1947: Love That Gable

Love that Gable!

By Russell Byrne

Movieland magazine, May 1947

He’s the same irresistible Clark—with the magic grin that proclaims him everybody’s friend

Clark Gable settled back on the couch in his portable dressing room and conceded, somewhat cautiously, that The Hucksters was “going along fine.”

“I don’t say it’ll be good,” he hedged. “Can’t tell about that yet. I just say it’s going along all right and it can be good.”

The big guy was back on a movie set for the first time in eighteen months. He was happier, obviously, than he had been the last time he faced a camera. Then, winding up Adventure, he was already convinced that the film would be a dud—and nothing that has happened since has changed that conviction.

The golden flood of box-office coin that greeted the picture didn’t change it, certainly. The reassurances of many fans who were happy because “Gable’s back and Garson’s got him” didn’t change it.

By his own standards, Adventure was a flop. It was his first movie in four years, and he didn’t like it. That is putting it mildly, which Gable doesn’t:

“You ask if it’s really so tough for them to find pictures for me? Look, I’m gone three years and in all that time all they can find for me is that jewel. Yeah, it must be tough.”

He rates Adventure along with Parnell, his 1937 error. Parnell was the epic in which the bosses tried to subordinate Gable to a “character,” forgetting that their prize boy brings in those shekels not by acting (which he can surely do) but primarily by being Gable.

All of this suggests that, when MGM proceeds with its quest for future Gable vehicles, the perfect Gable role is right in front of the studio’s collective nose: “The Life of Clark Gable.” There’s a story that has everything: poverty to riches, adventure, adversity, humor, romance, tragedy, courage—and most of all, that essential ingredient of any good story, a richly human character.

There’s a hitch to this, of course. And it’s Gable himself. For if by some improbable chance Clark ever consented to a movie based on his life, he would immediately stop being himself, go “out of character.” One of the remarkable things about the man is that—through sixteen years of stardom, through ten years as one of the screen’s “top ten” attractions—he has always been Gable true to Gable, Gable “in character.”

When we broached the idea for such a picture to Clark, his reaction was instant—mildly startled, tolerantly amused, and definitely “No.”

“I’m not a writer of memoirs,” he chuckled, “and I certainly hope, even after I’m gone, I’ll never be dramatized. And as for playing in such a picture—nunh-unh!”

This reaction, easily predictable, was in character for many reasons. One is that the fellow has always been constitutionally unable to take things, including himself, “big.”

Even if he tried, he’d have little success in achieving that state of self-absorption and self-glorification which proclaims the ham.

He said it at the beginning, when the adulation and fanatical acclaim he received could have lifted an average Joe’s feet off the ground: “I’m Joe Lucky.” He says it now, when his popularity is ever more firmly established: “I’m still Joe Lucky.”

Another reason is that, for all the efforts that have been made to lionize him as a hero, war or otherwise, Clark Gable isn’t having any. Like Jimmy Stewart, Robert Montgomery, Wayne Morris and all the other Hollywood men who dared and did in combat, Gable looks on his war exploits as a closed chapter, not to be capitalized. He saw a job to do and he did it, like ten million other guys. But a film about Gable’s life would necessarily include the war.

Good dramatic construction, indeed, would make his departure from Hollywood the climax of the story. The hero Gable, would quietly finish his movie work, pack up and leave to enlist in the air forces. He would dedicate himself to action in a cause. And the final scene, doubtless, would show the Gable spirit triumphant—Gable manning camera and gun in air combat over Europe.

At all such scenes, which would be authentic biography, Gable would writhe. He still parades no emotions, refrains from dramatizing himself. He would never play the perfect Gable role.

Today, on the set of “The Hucksters,” he is the same old Gable. His thick black hair is a little grey about the temples; his only make-up is a natural tan; he is tall, broad-shouldered, and his tummy is as flat as a high school athlete’s. The famous grin flashes as quickly as ever. He’s good-natured, friendly, sure of himself but not cocky. He never seems to be thinking “I’m the great Gable” because, obviously, he isn’t thinking t. Like a good business man whose business happens to be acting, he tends to his work.

All the visitors who can wrangle a pass to Stage 24 are flocking there to watch him at it. Studio girl employees who can find the slightest excuse dash over there. Gable is still magic.

And he’s with old friends. Jack Conway, the director, has directed him in six previous films, including “The Easiest Way,” the 1930 picture in which Gable began his MGM contract. He had a bit role as a milkman, but it was enough to set the fans to asking “Who?” Starred in that picture, with Constance Bennett, was Adolphe Menjou. Menjou (who is writing his memoirs if Gable isn’t) is in “The Hucksters” too. Deborah Kerr, the English leading lady, Clark met only when she arrived for the picture. But her husband, young Tony Bartley, is a constant visitor to the set. Tony was an ace in the RAF during the war, and he and Clark were friends over there. There’s Frank Myers, an assistant director, and Hal Rosson, the cameraman, and Shug Keeler, now a head electrician, and a host of old time crewmen who make Gable feel at home.

“Shug,” says Clark, “is a guy who helped me stick it out in those early days. I remember one day I was pretty sore because they insisted on taping my big ears back. I groused to Shug that I was sick of it and I was going back to the stage where a man’s ears weren’t a major catastrophe. Shug said, ‘You stick around, kid: you’ll go places.’ And the ears took care of themselves.” Gable laughs. “One day, in a scene with Garbo for ‘Susan Lenox,’ the tape snapped loose and one ear flapped in the breeze. That was the end of taping.”

On his dressing room wall the main decoration is a caricature of Gable—largely ears.

As a good business man-actor, Clark insisted that the character of Vic Norman, the ad agency “hero” of “The Hucksters,” be revamped in the scripting. “Vic is still a heel,” he explains, “but he’ll get a little sympathy in the end. That charming heel stuff is okay, but an audience is likely to get pretty tired of a straight dose of it.”

The character, Vic, incidentally, has taught Clark at least one thing he didn’t know, Gable, who has made a best-dressed man list or two with only six suits in his wardrobe, learned from Vic about neckties. In the story, Vic has only $50 to his name and he’s on his way to apply for a job. He splurges $35 on a necktie—a “sincere” necktie for Clark to wear, a hand-printed number costing $27.50.

“I didn’t know you could buy ties like that,” muttered Gable in amazement. “I never paid more than $2.50 for a tie in my life.”

Despite this discovery, fancy neckwear isn’t being added to Gable’s brief list of pet extravagances. He goes for handmade shoes, smart and expensive traveling bags and streamlined cars (he’s an inveterate mechanic and tinkerer) but he’ll be skipping “sincere” neckties.

Gable continues to live simply on his twenty-acre ranch in the valley. His eight-room white house is virtually as the late Carole Lombard decorated it, with warm bright colors and big stone fireplaces, and his gun room is still the informal gathering place for friends when he entertains. He dabbles at farming—a few chickens, one cow, a little citrus—but doesn’t expect to make money on it. He has a couple from Iowa taking care of things. He gave up his horses when he went to war, and he hasn’t replaced them. “Cost too much now—they’re asking all kinds of prices even for broken-down old nags,” he says.

He is still a great one for hunting and fishing. It was probably by virtue of these periodic outdoor jaunts that he shed twenty pounds before reporting for “The Hucksters.”

“Didn’t plan it that way,” he grins, “and I surely didn’t do any dieting.”  His appetite—for steak, potatoes and all he-mannish fodder—is unfailing.

Once there was talk that Gable was thinking of retiring from pictures. “No,” he says, “I’m not. I’ve said I’d like to do just one picture a year. My contract gives me four months off between pictures now, and that should work out to about one film a year.

“The stage? No…I’ve got no great message for the world. This (pictures) is what brings in the groceries, and that (the theater) is work. Sure, this is work too, but it’s broken up. You get a day off now and then. You get time between. If a stage show’s a hit you’re in for the duration. Not for me, brother!”

He is in almost every scene of “The Hucksters” and hasn’t had a day off, but he still hasn’t decided what he’ll do with his next vacation. He’d like to go to England but—“I want to wait and see how things are. Don’t want to give them one more mouth to feed when things are tight over there—not just so I can play a little golf with them. Guess I’ll go hunting.”

He kids about his age.

Out on the stage when Conway calls him for a scene, he has to stoop down to be kissed by little Diane Perrine. On the fourth take, as he is rising, an arc-light sputters faintly.

“What’s that?” asks Conway.

“That,” says Clark, “was my knees creaking.”

Actually, he is a fit man, full of spring and bounce and youthful good humor.

His fan mail, as usual, continues to offer opportunities for matrimony. A widow with four children suggests that the five of them could surely relieve his “loneliness;” another offers her daughter as the ideal Mrs. Gable; others, equally pathetic, state frankly their willingness to be coxed into the bonds.

Gable, probably the top eligible of Hollywood, has given no indication of serious matrimonial intentions. He has dates now and again—with Virginia Grey, Anita Colby and others—but if there is any romance budding he has kept mum about it. He neither shuns the night spots nor patronizes them with any fervor. Lately he has been seeing a good many movies, usually in studio production rooms.

There is one film he would like to find—the footage containing his first screen test, for “The Bird of Paradise.” For the role of the native hero, Gable wore body makeup, a loin cloth, a curly black wig and a hibiscus behind one prominent ear. The verdict was “No.”

“I’ve looked for that test,” Clark says, “but it’s disappeared. It would be something now—good for a lot of laughs.”

He has come a long way from his first association with “The Bird of Paradise.” That was even before the test. It was the play he saw, while a laborer in an Akron rubber plant, that turned him toward the stage. He was about eighteen then, a farm boy who had never seen a show before. It gave him the acting fever, and sent him on the long trail to fame. It was a broken trail, broken by the need to eat as well as act. He labored in Oklahoma oil fields, in Montana mines, in Oregon lumber camps, in all kinds of odd jobs before the road straggled into Hollywood, extra work, lean times, the stage, more hunger, and finally, overnight success.

All this would be part of that picture, “The Life of Clark Gable,” which will never be filmed.

As for those future pictures of his, Gable is in the mood for modern stuff. He doesn’t want to look backward, even impersonally. “I want modern talk,” he says, “in pictures showing how people actually live and think and do.”

His next picture is already in preparation. It’s “Angels’ Flight,” from a novel by Edward Holstius. He’ll play a Los Angeles gangster who goes to England in quest of “culture,” and Mickey Rooney will co-star as a young racketeer who idolizes him. The scripting is by John Lee Mahin, Clark’s close friend who wrote “Combat America,” the documentary Gable made in England for the United States Army Air Force.

Gable is hopeful about the whole thing, but cautious. He thinks it will be good. That’s Gable, still and always—“in character.”