Clark Gable Page 3
She was 43, when she met Gable and was about to dispense with husband No. 3. Accustomed to her arriving at parties with her latest well-turned-out youth, her society friends must have been shocked to see this lanky, uncultured ‘hick’ with big ears and rotting teeth swimming in the pool at her Sunset Boulevard mansion. Not only this but he was receiving tennis lessons from the hunky coach with whom Frederick was also sleeping, and who is reputed to have joined in with threesomes and even foursomes when commanded to do so by la patronne. She is also thought to have been responsible for teaching him endurance in the sack - by buying him an ‘Arab strap’, which he would wear to ensure longer-lasting erections.
‘Pauline Frederick couldn’t get enough of me - she almost fucked me to death!’ Gable is reputed to have said, claiming such had been Frederick’s hunger for his body that he had actually been pleased when Madame X closed and she had taken the production to London. Even so, he would keep going back for more. Off and on, the affair with Frederick was to last another two years and though she could do nothing for his ears, she did pay for his dental work and bought him the second-hand, but nevertheless expensive Duesenberg Roamer that he was driving at the time.
Until now, Josephine Dillon had paid scant attention to her husband’s philanderings. She changed her tune, though, when he hit the road with the now-forgotten Mabel Julienne Scott in Edward Knoblock’s The Lullaby. Among the cities taken in was San Francisco, where Franz Dorfler had by chance founded a dance school across the way from the theatre where Clark was working. When Dillon learned that the pair had been seen socialising together she headed for the city, where she made such a nuisance of herself that the theatre manager barred her from entering his premises.
Gable’s next part - an important one - was in Augustus Thomas’s The Copperhead, directed by and starring Lionel Barrymore. First performed in 1918, this told of an elderly Yankee accused of spying for the Confederates, who at the end of the piece exonerates himself by reading out a letter from Abraham Lincoln proclaiming him a hero. Clark and Barrymore formed a close friendship that would last until the older actor’s death in 1954. He also found time to appear in two matinée-movie serials, playing heavies in Fighting Blood and The Pacemakers. While shooting the latter he was befriended by William Haines, then Hollywood’s biggest male star after Rudolph Valentino.
Born with the century on 1 January 1900 in Staunton, Virginia, Haines reached prominence in 1922 after winning a Sam Goldwyn New Faces contest. Six feet tall, butch and very good-looking, he was often typecast as the wisecracking, athletic, financially strapped guy-next-door that hooked up with the elusive rich girl at the end of the last reel. Haines was Joan Crawford’s best friend, nicknamed her ‘Cranberry’, and was openly gay. He was making so much money for MGM, in-house or as a loan-out, that they were willing to turn a blind eye to his sexuality so long as he remained discreet.
Haines and his long-term lover, Jimmy Shields, stayed together until Haines’ death on Boxing Day 1973, but both liked to play the field. A favourite cruising area was Pershing Square, in downtown Los Angeles, where there was an abundance of marines, labourers and rough trade. In those days Clark very definitely fitted into this last category and he was not averse to charging for his services. Haines told Joan Crawford (as quoted in Jane Ellen Wayne’s Golden Girls Of MGM, 2002) how he recalled Gable ‘hanging around’ - in other words touting for sex - on the set of The Pacemakers while working as an extra. He admitted that he would have done absolutely anything to earn money or find work: ‘Cranberry, I fucked him in the men’s room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He was that desperate. He was a nice guy, but not a fruitcake.’ Haines’ biographer, William J. Mann (Wisecracker, 1988) also exploded the myth not always known outside gay circles that big, macho men such as Clark Gable are not necessarily the active partners during sex. Referring to Haines’ reputation for giving ‘the best head’ in Hollywood, Mann writes, ‘It wasn’t a blow-job,’ a friend insisted. ‘Billy fucked him in the mensroom. Billy was the fucker, never the fuckee.’
Haines also got him a walk-on part in The Plastic Age, starring Clara Bow. Doubtless to his lover’s delight, he appears in an extended locker-room scene with 24 near-naked men, overtly homoerotic for its day and cut out of some prints. He reveals a pleasantly muscular torso, but is uglier than everyone else on display, and fifteen years from then, as will be seen, the incident within the Beverly Wilshire mensroom would have near-disastrous consequences for Gable, Haines, and several of their so-called ‘fuck-buddies’.
Clark’s next stage role, in Maurice Watkins’ Chicago, was the first to get him noticed by the critics. Centred round the trial of murderess Roxie Hart, this ribald story - with Francine Larrimore in the lead - had just taken Broadway by storm. A few years later it was remade with Ginger Rogers, and later still, sensationally revived on both sides of the Atlantic with Catherine Zeta Jones and Richard Gere. Opposite Nancy Carroll’s Roxy, Clark played Jake, the reporter who covers her trial - following a scene where Roxy shoots her lover dead while he is buttoning his flies after they have had sex, which had moralists up in arms. The San Francisco Chronicle applauded Clark as, ‘The only three-dimensional portrayal of a newspaperman ever witnessed on the San Francisco stage.’ The review was almost certainly instigated by Nancy Carroll herself, in the hope of getting Gable to stay with the production after an argument with the producer had seen him threaten to walk out and therefore leave her side. Like his previous leading ladies she too was paying for his stud services.
The baby-faced actress (1903-65) - regarded by many as the successor to Clara Bow, minus the dreadful nasal twang - was, at 22, the first high-profile lover to have been younger than Clark. She was about to sign a movie deal with Paramount and despite being married (to scriptwriter Jack Kirkland) with a small child, she was hoping Clark might accept a part in her next film. But he turned her down, declaring he would never face a movie camera again - unaware that in a few months’ time the release of The Jazz Singer (1927) would take motion pictures to a new dimension and that the new-fangled concept of sound was no mere flash in the pan.
According to Josephine Dillon’s more credible memoirs (Modern Acting, 1940), when Chicago closed, Gable was presented with two offers: a film with vamp Dorothy Davenport, or a season with the Laskin Brothers Stock Company based in Houston, Texas. Despite his aversion to the movies, unless he was watching them, he was in favour of the former. But the move was blocked by his wife and after all she was still paying the bills. Davenport, Dillon declared, was bad news. In 1923 she had been at the centre of a messy scandal when her husband - 30-year-old King of Paramount Wallace Reid - had died after being railroaded into a sanitarium. Following an accident on set, rather than send Reid to hospital, have him laid off for a few weeks then push the production over budget, the studio doctor had been instructed to administer morphine. Over the next few weeks he was injected regularly so that he could continue working, and when he had become addicted to the drug, Dorothy Davenport had signed the papers to have him sectioned. It was also widely rumoured that she had been behind Paramount’s decision to have him ‘put out of his misery’. Josephine Dillon’s decision to keep Clark away from such a woman, particularly as he would almost certainly have ended up sleeping with her, was a wise one.
Gable therefore travelled to Houston, surprising even himself by triumphing at the Palace Theater. His starting salary was $40 a week and saw him playing bit parts until the managing director, Gene Lewis, offered him the lead in George Kelly’s Craig’s Wife. The Houston Press criticised his high-pitched voice, but concluded ‘He has a charming stage personality’. Lewis next put Clark into Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, soon to be filmed as Greta Garbo’s first talkie. Gable played burly seaman Matt Burke, who falls for the heroine (Eveta Nudsen), unaware that she is a prostitute. Such was his popularity that each evening he was mobbed at the stage door by female fans and invited to society parties. Such unprecedented adoration brought Josephine Dillon rushing i
nto town and Clark, starting to tire of her now that she had served her purpose, gave instructions that she was not to be allowed anywhere near him.
In The Gingham Girl, he sang and danced for the first time - there is no record of how good or bad he was - in an undersized checked suit. In Willard Mack’s The Noose, he played the owner of a plantation in the tropics. In The Dark Angel, he was an airman blinded during the war, and in Zat So? he played a boxer, offering fans a glimpse of his fine physique when he stripped off for the fight scenes.
It was at a society reception that Gable first encountered Ria Langham, or to give her her full list of names: Maria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham. She was thrice married and, at 44, seventeen years his senior. Born in Kentucky in January 1884, but raised in Macomb, Illinois, Maria married William Prentiss at 17, in the year of Clark’s birth. The marriage lasted four years and produced a son, George. Ria had moved to Houston to acquire her divorce and next married wealthy industrialist Alfred Lucas, a widower twenty-two years her senior. The couple had had two children: George Anna (Jana) and Alfred Jr. But Lucas died in 1922, bequeathing Ria a fortune, and three years later she wed Denzil Langham. This marriage lasted just two years and Ria had just received notification of her final decree when she met Clark.
Josephine Dillon was more concerned about this relationship than any of the others. Ria had money! She therefore called in a favour from a producer friend, Arthur Hopkins, who was currently casting the Broadway production of Machinal - the idea being that if Clark went to New York, he would be out of Ria’s clutches. Dillon only found out that her rival also had an apartment in New York after he had been given the part. Inevitably there was a row during which Clark ordered her to stay out of his life for good. Dillon’s vitriolic response - ‘You’d better become the best actor you can, because you’ll never become a man!’ - coming after his father’s taunts and Lillian Albertson’s ‘pansy’ slur were to rankle with him for the rest of his life.
Machinal, Sophie Treadwell’s feminist drama starring Zita Johann, opened at the Plymouth Theater on 7 September 1928, following try-outs in New Haven, Connecticut. It was loosely based on a murder trial - Judd Gray and Ruth Snyder had been found guilty of killing Snyder’s husband and were executed in Sing-Sing at the beginning of the year. What made the case more sensational was that a newspaper had sneaked a photographer into the prison to snap Snyder in the electric chair. The picture appeared on front pages across the country. Because of the legal implications, none of the characters in Treadwell’s play were given names. Clark played The Lover who coerces The Woman into committing murder. His inclusion in the cast was also against the wishes of Zita Johann, an alumnus of Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne. So much so that a clause was added to the contract stipulating that should she find him unsuitable in his role, he could be fired at a moment’s notice and replaced with an understudy. The review in the New York Times - ‘He’s young, vigorous and brutally masculine!’ - assured his stay with the production until the end of its 100-plus performances run. Indeed, Machinal was only removed from the Plymouth Theater’s programme in December to make way for a previously sold-out seasonal item.
Thus far, in his twenty-seven years, Gable’s more serious relationships had been with three homosexuals (Larimore, La Rocque and Haines), two lesbians (Dorfler and Dillon), two man-eaters (Cowl and Frederick), and now a society matron old enough to be his mother. Ria Langham, however, fitted into the same category as Pauline Frederick in that she was not satisfied just to be seen on the arm of the testosterone charged stud with a reputation for sleeping with absolutely anyone of either sex - she needed his services in the bedroom too. In this respect she made sure he earned his keep and repaid her in kind for the luxuries she heaped upon his broad shoulders, ranging from silk underwear to a Ford Roadster. Like every one of her predecessors she also knew that once Clark tired of using her, he would cast her aside and move on. Why Ria bothered, when she had the wherewithal to attract someone of her own class who would have treated her better, only baffled those who knew her.
It was Ria who announced their forthcoming marriage in one of the society columns - mindless of the fact that Clark had yet to ask Josephine for a divorce. There is some confusion as to when, or if at all, the subsequent ceremony took place. Gable later claimed that he and Ria had married ‘some time in 1929’, after he had arranged a Mexican divorce from Dillon, then changed his mind and said that the ceremony took place on 31 March 1930. Dillon, however, is on record as doubting the legality of such a divorce, fearing one or both of them might have ended up on a bigamy charge, as had recently happened with Valentino. The truth appears to be that Dillon filed a suit against Clark on 30 March 1929, citing desertion, requesting no alimony, and with the decree to become absolute on 30 March 1930. Therefore one may assume, given Hollywood’s traditional urgency with such matters, that the later date given by Gable was the correct one.
His career was edging forwards in smallish leaps and bounds, though not without the occasional stumbling block. He played a navy lieutenant opposite Lester Lonergan in a turkey called House Unguarded, a murder mystery which opened in Westchester in December 1928, from which he was fired for ‘incompetent acting’ before the production transferred to Broadway. His ego dented, Clark vowed never to set foot on another stage, but within weeks he auditioned for the lead in Conflict. But his pride took another bruising when this went to another relative newcomer - Spencer Tracy.
Next, Gable’s agent, Chamberlain Brown, got him the lead in George M Cohan’s Gambling. Try-outs opened at Philadelphia’s Garrick Theater on 13 May 1929, by which time - solely on Cohan’s reputation - the production had been booked for Broadway. Cohan, however, only wanted a stooge to test out his new material. Weeks ahead of the Broadway première, when the company reached Atlantic City, Clark was fired.
In the run-up to the October Wall Street Crash, across America theatre productions had dwindling audiences. This was not just on account of the failing economic climate but also because of the Talkies boom. Most cinemas had lower overheads than the theatres, and this was passed on to the customer, whereas good seats for a stage performance cost upwards of $1; one could take in a double feature at the movies for as little as ten cents. The best-received of Gable’s plays during this time was Black Widow, staged by the legendary David Belasco, in which Clark and Beth Merrill play inmates of a European prison awaiting execution. The pair falls in love, she becomes pregnant and their executions are deferred until after the birth of their child. The play opened in Baltimore the week of the Crash, transferred to Philadelphia and then, like Machinal, was removed from the programme to make way for a festive production.
Love, Honour And Betray, which did the rounds during spring 1930, was not a great success, though it enabled Gable to exact his revenge on an old enemy. With him in the very apt role of a gigolo, this was staged by leading Broadway producer of the time Albert H. Woods. The director was Lester Lonergan, the man who had fired him from House Unguarded, and though he would not be acting in this one, he made it clear that he did not want Clark in the production. Woods, a connoisseur of young men who had clearly set his sights on Clark, convinced him otherwise - either Gable stayed, or Lonergan left. This was to be the beginning of Lonergan’s downfall and within the year he would die of alcoholism. Whether Woods succeeded in bedding Clark is unknown, but extremely likely considering he slept with just about every good-looking man, straight or gay, to cross his path, on the premise that it would be in the interests of furthering their career. Woods had a long-term relationship with female impersonator Julien Eltinge and was currently involved with his latest leading man, George Brent.
Clark certainly became enamoured of the leading lady, Alice Brady (1892-1939), a precursor of Carole Lombard (with whom she would appear in My Man Godfrey in 1936), who had a penchant for high life and vulgarity. Love, Honour And Betray had try-outs in Hartford and Atlantic City before transferring to Brooklyn’s Flatbush Theater, then New York’s Eltinge
Theater on 12 March 1930, where it ran until the end of April. The play was almost a word-for-word translation of André-Paul Antoine’s L’Ennemie, a massive hit on the Paris stage. The setting is a cemetery wherein the Brady character’s newly opened grave is sandwiched between those of the two men she loved (Brent, Robert Williams). One at a time their ghosts appear and explain, with flashbacks, how Brady drove them to their deaths. Then her last lover (Clark) arrives at the cemetery, ahead of the funeral cortège, to tell his version of events.
What makes the play historically interesting is that Gable wore a moustache for the first time - which he hated and shaved off in his dressing room immediately after the final performance. The reviews tended to favour him, while virtually ignoring Brady, and this brought the curtain down on their affair and got him into hot water with Ria, particularly when the New York Telegram enthused, ‘Mr Gable wins the kissing prize. He busses Miss Brady with vim, vigour and vitality and should be commended for his skill at such psychopathic endeavours!’ It was Clark’s penultimate theatrical venture and his last to be staged on Broadway. Some time during late spring 1930, Albert H. Woods earmarked him for a part in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, scheduled for its Broadway première in the September. Meanwhile Chamberlain Brown optioned him for what would have been his first major screen role opposite Mary Pickford in Secrets, to be filmed around the same time but not completed until 1933. But both were shelved when Clark was contacted by his former mentors, the MacLoons: the pair were planning a West Coast tour of The Last Mile, currently wowing Broadway audiences with Spencer Tracy in the role of hard-bitten convict, Killer Mears.