As soon as Rushmore left, I called the delinquent husband and got him over to my house. “How could you do this, and just after you’re reconciled with your wife?” I said. “If you wanted something like that weekend, why did you go in a car that anybody can recognize? Why didn’t you go further afield—to Santa Barbara, Laguna, La Jolla?”
“I guess I was out of my mind.”
“You must have been. You and your wife are so happy now.”
“How can I tell her?”
“Tell her the truth. Ask her to say, when her dear friends come to gossip, that she knows all about it, and it happened a long time ago. If you’re lucky, she’ll forgive you.”
I heard from him within an hour. “I told her,” he said, “and she was wonderful. Now things are better than ever.” And they remained that way until his death.
There’s probably more temptation to the square mile in our town than anywhere else on earth. A male movie star is bait to all seven ages of women, including female movie stars. A good-looking, virile male can take his choice among literally thousands of girls when it comes to romance. Some of them go into it for thrills, some in the hope of advancing their careers. Some of them get hurt, and some do the hurting. Many sell themselves too cheaply, a few value their favors too highly.
Gable could have had his pick of half the women in Hollywood after the plane carrying Carole Lombard home from a defense-bond drive crashed on Table Rock Mountain, Nevada. He couldn’t appear in public or private without starting a near riot. They flocked around him like moths around a candle—duchesses, show girls, movie stars, socialites—name them, he could have had them. He had the knack of taking just one look at a girl and flattering her to swooning point. He looked like hundred-proof romance, and was, unless you knew about his dental plates, a full upper and lower set. He hadn’t a tooth of his own in his head.
As a newcomer to Hollywood, he’d faced the usual months of torment having his teeth, which were in poor shape, fixed and capped to repair the cavities and fill the gaps. There was one difference between Clark and other recruits of his age group like Jimmy Cagney, Spencer Tracy, and Pat O’Brien. Clark had a rich wife at the time in Ria Langham. On her money, he had all his teeth yanked and a false set installed so natural-looking they deceived almost everybody but a dentist.
The script of Command Decision, filmed long after Ria had made her exit and he’d paid her a quarter of a million dollars for the divorce, called for a slam-bang screen battle between Clark and Walter Pidgeon, to be staged near a fire that was blazing outdoors. The two of them mixed it up like heavyweights. In the middle of a wild, openmouthed swing, Clark’s uppers and lowers went sailing out of his jaw straight into the flames. He collapsed on the ground, helpless with laughter. “They ought to see the King of Hollywood now,” he gasped.