God bless you, most darling Darling. Be gentle with yourself. Allow yourself happiness. There is no paying life in advance for what it will do to you. It asks of one’s unarmored heart, and one must give it. There is no other way.... When you find happiness, take it. Don’t question it too much.
Goodbye, my Clark. I love you as I always shall.
You may wonder why I am using this. Millicent gave me a copy of this letter to read and asked if I thought she should send it to Clark. I said: “By all means.” She never heard from him again, but I think it is one of the most beautiful love letters I have ever read.
Millicent Rogers found nobody else, never married again. Clark, on the other hand, got as far as proposing to another woman, Dolly O’Brien, which was rare with him. Julius Fleischmann, with his yeast fortune, stayed in love with his wife Dolly after she fell into the deep end for handsome, polo-playing Jay O’Brien. When he agreed to a divorce, he settled $6,000,000 on her. “I want you to be comfortable,” he said. One year later Julius fell from his pony and died on the polo field, leaving an estate of $66,000,000, which could have been the former Mrs. Fleischmann’s if she hadn’t been in such a hurry.
Dolly, blond, blue-eyed, and full of fun, lived in style. She wouldn’t go on a train without taking along her own bottled water, silk sheets, and bedding. She was a lot like Carole Lombard, and Clark was searching for another Carole. When Dolly met him a few years after Jay’s death, he thought he’d found the woman he wanted as his wife. But Dolly turned him down. “We live in two different worlds,” she told him. “You’re a rich actor, I’m a rich woman. You like the outdoors, hunting and fishing, but I’m a luxury-loving baby. Your life, frankly, would bore me to death.”
The aging male enjoys a far better time than the average aging female. If he’s a big enough star, the producers throw him into picture after picture playing opposite girls young enough to be his daughters. Coop, Gable, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne—they all were pitched into these June-and-December screen romances, and the public finally rebelled. But Duke Wayne was the first with sense enough to cry halt and insist on acting his age.
Too often the wives of both stars and producers haven’t enough to do to keep them content and out of mischief. Their husbands go to the studio and spend their day working with beautiful girls. The girls, wanting better parts in pictures, will do virtually anything they can to please them. Reality and normal values got lost. The men live with both feet off the ground. They can have any girl they try for, as easy as plucking a peach off a tree.
When they arrive home, they often find waiting a wife who can’t compare with the studio girls in looks. She may be complaining—I’ve heard it a thousand times—that she’s been stuck at home with only the children and servants for company. “Why don’t you take me out more? Why didn’t you tell me there was a party last night? Why do you have to work so late so often?”
It can get irksome. I am certain one reason for the flight of movie making from Hollywood to Europe has been the pressing desire for producers, writers, directors, and top-money stars to escape from nagging wives. The wives, if they’re lucky, may be given a week or so in Paris or Rome or London in the course of production. Then back they go to the house and the children while the husbands live it up for months on end. It’s a pattern that has set Hollywood on its ear. And it’s crowded our divorce courts.
Louis B. Mayer married his first wife, Margaret Shenberg, daughter of a Boston synagogue cantor, when he was nineteen and earning a meager living as a scrap-metal dealer. He worked like a stevedore, breaking into the entertainment business with a nickelodeon in Haverhill, Massachusetts, where Margaret served behind the wicket selling tickets.