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Gossip Friday: Not Very Romantic
From October 1933: The very romantic Clark Gable doesn’t like being the very romantic Clark Gable because he isn’t the very romantic Clark Gable. This business of being a great lover is exactly that to Gable–just business. It annoys him to have to look dark and romantic and be the object of worship from giddy women. “Do you find that a nuisance in some way?” I asked Gable. “In every way,” he retorted. “You just can’t have any private life or go anywhere without having to run the gauntlet. That’s all right for the guys who like it, but I don’t.” Gable prefers seclusion and Getting Away From It All.…
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Gossip Friday: Best Dressed Man
From December 1935: Virginia Bruce Fires Broadcast at Men’s Dress Virginia Bruce fired a broadside at Hollywood men’s fashions yesterday. Declaring that men, much more than women, are “slaves to convention” in the matter of dress, the blonde player said she was “disgusted” with formal dark business suits, shoes and hats for every day wear. She held Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jack Oakie were outstanding “best dressed men” of Hollywood–because they are entirely informal and know how to wear light colors and contrasting shades becomingly.” Men, she said, may belittle women because of their fondness for accessories, but men would be much more attractive if they adopted some of…
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Gossip Friday: Nobody Like Clark Gable
From 1947 (Louella Parsons): Say what you will, there’s nobody like Clark Gable. With his charm, it will be a long time before the King is displaced. Younger men have come along to dazzle the gals, but none has yet hit with the force of a Gable. Oh, sure–there have been times when Clark has miffed me, and long periods would go by when we didn’t see one another. But it is impossible to be in his company more than a split second, and not fall under his fascinating spell again. Not long ago, he came to see me and we had a grand time drinking coffee in the garden…
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Gossip Friday: Not Taking Credit
From January 1940: Miss Josephine Dillon, first wife of Clark Gable, is newly appointed dramatics instructor at Christian College, Columbia, Mo. [She says] Clark had a number of faults when she began coaching him. For two things, there were his ears, as someone suggested to her. His voice was too high. “All athletic men, Dempsey, Weismueller and others, have high voices,” she observed. “Then, too, the greatest fault was Clark had a big body and he didn’t know how to handle it. He also had the accent of that part of Ohio from which he came.” Miss Dillon fixed up everything except the ears, but she refused to take credit…
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Gossip Friday: His Biggest Fan
From September 1940: It takes more than bombs to keep a Gable fan down. The star has just received from a girl in Lancashire, England, a cigarette case inscribed: “To Clark Gable–from his most ardent English fans.” While blitzkrieg impended, she went on to explain she has 10,000 photos of him, 172 magazine articles, 1,434 press clippings, 62 biographies and two authentic signatures of Gable. ___ No, that was not me. I promise I was not alive in 1940!
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Gossip Friday: Why the Sudden Crush?
From June 1943: Clark Gable says that Mickey haunted him for two weeks once. He followed Gable all over the lot. When Gable looked up from his bowl of special chicken soup in the studio commissary, Mickey’s eyes were bored into Gable’s face. Clark couldn’t figure it out. Why the sudden crush? The mystery was solved when Rooney did a devastating impersonation of Clark on the screen. “I had to look away a couple of times when I saw it,” Gable said. “He was more like me than I am like myself. I recognized mannerisms that I did not know I had.” Incidentally, it got Clark over these same mannerisms.
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Gossip Friday: Mighty Pleased
From February 1949: We hear that Clark Gable would be mighty pleased if Marilyn Maxwell would say yes to a request for a date. Seems Clark tried but failed to get a date with the blonde singer. Whatever happened to Marilyn’s planned marriage to Mike North? ______ Marilyn Maxwell had a small role in Key to the City with Clark. And they did date for a little bit!
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{New Article} 1954: Please Don’t Talk About Me
Here’s another one of these early 1950’s articles debating whom Clark will or will not marry. The subject of this one is the elusive model Suzanne Dadolle. I discussed Suzanne a few years ago in this post. Suzanne, like many before her, made the fatal mistake of talking to the press about her relationship with Clark. And with that, Suzanne was swiftly cut off, and rather stunned at the abruptness of it all. In Paris, on October 12, Suzanne, after returning to work at Schiaparelli’s, announced that she and Gable had been engaged, “but informally,” for several months, the implication being that never in a million years would she have…
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Gossip Friday: A Strange Difficulty
From August 1934: Gable Shuns Crowds Clark Gable shuns crowds because he has, more than once, found a fist thrust under his nose and, “Come on and fight you big so-and-so,” bawled at him. And not by drunks either. The roles Clark Gable plays waken the animosity at punch devotees. The actor has a horror of coming out of a crowd with a black eye, a swollen nose, or of being forced to fight his way out of the situation. When he is making a picture, Gable never goes out in public because of this strange difficulty.
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{New Article} 1954: Gable and His Girls
This 1954 article was written by everybody in Hollywood’s favorite “frenemy,” the infamous Louella Parsons. Most of the articles of this period, between Clark’s ill-fated marriage to Sylvia Ashley and his subsequent union with Kay Williams, focus on all of Clark’s girlfriends and who will be the next Mrs. Gable. The King laughed when I persisted in asking about beautiful blonde Grace Kelly (the new Hollywood sensation) with whom Clark was supposed to have been very much in love with they were making ‘Mogambo,’ and of Suzanne Dadolle, the French charmer of the odd name, with whom his name was later linked all over Europe. Grace is supposed to have…
