SLEEP DIDN’T SO MUCH COME quickly to Clark as overwhelm him in a crashing wave. With it came a rush of memory as bright as the Californian sunlight which had first beckoned him west. For this town wasn’t Akron, or Tulsa, or off-Broadway, or Portland, or even the Lurie Theater in Houston. This was LA and this was a different kind of acting to provide a different kind of entertainment to a changing world. He’d started off playing gangsters, wife-beaters and convicts and all the usual dross back at the turn of ’30, and was all set by the middle of that same year to head back east for a new production of A Farewell to Arms when he received a phone call from his new agent Mina Wallis to tell him he’d been offered a year long contract with MGM, no fucking less.
He was suddenly being groomed for stardom, and groomed really was the word. He had his suits cut in the latest vee which emphasized his broad shoulders and svelte hips. Saxony wool, or Prince of Wales plaid, with silk accents. Double-breasted mostly. He went to the studio barber—who called himself a stylist—at least once a week. There was advice about where he should eat, and what sort of company he should keep. There was even a trip to the orthodontists in a mostly futile attempt to sort out his teeth, and some asinine debate about whether they should pin back his jug ears. But he was who he was—Clark Gable. Or he soon fucking would be. When he cut a ribbon at a new supermarket, the people cheered like he’d built and stocked the whole place himself. He took a ride in a monoplane wearing a plain navy blazer with cream linen slacks and an open-neck Lacoste polo shirt with dark willow tan brogues.
The whole business of banging out talkies the way Henry Ford was banging out cars struck Clark as a decent enough thing to be doing for a living. Okies were being driven west by starvation and duststorms to die in streetcars and sleep on railroad sidings, but hey, at least those who could afford to get into the movie houses were being properly entertained.
The previews and reviews for his first above-the-title role in Susan Lennox weren’t so good. Garbo might be a bull dyke lesbian with a voice like a concrete mixer that would never have come out of the silents, but she was a genuine star. So it was Clark Gable who got the blame for the movie being a mess. The results for the pre-screenings for his next effort, Possessed were also pretty mixed, and Mina told him it was one of those talkies that could go either way. Clark Gable was a new face, and he gave the women in the audience—many of the men, for that matter—a certain tingle, but it wasn’t a tingle they yet felt entirely comfortable with. So was he just some gangling lout with big ears and bad teeth too clumsy to handle a scenery board, let alone act? Or was he the box office savior MGM had been promising themselves when they’d given him that contract?
Clark gauged his arrival on the red carpet outside the Carthay Theater on the night of the premiere of Possessed perfectly, leaving just enough time to hang around with the crowds without it seeming like he was waiting for Joan Crawford. They might have had to move this whole showboat to the Carthay because Howard Hughes was putting on some carnie ride called Broken Looking Glass, which wasn’t any proper kind of movie at all, up at Grauman’s on this same night, but you sure as hell wouldn’t have known it from here. Flashbulbs flashed. Floodlights hazed the sky. Then Crawford arrived, and the crowd went apeshit, and Clark gave the newshounds a knowing grin as he offered her his arm. Then she planted a kiss on him for just that teenie bit longer than expected. All in all, the two of them put on as good an act out on that red carpet as anything they’d done in the talkie.
“Savor the moment, Gable,” she’d murmured. “You never know how long it’ll last.”
He got a call from the studio a week or two after to come in on a day between shootings. He was living in a serviced bungalow in the grounds of the Marmont by then. A low, adobe-walled structure, the roof a shrug of pantiles, windows a raised eyebrow of arches, it and a cluster of other similar peasant-style dwellings formed a corral amid the winding drives, hibiscus bushes and palms. Quiet Mexicans in white pajamas did the watering and clipping. Every time he stepped outside and climbed into whatever car he was currently driving, he decided that paradise, if you excluded the Mexicans, must look pretty much like this.
He drove south toward Culver City with no particular thoughts in his head. Some publicity thing, most likely. Maybe there was a new director or leading lady they wanted him to meet. Past the Beverly Wiltshire and past the Brown Derby and past the Cotton Club, he reached the fortress-like walls of MGM studios, and followed them around to the Grecian-pillared entranceway, where the security guard gave him a smile and a salute as he raised the barrier. Trying to remember the guy’s name—was it Walter, Willy?—Clark Gable responded with a cheery wave.
MGM occupied several lots around Culver City in those days, but this, the largest and the headquarters, was a city in itself. Not just a congested jumble of the new enclosed soundstages which had replaced the open or glassed-in lots of the silent era, but also a school, a small hospital, several decent restaurants, and even a small railroad to carry things here and there.
He pulled in at his designated space in the main parking lot beside the offices. He smiled back at himself as he checked his parting in the car mirror. It went without saying that it was another beautiful day.
The receptionist didn’t quite get up for him—that was reserved for real stars—but she did make a small bobbing movement, almost a curtsey, from behind her glass and chrome desk. Then another broad came from somewhere to find him, one of those near-edible gofers who bumped at you with their breasts, and fluttered their eyelashes so much you were sure you felt a breeze. She reminded Clark about a party up in Laurel Canyon she was sure they’d both been to as she led him along corridors to wherever it was they were heading, although he concentrated mostly on the sway of her ass.
He’d imagined the usual handshakes in an exec’s office, but he was being taken down deeper, darker routes into one of the technical areas. A small uh-oh sounded in his head. If he was being required to revoice some of his lines, the request to do so should have come down the channels from the director, or at least his assistant. Anything less was a diminution of status. Maybe he should speak to Mina about this. Maybe he should have spoken to Mina already. Or maybe Mina already knew about this, and simply hadn’t bothered to tell him. All that Californian sunlight which Clark had been carrying with him started dimming inside his head.
As if sensing his unease, the pretty gofer stopped and turned and nudged at him sweetly with her breasts. This was, she assured him in breathy pants, something that all the MGM roster of actors were doing. Just a small, quick, test. Nothing really, but rather exciting nevertheless.
He was put in a room where all the walls had been faced with what looked like chickenwire, except for a window into a bigger and better lit space. With the amount of electrical stuff in there, and but for the chickenwire and the absence of a microphone, he could have been in a sound booth. But he could tell that the creation of corkscrew glass and wire which dangled from the ceiling before him had nothing to do with receiving sound. Just looking at it made his teeth itch, and set off a weird, resonant buzzing inside his head.
The guys who were mooching and prodding in the space beyond weren’t wearing white coats. This being Los Angeles, they wore paisley cravats and Palm Beach suits. One of them leaned to a microphone and spoke to Clark through a loudspeaker. He had on a scratched namebadge which said he was Hiram P. Something-or-Other the Third, but he had to squint at his clipboard before he called Clark Mr, ah, Gable. He peered at Clark a little more closely like he maybe even recognized him from some movie he’d seen. Then he smiled to reveal a most un-Hollywood set of buck teeth and told him, just like the breast-bumping girl had, that this was nothing more than a few quick tests. Best to think of it as simply a rehearsal, Mr Gable. Better still, a test shoot.
Dials twitched. Valves glowed. Things buzzed and hummed. Then the frail coil of glass and metal hovering before him started buzzing and humming as well. This, he was just about starting to realize, must have something to do with all that voodoo stuff about—what was the guy’s name again?—Lars Bechmeir’s new discovery that Howard Hughes had then gone and invested in so heavily.
“All we want you to do,” Hiram P. Something-or-Other’s voice crackled, “is exactly what we already know you’re good at. We want you to try to act for us, Mr Gable. Is that alright?”
Could have done without the try to, and there was nothing worse than being dropped into a situation for which you’d had no chance to prepare, but Clark swallowed, nodded. Then, after the first one-two-three count-in, there was a sudden increase in the angry buzzing and a smell of rubber burning, and Hiram and his mates were flapping around for several minutes as they struggled to fix some fault.
These guys didn’t have the look of MGM employees, although they were some of the oddest ever hired guns. Clark tried asking them a few questions as he waited. He even got some replies. No, this equipment wasn’t even MGM property—this Bechmeir guy had already set up some kind of trust through which they were employed and all use of his patents had to be channeled. Neither was any of it owned by the Hughes Corporation, although Hughes had already shot and premiered that first feelie-movie to what you might call mixed reviews. The whole business sounded odd to Clark. It was probably just another flash in the pan like 3-D or Smellovision, although he understood that MGM had to try to keep track.
“I want you to feel happy, Mr Gable. Just straightforward common-or-garden happiness. Any time you’re ready.”
“Now?”
“No, no. Sorry, no. Not now. You’ve got to tell us you’re ready. And then I’ll get this spool here turning—you wouldn’t believed how much magnetic wire costs by the foot—and then I’ll count one, two, three, like it’s the start of a song. And then you feel happiness. Right?”
“Right.”
Clark thought of himself as generally a pretty breezy kind of guy, at least off-set, but he knew he was better at doing brooding, dark performances. Until recently when he did happy as an actor, it had generally been because he was being especially nasty. Like raping the leading lady, or torturing the guy who’d come to rescue her.
“What’s the, uh, premise?”
Hiram and his colleagues exchanged glances. “It’s just, well, happiness. There isn’t a premise. Try using your imagination, is what we suggest.”
No use doing what any actor would normally do, which was simply to act happy. Not with this icily humming twisting thing reaching down from the chickenwire ceiling to claw at the insides of his head like the underneath of the iceberg that did for the Titanic. No use changing the way he stood and moved, or using the smile and the eyes and the voice. For these were just effects, calculations. Sure, when you acted happy, you felt happy, but it was as different to regular happiness as kids playing baseball in a dusty backlot was to Walter P. Johnson winding up on the mound for the Nats. Poor Peg Entwistle had once explained Stanislavsky to him, but as far as he was concerned, acting was a craft, plain and simple, and he really didn’t buy all that acting-from-the-inside shit. Far as he was concerned, if it was inside, it might as well stay there.
“You ready, Mr ah Gable?”
“Sure.”
Sunsets, maybe. Or cars. Yeah, cars. Or better still, sex. No, no, no, no. Not sex. That was some other emotion entirely. But what about kittens? Weren’t they supposed to make you feel happy? Yeah, kittens at Christmas. Or sex in a car filled with kittens at Christmas. Or how about…
But the damn thing had broken down again. He could tell that just from the renewed smell of burning and the bellyache which now seemed to start right down in his groin. Eventually, though, after much fiddling from Hiram P. Bucktooth and his minions, they managed to get the thing working. It still felt odd. But odd wasn’t even the word. It was like he was being joined, stretched, swallowed. No. It wasn’t even that. It was like, in some way which had nothing to do with those guys on the other side of the window, he wasn’t alone. His fingertips tingled. His scrotum crawled. He looked left and right and glanced behind his back in case someone had somehow snuck in here without his noticing. He also felt, if he was totally honest, like he needed to take a shit.
“Seem to be having more than our usual teething troubles with the equipment today. If you’ll just bear with us, Mister, ah… I’m sure we’ll get there…”
Get there they did. Or somewhere. They made him do fear, which was all too fucking easy. And elation—although wasn’t that just happiness with extra gravy?—and all he reckoned he’d come up with was more of this sick displaced feeling, which was how he actually felt. Then there was another glitch, and more smoke. No way of telling from the reaction of the guys beyond the window with their off-kilter teeth and fashion sense how he was doing, but it was already pretty obvious he wasn’t doing that well. If Hiram P hadn’t called an end to things when he did, Clark was seriously concerned that he was either going to have an embarrassing personal accident, or faint.
“Guess you’d like to see the results?”
He shrugged.
He was already fully convinced by now that nothing would ever come of this process. Too fiddly. Too messy. Too—well, just plain wrong. Nevertheless, he was mildly curious to see what they’d done as they took him into their temple of bakelite, glass and bad acne and wowed him with their talk of wavelengths, volts and amperes. Then they showed him a big glass bulb with a green ghost floating in it, and told him that was what he looked like to the receiver thing in there. They re-spooled the wire through the reading heads and reminded him again about how expensive this stuff was, and ran it back through crocodile clips out of some kind of amplifier into a dome-shaped grid that looked like a large, upturned sieve sat on rubber grommets right there before them on the desk. The sieve sparked and crackled. It gave off that thunderstorm and clean armpits smell with which the whole world would soon become familiar. And then it actually glowed, and to Clark it felt as if the devil himself had just shoved his coldest, biggest finger right up his ass.
“You okay, Mister ah…? We’ve found that some performers have a particular sensitivity to their own emanations.”
“Felt better.” He guessed he was probably swaying a little in the chair in which they’d sat him. And they probably thought by now he’d come straight from the speakeasy.
“This, er, is, erm, happiness.”
The field danced and glimmered. It wasn’t happiness, but it sure as hell was something.
“Jeeze…”
And then he found that he was reaching toward this fizzing pit of nonsense without even thinking about what he was doing. The weirdest thing of all was that the bloody stuff seemed to be reaching back to him—shaping itself to clasp his hand with wraith-like fingers before Hiram P grabbed him and hit the off switch and muttered about how he could have damn well gone and electrocuted himself. When Clark was finally led back along the corridors, he realized that he did need to visit the restroom—and pretty badly at that. As Miss Don’t-I-Know-You waited outside and preened her tits, he hunched over the studio porcelain and was copiously, copiously sick in spasming yelps.
All in all, it was a pretty bad introduction to new technology that had become de rigeur in almost all the big studios within a year, even though the results were most often a mess. Clark’s contract was renewed and he did his best to soldier on through Windy August and The Raging King, but the technicians were confused, and the rentals and royalties which the canny Bechmeir Trust were demanding of MGM for the use of their equipment meant skyrocketing costs.
None of the actors professed to like the new turn that their business was taking, and the demand in those early days was for nothing but crude emoting—all the nuance which had started to appear in the better talkies had instantly disappeared—but Clark seemed to have an especial antipathy. That first feelie experience with Hiram bucktooth in that chicken shed seemed to have set a jinx which continued to follow him. He got used to sparks and hissings and directors’ curses and the smell of things burning. But he almost preferred those times to the ones when the iconoscopes actually worked. He didn’t like the way those cold glass eyes made him feel—which was ill, basically, but a with whole lot of other crap going on around the edges. It was as if he was being sucked away. No, it wasn’t even that. It was as if the real guy he was almost sure he was somehow wasn’t standing there any longer and had slipped away like the sliver of last night’s soap down a plughole into—what? Some other place, time, dimension? These weren’t the kind of thoughts that Clark was used to having, and he felt no more comfortable with them than he did with the iconoscope itself. When he tried to explain all of this to his fellow actors, quite a few of them went partway to agreeing with him, but then they’d shrug and tell him it was a knack like any other. That it took a bit of getting used to, for sure, but it was like booze, or getting your sealegs, or smoking locoweed, or any of the other fancy new pastimes which were then making their way into the industry, and it was really just a question of giving it your best.
He’d never been much of a one for why-the-hell-am-I-doing-this-crap tantrums which were a regular part of any kind of dramatic production. But these things got to a guy, and acting of any kind was always an emotional process, and he soon reached the point where he was doing most of his best acting, as the saying went, after the director had called that’s a wrap. Things came to a head when he was asked to break down in tears fifteen whole separate fucking times until the technicians finally managed to get something resembling a signal down on wire. And even then they said they weren’t happy with it. Something about amplitude, the way the machine was picking him up. He’d been feeling it as well. That was the thing. He’d been sobbing like a fucking baby as if he was really mourning for something he didn’t even know he’d lost. By the fifteenth take the process of emotional collapse had gotten so absurdly easy that he could barely stop. And still it wasn’t right.
But for him that was it. As far as he was concerned, this wasn’t acting, this was some new bullshit freaktent claptrap crock he was involved in, and Louis B and all the rest of them could shove it all the way to midnight up their tight Jewish asses. He wiped his face and blew his nose and left the set and drove to his suite at the Ambassador in his current MGM rented limo. There, he ate some complimentary chocolates and waited for the pleading phone call from the director which didn’t come. Mina, though, did plead with him—at least, when she heard about the incident a few hours later—but even she seemed to have sensed some kind of defeat. Clark hung around some more, which was something any actor had to be good at doing. He even tried calling the director himself the next day, only to be told that the plug had been pulled on the whole project and that it wasn’t his fault and these things were understandable and he wasn’t to fret. So he kicked his heels for a few days longer as he waited for a courier to bring his next script. But it was the hotel maître came to his door instead, to enquire in that gratingly polite way of all maîtres why his last two week’s bills for this suite, not to mention room service and the bar, hadn’t been paid. Quietly, but in that lingering way people do when they know they’re leaving somewhere they will most likely never see again, Clark gathered up the few things from the suite that he could actually call his own, and then a few others that strictly speaking weren’t. And he left. He thought for a while that this was the end of Clark Gable. He only realized later that what he’d really witnessed was the end of MGM.
Things happened fast in LA—that was something he should have made proper note of when he was on the way up in this business. There were all sorts of reasons he could have given as to why he’d fallen from grace so rapidly, but in his heart of hearts he knew that the real fall from grace had been somewhere inside him. And now he’d got so far down what had briefly seemed like a golden way that he couldn’t bring himself to tread the boards again, and the directors and producers were already wary of anyone with a taint of the old talkies about them, especially a nearly-star whose few headlining appearances had all nosedived.
It was one of those things you could look at in a hundred different ways, and not one of them would make the slightest difference, as Clark had long ago discovered. Sure, he could blame Mina, or the studio. Sure, he could—and he did—blame himself. He could even blame that idiot director, or lousy luck with the choice of scripts, or some wooden performances by his leading ladies, or not enough kissing of the right kind of ass. Or maybe he should have tried harder and been more patient with technology which everyone agreed was a hard enough bullet to bite. But none of that mattered, and Clark took the view that most things in life really weren’t that complex when you took them apart and wiped the grease off them and laid them out. When people asked Clark what had gone wrong, which had happened less and less over the years and barely at all now, he preferred the simplest answer because he reckoned it was also the truest. There had always been that way the camera seemed to like some actors more than others, and it was the same with iconoscopes.
He told people that he hadn’t liked the feelies much, and that the feelies hadn’t liked him.