Santa Monica,
California
June 1935
Irving gazed into those two limpid pools of Pacific blue staring back at him.
“What puzzles you so?” he whispered to his daughter. “Are you asking yourself who is this funny-looking guy gawping at me like some love-struck maniac? Well, my precious little bundle, it’s me, your papa, that’s who. And I will happily stare and stare and stare at your perfect face until the men with the straitjacket come for me.”
Katherine blinked a slow, deliberate blink, as though she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“Was that a coded message? Your way of telling me that you like me holding you for hours and staring at you and telling you how much I adore you?” He kissed her forehead, warm as toast and lotus blossom pink. “Because I won’t stop, you know. I’m going to go on and on.”
The love that gushed out of Irving had taken even him by surprise. Was it because this was his second ride on the fatherhood merry-go-round and thus his expectations were lower? Or because he was older? Or because Norma had given birth to a girl?
Whatever the reason, Irving’s heart melted every time he scooped this infant into his hungry arms. Sneak previews didn’t matter. Nor did box office returns or last-minute reshoots. Stock options, screen tests, story conferences—none of it was worth a damn.
Those slow, deliberate blinks. Surprising sneezes. Leisurely yawns. Tiny fingers grasping his fingertip. They were what mattered now. Those miraculous events relieved him of all his worries and problems. They calmed him, relaxed him. What more did he need than an hour alone with his daughter to set the world right?
“Daddy, are you playing wiff Kaffrin again?”
Junior always used this plaintive, petulant voice whenever he encountered his father cradling his interloping sister.
“Just a minute or two more,” Irving told him.
“But you said that ages ago.”
“It was only five minutes.” He checked the wall clock. How did time fly by so fast inside the nursery? “Ten at the most.”
“You promised to play catch before we went to the place you work at.”
“Where’s your mother? Perhaps she can—”
“Awwww, she don’t know nothing about how to play catch. And anyway, Nanny said she’s still in bed.”
At a quarter of nine? Was this normal two weeks after giving birth? Even one as taxing as what Norma had endured? All Irving knew about childbirth was to hand cigars around the office afterwards.
Irving returned Katherine to her crib. “You go get your football and we can have five minutes on the beach.”
Junior’s “Yippeeeeee!” rang the length of the corridor as he sprinted into his bedroom.
Just a few moments longer. Each one was precious. Katherine’s eyes were closed now. Was she sleeping? Dreaming? Was she trying to make sense of this pale face that grinned at her morning, noon, and night?
“DAD-DYYY!”
“Coming, son.”
Irving’s new assistant, David Lewis, was waiting for them at the open barn doors of stage fifteen.
“How’s it going in there?”
David shook his head. “Not great.”
“Who’s the problem today? Laughton or Gable?”
Irving’s money was on Charles.
The night before shooting on Mutiny was due to begin, Charles had telephoned him at eleven twenty, pulling him out of a deep sleep. “I’m having second thoughts,” Charles had bleated. “I don’t understand Bligh at all. How am I supposed to play a character who I’m utterly failing at coming to grips with? If I don’t understand him, how will the audience?” Irving had stayed on the line for three hours, talking him through the story, scene by scene, motivation by motivation. This was Charles’s ritual of self-torture, so if this was how he burrowed into Captain Bligh’s skin, and if this was how Irving would get the superlative job he needed from Charles, then it was worth losing half a night’s rest.
“It’s Gable,” David told him.
“Daddy?” Junior tugged at Irving’s hand. “What’s a lorton?”
Irving crouched down. “A Laughton isn’t a what, but a who. Remember how I told you Daddy is making a sailing ship movie?”
“Sure I do.”
“Do you remember the name of the ship?”
“Boundee!”
“That’s right.” Irving led his son inside the soundstage. Fresh paint and varnish filled Irving’s senses with a heady tang. “Today’s the day you get to see it.”
Junior halted, trying to pull his hand out of his father’s. “It’s not on the water, is it?”
Irving wished someone would explain to him how a kid who had grown up in a house with a swimming pool fifty yards from the ocean was nervous to go into any water deeper than a puddle. “Not a drop in sight.”
Replicating the ninety-foot HMS Bounty required MGM’s largest soundstage—and even then, it barely fit. But the hundreds of man hours and tens of thousands of the film’s budget had been worth it. The sleek black sides shone in the key lights; an amber yellow strip down each side glowed as though lit from within. A crew of six stagehands were hoisting all fourteen white canvas sails up the three masts. The youngest member of the prop crew sat atop the tallest one fixing a triangular flag in place. If he reached above his head, he would have touched one of the catwalks crisscrossing the ceiling.
Irving pointed to his assistant. “You remember Uncle David, don’t you? He’s going to show you the Boundee.”
Junior’s face fell. “I thought you was.”
“I wanted to, but now I have to talk to Uncle Clark. He’s a bit sad right now, so I have to cheer him up.”
David crouched down like Irving had done. “I wonder how many little boys get to explore a great big sailing ship.”
Junior looked down at his shiny shoes. “Are there pirates inside?”
“I’m not sure. But if you’re brave , then I am, too!”
David stood up. “Uncle Clark is in his dressing room.” He pointed off to the left with his free hand. “Come on!” He tugged Junior toward the ship. “Let’s go exploring!”
Irving watched the two of them march up the gangway. He’d been so excited about Katherine that he hadn’t considered how his son might view his tiny burbling gate crashing sister. It had taken a week of temper tantrums and brooding sulks for Irving to comprehend that he had a jealous little boy on his hands. Norma had been little help. Other than breastfeeding, she’d handed off all child-rearing chores to the nanny. He hadn’t seen Norma in the nursery once in the two weeks since they had returned from the hospital.
This trip to visit the HMS Bounty had been part of Irving’s plan to placate his son. He hated to break his word that he would be the tour guide, but he had two million riding on this picture. They were several days behind schedule, and they hadn’t even moved to shooting on the open sea yet.
Irving knocked on the dressing room set up in the soundstage’s corner, but didn’t wait for Clark to answer. “It’s me, Irving. I’m coming in.”
Clark stood in front of a full-length mirror. Fists jammed on his hips, he was glowering at the tan breeches that reached below his knees, the white stockings and black shoes with square, brass buckles.
“Just thought I’d see how it’s all going.”
“Ack.” Clark hitched up his breeches. “I’m trussed up like a sissified dandy.”
Holy hounds of hell, give me strength. Are we still dealing with this? “If you were a sissified dandy, those breeches would be made of Florentine velvet, with gold embroidery and silver buttons fashioned like roses instead of those plain ones. And you’d be wearing a paisley silk cravat tied at the neck of your ruffled shirt instead of that simple, open-necked cotton one.”
“Don’t be a wiseass. I’m not in the mood.” Clark ran a finger across his upper lip. Irving hadn’t noticed until now that shaving off his pencil mustache changed the shape of the man’s face. “I feel naked without it.”
“You don’t look like you—and I mean that in a good way.”
“Newspaper men, bootleggers, racketeers—those are the guys I should stick to. Even lawyers in a pinch, but eighteenth-century British sailors?” He collapsed into a chair and lit up a cigarette. “I was out of my mind to say yes, and I resent you talking me into it.”
But we’re a week into filming. You can’t pull out on me now. Irving took the chair opposite him and crossed one nonchalant leg over the other. “Do you trust me?”
“I guess so. Yeah, sure.”
“In that case, trust me when I say that you, Mister Clark Gable, have greater range than you know.”
Clark’s knee jiggled up and down. “Oh, I do, huh?”
Irving wanted to tell him that for three thousand a week, he’d play one-legged circus clowns if that’s what his employers decreed. America was scrambling out of the Great Depression, but it wasn’t there yet, and studios retained lawyers whose job it was to find loopholes to get them out of contracts. But Clark Gable was a major asset now, and major assets needed individual attention. Especially if they were the key component in what could turn out to be the most successful picture of Irving Thalberg’s career.
“Are you still intimidated by acting opposite Charles Laughton?”
Clark sucked through half his cigarette in a couple of seconds. When he responded, his voice was low and gravelly. “What do you think?”
“Sharing the screen with Laughton would overwhelm Sarah Bernhardt, but you can’t let that throw you off your game.”
“Remember the night at the beach? With Jean and those glowing fish? Charles and me, we had a heart-to-heart. I got the impression that we found some common ground to build on. But that Brit bastard doesn’t even look me in the eye during a take. I don’t ask for a lot but, for the love of Mike, I do want—no, I need the son-of-a-bitch I’m acting opposite to look at me.”
“Do you know why he does it?”
Clark threw up his arms in frustration. “Damned if I know. But if he can’t, then you can give these breeches to some other punk who doesn’t mind being treated like a sack of horseshit.”
Three hours into that late-night telephone call, Charles had admitted, “I’m scarcely able to look at him. It’s too much. He’s too much.”
“Too much of what?” Irving had asked.
“Of everything I’m not.” The clink of ice against glass had tinkled down the line. “I hate myself and I hate my character. On top of which, my character hates himself, too. But along comes Clark Gable, striding up and down like he’s Paul Bunyan. I’m sorry, Irving, but I cannot endure this agony a minute longer. You’ll have to get someone else to play Bligh. The toll it’s taking on me . . . You’re asking too much. Far, far too much.”
It had taken Irving forty minutes, but he’d got Charles where he needed to be. And now, to help Clark get where he needed to be, Irving had to betray their friendship.
“Charles doesn’t look at you because he finds you intimidating.”
“He? Finds me intimidating? That’s rich!”
“He wishes he had your braggadocio.”
“My bragga-what?”
“Your self-confidence.”
Clark killed his cigarette in a brass ashtray with a spyglass etched on the bottom. “It’s all an act.” He took in the smile creeping onto Irving’s face. “The one hundred percent secure actor doesn’t exist. But you must know that even if Laughton doesn’t.”
“I’m smiling because I was recalling the first time you came to my attention.”
“What of it?”
“L.B. was all gung-ho and railroaded me into casting you in The Easiest Way. If I do say so myself, I’m proud of my ability to spot potential, and charisma, and on-screen chemistry. But with you I thought maybe—maybe—this Gable guy could make a halfway decent third henchman to the left, but that’s about it.”
Clark barked out a laugh. “I’ll be damned!”
“I’m trying to illustrate how we can’t always be right about people.”
“Do you want to hear what I thought of you?”
Irving held his hands up like Clark was a bank robber. “Do I?”
“I asked myself, Why is this pantywaist deciding whether or not I get a contract?”
“Who put you straight?”
“Lionel Barrymore. He ripped into me. ‘No, you big lug. That’s Thalberg!’ Then I remembered seeing you on the Ben-Hur set, the day of the chariot race.”
“You were there?”
“I played a Roman guard. Third to the left, as I recall.”
He flashed that crooked Gable smile that, Irving was sure, had loosened many a brassiere in its time. Irving didn’t believe the It’s all an act line, but it suited his purpose.
“You need to remember that Charles hates his character. Bligh is taking a toll on him. And it’ll be that much harder when you’re out there filming on open water off Catalina.”
“That’s the part I’m looking forward to the most.”
“You wouldn’t be if you suffered dreadfully from seasickness.”
“Jesus. All that and he gets seasick?”
“Go easy on him is all I ask.”
“Order him to damned well look at me.”
Irving traced a large cross over his heart with a fingertip.
Clark lit up another cigarette and thrust it toward Irving. “You owe me a knockout role. A real doozy, okay?”
“Newspaperman, bootlegger, racketeer, lawyer. Got it.”
Irving wondered how David was doing with Junior. Poor little tyke. His mom had lost interest in motherhood, and his father was preoccupied soothing the disheveled feathers of movie-star egos. If there hadn’t been an HMS Bounty to distract him, this whole father-and-son-at-work day might have been a disaster.
“Speaking of lawyers,” Clark said, “Dave Selznick must be up to his jockstrap in them at this point.”
“Why is that?”
“He’s collected almost enough capital to finance Selznick International Pictures.”
Irving sank back into the chair. Had he been so preoccupied with Katherine that he’d missed what was going on right under his nose?
“Good for him.” His words came out hollow.
Irving had lately been nursing the idea of forming his own production company. Independence: that’s what he craved above all else. The freedom to create whichever pictures he wanted without having to convince the bureaucrats and bookkeepers. And now Dave had gone out and done exactly that. The guy was starting to make him feel like an also-ran in the Kentucky Derby. “I suppose L.B.’s got a hand in this. It can be useful to be the king’s son-in-law.”
“Or not.” A whiff of scorn blew across Clark’s face. “L.B. tried to use Dave’s gambling debts as leverage to keep him at Metro. Presented him with a million-dollar partnership. He told Nick Schenck and Eddie Mannix that—and I quote—‘with Irving’s health how it is, Dave might have to step into his shoes.’”
A roll of nausea coiled through Irving’s stomach.
Clark scratched at his leg through his woolen stockings. “From what I hear, Dave’s response was ‘I’m thirty-two. I can afford to fail,’ which is a ballsy way of telling Papa Bear to go shove it. And now he’s a handshake and a nod away from leasing the RKO studios a few blocks down from here.”
Irving licked his lips; his whole mouth had gone dry. He kept a crate of Coca-Cola bottles in his office in case he needed a lift. In a desk drawer, vials of vitamins helped to boost him through the day. Somewhere on the Bounty set, David had pockets filled with dried fruit and chocolate bars. But none of them were within reach and he felt too vulnerable to ask Clark what he had on hand.
“Who’s your source on all this?” he asked.
“That picture I shot for Twentieth Century, Call of the Wild. Most of it was out on location, which I loved, of course. But boy oh boy, that weather up in Washington State did not cooperate, so we had tons of time to kill. You get together a bunch of movie people and everybody talks movies.”
It wasn’t hard for Irving to connect the dots. The producer on Call of the Wild was Bill Goetz, who was married to Mayer’s daughter, Edie. His other daughter, Irene, was married to Selznick.
“I appreciate you telling me all this.” It must have taken a terrific load of grit and guts for Dave to knock back L.B.’s million-dollar carrot. “When you say he’s collected almost enough capital, does that mean he’s still looking for investors?”
An assistant director knocked three times. “Mr. Gable, they’ll be ready for you in ten.”
Clark cocked an eyebrow. “You investing in Dave’s company would blow L.B.’s stack sky high.”
All the more reason. “Just wondering.”
Irving led his son out of the soundstage. With David Lewis to Junior’s left, the three of them headed back toward Irving’s office. “Did you see all over the ship?”
Junior nodded. Irving loved how the little guy’s cheeks reddened with excitement.
“Which part was your favorite?”
“The big wheel that tells you where to go. Uncle David let me spin it around and around.”
“I hope you didn’t steer the Boundee onto the shore.”
“Don’t be silly, Daddy. It’s not a proper ship. The real one is on the sea on Santa Claus Island.”
“You’re right,” Irving said. “Silly Daddy got confused.”
Junior babbled on about how the anchor wasn’t really made of metal, but this news about Selznick had thrown Irving off balance. How close was he to reaching full financing? Would it hit too raw a nerve if L.B. learned that Irving had helped his renegade son-in-law? “You heard anything about Selznick’s move to strike out on his own?” he asked David.
“Does idle gossip count?”
“Clark told me Dave’s ready to lease studios from RKO.”
“But is he still threatening to quit the picture?”
“I managed to talk him off that cliff. But he made me promise to find him a sure-fire role.”
“I have a suggestion.”
“DADDY!” Junior mugged his you’re-ignoring-me face. “Did you hear me?”
“I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
“I checked all over and there are no pirates on the Boundee, so you can tell Uncle Clark he’s safe.”
“Thank you, son. I’ll let him know.”
Back in the office, with Junior installed at an empty secretary’s desk with paper and pencil, and instructions to draw the Boundee, Irving said, “So, your idea for Clark?”
David extracted a thick stack of papers from his tan leather briefcase.
Irving guessed it was at least thirty pages. “What’s this?”
“Synopsis for a new novel due for publication this time next year.”
Irving popped open a Coca-Cola. “Did I not make it quite clear that you were not to present me with a book synopsis any longer than twelve pages?”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“The book is over a thousand pages long.”
The soda had given him a quick rush, but Irving felt his breath coming in short, clipped wheezes. And he was disappointed in David that he was wasting his time on anything as impossible as this. Irving wondered if he’d been mistaken about David’s abilities. He liked the kid, even if he was living with James Whale in what Irving assumed was a one-bed relationship. “How the hell are we supposed to film a thousand-page novel?”
“There’s always a way to tell a story, no matter how long, how brief, how complicated, or how superficial.”
It was the one argument David could have made to ensure Irving kept listening. “But it’s set in modern day, right?”
“Well, no. It’s a period piece, but I’m telling you, the lead male is perfect for Gable.”
Most underlings would have tucked their chin to their neck, told him “Yessir,” and scampered away like a wounded puppy. But this kid was standing his ground. Irving admired that.
“Let’s set aside the fact that a thousand pages means an impossibly long movie. Tell me why a period story is tailor-made for Clark.”
“After being disowned by his father, the protagonist enrolls in West Point, but then gets thrown out and becomes a professional gambler.”
Irving could now see why David had persisted; this had the makings of a quintessential Gable role. He checked the clock on his wall; it wasn’t even eleven o’clock yet. Did Junior like soup? Irving couldn’t remember. Then again, everybody liked Mrs. Mayer’s chicken soup—it was the most popular item at Metro’s commissary. “Okay. I’ll bite. What’s the name of this scoundrel?”
“Rhett Butler.”