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CLARK GABLE AND THE $50,000 PUNCH IN THE MOUTH Continued headlines with that smashed lip. “Boom Town” was my final sustained assignment with Gable. I was to see him, more than a decade later, when I was at Paramount and he starred in “Teacher’s Pet.” Back in September, 1940, I was about to start work at MGM with him and Hedy Lamarr on “Comrade X” but left suddenly to return to Paramount. It is natural for me to conjecture that, had I stayed at MGM to work regularly on Gable films, I might have been with Carole Lombard that fatal night. I had known her since she first came under contract at Paramount as a leading lady and me making that trip would not have been beyond possibilities. Gable was such a magnetic Personality that it was almost impossible not to have heard colorfully about him long before he became a super-star. I got briefed on him even before he was in movies. One of Paramount’s last silent movies wa^ “Abie’s Irish Rose” It was so close to the end of that era that three sound sequences were shoved into it as a last-minute effort to let it be billed as “part talkie.” One of these sequences showed the two stars of the movie in a war camp. Buddy Rogers played the piano while Nancy Carroll tap-danced. It was Nancy’s first film. I was to handle a lot of her pictures. She had been signed as a result of playing Roxie Hart in “Chicago” at the Music Box Theatre in Hollywood, late in 1927. She kept telling everyone about this young actor named Gable who had played a reporter in the play with her. Nobody took her seriously. Then in 1930, Gable starred as Killer Mears in “The Last Mile” when it had a road-show engagement in Los Angeles. Spencer Tracy had starred in this role on Broadway. I was to see Gable in that play. Richard Arien, then a new young star at Paramount and a good friend of all the guys in Publicity, took three of us flacks to see an actor he kept shouting someday would be a screen biggie. “The Last Mile” should have done it for Clark. Lionel Barrymore, about to direct “The Bird of Paradise,” saw Gable and flipped. He tested Clark as the native hero, but nobody agreed with Barrymore’s enthusiasm. Irving Thalberg turned thumbs down. So did Turn to Page 24 PRIDE’S GALLERY Presents “Wedgewood State Seal Series” Commemorating the Bicentennial of American Independence. Series consists of thirteen sets (Limited editions) representing each of the original States, to be completed by 1976. Set No. I The Commonwealth of Virginia...$20 8121 VAN NUYS BLVD., PANORAMA CITY, CALIF. TELEPHONE (213) 994-7838 There’s a man in Van Nuys who makes wonderful things out of canvas 21