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Gone with the Wednesday: Vivien Leigh, Unafraid
A short little interview with Vivien Leigh from November 1939: When David O’ Selznick shortly releases Margaret Mitchell’s famous story, “Gone with the Wind,” a little English girl, born in India, will be under the guns of Hollywood. For the comparative newcomer, Vivien Leigh, landed the role every actress in the movie colony longed to play. Is Miss Leigh, the Scarlett O’Hara of the film, afraid? “Why afraid?” returns Miss Leigh coolly. “All that talk of hundreds of actresses trying for the part was publicity, a lot of it on the part of other studios. Actually less than a dozen made tests. Norma Shearer, who had considered the part, sent…
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{New Article} 1961: Clark Gable’s Baby: This is a Story of Faith and Immortality
Sometimes, when I find a new article for the site, I sit down and read it, jot down some notes, and then put it in the pile to type. Other times (often when I’m backlogged!), I don’t read the article until I am actually typing it up. This article is one of those and I must say that while I was typing it I had to stop several times and re-read what I typed, shaking my head, “What the heck is the point of this article?!” I’m still not sure. Kay Gable ignored the advice of her doctor. “Your own heart’s not in such great shape, you know,” he’d said.…
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Gossip Friday: Lunch Break
From August 1936: All of a sudden like, the little stenographers in the upstairs executive officers at Warner studios started bringing their lunch. No one could quite understand the sudden love for office routine, until the reason leaked out. Below the windows is a tennis court where the stars sometimes play. temporarily it has been surrounded by canvas. Clark Gable is using it to train for his role of the prize fighter in the next Marion Davies picture. Well, girls, how would you like to sit up in a window for sixty minutes and gaze down upon Clark Gable, wearing little more than a smile?
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{New Article} 1953: Gable Wants to Marry Again
This article is an interesting piece, since in the majority of interviews with Clark after the abrupt end of his marriage with Sylvia have him stating he will never marry again ever, that perhaps him and marriage weren’t compatible. There are some interesting quotes from Clark littered throughout: “That was unfortunate. The faults weren’t all on one side, you know. It might have lasted, I suppose. I don’t ever go into marriage thinking ahead to divorce.” (on the split from Sylvia) “Sure, I’ve been unhappy, too, at times. After marriage has failed, for example. But you can’t go on being miserable. Some people may say I’m crusty,but I take life…
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Gone with the Wednesday: Olivia Knows…Clark is a Softie
Since Olivia de Havilland’s 98th birthday was yesterday (and yes, she is still alive and kicking in Paris!) here’s a snippet Olivia told a fan magazine in November 1939: Clark Gable is just an old softie. Olivia de Havilland made that discovery when she was working on “Gone with the Wind” with him. According to Olivia, (whose “Melanie,” they say, is something out of this world it’s so wonderful) there was an old worn-out horse, called “Marse Lee,” used in the flight-from-Atlanta sequence. The horse was so skinny it’s bones rattled, but everyone at the studio had definite instructions not to feed it as they had to keep him starved…
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We’re 5!
Today marks the fifth anniversary of DearMrGable.com! I can hardly believe that myself. It seems like only yesterday I was just a Clark Gable fan on the internet, sharing information here and there, until people started saying, “He doesn’t have a decent website! YOU should do it!” I went from “Nah, no way I could I do that.” to hand-coding and dealing with the trials and tribulations of WordPress and Coppermine. Five years later and there are over 10,000 pictures in the photo gallery and over 160 articles in the Article Archive. I’ve been told a few times that I should write a book. Now THAT idea frightens me!…
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June Movie of the Month: Dance Fools Dance (1931)
This month, Joan Crawford is a plucky newspaper reporter and Clark Gable is a loathsome gangster in Dance Fools Dance. Crawford is Bonnie Jordan, a rich girl suddenly thrown into the real world after her father dies and she finds out all his money is gone. She goes to work as a writer for the local newspaper. One of her assignments is to go undercover and get a story on a gangster, Jake (Gable). As Jake pursues her romantically, Bonnie finds out that her unscrupulous brother Rodney (William Bakewell) has hooked up with Jake’s gang and is in deep trouble. Joan and Clark were steaming things up behind the scenes…
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Gossip Friday: A Lurid Play By Play
From January 1941: I’ll bet Clark Gable could have walloped that youngster who hung around the “Comrade X” company on location and shinnied up a telephone pole, gathered a crowd below him, and did a play-by-play broadcast of Clark’s hurry-up change of clothes in his outside dressing room. The company was on location at Los Angeles harbor and Clark was dressing in a ceilingless enclosure. The youngster did a thorough job by shouting to his hilarious audience, “He’s takin’ off his left shoe—now he’s takin’ off his right—now he’s putting on his shirt!” he didn’t miss a trick, he even got in a lurid description of Gable’s colored shorts.
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Gone with the Wednesday: 75 Years of Frankly My Dear…
Seventy-five years ago this week, on June 27, 1939, Clark Gable uttered what was to be the sentence that followed him around the rest of his life and beyond–“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” June 27 was the the last day of principal filming on Gone with the Wind, and even though the film was not shot in sequence at all, it happened to be the day they filmed the very last scene. Here’s some trivia regarding that famous last scene and that enduring line: The original line in the book is “My dear, I don’t give a damn.” Producer David O. Selznick threw in the “Frankly” for…
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Gone with the Wednesday: Some Upcoming 75th Anniversary Events
Following the celebration in Marietta, there are a few more events in the coming months celebrating Gone with the Wind’s 75th Anniversary: The 75th Anniversary edition Blu Ray will be available Sept. 30. The transfer is the same as the 70th and so is most of the content, aside from a documentary “Old South/New South” which compares Civil War locations then and now. For a while i heard rumblings of both a new Gable documentary and a new Leslie Howard one on the set, but alas it does not appear to be. It does include a music box and a replica of Rhett Butler’s “RB” handkerchief (yes, I’m serious.) More…