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{New Article} 1940: Gable vs. Crawford
This is a new short little article gossiping that Clark Gable and Joan Crawford were not getting along on the set of Strange Cargo. This was actually mentioned in a few Gable biographies. Clark did not want to be in the film as he did not like the script (I can’t say I blame him). Joan’s career was on a downturn and she needed a hit so she was paired with Clark, who was just coming off Gone with the Wind success. Joan was a bit miffed at this, since just nine years earlier, she was the big star and Clark was getting his feet wet playing her love interests…
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Gossip Friday: No Feud in Cargo
From November 1939: For these many weeks, we’ve been reading items and hearing rumors about Clark Gable and Joan Crawford being so angry at each other the chances are against their ever finishing their current costarring picture. So we dropped by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer today on the theory that maybe we’d see Gable get his face slapped by an outraged Miss Crawford. On stage 26 was Miss Crawford in tatters, as if somebody had gone after her with a pitchfork. There also was Gable, dirty, sweaty, greasy–and snarling at his leading lady. “Don’t tap your heart,” she yelled back at him, “it’ll break your finger.” If ever two movie performers were boiling…
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Gossip Friday: Sound Your Siren
From January 1940: The boys play too rough on Clark Gable’s sets, Carole Lombard discovered. She visited her husband on the sound stage where Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s “Strange Cargo” was in production, in time to see Gable watching with great amusement while Lou Smith, his stand-in, and Stanley Campbell, his make-up man, reenacted the fight that is staged by Gable and Albert Dekker for the film. Neither of the combatants saw Miss Lombard until Smith suddenly ducked and Campbell landed a haymaker on Miss Lombard’s cheek. The two retired in great confusion and amid profound apologies, while Gable grinningly warned his wife that “next time you step into this gymnasium, you better…
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Gossip Friday: No Strange Cats on Strange Cargo
From March 1940: Disappointment smacked down all the let’s-be-there-when-it-happens gang, who under one pretext or another managed to clutter up the sound stage on the first day of shooting for MGM’s Strange Cargo. That’s the picture in which, you know, Joan Crawford and Clark Gable share top billing. And for weeks, the rumor has hottened Hollywood, that Joan and Clark were about as friendly as a couple of strange cats, and that when they got together, the temperamental fur would fly all over the set. So what happened? So Joan smiled at Clark, and Clark smiled at Joan, and it remained for Joan’s famous dachshund “Puppchen” to provide the only…
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Gossip Friday: Whiskers and All
From March 1940: During “Gone with the Wind” Clark Gable often remarked that nothing could give him greater pleasure than a haircut. But since “Strange Cargo” has been before the cameras, the actor has decided a shave can mean more to a guy than a haircut. Relating his miseries over the nine-day growth of beard which his role required, Gable said he was awfully tired of being hailed as Mr. Zola. And worse than having someone ask you why you don’t get a haircut or a violin,”he said,”is to have someone ask why you don’t get a snood for the whiskers!”
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Gossip Friday: Off the Hinges
From December 1939: Carole Lombard visited the set of the untitled Clark Gable-Joan Crawford picture when some of the early scenes of his escape from a Guinea prison were being filmed. One brief shot showed him running down a corridor and through a door which slammed behind him. But Gable did it so violently that an end section of wall, presumably made of stone, rocked dangerously, and a hinge was torn from the door. Whooped Miss Lombard: “He’s just like that at home!”
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Gossip Friday: Visitor in a Station Wagon
From December 1939: It was a great thrill for the tiny coast town of Pismo beach to have a big movie location move right into their midst. The entire town was agog because Joan Crawford was reported really to have arrived in her limousine, in true movie star fashion. Every youngster in the village was out for an autograph. The Crawford name was magic until the youngsters found out that the guy driving an old station wagon looked like Clark Gable. When they found out it was Gable, and he fixed up an immediate game of softball to entertain the mob, because the weather got too foggy to work, glamour…
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{Photos} Play Ball!
While on location filming Strange Cargo on Pismo Beach in 1940, Clark, co-star Ian Hunter and some of the crew played ball with a girls softball team. It’s funny to see him playing all scruffy and unkempt, in his raggedy costume. I’m sure that was a story those girls told for the rest of their lives!
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Gossip Friday: “One Honey of an Actor”
From February 1940: ….we beat it for the “Strange Cargo” [set], which [includes] not only Gable and Crawford, but also Paul Lukas, Ian Hunter, J. Edward Bromberg, Peter Lorre, Albert Dekker, Eduardo Ciannellu, and John Arledge. They are all on the set as we mosey in and a worse looking crew you never lamped. They are escaping from the jungle. They have one small boat and Crawford between them. The idea is that the men are escaping convicts. Crawford is a babe from the streets whom Gable has picked up and dragged along, and love is beginning to gnaw them. You practically can’t see What-a-Man Gable behind the three days’…
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Gossip Friday: Who’s on First
March 1940: Never has the team batting average of that girl’s softball team in that little beach town near Hollywood been os high as the day they played a team made up from the company of MGM’s Strange Cargo troupe, which was shooting there. Every gal on the high school team boosted her batting average. Because–Clark Gable was playing FIRST BASE for the MGM team! ___ From February 1940: It was an off day for the “Strange Cargo” cast on location at Pismo Beach, a small seacoast town above Santa Barbara, California, and loathing inactivity like a snail hates pace, Gable gathered together members of the crew and challeneged the…
