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Claudette's Like That
[Continued from page 23]
sympathetic, considerate and kind, funloving and gay, and as refreshingly wholesome as a sunrise in the desert — that s Claudette. If you get the idea that I like her a lot, you are so right.
Of course, I pretend to be as innocent as a nesting baby bird about the whole thing, but Claudette says that she has noticed that this beautiful friendship of ours may lag for long stretches, but the minute she starts a picture with an attractive male star it seems to take on a spurt and a glow. And if the attractive male star happens to be Clark Gable, it seems, according to Claudette, that I am so overcome by a sudden rush of friendship that I drop by the set practically every day to see her — and Gable. During the production of "Boom Town" it appears I couldn't have been friendlier.
Which brings us up to a paragraph I read in a popular national weekly magazine one morning recently. Said the item: ". . . some advance publicity for 'Boom Town,' and as far as we can see it is going to offer more riches and beauty than any film in history. There will be the combined charms of Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, and Claudette Colbert. . . . As if that weren't magnificent enough, the whole thing will culminate in a strip tease by Clark Gable, who is guaranteed by the management to take off his pants."
Well, when I read that my day was made. First, because Myrna Loy isn't in "Boom Town" at all {it's Hedy Lamarr), and it did my heart good to discover that those very fastidiously correct weekly magazines can confuse picture casts, too. It's a little something I've been doing for years, to the annoyance of my editors, but even I never confused a Myrna Loy with a Hedy Lamarr. And second, because if Clark Gable was going to do a Gypsy Rose Lee I wasn't going to miss it. I drove right through a couple of stop signals and nearly had a truck in my lap, but I made an all-time record for Culver City and the M-G-M studios.
Alas, girls, What-a-Man Gable does not do a strip tease. He merely appears in an old-fashioned union suit, the droopy kind, for one brief sequence, which wasn't quite brief enough for Clark as he was embarrassed as hell about the whole thing. Pleased, yet not pleased, if you know what I mean, I wandered over to the "Boom Town" set.
"Hello," said Claudette, "I haven't seen you since yesterday. You can stay and have lunch with me. Isn't it a pity Clark isn't working today? And you wore your new dress — and going in for red polish again I see." {Those big eyes of La Colbert never miss a trick.)
"I prefer to ignore your insinuations," I said haughtily. "And besides, you, a happily married woman, wouldn't understand about such things. As for lunching with you, if I had my choice of all the brilliant and charming men and women of history — Cleopatra, Salome, Alexander the Great, Helen of Troy, Don Juan, Madame Pompadour, Mark Antony, Marie Antoinette, and the Man in the Iron Mask — I would choose to have lunch with you."
"Ha," said Claudette who is so lacking in conceit that I often wonder how she ever became an actress. "You mean no one else asked you today. Relax."
That's the trouble with Claudette. You can't flatter her. She is simply allergic to flattery in all forms, and if you ever think you are going to put a fast one over on Colbert by a line of drip and droll you will find yourself sadly mistaken. Many a producer, director, writer and jewelry salesman has tried that and failed. She can detect a phony a mile away. Depressingly sincere herself she heartily dislikes insincerity and hypocrisy in others, but after seven years in Hollywood she has learned to cover up her distaste with a very disarming smile, if she doesn't know you very well. Rather than tell a lot of silly lies in the Hollywood tradition, and feign an enthusiasm for something she doesn't feel, Claudette just turns on her charming, disarming smile, and has discovered that it will get her out of any situation short of murder. Like a number of oil wells owned by my acquaintances, Claudette simply won't gush. She may not believe what you say, but you can definitely believe what she says. And after all, that is something.
How she has done as well as she has in the land of the gilded tongue I'm sure I don't know. But well she has done. She arrived in town in the midst of all the frenzied artificiality of the Glamour Period — a shy, unassuming, sensitive girl who was so self-conscious that she refused to go to Hollywood night clubs or parties for fear people would say, "Is that Claudette Colbert? Whatever made Paramount sign her. They must be crazy." Now she is accepted as one of Hollywood's social leaders and highest paid stars. One of the highest paid, yes, but certainly not one of the richest, for money goes through Claudette's fingers like so much sawdust. Her contributions to all charities are lavish. She cannot bear to read about, or see, humanity suffering. Immediately, the cool reserve and poise that she has built for herself, melts like ice in the sun, and she goes completely to pieces, but not until she has signed a few substantial checks. Emotions may be easy in Hollywood, but checks are not so easy. Since the invasion of her native France, Claudette has contributed so magnanimously to the poor refugees that I am sure that I will have to give her a benefit before long so she can get a square meal.
On her way up, Claudette lost most of her shyness and self-consciousness, though it still pops out occasionally, but she has never lost her sensitiveness, unfortunately, and like most sensitive people she goes out of her way to slap herself down. After the preview of one of her pictures Claudette, like all stars, reads her reviews — and always they are very flattering to Miss Colbert. Except one, perhaps. A reviewer'for some little, paper in the Middle West with possibly a hundred readers will write that in her new picture Miss Colbert stinks. Immediately, Claudette forgets all the wonderful things that the ace reviewers have written about her, all the
marvelous things that her friends and family have said, she forgets everything except that one little writer with his hundred readers. He suddenly becomes right, everybody else is wrong. She stinks. She knew it all the time. She worries, and worries, and worries. Times like that you want to kick her teeth in.
When she first started in pictures, someone— probably a Fuller brush man, or a postman, or a Western Union boy — told her that her right profile wa? bad. It isn't. Her friends, her family, and the leading directors and cameramen of Hollywood have been telling her for years that there is nothing wrong with it, but Claudette is fully convinced that there is {though she couldn't tell you to save her life who told her that), and she'll have scenes re-written and sets re-made so that she won't be caught with her wrong side.
Although she is known today as one of the gayest, most approachable actresses on a studio set there was a time when Claudette was considered cold and aloof with no sense of humor. Claudette had a sense of humor then, as she has now, but she was so busy being sensitive (a laundress probably told her that people were talking about her) and self-conscious that she never gave herself a chance to warm up. If the director of her picture moped on the set, Claudette immediately assumed that he was thinking, "Why did I get stuck with Colbert? Why didn't I get Bette Davis for this part?" Or if the leading man, suffering from a hangover no doubt, appeared morose Claudette was but positive he was saying to himself, "Why the hell didn't I do the picture at Metro? I could have had Crawford." She'd go to her dressing room and worry, and worry, and worry. She probably would have worried herself right out of pictures if that grand guy, Gregory La Cava, hadn't been assigned to direct her in "She Married Her Boss." La Cava knows an inferiority complex when he meets one out, even if it is all done up in Cellophane, so he started calling Claudette "The Fretting Frog." The company froze in its tracks the first time he called her that, fully expecting that Miss Colbert would go for his scalp. But she didn't, she laughed. And the next morning she had painted on her stage dressing room "The Fretting Frog's Puddle." From then on it was nip and tuck as to whom could be gayer, Colbert or La Cava.
People who work with Claudette are crazy about her. She's considerate, honest, and right down to earth, without even a dash of that prima donna chichi that so many of the glamour babes go in for. The various friends she had made at studios are not a matter of convenience with her, as most studio friendships are, but they remain her good friends through the years. She is as interested in them, and their problems today as she was the first year she met them. When they come to her for advice she doesn't soft soap them, she really takes the trouble to give them excellent advice.
Though she has become very socialminded these last few years {she has finally decided that people might be discussing the weather and not her when she enters a room or a night club) Claudette rarely gives out with a. large party. She prefers to have six or eight congenial
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Silver Screen