Gossip Friday: Snooping in the Dressing Room

From Febraury 1939:

It occured to us while we patiently waited in Clark Gable’s portable dressing room for Clark to finish a scene with Norma Shearer for “Idiot’s Delight”, that maybe you, too, would like to know something about that famous Gable dressing room which is wheeled from set to set.

The walls, to begin with, are knotty pine. The dressing table, also knotty pine, is bare and simple , with a single mirror and two lights. There is no make-up kit anywhere in sight. Two ample-sized brass ashtrays are gastened to the walls–one by the red leather divan and one by the red leather easy chair, the only two articles of furniture.

A cigarette box is nailed down by the built-in dressing table. Two prints, the tally-ho type, are nailed to the walls. There is a clothes closet without a single garment in it. Only an empty box lies on its floor.

The day we were there, two scripts of “Idiot’s Delight”, one opened to that day’s scene, lay on the dressing table that contained no powder, comb, brush–nothing to make our hero beautiful.

But on a small built-in shelf lay what seemed to us the oddest selection of books, for Gable, we could imagine. One, autographed by its author, Maurice Watlikns. was labeled “Chicago”; another, “After the Storm”, was also autographed by its author, Arlo D. Pollock.

But the third formed a climax that even now stips us in traffic for a moment’s refelction. It was called “The Parnell Movement with a Sketch of Irish Parties from 1843.”

I mean, wouldn’t you think he’d want to forget? Or doesn’t he even know its there?

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I’ll be reviewing Idiot’s Delight as part of the Classic Movie Blog Association’s Classic Movies of 1939 Blogathon in May, so stay tuned!