Ginger
“The Misfits” was the first Gable movie that I saw after “Gone With the Wind”, and I was shocked that this was the same man who played Rhett Butler. In addition to the heavy smoking and drinking, I wonder if crash dieting also contributed to Clark’s demise. I think he looked so much better in “It Started in Naples”. Jean Garceau’s book touched on Clark losing weight after “Naples” and said that Clark told everyone he needed to drop 30 pounds to play a horse wrangler. According to her timeline, he returned from Italy in November 1959. In the Spring of 1960, he announced his weight loss plan to the Stricklings, and Garceau said that Clark had lost 35 pounds by the time he and Kay celebrated their 5th anniversary on July 11. I doubt that he lost the weight by working out in gym and adhering to a low fat diet. When filming ran so long, he had to maintain the weight loss. He doesn’t look very good in the color picture.
admin
I agree, the dieting was probably the final straw. He took diet pills, as many of them did back then. His heart was already in such bad shape. Like I said in the article, it baffles me that people say “he seemed so healthy.” He looks ghastly, the poor thing.
Coco B
I have a hard time watching The Misfits. I finally understand the story thanks to my husband. As usual this was a very thought provoking piece that you wrote. Gable does indeed look haggard in this movie. Not only was weight loss a major stress on his heart, also the constant stress on set. As fans we have to remember that Gable has more than one facet. He is a difficult man at best. Sometime back I wrote that it would be hard to be his girlfriend/lover, working with him would be difficult as well. Gable was the absolute professional. And while he made his demands, like not working after 5:00PM when he was on set he was the perfect professional and everyone got the benefit of that. He was also from what I’ve read generous with his co workers, putting people at ease. But he demanded that you be professional. Marilyn Monroe was anything but, along with other capricious cast members. Kay blamed Marilyn for his death and I kind of agree. His own health and bad habits contributed but the stress on than set had to have been horrific for Gable.
Clark’s passing was not just the loss of an American icon, but it really does mark the end of an era in society. It was an era in which people were able to look beyond themselves far more than they can now.
Ginger
Coco B: I’m sure that it was difficult for Clark to tolerate the difficult working conditions on the set of “The Misfits”. I read James Goode’s book, “The Story of The Misfits”, and it described Marilyn’s difficulty with her lines in the garden scene when Gable’s character complained about the rabbits eating the plants. Clark had to drink a glass of lemonade each time they had to reshoot the scene. He finally told Marilyn to quit filling the glass so full, or he was going to make her drink it instead. For someone who is a professional, it is difficult to work with colleagues who act less than professional.
I’ve lived long enough now that I understand “The Misfits”, and I appreciate the underlying story that all of us are misfits in one way or another. Marilyn’s character was beautiful, but had a sad life and difficulty with relationships. Clark’s character was a cowboy, but was in financial ruin and watching the life that he had known be phased out by “the next thing.” The line, “Maybe all there is is just the next thing” is brilliant.
Barry Kurland
I knew Kay when I was a teenager. Her son, Bunker, was a close friend. We used to get into all kinds of trouble on the Gable estate in Encino, California, a suburb of LA, in the Santa Monica mountains, oppsite Bel Aire. One of my favorite memories was playing with the Oscar that Gable won for “it happened one night”, with Claudette Colbair, in 1938. Steven Speilberg many years later bought that Oscar from the Gable estate for 650,000 dollars. To think it was Bunker’s paper weight.
Kay came to see me after I’d had a serious car crash, I was 16 or 17 to see how I was doing. She was one of the most caring, compassionate people I’ve ever met. The most striking feature, aside from her obvious beauty were her blue, blue eyes, almost mesmerizing. At the time Clark and Kay’s son John was about a year old