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Crazy for Carole
This month marks Carole Lombard’s 102nd birthday and so here at DearMrGable.com we are dedicating the month to her. Clark and Carole pictures are the most popular by far in the gallery—there is just something majestic about those two, even despite the tragedy. So this month, they’ll be Carole gossip items and I’ll do some posts featuring some Carole articles and rare Carole candids. To start, here’s a blurb from December 1940: Carole Lombard hasn’t been to a party in over a year; the Gables not being the party type. But when Lillian MacMurray threw a birthday party for Fred recently, Clark said all right, they’d get dressed up and…
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Gossip Friday: Mr. Popularity
From November 1940: Whenever Clark Gable makes a picture his portable dressing room becomes a second Grand Central Station. All the publicity boys, the newspaper boys, his stand-in, make-up boy, and as many of the cast and crew as possible gather in his dressing room for bits of food and gossip. Poor Clark has to go out in the back alley to learn his lines. When Carole Lombard arrived at the studio the other day to visit her popular spouse, she found the gang making coffee and passing around cookies in his dressing room. She had a cup of coffee and a cookie herself, then made the boys clean up…
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Scandalously Unmarried!
If you’ve read any biography of Clark or Carole, you’ll come across a mention of a certain Photoplay Magazine article titled “Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands and Wives”. This seemingly innocent article caused quite an earthquake among the studios. It lists Hollywood couples who conduct themselves as if they are married—but they aren’t! The article scolds: And that, it seems, would point a lesson to the unique coterie of Hollywood’s unwed couples—Bob Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck, who could get married if they really wanted to; George Raft and Virginia Pine, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable and the other steady company couples who might swing it if they tried a little harder. You…
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Gossip Friday: Claudette and Bing
Since this week (9/13) is Claudette Colbert’s 107th birthday, here’s some gossip about her from Septmeber 1937: Claudette Colbert was playing some of her favorite Bing Crosby records in her dressing room the other day, when her telephone rang. The star herself answered. An irate voise yelled, “Listen! If you must make all that noise, which disturbs me in my dressing room, for heaven’s sake play something better than those Crosby records. That’s guy’s crooning gives me a pain!” “I don’t know who you are,” cried Claudette angrily, “but you can’t make cracks to me about my friend Bing Crosby and his singing! If you had any musical sense you’d know…
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Irving Thalberg
Norma Shearer, Irving, Ria and Clark, 1932. MGM producer Irving Thalberg died 74 years ago today. If it wasn’t for Irving, many classic stars would have never made the marquee–Clark included. As MGM’s “boy wonder” head of production, Irving oversaw many of Clark’s pictures, including The Secret Six, A Free Soul, Possessed, Strange Interlude, Mutiny on the Bounty and China Seas. He was never listed as a producer in the credits of any of the pictures he produced, stating that “credit you give yourself isn’t worth having.” Following his death, the Academy created the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award in his honor. It is presented to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect…
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Gossip Friday: A Plain Nurse, Please
From April 1940: There never has been such a contagion of hospitalization among the celbrities of Hollywood as there has been recently. Envious eyes are turned toward the nurses who care of these famous bruised and injured. “It’s all in a day’s work,” one pretty nurse told [us], “but movie people (especially the men) are harder to nurse than other patients because the never relax from their work and worries for one minute. Joe E. Brown’s nurse had almost to hold him in bed during a big football game. Joe wanted to get out of bed to lead cheers.” “Director Leo McCarey is the worst of all. He starts at…
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Movie of the Month: Teacher’s Pet
************************ Note: The gallery is currently not working. I am hard at work on it and I hope it will be back up soon! Sorry for the inconvienence! ************************* School’s back in, so what better time to select Teacher’s Pet as the Movie of the Month! Teacher’s Pet, made in 1958, was one of the best of Clark’s final years on screen. Unlike some of his previous films, he seems at ease, at peace and, dare we say it, actually having fun with is role (should we thank Kay Gable for all of that? I think so..) Clark is Jim Gannon, a hard-nosed editor of a New York newspaper. When he receives…
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Rest in Peace, Bonnie Blue
Cammie King Conlon, who played Rhett and Scarlett’s daughter Bonnie Blue in “Gone with the Wind”, has died. Whenever I think of her, I see a little girl in ringlets–“Let me, let me, Daddy! Let me, let me!” From the Associated Press: FORT BRAGG, Calif. (AP) — Cammie King Conlon, the former child actress who portrayed the doomed daughter of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” has died at the age of 76.lung cancer Wednesday morning at her Fort Bragg home on California‘s north coast, said friend Bruce Lewis. Her son, Matthew Ned Conlon, was by her side. Conlon was picked to play the small, but…
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Gossip Friday: Silent Scarlett
Since TCM has selected Vivien Leigh as their Star of the Month this month (set your DVRs!), here’s some gossip on her from September 1940: …of all Hollywood’s femmes fatales, we call your attention first to Vivien Leigh. If you lived in Hollywood this wouldn’t be necessary. You’d be aware of her–with reason! It looks as if there’d be no liomit to Vivien’s conquests when–a little less enthralled by her Romeo, Laurence Olivier–she becomes aware that other men walk the earth, too. For those men who’ve managed to impress themselves on the Leigh consciousness, usually through working with her, are quick to admit her natural attraction. “There’s always something more…
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Gossip Friday: Anniversary with Joan Crawford
From November 1936: With the first day of production of “Love on the Run”, Joan Crawford and Clark Gable celebrated the fifth anniversary of their first co-starring picture: “Possessed”. Neither Joan nor Clark could recall off-hand how many pictures they have co-starred in during the last five years. Director Van Dyke staged the party as a surprise to his two stars and provided a cake appropriately decorated with two little figures in wedding costumes. During the party the victrola played over and over again “You Are My Lucky Star.” ______ I would think that would be quite the awkward party considering that Clark and Joan were at one time romantically…