General Hollywood History

When I Grow Up…

…I want to be Rudy Behlmer. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I can dream, can’t I? If you’re a fan of classic film, Rudy’s work has likely touched you in some way. If you have seen Ken Murray’s Hollywood Without Makeup, which plays often on Turner Classic Movies, then you’ve watched a program directed by Rudy Behlmer. If you have read Memo from David O. Selznick or Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck, just two of his many books, then you’ve been enriched by Rudy Behlmer’s scholarship. If you have explored the bonus features of DVDs like The Adventures of Robin Hood or King Kong or dozens of others, you’ve been enlightened by Rudy’s crazy knowledge of the production of classic Hollywood pictures. Rudy is the guy who took us Inside Warner Bros. where he sifted through those terrific inter-office memos that circulated during the production of Warner classics and gave us glimpses of the off-camera dramas. And, of course, Rudy was co-author along with Tony Thomas and Clifford McCarty of The Films of Errol Flynn, the 1969 Citadel volume that put Flynn’s career in perspective. Just this week I was enjoying the BYU CD original score of Dodge City—Rudy wrote the liner notes—70 pages worth!

I have asked for Rudy’s help on a number of occasions and at first it wasn’t easy because the man’s a legend and has an imperious quality about him. He has known and worked with the greats. Every time he answered one of my questions (or 10 of my questions) or reviewed a piece of my writing, I felt honored that he thought my work was worthy of his time and expertise.

No, I will never be Rudy Behlmer when I grow up; there’s only one, and I appreciate his love for Golden Hollywood. I respect his desire to protect the memories of those who made the pictures. I revel in his body of works that have benefited those of us who care about the studios and the stars. If there were a Mount Rushmore of film scholarship, he’d be on it.

I’m curious to know what your favorite Rudy Behlmer work is. If you look him up on IMDB you won’t believe how many credits he has in media. He’s one guy that we just haven’t taken time to appreciate and thank for a lifetime of service to classic film.

Lion Tamers

It seemed like a good idea while in L.A. last week to visit the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot in Culver City since my new subject, James Stewart, worked on the lot for the first five years of his career and won an Academy Award while there. I have one of those vivid imaginations you hear about now and again and spent my time rubbing shoulders with Gable, Crawford, Turner, Garland, and Munchkins as a group of us roamed the streets of MGM.

Oh, by the way, if you take the MGM tour, be prepared for a couple of shocks. They begin by taking you in a room and showing you a short film about the history of the lot, but after the first five or six three-second clips, it dawns on you: every shot you’re seeing is from a Columbia picture—you know, It Happened One Night, On the Waterfront, From Here to Eternity—and Columbia pictures weren’t shot here at all but rather on Gower Street in Hollywood, miles and miles away. It’s sort of…sacrilegious to do what they’re doing on that tour, even though Columbia bought out what was left of MGM in 1989 and then the new studio became Sony Pictures, and the tour begins in the big Sony Entertainment building and ends there as well.

So, you’re in the middle of this short film and feeling pretty enraged about the fact that you’re watching a Columbia reel on the MGM lot, and then the picture veers into an oh-by-the-way explanation of the fact you are actually on the MGM lot, which was bought by Columbia, and so the clips show some Gable and some Munchkins for a minute or so, but it’s pretty short shrift for Leo the Lion, Mr. Mayer, Mr. Thalberg, and Company.

Yeah, yeah, so let me out of this damn little room with these grinning tourists—I want to see the lot! I was skeptical of John, our tour guide, as he led 15 or 18 of us across the street and onto real studio property, and I was on him right away wanting to know if we were going to learn about more than production of the TV series, The Goldbergs, which he was already pushing, and he assured that, oh yes, the two-hour tour would also cover the MGM of olden days.

We stopped at a building, a grand art deco building, and I assailed John again with, “Is this the MGM administration building?” and he said patiently, as if I were, you know, dim, “This hasn’t been MGM for a long time.” I redirected: “Is this the MGM administration building of olden days?” and he said we were going to talk about that right then.

Mary said out the side of her mouth at this point, “He knows you’re trouble and you’re going to get kicked out of here,” as if I get the boot from places frequently when it really only happens once in a while, and always because I’m misunderstood.

Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

The Thalberg Building, which now has the label above the door, Columbia Pictures. Which is a lot like the flag of Spain flying over the U.S. Capitol. L.B. Mayer’s office was on the third floor.

Turns out we were in front of the Irving Thalberg Building, opened in 1938, which of course begged the question, “So, where were the administrative offices before 1938?” and suddenly John realized he had his hands full. He never did whirl around and ask, “Who the hell are you, anyway, and why are you ruining my tour?” Instead, when I apologized for my umpteenth question he said, “No, no, questions are good. Bring ‘em on,” and it turned out he knew a lot about the old studio and where things were, like the star bungalows and the edit suites and where the writers worked and where Judy Garland went to “star school.” I was impressed with John by the end.

The MGM lion used in trade papers wasn’t the snarling beast in the studio logo but rather a friendly cartoon guy working tirelessly to improve the bottom line.

Of course, you know about the dissolution of MGM in the 1970s, the selling off of all the props and costumes now nearly priceless, like the million-dollar ruby slippers, and the demolition of the entire backlot where everything from Andy Hardy to Mutiny on the Bounty to Singin’ in the Rain were shot. In other words, a lot of MGM is gone with the wind and has been for decades. But some is still there, and as I roamed the streets among the soundstages, I could see in my mind’s eye Clark Gable walk past dressed in his San Francisco tux; I could see Joan Crawford slink by in a glittering gown. Over there, Eleanor Powell showing miles of leg, and yonder, Carole Lombard skulking about, checking up on the set of Honky Tonk and her husband’s new distraction, Lana Turner. They’re all there among the stucco buildings with chrome accents—baby Jean Harlow, boy genius Irving Thalberg, the three Marx Brothers, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, and yes, long-legged, loping James Stewart, the guy who had no great looks but loads of natural talent that Metro didn’t know what to do with. Jim was winning an Oscar for Leo on the one hand while, on the other hand, they saddled him with wooden Indians like Hedy Lamarr and Paulette Goddard in pictures he didn’t want to make. Suddenly, military service seemed like a good idea, and he flew off and left behind in his propwash the lot on which I now stood.

We visited three soundstages on the tour. First was the music scoring stage, which interested me not because of its perfect acoustics or because John Williams directed the Star Wars scores there, but rather because in the mid 1930s it was used for process shots like the San Francisco earthquake. Then, inevitably, we looked in on the set of The Goldbergs, which John was required to plug yet again. Finally, we visited the set of Jeopardy, which was dark that day but interesting nonetheless. We stood outside the mighty titan, Studio 15, where Metro craftsmen built Munchkinland and Dorothy started down the Yellow Brick Road.

Our final minutes were spent at the gift store where you could buy any number of Columbia souvenirs. It was the final offense, but by then it really didn’t matter because I was outside in the warm California sun, distracted by the ghosts of all those great people surrounding me. People I’ve gotten to know over the years, some of whom have become friends. Now, I stood there catching glimpses of each at home in the mightiest studio of all.

This is main street on the lot, which runs from the Thalberg Building to the soundstages. The buildings are vintage and once housed offices and the commissary, but the facades are of Sony vintage so the lot can also serve as a working backlot for features and TV shows.

Too Much

Well, it’s happened again. An airliner has crashed into a mountain, this time in the French Alps. Reports indicate that the A320 flying from Barcelona to Dusseldorf descended from 38,000 feet to the impact point at 6,000 over the span of 8 minutes. There may have been a fire on board that incapacitated the pilots. There may have been a failure of one or both engines, with the descent accompanied by automatic warnings chiming in the cockpit and pilots desperate to restart an engine or engines. I’ve sat in various flight simulator cockpits that are used to train airline pilots. It’s chilling when you’re sitting in a simulator on terra firma and warnings begin to sound—it’s a simulator and utterly realistic. Imagine living the experience six miles up. Better yet, don’t imagine it.

My heart goes out to the crew, the passengers, the families. And my heart goes out to the recovery teams because I was once forced to relive the recovery effort at the crash scene of an airliner—TWA Flight 3 that crashed into Mt. Potosi, Nevada, on January 16, 1942. I undertook this exercise while writing Fireball. Among those lost in that crash was Hollywood actress Carole Lombard. It was “only” a 21-seat, twin-engine DC-3 and there were “only” 22 people on board (19 passengers and a crew of 3) and it hit the mountain at “only” 190 miles per hour versus the 180-seat A320 with 150 that hit at 350 yesterday.

A plane crashes into a mountain, in this case TWA Flight 3 on January 16, 1942.

The fuselage of a state-of-the-art 1942 DC-3 Sky Club was gleaming aluminum, meaning that when the aircraft struck granite, it exploded and deformed, but large pieces remained. In fact, some of those pieces of twisted aluminum can be seen today on Mt. Potosi. Modern airliners are made of composites that disintegrate on impact, resulting in the bizarre scene in the Alpine landscape, which looks like a litterbug went mad. How many pieces of people and debris are up there? Hundreds of thousands? A million? Each will have to be removed from the site with care because some are human remains and the rest are potential clues to what happened to Germanwings Flight 4U 9525. Perhaps the aircraft’s badly damaged voice recorder and flight data recorder will answer all questions, in which case the jigsaw puzzle of wreckage will still need to be collected and removed. All this will be done by people who are now witnessing sights that are meeting and then far exceeding the human capacity to rationalize and cope.

Previously unpublished and in some cases undiscovered accounts of the recovery effort of TWA Flight 3 were blunt by 1942 standards. A few of the bodies of crash victims were thrown clear of the impact point when the ship blew apart and these remained intact. The rest were put through a literal meat grinder—and then set afire. Imagine being ordered up the mountain on a U.S. Army recovery team or volunteering for the recovery job. Better yet, don’t imagine it. The team of about 30 painstakingly picked up what there was to pick up in the way of human remains for four solid days. In the book I referred to it as a “pudding” composed of flesh, bone, melted snow, and pieces of plane as small as splinters. There were 22 victims, remember. Then the recovery team declared the job finished and departed the scene. An hour later, a TWA man still onsite discovered more human remains and stuffed them into all he had with him—a mail sack. Seventy years later when I visited the site, a human bone turned up. That’s the way it is at such sites.

The recovery team reaches the scene 36 hours after the crash.

Take that scene times six and you’ve got something akin to what’s facing recovery teams in the Alps as we speak. There isn’t any snow, but there is a vast mountainside and a ravine covered in objects foreign to serene Alpine landscapes. As for people living the recovery, let me put it in perspective this way: One of the Flight 3 civilian volunteers was interviewed more than 40 years later as a wheelchair-bound old man and said in something akin to bewilderment, “I still see it in my dreams sometimes.”

More than 300 police officers and a like number of firefighters are up there at present, all of them heroes for doing what they’re doing. Many will get past the task they’re accomplishing right now, but none will forget it. They’ll keep seeing it in their dreams.

In the Shadow of Beasts

I’ve always been a sucker for a woman in a beret. This time it’s Fay Wray in a 1930s pose.

The always-interesting Marina Gray pointed me to the link to a 1998 article that appeared in Scarlet Street magazine. The article detailed an encounter by filmmaker and writer Rick McKay with Hollywood leading lady Fay Wray in New York City in 1997. I was bowled over by the nature of the piece, which included an extensive interview with Wray, who was almost 90 at the time and very much a real-life Norma Desmond in manner, as actresses can be.

You know how sometimes you read about a person now gone and get the feeling you would love to have met him or her? Well that’s the feeling that hit me reading about the evening spent by the author with Fay Wray. Here was a woman who started out in silents and remained so full of life that James Cameron had recently, as of the time the article was written, offered Wray the role of “Old Rose” in his epic in the making, Titanic. Wray had declined the offer because one of the plays she had authored was opening in New England and she didn’t want to miss it. Wray’s contemporary, Gloria Stuart, then landed the role and earned an Oscar she had coveted for 70 years.

Rick McKay asked all the right questions during his evening with Fay Wray, a date that included a Broadway show and dinner and drinks. Man: dinner with Fay Wray. Does it get better than that?

Fay in one of her best pictures.

In the lengthy interview, McKay returned time and again to Kong, Kong, and more Kong. The making of the film, reaction to the film, and Wray’s opinion of the film. After a while it became apparent that Fay Wray was a brilliant person who was (naturally enough) sick to death of King Kong but too gracious to say it in so many words. She was an early—perhaps the first—casualty of that one career-crippling iconic Hollywood role. A chosen few know what it’s like; Basil Rathbone with Sherlock Holmes, Leonard Nimoy with Mr. Spock, and so on. But mixed in with Kong Q&A, Fay offered the kind of insight into Old Hollywood that can only be learned on the inside.

Her first big picture was Von Stroheim’s The Wedding March, and she describes a sexual Svengali/Trilby sort of vibe between them. She starred in a number of pictures in the early era of sound, including three with Gary Cooper. She also made an early masterpiece with horror undertones, Most Dangerous Game, and two early Technicolor features at Warner Bros., The Mystery of the Wax Museum and Doctor X., both directed by the Hungarian maestro, Michael Curtiz. Like most others who toiled under the Curtiz whip, Wray’s memories of the experience were not fond: “I didn’t appreciate him at all as a director. I thought he was more like a part of the camera. He didn’t have any warmth whatsoever.”

Of course it didn’t help that conditions were brutal on Warner soundstages. Wray provides thought-provoking testimony regarding the experience of working in early Technicolor on sets that had to bathed in light—drenched in light—to suit the Technicolor cameras. Today we’re used to mega-chip HD cameras and cool LED lighting, but in 1932 the lights were incandescents that give off 10 percent of their energy as light and 90 percent as heat, which was “Awful! Awful! … They left the lights on, because a lot of scenes were so sustained that you needed quite a bit of time. But, it was an unhealthy kind of feeling that we all had to go through … it was just a miserable experience.”

Toiling under hot lights and showing some leg in The Mystery of the Wax Museum with co-star Glenda Farrell.

Both Wax Museum and Doctor X and a third scream feature, The Vampire Bat, paired Way with one of Hollywood’s more unusual actors, Lionel Atwill, whom she described as “a profile” and explained that “He knew just how to position his head to get the right angles! He was very conscious of his contour.”

Here was a thoughtful, serious young actress now in her mid-20s making what she considered mindless horror pictures for brutes like Curtiz. And then came Kong. She remembered working in the giant mechanical Kong hand, which was manually manipulated by stage hands, and her fear wasn’t being crushed by the hand of Kong but rather falling out of it because the grip was loose at best. Of the origin of her Kong screams: “I went into the sound room and made an aria of horror sounds.” They were screams directed by … Fay Wray.

Wray discussed the decline of her career and relationships with a succession of talented, high-profile screenwriters, first John Monk Saunders, then Clifford Odets and finally Carole Lombard’s ex-boyfriend, Robert Riskin. Her marriage to Riskin endured through his severe stroke and subsequent death in 1955. During his illness she went back to work in television and movies to pay the medical bills, most of the roles forgettable or downright embarrassing. Her biggest pictures of the time were The Cobweb with Widmark and Bacall and Queen Bee with Joan Crawford. And what a terrific take Wray had on the star: “Joan was not a happy person and she liked showing that. She worked on her fan mail all day long. I just didn’t understand that, but she did. She washed her hands a lot. She washed her arms all the way up past her elbows … She was so worried about herself, I felt. She was a good soul, a good soul. She wanted to be nice to everybody and kind, certainly kind to her fans. She thought about them a lot.”

Wray in a straight role with Gary Cooper in 1933. Coop was stamping out pictures at this time and made three with Fay; two with Carole Lombard.

Like so many actors of her day that disdained the kind of pictures they were in—for example, Olivia de Havilland would not condescend to watch The Adventures of Robin Hood for 20 years after its release—Fay never went to see completed versions of Mystery of the Wax Museum or Doctor X, pictures that are today considered horror classics. She was a year older than Carole Lombard and started in pictures about the same time Lombard did, around 1925, and both made their move in Paramount Pictures in the early 1930s. Both were good-looking women with earthy sexuality, but Wray had none of the Screwball Queen’s savvy for crafting a career, and if it weren’t for the horror pictures, Fay Wray’s name would barely be remembered at all. Instead, she remains a Hollywood icon.

Later in life she became a writer, and I want to read her books and drink in more wisdom like this: “I love films, I love the camera—I love the thought that when you’re in front of the camera, whatever you do can go around the world. Isn’t that a marvelous feeling to have? That’s a beautiful feeling.”

Rick McKay’s full article can be accessed here.

Putting it all in perspective: one small woman and the big ape who immortalized her.

Lure of the Forbidden

Almost 40 years before Ana met Christian, there was The Story of O, as sold in this vintage Italian movie poster.

I’m not sure how the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon happened. It’s a mystery to me how this exercise in juvenile erotica found its way into supermarkets and other retailers across America. In my long and checkered literary career, I have been an erotica-for-hire writer, and out of curiosity read 50 Shades. I was appalled, not because of the salacious subject matter, or because the depiction of women might set their cause back a couple generations, or even because the writing lacked sophistication. I started flinging 50 Shades around the room because of the presentation of Christian Grey as a dominant. Kids out there trying this writing thing at home: your characters have to be consistent, and no dominant male acts like Christian Grey acts in this story—it is a cloistered adolescent female’s imagining of what a dominant male would be like as he is “tamed” by a girl who in real life would bore the guy stupid in a couple of dates.

The writer in me applauds E.L. James for capturing lightning in a bottle and selling a gajillion copies of her B&D trilogy. Somewhere there’s another book waiting to be written called “Revenge of a Wallflower” where we learn about E.L.’s upbringing and long-ago snubbing by a bad boy who dumped her after a couple of dates and thus the 50 Shades phenomenon was born.

However, I’m not really here to talk about 50 Shades of Grey. We’ve heard enough about it all month. As I sit here and write in the pre-dawn murk of a frozen Friday the Thirteenth, this picture is about to shatter box-office records in these United States, riding a wave of hype that goes far beyond merely trailers on TV. There are 50 Shades tie ins across the straight-laced retail world; 50 Shades of nail polish, 50 Shades hairstyles; 50 Shades shoes. It’s being pitched on QVC and via email, and I get the feeling that somewhere, one-time movie flakmeisters like Russell Birdwell and A-Mike Vogel are beaming. Today’s blockbuster is the latest in a long line of pseudo-kink that promises the forbidden, lures you inside, and then laughs all the way to the bank as you stumble out of the theater wondering how you had been hoodwinked.

In my misspent youth, the X on a movie poster always enticed me. Of course, I’m far too young to have seen in first-run the films I’m going to mention. But…

Midnight Cowboy, starring my “twin brother” Jon Voight, proved to be an interesting picture but not the Dante’s Inferno of naked flesh that I envisioned.

Emanuelle was my first exposure to simulated sex, but today has a sanitary sweetness about it.

The Story of O offered a more realistic dominant-submissive story than what you will see this evening. In fact, save yourself 40 bucks and rent The Story of O. If Ana had a worldly grandmother, it would be the girl code-named O.

Last Tango in Paris was utterly boring and seeing dissipated Marlon Brando naked upset my stomach.

I won’t waste your time relating my frustration at Crown International sexploitation pictures that swindled me, like The Teacher and The Stepmother. Only A Clockwork Orange felt like an X to me even as a kid, and that wasn’t because of the sex but rather the ultra-violence.

There’s a sucker born every minute, and I was it. Finally I gave up on pictures that were sold as smut but never fit the bill and saved my money by avoiding Nine 1/2 Weeks until I could rent it on VHS for a buck. All I remember about it now is that it unspooled so slowly that I knew where the name came from. It was also relatively tame and I couldn’t understand much of Mickey Rourke’s dialogue because he’s a mumbler. (I spared myself entirely the experience of yet Another Nine 1/2 Weeks.)

From Showmen, Sell It Hot: Baiting the lure with “It” way back in 1932.

Greenbriar blogger John McElwee wrote a fantastic coffee-table book about showmanship in Hollywood’s Golden Era in which he examines the production of classic pictures and the ways they were sold to the masses by people like A-Mike Vogel. In Showmen, Sell It Hot! there’s a chapter called Titillated to Distraction detailing the lure of the forbidden in Hollywood’s naughty pre-Code years of the early 1930s. I’m reminded looking at McElwee’s work that in terms of attitudes about sex, America hasn’t come very far in 80 years. We were spawned of Puritans after all, making forbidden sex practices repugnant and therefore all the more irresistible.

As documented in Showmen, the 1932 feature Bird of Paradise “promised island beauty Dolores Del Rio au natural and indeed delivered via nude swim scenes.” Other examples by the author: “’Give me a job—at any price,’ says Loretta Young to Warren William in a teaser ad for Employees’ Entrance, and by February 1933 customers knew Warner Bros. wouldn’t let them down. Hold Your Man bade audiences to ‘Learn how to do it in one easy lesson,’ with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow more than capable instructors.”

This still from Virtue showing Carole Lombard and Mayo Methot appeared in the risqué movie magazine, Film Fun. As per usual, the picture itself didn’t sizzle.

The Carole Lombard of Fireball fame posed with Mayo Methot for a lingerie shot that remains today pretty suggestive as they were hyping the 1933 Columbia picture Virtue. It didn’t matter that Virtue was bland stuff; by the time a healthy American male found this out, the theater already had his money.

An ad for the Barbara Stanwyck picture Baby Face depicted Missy Stanwyck in a provocative pose beside an ad line that read, “She used everything she had … to get everything men had … She stopped at nothing and made ‘It’ pay.” And audiences knew what ‘It’ was, even in 1932. In all caps below the credits was a sobering warning: PLEASE DO NOT BRING YOUR CHILDREN.

I don’t know how many of you will queue up to see 50 Shades of Grey today or over the weekend, but if and when you do, be aware that you are carrying on a proud tradition that goes back as far as the motion picture itself. You have been summoned into the dark to see forbidden things. Enjoy whatever salacious moments you can wring out of this picture, because odds are you will return to the open air a little worldly wiser … by feeling hoodwinked yet again.

One more from Showmen, Sell It Hot: Joan Blondell was a nice girl selling naughty, pre-Code style. I can’t figure out, is she leaving a little or a lot to the imagination? Or is her expression merely saying, “Look out, people! Your wallets are being lightened!”

Mocked by the Mockingbird

Clifford Irving, the cat who thought he ate the canary. It turned out to be the other way around.

Clifford Irving is alive and well and writing books more than 40 years after being caught peddling a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. It’s a great story that was made into the movie The Hoax with Richard Gere. By 1970 Howard Hughes was a recluse seen by no one, and Clifford Irving figured that nothing could drag Hughes out into the sunlight, even the publication of a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes.

As was accurately depicted in the picture The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio, anybody messing with Howard Hughes was going to come out bloody as long as that man’s heart continued to beat. Hughes didn’t exactly step into the sunlight to fight Irving, but he held a press conference by telephone that I remember very well and blasted Irving for the fake book. Clifford Irving gambled and lost and spent a year and a half in prison as a result.

Call me a skeptic, but I can’t help but wonder if history is repeating itself, this time in foolproof fashion. It’s a sad world we live in when the surprise headline about publication of Harper Lee’s second book causes me anything but glee. Her simple story of Atticus Finch and Scout and Jem bowled over the literary world and has continued to sell a million books a year for decades. To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize and then transitioned seamlessly into a great motion picture, which doesn’t always happen. The film version earned five Oscar nominations and three wins, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck as Atticus. I can’t imagine that any of you haven’t seen the movie—it’s a humdinger.

To Kill a Mockingbird is the great American novel, and its author has frustrated us ever since the book’s publication because this was all she wrote. She saw the avalanche of publicity that resulted and fled. Case closed. Harper Lee, one-hit wonder of the ages.

But wait! I read the New York Times article yesterday about another manuscript by Harper Lee being discovered and thought: This is too good to be true! But my immediate second thought, knowing the circumstances, was: Wait, this is too good to be true.

The real Harper Lee, back in the day.

Supposedly, the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman, a novel that picks up the story of Atticus and Scout 20 years after events in Mockingbird, was discovered attached to a copy of the original Mockingbird manuscript. Watchman is described as a sequel written prior to Mockingbird.

Here’s the thing. At age 81, Harper Lee suffered a stroke in 2007, apparently a big one. Her sister Alice, an attorney who had been Harper’s caregiver and companion, died in 2014. Alice’s death not only devastated Harper; it left her without protection in making decisions like using her name and that of her famous book to hawk another book. Based on lifelong behavior, this is the very last thing one would expect from Harper Lee, yet the very thing that happened yesterday when news rattled the publishing industry to its bones about another Lee novel. Press releases quote the incapacitated woman, who according to witnesses at her sister’s funeral may no longer be all there, as saying of Go Set a Watchman, “[I am] pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.”

As of this writing, Go Set a Watchman, almost half a year from release, has shot to #1 on the Amazon bestseller list and To Kill a Mockingbird is #2. Oprah is gushing with excitement. That’s fine, but I have been dealing with New York publishers for 30 years, and I’m here to tell you that today they are soulless corporate monoliths in survival mode. Oprah may be gushing, but I’m sitting here thinking about this 88-year-old, wheelchair-bound sweet soul who’s imprisoned in a withered body and no longer capable of rational thought. Given her situation and the timing of her protector’s death, I can’t help but smell a rat. A big one.

Caveat emptor, my friends. Caveat emptor.

Hail to the King

Happy Birthday, Clark Gable. Today, had you taken better care of yourself, you would be 114. Let that be a lesson to you.

Come to think of it, Mr. Gable, I guess no matter how many cigarettes you had eschewed, no matter how many bottles of Chivas Regal you hadn’t consumed, you wouldn’t be around at 114. That’s a lot of years, and how they do fly by.

Some places reflect the years better than others. This past week I found myself in a city that feels very old: San Francisco. I was there on business, business so intense that I had barely a moment to see the sights, but a friend and I scaled Telegraph Hill from Chinatown to Pioneer Park and Coit Tower and looked out at Alcatraz, my first-ever glimpse of The Rock. Hard not to think about Al Capone or Clint Eastwood’s Escape from Alcatraz. Or his Dirty Harry, for that matter. It’s going on 70 years since Capone died; almost 40 since Escape was made; more than 40 for Dirty Harry. Hell, it’s already been 52 since The Rock closed as a prison. Years, years, years, speeding by.

My discovery: the top of Lombard Street. Pioneer Park is above.

It’s a long way down Lombard Street from here, all the way down Telegraph Hill to Columbus Avenue in the Italian part of town.

Exploring the streets that radiate out from Pioneer Park, I stumbled on Lombard Street, and it was one of those moments when my mind went boinggg! I had read someplace decades ago that Jane Peters took the name Lombard because of Lombard Street; it was here in San Francisco that mother Elizabeth Peters had first lighted with the kids in 1914 after leaving Fred in frosty Fort Wayne. Now, here I was at the head of Lombard Street all these years later, in another century, feeling some magic about the name and exploring on down the long hill to Corso Cristoforo Colombo—yes, Lombard intersects with Colombo. (Another intersection of the two would take place in 1933. Sort of.) Up yonder hill to the west Lombard Street turns serpentine in a crazy little section that’s a kick to drive down as I found out later in the evening.

I asked Carole Lombard authority Vincent Paterno, proprietor of bold and sassy Carole & Co., if he had ever heard this story about the origin of Lombard’s name, and he said he thought she took Lombard from family friend Harry Lombard. I had heard this too, but part of me wonders if she would have appropriated the name of a friend, which could have made an awkward moment or two had he said no. But I could see her using the name of the wildest street in San Francisco, Lombard Street.

Original poster art from San Francisco, selling the bad boy and the warbler with the gams.

Birthday boy Clark Gable made a picture about San Francisco called San Francisco while banging his new girlfriend, Carole Lombard, in the spring of 1936. The picture San Francisco featured a different kind of banging as it details the earthquake of 1906 that leveled parts of the city. Does anyone know if the picture premiered in San Francisco? I like to think it did, back in the day when studios took their stars and the press on junkets amid much ballyhoo to launch the A-pictures.

This was a landmark film for its recreation of the Big One and shows off Gable at his finest as yet another black-hearted rogue, the kind of role that established him as a man’s man and bad boy who made the ladies swoon. Women didn’t want to own Clark Gable because they knew he couldn’t be owned—but they spent a great deal of time imagining what it would be like to get roughed up a little by Clark Gable, who was 35 at the time of San Francisco and in his absolute prime. It became a great part of the legend between them: Lombard in her prime, the year she made My Man Godfrey, landed Gable in his prime, causing a great stir among the gods. It was quite a year on Olympus.

Clark and Carole early in their relationship. Customary Coca-Cola in hand, she wears a look that admits she just ate a canary.

Carole was always very big on birthdays, so somewhere, maybe up there on Olympus, she is calling Benny Massi to make sure the catering from Brown Derby is perfect for Pa’s surprise party to celebrate this, his 114^th birthday.

Flyboy

A 1944 Government Printing Office poster for Gable’s wartime feature. Notice he was Major Clark Gable by the time of the picture’s release in the second half of 1944.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner to check out Clark Gable’s 1944 propaganda picture, Combat America, as background research for my new book project. But it took prompting from my pal Tom before I went ahead and sought out Combat America.

For those not in the know, Gable enlisted in the Army Air Corps in August of 1942, seven months after the death of wife Carole Lombard aboard TWA Flight 3. At this time Gable was making no secret of the fact that he didn’t care whether he lived or died. In fact, he preferred the latter over the former, and if he were to cash in, he would like to go the way Ma did.

Meanwhile, at MGM of Culver City, Louis B. Mayer and his lieutenants had spent many of their waking hours worrying about their multi-million-dollar investment, Clark Gable, king of the movies, getting mixed up in the war. Whenever the subject would come up they would hammer into Gable’s ear: You’re too old to go. For God’s sake you’re 41. Stay stateside where you can do the most good for the greatest number of people.

Gable was the hardest-headed man in Hollywood. Lombard had learned this sideways and in their six years together developed ways to penetrate that cement noggin—but mostly she just surrendered and did thing’s Pa’s way.

After Ma’s passing, Pa Gable was a sleepwalker, at first numb and somewhat pliable, and then after some months his old cement-head self. When it became inevitable to MGM that Gable was going to enlist, the powers that be dealt with ways to keep their man in one piece. He told them flat-out that he would not be a paper soldier who stayed stateside and wore a uniform for show and appeared on camera reading scripts about how hard the war was. He was going over. He was going up.

Of all the studios, MGM was tightest with Official Washington, so it was no great feat in summer 1942 for Mayer’s brain trust to arrange for Gable to be inducted into the Army Air Corps with the mission of making a motion picture about the importance of aerial gunners on heavy bombers that would soon be flying dangerous missions over the wartime industrial heart of Nazi Germany.

Gable went in in August 1942, fulfilled 13 weeks of officer’s training in Florida with men half his age, and emerged an officer for assignment in the Polebrook-based 351^st Bomb Group in the Eighth Air Force. Gable was thus a member of the Mighty Eighth and in the middle of the great air war in Europe at its most devastating point. Daily, he saw bomb crews go over and not come back. He saw B-17s come limping home to base shot to pieces. He was there to record all of it on 16mm color film with an MGM camera crew.

Gable poses for a photo with the crew of the B-17 Delta Rebel after a flight with them in 1943.

For Gable personally, there were problems and they were significant. MGM couldn’t let him serve as an enlisted man—how would that look for a king to be a private or noncom? So he served as a captain with a specialty in aerial gunnery…but gunners on B-17s were at most noncoms, not officers. The officers on a B-17 were the pilots, navigator, and bombardier. Plus, Gable hadn’t been assigned to a crew from the beginning and hadn’t trained with that crew for grueling months and years in preparation for service with the Eighth. He flew from May to September 1943 on five missions, mostly “milk runs,” which were shorter hops from eastern England over the Channel to targets in German-occupied countries. Practically speaking, Gable had to go on shorter runs because he was an extra man on the plane, taking up space and adding weight. You can see a recap of the Gable missions here. On his only mission to Germany as a gunner/observer, one man in the crew was killed and two others wounded, and this was the mission during which a piece of ordinance nicked Gable’s boot in his gunner’s position in the waist of the plane.

Gable’s bigger problem in the service was being Clark Gable and a center of attention. If ever an organization did not thrive with a celebrity in its midst it was the United States Army fighting the most brutal war imaginable in 1943, and there was Gable distracting air crews just by being around base. It wasn’t going to work; it couldn’t work. So when Gable “ran out of film” after exposing 50,000 feet of 16mm footage, he was sent home to MGM to cut together a feature that would become Combat America.

Gable’s biggest problem was how fast the air war had changed. Since his enlistment in August of 1942, the Eighth Air Force had converged on Great Britain like so many swarms of bees and set up massive operations in and around Norwich. They started sending concentrated bombing missions into Germany right away and got shot out of the skies with sickening frequency. By the time Gable got over there and into the war and made his film and came home, there was no need to make a movie explaining to the civilian population what it was like to be a machine gunner on a bomber—the whole thing was daily news and men were enlisting by the thousands to be glamorous flyboys.

That’s a lot more backstory than you needed about Gable’s feature documentary, Combat America, which meanders through 62 minutes to remind us how little direction Gable had making his picture and how frustrated he must have been with the entire enterprise. He wanted to go and fight and die in the air. Instead he went, fought a little, spent too much time on the sidelines filming and drinking, and lived. Lived to sit in the dark back at MGM looking at real fighting men on a moviola.

The title itself sucks. Combat America: what the hell is that? Audiences had no chance to feel a sense of mystery, a sense of, “I have to go see Gable’s new war picture.” On the other hand the title didn’t matter because the picture got negligible distribution. In the end, Gable had gone overseas on what might have been the greatest snipe hunt in recorded history.

Most of the footage shot in England was MOS (picture with no sync sound). A few times cameras rolled with audio to show Gable interacting with the brass or with other soldiers—non-actors all, men who were terribly self-conscious in the presence of the king. Gable narrates throughout and he’s sincere in the effort. He takes us on tours of ancient British sites, he takes us to character studies of the men of the 351^st, he takes us inside pre-flight briefings and through missions all the way to landings back in England. It’s a bittersweet experience watching Combat America because we know where Clark Gable was at this point in his life. A widower who had been launched into mid-life crisis; a man who wanted to serve but ended up (in his own mind) a buffoon among those fighting and dying; a filmmaking professional denied a real goal and the support to do what he did best: make movies, and convey to the people back home what he had seen, heard, and done in the war. It soothed Gable not at all that he earned the Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross, or that Adolf Hitler put a bounty on the king’s head.

Combat America is available complete on YouTube, although the print looks like Lake Erie stands between it and you; one only wonders how it could benefit from Blu-Ray restoration, if the original elements even exist in the MGM vaults.

The Many Stops of the Gables

Growing up in Pennsylvania, I would often see signs on old buildings that read, “George Washington slept here.” GW was so famous it mattered where he slept. Similarly, there are places all over the Southwest that claim Clark Gable and Carole Lombard slept there, even though there seems to be no documentation that they ever did.

Owners of the Oatman Hotel in Oatman, Arizona, claim that the Gables spent their honeymoon at the hotel following their March 29, 1939, elopement to nearby Kingman, Arizona. Further, it is claimed that the ghosts of the Gables haunt the hotel, even though evidence shows that Carole and Clark (on a rare day off from Gone With the Wind) were driven to Arizona, got married, and headed straight back to Hollywood in time for a next-morning press conference announcing their union at Carole’s St. Cloud Road home in Bel Air.

Big Barbee Lake in Indiana is another supposed honeymoon location for the movie star duo. Now there was a commute for a Rhett Butler on 24-hours’ leave.

Indeed, welcome to the many honeymoon spots of Gable and Lombard.

The Ingleside Inn in Palm Springs, California, has also put in a claim as the spot where the lovebirds honeymooned, even though this interlude would have required a desert detour of 240 miles in the wrong direction on a tight timeframe since Clark was using his day off to hitch his bride. I’m not saying that the Gables never stayed at the Ingleside Inn—in fact, I’d be interested to see their names on the register to confirm the stay. It would be great to add this fact to existing scholarship on the pair.

Palm Springs seems to have been quite popular with Mr. and Mrs. G for honeymooning as they are reported to have spent their wedding night at The Willows, an historic Palm Springs inn that was frequented by their close pal, Marion Davies. This one at least has Davies as a legitimate connection to the couple, and Davies was renowned for entertaining early and often. Maybe Carole and Clark went to see her at some point, although I’m not sold it was on their wedding night.

Then there’s the Palm Springs estate that Ma and Pa were supposed to have owned in the Old Las Palmas section that was recently offered for sale at more than $2M. Mind you, this is penny-pinching Clark and Encino ranch-owning Carole that supposedly motored on over to Palm Springs to this posh estate and lived there. Here’s why I’m not buying this one at all:

They already had a home and loved its seclusion. They didn’t need to buy an estate in Palm Springs—they already had one in Encino.
When they wanted to get away from it all, the Gs went as far away from civilization as possible into wilds so remote that there was no running water and no electricity. To Carole and Clark, the wilderness was escape. Palm Springs wasn’t escape.
No one that I’m aware of in their inner circle ever mentioned Palm Springs as being a destination for the Gables. Much later Clark and his last wife Kay would build down the road from Palm Springs in Bermuda Dunes, CA—a vacation home he would enjoy for less than a year before his death.

Here is the Pioneer Saloon back in the day. Judging by the auto and attire, this shot was taken in the era of Gable’s supposed visit.

I’m reminded of the Pioneer Saloon in Goodsprings, Nevada, where Clark Gable waited out the hours as search parties hunted for his wife’s downed plane. There are cigar burns on the top of the bar that go all the way back to Gable’s dark days at the Pioneer. Hour upon hour of waiting, of not knowing. Clark even fed coffee to rescuers and bought an old prospector false teeth.

There’s only one problem: No evidence supports the legend. None at all. Common sense doesn’t support it either. Gable flew to Las Vegas by Western Air charter in the dead of night and was sequestered by his MGM handlers at the El Rancho Las Vegas Motor Hotel a half hour from Goodsprings. The last place MGM would allow Gable to be was the Pioneer Saloon because that’s where the reporters hung out waiting for definitive word on the fate of Carole Lombard and the 21 others aboard TWA Flight 3. Gable was in shock and unable to interact with anyone, let alone reporters. Yes, Gable was near the Pioneer Saloon because he had to pass by on his way up 99 Mine Road to the base camp; he demanded to be taken to base camp and he was, so he did pass by the Pioneer Saloon, but he didn’t hole up there as much as your imagination tells you that he did. Hell, even I fell for the legend of the Pioneer Saloon when I stopped by. Even I could imagine Gable in here pacing the wood floor. The Pioneer reeks of history and one of its walls is covered with newspaper accounts of the crash and search. I haven’t come out against the Pioneer’s claims up to now for the simple reason that even though this legend isn’t true, it should be true. It’s an utterly tragic, heartbreaking moment in time, even if it never happened.

The Pioneer Saloon in dusty and historic Goodsprings, Nevada. Right before taking this shot, I raked my leg on a cactus and the next day, climbed Mt. Potosi.

There’s a bottom line here based in fact: After all these decades, the names Clark Gable and Carole Lombard still have drawing power. These two were what Loretta Young called “juicy people” and son of a gun, they’re still juicy today. Somebody on Facebook said this morning, this morning mind you, “They were more in love than any couple I know.” Well, if you can see that from a distance of 70 years, then OK. As the man once said, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Long ago they printed the legend at the Ingleside Inn, the Willows, the estate in Old Las Palmas, the Oatman Hotel, and the Pioneer Saloon. When I buy a hotel or B&B, the first thing I’m going to do is print the legend again. I don’t know yet which room Carole and Clark stayed in; I’m sure one will seem like them when the time comes.

Thanks to Marina Gray for info on the Palm Springs Gable-Lombard connections and for the lowdown on Big Barbee Lake. Thanks to Larry Selkow for information on the Ingleside Inn, which got me to thinking about the very busy honeymooners.

Mystery Woman

You remember how I posted a picture of James Stewart and Errol Flynn and jokingly said one of the women with them was Marge Eddington just to see if you were paying attention? Well some of you were and stated that this is NOT Marge Eddington, mother of Nora Eddington Flynn Haymes Black, who in turn was the mother of Rory Flynn, who co-hosted an evening of Errol Flynn pictures this past Tuesday evening on Turner Classic Movies. Rory was one of those saying this pic did not show the elusive Marge—David De Witt did a posting featuring the photo on his excellent Errol Flynn blog.

Actually, I could have sworn it was Marge. There’s a facial resemblance to Nora and her daughters. But to me the takeaway is that people are reading this column and it’s moving them to thought and action. I’m happy to review comments by new participants like Betsy, who commented on recent Carole Lombard columns.

Uncomfortable James Stewart, the mystery woman, burr-under-his-saddle Errol, and his wife Nora. We still don’t know the context for this meeting. Also note that Flynn at six-foot-two is still looking up at the towering Stewart–something else to make Errol uneasy.

At any rate, below is a photo of Marge from Nora’s landmark 1960 tell-all, Errol & Me, which paints Errol none too kindly as a date-rapist and drug addict. By the time I knew Nora 20-some years later she was anything but an iconoclast. She had come to terms with all the facets of her ex-husband’s character, the good and the bad, and was feeling quite protective of his memory.

Marge and Errol captured in a photo from Errol & Me. This photo would have been taken several years after the Stewart-Flynn photo op. So you are SURE that if you take the cat’s-eye cheaters off this woman, she’s not the one in the poodle perm seen in the photo above?

The funny thing is that the identify of the woman is a topic of discussion, yet no one has commented on the event that brought James Stewart and Errol Flynn face to face, and no one has noted the discomfiture of both the males in this photo. Stewart has forced a smile and stands there stiffly, hands in pockets (we do that when we’re on guard), as if counting the seconds until he can exit stage whatever; Errol is wearing his most smug, unfocused expression of disdain. Yet here are these two women who appear to be genuinely thrilled to be in Stewart’s presence at a time in his career when he wasn’t anywhere near the cult symbol that he would become with the re-emergence of public domain It’s a Wonderful Life. He was just another leading man in trouble at the advent of television. If this is 1948, which Tom Hodgins believes, Stewart was in the process of reinventing himself with pictures like Call Northside 777 and Rope. In retrospect it turned out to be a good Stewart year, although I’m not sure it seemed so to him at the time.

If this is late 1949 or 1950, then it’s after Nora and Errol split up. One critic claims it’s impossible that the photo was taken in 1950 for this very reason: Errol and Nora were divorced in 1949. However, Mr. Critic, Marge continued to work at Mulholland Farm, and according to Nora herself, Errol grew more civil after they split. Plus the fact that Errol continued to participate in the upbringing of his children. For the unorthodox Flynn, squiring your ex to a formal affair is well within the sphere of credibility.

Whatever the truth of this photo may be, Tom Hodgins has surfaced quite the Kodak moment.