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Gossip Friday: Praise from a Barrymore
Since the Oscars were Sunday…”Look Lionel, what I’ve got!” From October 1940: These Barrymores are picturesque mimes. A question to Jack will bring you any intimate detail about his personal life that you may want. Ask Lionel and he will devote his comment to boosting someone else. I asked Lionel what he thought of the 1940 films as compared to the silent pictures of 1909 and 1910 when he started performing before the cameras. And he turned the whole reply into a eulogy of Clark Gable. Here it is: “I am often asked whether or not the motion picture has improved. There is only one answer to that. Nothing stands still.…
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Clark for Sale
I have just added photos from the catalog of one of Clark’s estate auctions, that took place on December 15,1996 at Christie’s in Hollywood. This particular auction is well-known because despite the Academy’s pleading, Clark’s son put Clark’s only Oscar on the auction block. Steven Spielberg famously purchased it for $607,500 and donated it back to the Academy. Spielberg also purchased Clark’s personal copy of the Gone with the Wind script for $244,500 and kept it. Pictures of both the Oscar and the GWTW script are included as well as items such as Clark’s bathrobe, leather bed, golf clubs, poker chips, books from his library, his and Carole’s monogrammed sherry glasses and…
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Gossip Friday: Clark’s Rival
From September 1937: Clark Gable and Carole Lombard told us this one. They were coming away from the fights the other night when a newsboy–age ten–gave Carole a paper. Clark fished for a coin, but the boy stopped him. Giving the burly Gable–ordinarily a great favorite of youngsters his age–a dirty look, he said: “Keep your pennies, you big ham! I’m GIVING this paper to Miss Lombard–see?” New this week: Pictures in the gallery A rare article from 1932 in the Article Archive TV Listings have been updated through May
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Gossip Friday: Tuesday night in Hollywood
From February 1937: This is the thing that keeps Hollywood the town of enchanting contradiction and makes it the most unexplainable spot in the world. Take one particular Tuesday evening in Hollywood, for instance. At the Cocoanut Grove: Lights, music, champagne, movie stars, a Joan Bennett surprise party, a director and a blonde actress breaking their hearts for a love they can’t have. On a Laurel Canyon hillside: A barbecue, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Sandra, his wife, hot sizzling steaks, stars overhead, old-time songs, new-time stories and mustard. In the overflow meeting for a religious lecture: Director Frank Capra, Ginger Rogers and her mother, Sid Grauman,…
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Gossip Friday: Ann’s Ideal Man
A short article from June 1940 in which actress Ann Sheridan describes her ideal man: Right here I’d like to mention that I don’t go around describing, unsolicited, my masculine ideal to everyone I meet. What I mean is, I was asked by Movie Mirror to do this…so in describing the sort of man I would choose if I were to marry I’m contriving a sort of composite of several men I know and like and admire… He’d dance like Cesar Romero. The Romero dancing is in a class by itself. He’d have Joel McCrea’s physique–tall, square-shouldered, rangy and not an ounce of spare fat on him! I hate bay windows,…
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Gossip Friday: Clark’s Valentine
From September 1940: Happy-though-married Clark Gable keeps Carole Lombard’s dressing room filled with red roses. And Gene Raymond keeps Jeanette MacDonald well supplied with pink roses, pink being Jeanette’s favorite color. Lots of new stuff this week: New rare pictures in the gallery–hundreds added! A new article in the Article Archive by Norma Shearer describing her favorite male costars A new radio show in the Multimedia section–The Buccaneer from 1938
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Gossip Friday: Clark loses his poise
From September 1940, an article entitled “Would You Have Lost Your Poise, Too?” ...Clark Gable has done some nature facing, too, and has had a lot of years of trooping. But nothing had prepared him for the situation which arose when a piece of scenery fell on him and he heard that awful ripping sound and found himself without his trousers in front of five hundred delighted extras. To say nothing of a raucous cast and crew. Not only that. Unsympathetic blokes began cracking wise at once about the Gable knees. What does a seasoned trooper do under these circumstances? Smile? Toss it off with an airy gesture? Not this…
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Happy Birthday, Mr. Gable
Today is Clark’s 109th birthday! To celebrate, this month will be chock full of new stuff–pictures, radio shows, video clips, articles and sections. To begin with, there are a lot of new pictures in the gallery. The film pages have been given a facelift, featuring new pictures and many now have clips and trailers. Film pages have been added for Laughing Sinners, Hell Divers, Chained, Cain and Mabel and Comrade X. I’m also adding my own review of each picture. I’d like to add reviews from Gable fans as well. If you would like to submit a review for a Gable film (brief, and also rate it 1 to 5 stars), email it to me…
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Gossip Friday: Lunch at RKO
From September 1940: None of this light lunch on a card table in the dressing room for Clark Gable. He eats a hearty lunch in the Metro commissary every day when he is working, and his presence rarely causes a flutter, except when there are tourists lunching there. But the other day he went over to the RKO studio to have lunch with Carole and there was so much excitement in the commissary that things didn’t get normal for hours. The waitresses became completely confused and people got soup who never ordered soup, and the poor RKO stars, who aren’t appreciated on their home lot, got shoved around something awful.…
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Gossip Friday: On the set of Boom Town
From September 1940: Here’s mud in your eye! Being a movie star does have its unpleasant moments, too. For example, in “Boom Town”, Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable do a sequence in which they meet in a wooden plank stretched over a mud-hole. Each tries to make the other get out of the way. In the course of this scuffling, someone starts shooting down the street and both, for safety’s sake, dive headlong into the mud. Coming up first, Clark good naturedly tries to shake hands with Spencer, who says, “Aw nuts!” and walks away. Mud-holes are nothing new to Clark. He did a nosedive into one in “Too Hot…