Clark Gable, Marion Davies, Dick Powell

The Roaring Twenties descended on Hollywood as it became the film capital of the world, with dozens of young men and women—each dreaming of stardom—arriving daily from across America. It was an era of great affluence, as mansions were erected and stars drove around in made-to-order automobiles. It was also a time of cultural ferment and innovation in Pre-Code Hollywood. The film industry’s financial hub was still on Manhattan’s Wall Street, but its creative production center was in California. Directors could get away with almost anything—providing that their silent flickers made money. Hundreds of good-looking men came from the plains of Utah or the ports of New Jersey, hoping they would get cast in movies based on their looks alone. The women did the same, especially if they’d won a beauty contest such as Miss Indiana. Clara Bow and John Gilbert were typical of those hopefuls. Legends such as Valentino and Wallace Reid had arrived, as had Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, and Pola Negri. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., already wore their crowns. Studios such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rose out of the heap, as did Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, and Columbia. At the beginning, studios ruled by men such as Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner had near monopolistic control, from pre-production to release where they often controlled distribution. By 1925, 50 million Americans were going to movie houses every week. That was roughly half of the nation’s population. In poorer areas, a movie ticket cost ten cents. 

A lot of people in the film industry, both male and female, have claimed that they discovered the young Clark Gable. B.P. Schulberg, a pioneer film producer and studio executive, might have made the claim himself, but he never did. However, he did cast Clark in a minor role in the silent film White Man in 1924. Schulberg was born in Connecticut in 1892. As soon as he finished his schooling, he headed west to Hollywood, where he broke into the film industry. After some success, he founded Preferred Pictures, which he built around the silent screen star Katherine MacDonald. He also hired Clara Bow, 18, giving her a three-month option. He may not have claimed Clark as a discovery, but he had found “The It Girl,” the bob-haired flapper who rose to super stardom as the late 1920s rolled on. Schulberg, as a marketing genius, dubbed Mary Pickford “America’s Sweetheart.” A fixture linked with Paramount, he did much to promote the film careers of such legends as Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, and the French star Maurice Chevalier. In the early 1930s, he discovered child star Shirley Temple, who became a box office champ. However, by 1950, the film industry shoved him aside. He suffered a stroke and retired to Florida, where he died at the age of 65 in 1957. 

Clara Bow continued to date Clark Gable on occasion, but he grew disappointed with her when she vetoed him as her leading man in her next pictures. The first was Mantrap in 1926; the second was “It” in 1927. Producer B. P. Schulberg felt that Bow had great potential to become a major star as the Roaring Twenties moved on. He had tried to promote her as “The Brooklyn Bonfire,” but that label didn’t stick. After he read Mantrap by Sinclair Lewis, he became convinced that its film adaptation would shoot Bow into the upper ranks. He met with Victor Fleming who signed to helm the project. The movie became popular and helped make Bow a star. Its main detractor, ironically, was Sinclair Lewis himself. “I did not recognize my book from this film.” After Clark went to a movie house to see Mantrap, he discussed it with William Haines. “She let Ernest Torrence be her leading man. That’s insane. I would have been terrific in the role. Torrence might be better cast as her drunken uncle.” Producer Schulberg came up with another idea for Clara Bow that he thought would go over even bigger. “It” originated as a novel by Elinor Glyn. Schulberg was right about “It.” This star vehicle for Bow turned her into “The It Girl” of the flapper era. When asked to define “It,” she told the press, “The term is defined as the quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force.” 

Within New York theatrical circles, producer Arthur Hopkins was known as “The Sphinx of Broadway” because he said little, his facial expressions indicating his approval or dislike. He earned a reputation for casting unknown actors in key roles, notably Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Spencer Tracy, and Edward G. Robinson. Clark Gable could be added to that list. Hopkins had also cast a spunky New England redhead, Katharine Hepburn, in the play These Days. Hopkins gave Clark Gable his first big break when he cast him in a minor role with 22 other actors in the Broadway play Machinal, a drama which opened on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre on September 7, 1926. In spite of the Wall Street Stock Market Crash of 1929, Hollywood in the upcoming 1930s entered its Golden Age. After a long and difficult climb up the Tinseltown ladder, rung by rung, Clark Gable suddenly found himself cast opposite such leading ladies as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, and Norma Shearer. He became so well known that a sarcastic new reprimand “Who do you think you are? Clark Gable?” swept across the country. 

Clark Gable would soon be sustaining affairs with such leading ladies as Mary Astor and Marion Davies, the mistress of the immensely wealthy William Randolph Hearst. Another of his leading ladies, Helen Hayes, claimed, “There are only two actors in Hollywood that I would leave my husband for—Gary Cooper and Clark Gable.” Actors who had previously been allocated only small, sometimes uncredited roles, were becoming stars. Notable among them were Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, William Powell, and Constance Bennett. Legends were being born: James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, and Mae West. From vaudeville emerged such stars as Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Alice Faye, and Bob Hope. Paramount was not the only studio challenging MGM. Competition was intense from Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, RKO, and Columbia, too. Film historians rate 1939 as the greatest year in the history of filmmaking. In that benchmark year, Gone With the Wind would win the gold as its Best Picture. 1939 also loomed large in Clark’s book of memories. He married Carole Lombard, his third wife, defining for the world at large as “the love of my life.”

Howard Hughes wasn't too enthralled with Dick Powell's fiancé Mary Brian. “She’s a nice girl,” he told Lewis Milestone. “A nice, open, honest face. Nice smile. Nice teeth. Nice blue eyes. But she has the same emotion in every scene. Nice.” “But she’s from Texas like yourself,” Milestone said. “She’s not like any Texas broad I’ve ever met,” Hughes said before turning away. Mary Brian would re-enter Hughes’s life once again several years later, when her lover, Cary Grant, announced that he was going to marry her, angering Hughes. In later life, her career over, Brian took up painting portraits as a hobby. One of her first paintings was of Hughes, depicting him as a giant prick. She ultimately got her revenge on both Cary Grant and Hughes simply by outliving them, dying in 2002. She guarded good memories of her former suitor Dick Powell, though. Bogart had escorted Joan Blondell to the premiere of Night Nurse and later spoke about her to his best friend, actor Kenneth McKenna. “She’s my kind of broad. I like her tremendously, but I’m not in love with her. Besides, Dick Powell is always knocking on her door.” 

Had casting gone differently, Clark Gable might have ruled over the kingdom of Warner Brothers instead of being crowned at MGM. Director Mervyn LeRoy had been intrigued with Clark as an actor ever since he sat through his performance in The Last Mile. LeRoy contacted him the following day and Clark agreed to shoot a screen test for the upcoming film Little Caesar. Variety had already announced that Edward G. Robinson had agreed to play the title role of the Chicago mob boss Rico Bandello, nicknamed “Little Caesar.” Glenda Farrell would star as the female lead of Olga Stassoff. She was instructed to appear in the test in tandem with Clark. After Gable completed his screen test, LeRoy set up an appointment with Darryl F. Zanuck and Jack Warner to watch it. At the end, Zanuck gloomily predicted, “The lug will never make it… he's crude as hell.” “I hate that big-eared son of a bitch, but keep him as long as he makes money,” Louis B. Mayer told to Irving Thalberg. After his departure from MGM, Mayer was frank in his appraisal of Clark. “I couldn’t stand the son of a bitch. But he made money for the studio. MGM made $25 million when I loaned Gable to David O. Selznick for Gone With the Wind.”

Before there was a Louella Parsons, before there was a Hedda Hopper, there was Adela Rogers St. Johns. A daughter of Los Angeles born in 1894, she was a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist. She is best known for her reporting about Hollywood movie stars in the 1920s and 1930s, when she was the major writer for Photoplay magazine. It is said that she fell in love with the screen image of Clark Gable when she saw his performance in The Painted Desert, a 1931 Pre-Code Western starring William Boyd. Gable phoned her two days later and asked to meet privately with her. She always wrote glowingly of him. “Clark Gable is the same man on or off the screen, which is true of only a few stars. He has a charm that no psychologist can explain. It probably is the same feeling that Eve had when she first spotted Adam in the Garden of Eden.” In a subsequent article for Liberty magazine, she referred to him as “The Great God Gable. A year ago, not a soul in Hollywood had heard of him. Today, he ranks ahead of any established favorites.” Clark and St. Johns were soon seen riding around Los Angeles in a $10,000 automobile presented to him by press baron William Randolph Hearst, the boss of St. Johns.

Once, in one of her columns, St. Johns ran a widely publicized quote from Clark: “I’m no Adonis. I’m as American as the telephone poles I used to climb to make a living. Other men see me on the screen making love to Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, or Joan Crawford. They say that if I can do it, so can they. They go home and make passionate love to their wives.” The “New Romance” referred to in the March 7, 1936 edition of Liberty was Clark Gable’s romance with Carole Lombard, “The Queen of Screwball Comedy.” The two leading gossip columnists, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Louella Parsons wrote extensively about it. As author E.J. Fleming said, “Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling are virtually unknown outside of Hollywood and little remembered even there, but as general managers and as heads of publicity at MGM, they were the fixers of Hollywood’s Golden Age from the 1920s through the 1940s.” Some secrets were relatively minor, such as Joan Crawford’s adulterous affair with Clark Gable, who was also married. Sometimes, they were more serious, such as when Wallace Beery murdered Ted Healy, the creator of The Three Stooges. When MGM executive Paul Bern was found dead in the home he shared with his newlywed wife, Jean Harlow, Strickling was the first man called. When Clark made his co-star, Loretta Young, pregnant on the set of Call of the Wild (1935), the urgent message went out: “Get Strickling on the phone and get Young out of town until she has Gable’s kid.”

When stardom finally came to Clark, it arrived fast and furious. By December of that year, his name was familiar to movie-goers across the nation. His on-screen (and sometimes off-screen) lovers included Constance Bennett, Joan Crawford, Fay Wray, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, Greta Garbo, and Joan Blondell, among others. It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was still married to Ria Langham—at least officially. At this point in his career, since Clark had been elevated to the status of leading man, the management at MGM was ferociously committed to protecting his reputation. Mayer himself, horrified at the possibility of one of his star’s public involvement in a sex scandal, began defining both Clark and Spencer Tracy as “walking time bombs.”  In his bachelor days, James Stewart seduced as many beautiful women as Clark Gable himself. As he claimed, “My bachelor years were wonderful. Boy, did I have some good times.” Unlike the straitlaced Dick Powell, James Stewart was not the boy scout he seemed. Stewart’s seductions read like a Who’s Who from the golden age: Wendy Barrie, Diana Barrymore, Olivia de Havilland, Marlene Dietrich, Mitzi Gaynor, Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Jeanette MacDonald, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Margaret Sullavan, Lana Turner, and Loretta Young. 

Gable had met Stewart when they had co-starred in Wife vs. Secretary (1936) with Jean Harlow. One late afternoon, he phoned Clark to ask if he’d help him out of a dilemma he had become trapped in: Confusing his calendar dates, he had invited both Harlow and Patricia Wilder on the same round of nightclub hops through Hollywood. At that point in his bachelor life, Stewart’s main interest involved seducing Harlow, so he asked Clark to escort Patricia. Clark accepted, and he and Honeychile got along fabulously. Thus began Clark’s series of occasional sexual trysts with this Georgia peach. In Manhattan, she became a “regular” during lunch at “21” with her beau of the moment. In a typical late-night spree, she could be seen at the Stork Club, Café Pierre, and El Morocco. Conde Nast would send his limousine to take her to black tie dinners where she met the elite of New York society. George Gershwin asked her to sit next to him while he was composing Porgy and Bess. She went bar hopping with columnist Walter Winchell and his pal, J. Edgar Hoover. Gable was so taken with her that he even promised to marry her, pending his divorce from Ria Langham.

After divorcing her first two husbands Honeychile married Prince Alexander zu Hohenlohe-Valdenburg Schillingfürst in 1951. After that, she became known as “Princess Honeychile.” Patricia Wilder survived a widely publicized encounter on the night of February 22, 1941 at the Café Pierre in Manhattan. Beverly Paterno—whose husband was the heir to a real estate fortune, calculated at 63 million in 1941 dollars—confronted her, slapped her face, and then peppered her with a flurry of rights and lefts. Honeychile fought back, pulling her hair and ripping her gown. Then, Paterno picked up a pitcher of water and doused Honeychile. The fight made headlines the next day. Honeychile later said, “Everyone was my friend, even Clark Gable himself, but I never fell in love. That was, not until I met my Prince Alexander. He was my dreamboat, what I had been looking for all my life and never found.” She married him in 1951. Their union lasted until his death in 1984. After that, Honeychile spent the rest of her life visiting rich friends at their estates around the world. Death came in August of 1995 when she was 81 years old.

James Quirk at Photoplay wrote an article he entitled, “Why Women Go Crazy About Clark Gable”: “Clark meets every woman with a challenge in his eyes, a mocking grin culminating in a laughing dimple. He is an adroit opponent in a duel of the sexes. He is like a magnet that both attracts and repels.” He also defined Shearer as “a hottie who burns up the celluloid. She can simmer, seethe, and scintillate.” St. Johns later, in private, outed the affair between Gable and Shearer: “He made her hormones jump, something her husband, Thalberg, could not do.” In spite of her marriage to Thalberg, Shearer had a penchant for seducing her leading men. Gable, Shearer, and everyone else quickly realized that their sexual involvement was merely a fling, and rather brief. Shearer’s pattern of seduction had begun with John Gilbert during their filming of The Wolf Man (1924), continuing with Lew Cody in A State of Fashion (1925) and John Pickford (the brother of Mary Pickford) in Waking Up the Town (also 1925). By 1928, she moved in on Johnny Mack Brown in A Lady of Chance, followed by Ralph Forbes in The Actress (1929). She seduced Robert Montgomery when they made The Divorcée in 1930. 

Shearer was reunited with Gable when they co-starred once again in Strange Interlude (1932). However, by then her romantic radar was focused on the film’s third male lead, Alexander Kirkwood. Burgess Meredith seduced her when they co-starred in Idiot’s Delight (1939). She also sustained affairs with Howard Hughes, James Stewart, David Niven, and director Victor Fleming. Author Gavin Lambert summed up Shearer: “She was the personification of elegance. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, she was the most versatile actress at the most opulent studio in Hollywood. Without ever appearing on stage, she inherited the great Broadway roles of Katharine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne, and Gertrude Lawrence.” Norma Shearer’s husband, Irving Thalberg, asked her why she wanted Clark Gable as her co-star. “He’s nothing but a big-eared mug with bad teeth.” Although Shearer and Clark would spark the screen together again, she almost became his co-star in Gone With the Wind (1939), when she was offered the role of Scarlett O’Hara against his Rhett Butler. She rejected the proposal after she received a ton of mail from fans who protested her playing Scarlett. 

Most of the letters maintained that Shearer was far too sophisticated and refined to play a Southern dame like Scarlett. As Buddy Segal, president of her fan club in New York wrote, “our beloved Norma could never play a woman born in Georgia.” Shearer also rejected the title role in Mrs. Miniver (1942), an assignment that was eventually awarded to Greer Garson. Perhaps even more ironic, before its filming began in 1949, director Billy Wilder offered Shearer the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. Although she rejected the role, he adopted her first name (Norma) as the moniker for the faded (and homicidally demented) grand diva of silent films. Shearer later issued her own appraisal of Clark: “He was beautiful from head to feet. He was rhythmic, unconsciously alive with a powerful grace, like a jungle animal.” Gable first met Stanwyck and Blondell in Night Nurse. “When Babs (Stanwyck) and I first saw Clark Gable walk onto the set, we both had to sit down to control our fluttering hearts,” claimed Joan Blondell to a friend of Darwin Porter. She’d been cast as the film’s third lead, Nurse Maloney, Stanwyck’s gum-chewing, wise-cracking roommate. As Blondell remembered it years later, “Babs salivated over Gable, but I was the one who got him. Maybe he preferred blondes. I don’t know.”

Born in 1906 to a vaudeville family in Manhattan, Blondell had become famous in Pre-Code Hollywood working for Warner Brothers. She often portrayed wisecracking, sexy characters over the course of forty/fifty years. She and the also blonde, also wise-cracking Glenda Farrell starred in nine films together. Blondell became one of the well paid actresses in Hollywood during the Depression. James Cagney was one of her early co-stars in such movies as The Public Enemy (1931). “For the rest of my life, wherever I went, I was always asked the same question: “What was Cagney really like?” In the 1930s, she had an affair with Bing Crosby and much later, with George C. Scott. He said, “For me, at least, the sexiest woman on the screen was Joan Blondell and I've bedded Ava Gardner.” “I had a brief fling with Clark Gable,” Blondell admitted to author Darwin Porter during the course of a weekend she spent at his home. “Any dame would be a fool, or perhaps a lesbian, if she turned down Gable.” 

Stridently, Mayer once told Crawford, “Families go to movies, and I’m not going to put any actor or actress on the screen who isn’t a fit subject for father, mother, and their kids to watch. The only exception to my mandate is casting pictures with you and Clark Gable as the stars. For you two, perhaps we should put up a sign in front saying ‘Adult Entertainment.’” Mayer also told his secretary, Ida Koverman, “My greatest desire is that one day in the future, I will be able to summon Crawford and Gable to my office. There, I’ll order both of them to get off the MGM lot within the hour. Once they go through those gates, they are never to return. That will be the day when I will see the last of those two.” When Irving Thalberg learned that rumors about Crawford’s abortion of Clark’s child were sweeping through Hollywood, he summoned both of them into his office. Then he delivered a stern ultimatum: If they didn’t end their affair, Mayer would probably have them fired. Crawford was sent on a month-long press and PR tour of Europe with her alienated husband, with a special emphasis on London. There, they booked into different suites at the same hotel, where he was rumored to have engaged in seductions of three other women. Shortly after they returned to Hollywood, she filed for divorce.

To promote Marion Davies as a film star, William Randolph Hearst had founded Cosmopolitan Pictures, with links to MGM. By 1924, Davies was the number one box office attraction in America, at least temporarily. At the time, she’d already starred in two “big hit” silent movies: When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), and Little Old New York (1923). Hearst invested $7 million to promote her career, the equivalent of $145 million in today’s currency. Over a 20-year period, Davies appeared in 40 feature films. During Hearst’s long affair with Davies, he remained married to Millicent Veronica Willson, born in New York in 1882. She had been a vaudeville performer whom Hearst had been attracted to, marrying her in 1903. When his affair with Davies began, she refused to give him a divorce. She died in 1974 at the age of 92. She had remained close to their five sons for all her life. In California, Hearst erected the legendary castle, San Simeon, north of Los Angeles, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The sprawling estate was filled with Greek statues and celestial suites at which Hearst and Davies entertained not only the elite of Hollywood, but major figures in politics, science, and the arts.

Davies became known for her sense of humor. When Albert Einstein came to visit, she asked him, “Why don’t you get a haircut? I’ll lend you the money.” President Calvin Coolidge, a teetotaler, was also an honored guest. She served him a vintage Tokay wine from their cellar, telling him it was a luscious non-alcoholic fruit drink. He liked it so much he asked for another glass and another glass, pronouncing it “the most refreshing drink I’ve ever had.” Marion Davies was famous for her stutter, and many of her film scenes had to be reshot. She often said words such as “v-v—very” and “s-s-short.” There had been an earlier version of Polly of the Circus, a silent version starring Mae Marsh released in 1917. Re-releasing it in 1932 with a different set of stars (Marion Davies and Clark Gable) “seemed like a good and wholesome idea at the time.” As the means to getting it made as a starring vehicle for his inamorata, Hearst established and funded an all-new studio, Cosmopolitan Pictures.

Hedda Hopper: "I had a hunch that some shenanigans put Dick Powell off Marion's company as much as her long romance with WR Hearst. Although I wasn't exactly bosom buddies with Powell, due to his allegiance to Louella, I knew enough about him through Marion's confidences. She talked of him in very lofty terms, saying he was an old-fashioned gentleman and a sweet young actor. I think they had a flickering, secret relationship that lasted until 1935; one of those hurried romances that Marion was so fond of having like her champagne parties." Dick Powell, who played Napoleon Bonaparte's younger brother who woos Dixie American Marion Davies in the musical Hearts Divided (1936), would recount his experiences on the set to Tony Thomas. Powell recalled that William R Hearst would not allow Marion to perform unless he was on the set. Usually the mogul would be accompanied by three bulky associates, who said nothing but looked about with great intentness. "Those love scenes," Powell remembered, "were sheer torture. If I didn't make them look real, the director Frank Borzage would never use me again. If I made them too real, I was sure I was going to get a bullet in the back. Marion was doing her part in the long kissing closeups, but I was damn near choking to death. That picture lasted ten weeks, and I thought I'd die before I got out. I was still shaking months afterwards." 

In a private screening room at MGM, Davies had ordered film clips of some of the leading men being considered as her co-star. Clark appeared on the screen in an episode from his recent A Free Soul (1931) in which he seduces Norma Shearer. After watching it, Marion announced to Irving Thalberg, “That brute Gable is not right for my movie. He’d be better cast as a boxer, a gangster. I don’t want him to appear in a picture with me. The part calls for a society man. Gable would not look right in a tuxedo with tails. He looks like Jack Dempsey, a little dumb but muscled.” To her astonishment, when the lights went on, Thalberg made her aware that Clark was sitting nearby, as he had requested the lead in Five and Ten. She looked back at him as he was making his way to the exit, having heard her review of him. After Polly of the Circus wrapped, Clark became part of Davies’ inner circle of star-studded friends. He often drove to San Simeon, which lay midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on weekends. And he was invited to the parties she hosted at the 118-room beach house at Santa Monica.

Over the years, Davies’ reputation has been trivialized, maligned even though Orson Welles claimed she was not the inspiration for Susan Alexander, the mogul’s mistress in Citizen Kane (1941). That film character—an untalented, gold-digging, dim-witted floozie, is familiar to film devotees of Citizen Kane. She was a woman of wit and charm, who captivated the likes of Sir Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Chaplin, Joseph P. Kennedy, and the King of Siam. When Louis B. Mayer exited from a private screening of Citizen Kane, he was in tears. He tried to buy the negative so he could destroy it. Davies was devastated by what she felt was her caricature. Hearst advised her, “Ignore the clamor. Go on with your life and hold your head up proudly. Continue to entertain your coterie of friends and admirers. Living well and thriving is the best revenge over the “screeching hyenas.” Conceived as an acting vehicle for Marion Davies, whose career was financially supported by her very wealthy lover, press baron William Randolph Hearst, Cain and Mabel (1936) was a reincarnation of an earlier silent film, The Great White Way (1924). Produced by Hearst’s production company, Cosmopolitan, it had co-starred Anita Stewart and Oscar Shaw. In its recycled 1936 version, Davies opens the film—as produced by Warner Brothers—as a waitress and ends up, before the final reel, as Mabel O’Dare, a Broadway star. Production was delayed over confusion associated with who would be her leading man. Although Dick Powell was the original choice for the male lead, Hearst learned that Davies (his protégée and mistress) had developed a powerful attraction for him. As such, Powell was booted from the picture. —Clark Gable, The King of Hollywood (2025) by Darwin Porter and Hollywood Greats of the Golden Years: The Late Stars of the 1920s Through the 1950s by J. G. Ellrod