This column originally appeared in August 2010.
It was 50 years ago that the “King of Hollywood,” Clark Gable died. They called him the king for good reason. Women swooned at his masculine screen presence and men viewed him as a man’s man. Best remembered as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, most film critics agree that without Gable, GWTW would have blown away quietly. Yet, most Hoosiers don’t realize that Gable has several ties to our fair state.
It is a little known fact that Gable was a devoted race fan who regularly attended races such as the Indianapolis 500. In 1950 Gable starred in the movie To Please a Lady, filmed at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway,. Although not critically acclaimed, the movie is considered to be a motorsports classic. Most of the scenes were shot over a three-week period at the Speedway. To make the racing scenes as authentic as possible, director Clarence Brown used a good deal of actual professional racing footage. Gable did some of his own driving for close-ups, while a stunt driver took the wheel for the more dangerous shots. The film’s climax was shot at the 1950 Indianapolis 500 won by Johnnie Parsons in a rain shortened race.
In the film Gable stars as Mike Brannon, a thrill-seeking race car driver whose ruthless tactics cause a crash that results in another driver’s death. Barbara Stanwyck plays Regina Forbes, an influential newspaper columnist who is determined to get him permanently banned from the professional racing circuit. Gable’s Brannan character has a bad reputation and Stanwyck’s columnist Forbes character tries to interview him, but he refuses. Regina’s column suggests that Brannan caused the fatal accident deliberately, which leads to his disbarment from the racing circuit. Brannan begins driving in a stunt show, eventually earning enough money to buy a car of his own and enter the Indy 500 himself. The pair engages in an explosive battle of wills while fighting off an attraction to each other that threatens to spin out of control.
The film was director Clarence Brown’s eighth and final film with Clark Gable, who was also his good friend. Brown managed to pull off some of the most thrilling racing sequences ever filmed, capturing the raw excitement of the Speedway by throwing the viewer right into the middle of the action while experiencing the energy of the pit crew in action, the zooming car engines, and the roar of the crowd.
Cinematographer Hal Rosson used up to six camera crews at a time to capture the action of actual races. The location shooting paid off in the film’s nail-biting climax where car speeds averaged 100 miles an hour.
Gable and Stanwyck are well matched as a romantic on-screen duo whose character’s intense chemistry proves to be equal sparring partners. This was the couple’s second film together. Their first, Night Nurse, was made nearly 20 years earlier at Warner Bros. In that movie Gable, not yet a major movie star played a small role as a nasty chauffeur who viciously slaps Barbara Stanwyck across the face. The moment was replicated in the Speedway film when Stanwyck took another smack across the kisser from Gable.
Ironically, To Please a Lady was not a major box office success due in part to the surge in household television sales, which by 1950 was rapidly taking business away from movie theaters. However, the film did win plenty of critical praise. The New York Times said of the film: “You can bet that Indianapolis never experienced a contest as hotly run as the race that Mr. Brown has staged.” Variety proclaimed that the movie “has excitement, thrills, with some of the greatest racing footage ever put on celluloid — It firmly returns Gable to the rugged lover, rugged character status.”
The film’s legacy among race fans is the chance to see authentic open-wheel midget and Indy-car racing footage from an often neglected time in auto racing. The montage featuring a racing engine being machined and assembled along with some nice race car close-ups and pit stop action make it a must-see flick for gear heads. The film also captures a couple of minutes of authentic footage of Joie Chitwood’s famous stunt car show, a rare treat for vintage race fans.
Being in Indianapolis was difficult for Clark Gable personally. The city had been the last stop on a war bond tour in 1942 for his second wife, actress and Hoosier native Carole Lombard, before she was to fly back home to Los Angeles. Tragically, Lombard’s plane never made it back. It crashed in Nevada killing everyone on board. Gable and Lombard honeymooned at Lake Barbee near Warsaw, Indiana. Their three-year marriage had been a happy union, and Lombard’s death was a loss from which Gable never recovered.
At the time of To Please a Lady Gable had finally remarried, this time to Douglas Fairbanks’ widow, Lady Sylvia Ashley. During filming he seemed happier and healthier than he had in years according to friends. Even so, Gable remembered his beloved late wife while in Indianapolis. He quietly made a point to visit the downtown locations where Lombard had made her final public appearances before meeting her untimely death.
When Gable left Indianapolis, he had one last surprise waiting for him. Lady Sylvia’s teenage nephew, Timothy Bleck showed up on set with a group of friends and took over several rooms at the Marriott Hotel, where the Gables were staying, and charged their bill to the Gable’s account. Many who knew Bleck felt that the youngster had developed a “crush” on Gable. For his part, Gable often complained to his new wife that Bleck and his friends were “eating me out of house and home and always pestering me for money.”
Lady Sylvia, a British national, was famous for her spoiled tantrums who later that same year went so far as to demand a spacious dressing room for her personal use during Clark’s next movie being filmed in Durango, Mexico, The Wide Missouri. (A film solely distinguished as Gable’s first Technicolor film since Gone with the Wind.) The couple divorced within the year.
Married five times, Gable’s most glittering union was with Hoosier actress Carole Lombard. Gable’s list of film pairings includes most of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. Joan Crawford teamed with Gable eight times, more than any other actress. Jean Harlow starred with Gable in six films in a union that would have undoubtedly continued if not for her untimely death. Lana Turner shared the credits with him four times. Gable worked twice each with Loretta Young and Claudette Colbert. In his final film, The Misfits at almost 60, Gable starred opposite 34-year-old Marilyn Monroe. The film also starred the tragically flawed fallen film idol Montgomery Clift.
This last film would take on a macabre life of its own when Gable suffered a heart attack two days after filming ended and died ten days later. Monroe and Clift attended the premiere in New York in February 1961 while Monroe was on pass from a psychiatric hospital; she later said that she hated the film and herself in it. Within a year and a half, she was dead of an alleged drug overdose. The Misfits was the last completed film for both Monroe and Gable.
Montgomery Clift, previously known for his classic profile, had been badly injured in a 1956 car crash requiring reconstructive surgery on his face, evident in his close-ups for The Misfits. He died six years after the filming. The Misfits was on television on the night Clift died. His live-in personal secretary asked Clift if he wanted to watch it. “Absolutely not,” was Clift’s reply, the last words that he spoke to anyone. He was found dead the next morning, having suffered a heart attack during the night.
Many feel that Clark Gable danced a tango with death and morbid curiosity throughout his career. But there is one more eerie connection to Indiana by Clark Gable unmentioned above. The last movie Hoosier outlaw John Dillinger ever saw was an MGM film called Manhattan Melodrama starring … you guessed it, Clark Gable.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
