-
Gossip Friday: You Just Can’t Beat That Guy
From March 1942 (fan magazines ran about three months behind): Clark Gable is rapidly taking over the role of best businessman in Hollywood. On their recent trip back east, Clark and Carole bought an $1100 car in a Middle Western town and drove it home. In Hollywood they sold the car at only $100 loss. The expenses home amounted to exactly $87. Carole and Clark stopped in small towns and hotels, ate in small restaurants and had a bigger time than Santa Claus. When people have more fun than Gable and get a bigger kick out of doing it the American way–that of the average man–then we give up. You…
-
Gossip Friday: Inseparable
From July 1936: Now, what’s all this between Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, anyway? It’s getting so you can’t hear or read about one without hearing about the other at the same time, too. They guffaw loudly at romance-whisperers, and they deny there’s anything to it–and yet they’re about as inseparable as a couple of newlyweds! (And, incidentally, wouldn’t they make a swell pair of brand-new-mr-and-mrs?) Latest double appearance was at the circus, when it played Hollywood–and Clark and Carole were as much eyed, if not more, than the rest of the show, the night they hand-in-handed it in the big top! Marry?–heck, I wouldn’t bet a tin dime on…
-
Gossip Friday: Fire This Astrologer
From January 1941: From “Hollywood–Beware in 1942: Events–some happy, some ominous–as seen by a reliable astrologer in the ’42 futures of your favorite stars” Gable and Lombard: Last year I told you all about Mr. and Mrs. Clark Gable and how well suited they are in every way. They still are–but I want to warn Clark that due to the transiting Jupiter, Saturn and Venus, he will be under bad aspects. He must be as conventional as a country schoolmarm during all of 1942 and especially during August. The heretofore tolerant public will scowl and turn thumbs down at Clark’s slightest deviation from the path of convention. August and part…
-
In Memory of Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard died 78 years ago today, at age 33. The plane carrying Carole, her mother and MGM publicity man Otto Winkler, among others, slammed into Mount Potosi near Las Vegas on a cold snowy night, January 16, 1942. All died instantly. The death of Carole forever changed Clark Gable and despite whatever happiness he found later, he undoubtedly never fully recovered from it. As the news spread across the nation, the newspapers apparently called up everyone in fandom to give a comment on the tragedy: All Hollywood Mourns Popular Actress’ Death High and Low of Film Colony Shocked by Air Disaster Killing Warmhearted Actress Sorrow hushed the sound stages…
-
Gossip Friday: Sitting Fireside
From December 1940: Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard, were Sunday evening guests at the White House and were among the 19 persons who were with President Roosevelt when he delivered his fireside chat. Gable stopped here during the weekend en route to Baltimore where he enters John Hopkins Hospital today for examination of a shoulder injury suffered a long time ago. Mr. Roosevelt usually has no one present during such intimate broadcasts to the nation except the necessary radio announcers and technicians. Last night’s address was broadcast to an estimated 80,000,000 to 100,000,000 persons throughout the world over the three major radio networks in this country and re-broadcast…
-
{New Article} 1940: Mrs. Goldilocks and The Bears
Here is one of these articles that I had in a pile for years and I swore I had already typed and posted it, but turns out I didn’t. So here it is. It’s about Clark Gable and Carole Lombard and their friends in Encino–Andy Devine, Phil Harris and Lum and Abner. It all started months ago when Andy Devine, Lum and Abner, Clark and Carole, and Phil Harris kind of struck up a close friendship over hunting and fishing. Sunday mornings, or whenever they had a free dawn, they’d get up at the crack of it, and rig up duck blinds in a marsh some forty miles from town.…
-
Gossip Friday: She Knows a Flop When She Sees It
From May 1938: It was Carole Lombard who first tipped me off to the movie star’s definition of a flop. Carole didn’t go to the recent preview of “Fools for Scandal” in which she co-starred with Fernand Gravet. The picture has just been released at this writing and there are no figures yet from Kansas and the Bronx, much less from Afghanistan and Latvia, but Carole has a pretty good hunch that the picture is a “flop.” It seems that the day following the preview in Hollywood her friends called her up, as is the custom after a preview. “Darling, you looked simply divine last night! I have never seen…
-
Gossip Friday: A Startling Chapeau
From August 1936: While we’re in the startling chapeau department, it might be well to record the fact that Clark Gable arrived at the preview of “The Princess Comes Across” with Carole Lombard and a beret. He took a terrific razzing from a gang of youngsters on the sidewalk and went in to view the picture, which contains a funny sequence about a he-man type of guy wearing a beret. On the way out the beret was stuffed in the Gable pocket.
-
{New Article} World’s No.1 Honeymooners: The Clark Gables!
This article, by Ed Sullivan, appeared in newspapers on October 15,1939. So, here it is exactly 80 years later! It promises that “Sullivan takes you into the Hollywood home of the newlyweds to tell you for the first time the true story of their elopement,” but don’t get too excited because there is no interview with Clark Gable or Carole Lombard here, nor are there really any earth-shattering revelations. On the road maps it is route 101, the Los Angeles natives refer to it more familiarly as Ventura boulevard, the ribbon of concrete which meanders north to San Francisco thru the hot and fertile valleys and foothills of California. I…
-
{Photos} The Marital Mix-Up of Carole and Clark
Here is a pictorial layout in a fan magazine from 1939, before Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were married. Pretty much from the second these two were confirmed as a couple there had been article after article about whether or not they’d marry. You’d think with the title “The Marital Mix-Up of Carole and Clark” that there would be an article following this but nope, just pictures of Clark and Carole in No Man of Her Own and with their former spouses. Huh. Here it is anyway:
