The Books: “Clark Gable: A Biography” (Warren Harris)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Clark Gable: A Biography, by Warren Harris

Warren Harris also wrote a book about the romance of Carole Lombard and Clark Gable (she famously said once, “Lord knows I love Clark, but he’s the worst lay in town …” Ha!) … and so now Harris has taken all of that former research and honed in on Gable. Within 1 or 2 pages, I felt a familiar pang of disappointment, realizing that despite the nice matte-cover, the well-done production of the book – it wasn’t written well. It’s amateur hour. I am not aware of a big serious biography out there about Clark Gable, and I had hopes for this one. But nope. He uses the word “umpteenth”, for example. Time and place, Harris. Time and place. This isn’t supposed to be the rantings of a fanboy. Put your “umpteenth” away. He describes conversations as though he were there. At one point he says, “Gable blanched” at some bad news. That’s a description. You can’t do that. You weren’t there. Unless it’s a quote from someone else, you can’t say “Gable blanched”. Or, you CAN, but then you certainly lose MY trust as a reader. You’re making shit up, sir. He also reports rumors. “Rumor has it that …” No, no, no. Joan Crawford very well may have had an abortion due to getting pregnant by Gable, or a few abortions, who knows, but don’t set it up with “rumor has it …” Do your legwork, Mr. Harris. That’s your job. Get quotes from people to confirm or deny. Don’t just repeat the rumor. Bad form. It’s kind of a bummer, because I really wanted to like the book. I liked the information, but I didn’t appreciate the writing at all. It didn’t make me MAD like Peter Manso’s axe-to-grind style, it’s relatively harmless, and hell, I can enjoy a good fangirl ranting with the best of them (Cooper’s Women, anyone?) – but this book was packaged to look like something else. Unlike Cooper’s Women, it has pretensions. It doesn’t hold up.

Gable’s origins are a little bit unknown – many of the details lost – even his birth certificate is wrong. I think he was even listed as a girl. And the date and time were wrong. It’s indicative of the difficulties in putting together a picture of Clark Gable’s childhood. He had a lot of sadness as a boy – his mother died, there was some wrangling over religion – the two sides of the family fighting over baptisms and the like, and Clark Gable (which probably wasn’t his real name at the time) got a little bit lost in the shuffle. He seems to have been a mixed bag. He was great with cars and machines, loved working on them. He had ears that stuck out to here. He was shy.

Gable actually got his start in stock companies – he had no experience, he was a teenager, and needed to make some money. He learned his craft on his feet. He didn’t even know it was a craft, until he encountered some pretty damn fine actors in stock … who showed him the way. Or he learned by observing. As he filled in, and started to grow into his tallness (although his ears always stuck out) – women started to take notice. There are a couple of quotes in the book from colleagues and directors – basically saying that his sex appeal couldn’t be denied – he walked onstage and you could FEEL the reaction in the audience. (Which makes Carole Lombard’s quote about him not being a good lay even more interesting. He had grown up basically sleeping with prostitutes, that was his experience … and Lombard understood that, she had had plenty of sex, she knew he was no good, but that he was a good man and that he loved her.) He was never quite the same after her untimely death.

But back to his sex appeal: It was electric, and visceral – what went on between Gable and an audience (particularly a female audience) – and it was only a matter of time before Hollywood beckoned.

The stories about Gone With the Wind are well-known, the stuff of legend, so I thought I’d pick an excerpt having to do with something a little bit earlier in Gable’s career – either Red Dust with Jean Harlow (her husband of, what, one day? killed himself while filming Red Dust, or maybe just after wrap) or It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert, one of my favorite movies of all time. Ironically, the Best Picture From the Outside In series is going on now – (that’s where two film critics and writers “screen and compare two best pictures from either end of Oscar’s 80 year timeline until eventually we meet in the middle in the 1960s several months from now”) – great idea, right? I’ve been really loving it. So the latest installment is It Happened One Night, Oscar- winner in 1934 and A Beautiful Mind, Oscar-winner in 2001. Quite a jarring contrast, no? I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who was annoyed by Beautiful Mind but that’s another post entirely. I LOVED reading the thoughts about It Happened One Night, and so I pulled out the book today and knew I had to choose an excerpt dealing with the filming of that classic.

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Clark Gable: A Biography, by Warren Harris

A Hollywood legend claims that Louis B. Mayer loaned Clark Gable to minor-league Columbia Pictures as punishment for the problems he caused during Dancing Lady, but that’s not true. Between his illnesses and his suspended salary, Gable had been “punished” enough. It was simply a business deal that benefited both studios. MGM had no project of its own ready for Gable, and it also earned $500 per week by charging Columbia $2,500 instead of the $2,000 he received at home.

Undercapitalized Columbia couldn’t afford a large contract roster like MGM, so president Harry Cohn was always borrowing stars for the “A” releases that he produced to upgrade the studio’s image as a factory for cheap programmers and short subjects. While borrowing Gable for Night Bus, Cohn also took MGM’s Barrymore for Twentieth Century. From Paramount he obtained Claudette Colbert for Gable’s costar and Carole Lombard for Barrymore’s.

To Gable personally, going to work at Columbia probably seemed like punishment after the posh comforts of MGM. He remembered the small sstudio in drab central Hollywood from his struggling actor days. He used to frequent the nearby intersection of Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard, known as “Gower Gulch” because shoestring producers came there daily to hire extras and bit players for westerns.

According to Frank Capra, who would be his director for the four weeks of the Columbia loan-out, Gable had to fortify himself with booze before he could face reporting to the studio. When Gable arrived for a script conference, he called him “Mishter” Capra and said, “I’ve always wanted to visit Siberia, but why does it smell so bad? And why ain’t you wearing a parka?”

Infuriated, Capra said, “Mr. Gable, you and I are supposed to make a picture together. Shall I tell you the story, or would you rather read the script yourself?”

“Buddy, I don’t give a shit what you do with it,” Gable replied.

Capra saw that Gable was too intoxicated to reason with, so he simply handed him the script and escorted him to the door. As he left, Gable started singing the old saloon favorite “My Gal Sal”.

Once he’d sobered up and read Night Bus, Gable decided that it wasn’t any worse than some of his MGM scripts. Ironically, the original short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams had once been optioned by MGM after it was first published in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine, but when the studio decided to pass, Harry Cohn purchased it for five thousand dollars for Capra and scriptwriter-partner Robert Riskin.

Due to a recent flurry of bus movies, including MGM’s Fugitive Lovers and Universal’s Cross Country Cruise, Cohn ordered Capra and Riskin to find a more provocative title. The It in It Happened One Night could really stand for almost anything, although the neuter pronoun had been widely used as a euphemism for sex since the Middle Ages.

Retaining only the shell of the original short story, Robert Riskin wrote a script that started or at least perfected the genre known as screwball comedy. A hot-tempered newspaper reporter, just fired for impertinence while on assignment in Miami, heads back to New York by bus to find a new job. Sitting next to him and traveling incognito is the runaway, spoiled-bitch daughter of a millionaire. Daddy has posted a ten-thousand-dollar reward for her return, so it’s not long before the reporter recognizes her and realizes his good luck. Besides collecting the reward money, he can also write a juicy story about her and sell it to the highest bidder. To make sure that others don’t recognize her, he persuades her to leave the bus and to travel the rest of the way to New York by hitchhiking on the back roads.

Much of the script was left open to suit the improvisational style of Frank Capra, who had learned the ropes by creating visual gags for Hal Roach and Mack Sennett slapstick two-reelers and who had done his first feature directing the silent comedy star Harry Langdon. Since joining Columbia in 1928, Capra had directed nineteen comedies and/or dramas. From his first collaboration with writer Riskin on The Miracle Woman in 1931, his films had become increasingly laced with social comment that championed the ordinary citizen and moral goodness.

Gable had met Claudette Colbert during his Broadway period; she was an established stage star by the time of his debut in Machinal. He also knew that she was a lesbian in a sham marriage with gay actor-director Norman Foster, so he never tried to make a pass or to entice her into the temporary dressing suite that Columbia gave him.

“Clark had a ball making the film,” Frank Capra remembered. “He was playing himself, and maybe for the only time in his career. That clowing, boyish, roguish he-man was Gable. He was shy, but a lot of fun with people he knew. He was very sensitive about those goddamned ears, but he made jokes about them. After a shot, he’d ask, ‘What’d they get – an ear?’ He didn’t look like anyone else. It was not only physical. He had mannerisms that were all his own: ways of standing, smoking, and a great flair for clothes. Whatever came natural to him, I let him do it.”

“Gable, I believe, idolized Capra,” said the director’s longtime sound mixer, Edward Bernds. “Gable’s initial hostility was gone by the time we started, which was with a night scene at the Greyhound bus depot in downtown Los Angeles. Gable very quickly became friendly with the crew. I think he found that with Capra, picture making could be fun.”

The story builds to a scene where Gable and Colbert must share overnight accommodation in a one-room tourist cabin. Colbert’s actual reluctance to undress in front of the cameras gave Capra the idea for the “Walls of Jericho”, a blanket hung from the ceiling to divide her bed from Gable’s. While undressing behind the blanket, she drapes some of her clothes and undies on it, which turned out sexier than if she’d actually revealed herself.

As Gable stripes down in the same scene, he removes his shirt and has nothing on underneath. In real life he never wore undershirts, so he didn’t want to be bothered with one for the film. Capra went along with i.

During the filming of the “Jericho” scene, Gable and Capra pulled a prank on Colbert. The director called her over to Gable’s side of the curtain with “We’ve got a slight problem here. Clark wants to know what can be done about it.” When she came around, Colbert found Gable under the bedcovers, smirking, with a large bulge rising from his crotch line. He’d taken a prop kitchen utensil and positioned it under the blanket.

“Awww!” Colbert laughed. “You guys!”

In his handling of Gable, Capra erased the dividing line between hero and comic. He gave Gable routines that were usually reserved for slapstick comedians. Gable teaches Colbert how to dunk a doughnut and also how to thumb a ride. She does him one better by sticking out a shapely gam and getting a passing car to stop immediately. The audience could laugh at the hero as well as admire him.

The thirty-six-day filming ended just before Christmas and cost $325,000. “Clark and I left wondering how the movie would be received,” Claudette Colbert recalled. “It was right in the middle of the Depression. People needed fantasy, they needed splendor and glamour, and Hollywood gave it to them. And here we were, looking a little seedy and riding on our bus.”