“As a star, I have the right to pick my own parts, to decide whether or not a script is right for me. That is clearly understood by everyone who seeks to employ me.
“If the final script does not meet my requirements, the burden must remain with the company and not with me. The studio did submit a script I liked, which is why I signed to do the picture in the first place. Before we could get into production, they began making changes and the script they were finally ready to shoot bore little resemblance to the one I had approved.” He was right, the picture has never been made.
* * * * *
When press agents nudge an actor hard enough, he imagines he can write, produce, direct, and act simultaneously, as busy as a one-armed paper hanger. That was a delusion Clark Gable avoided.
“Why don’t you want to direct, like everybody else?” I asked him not long before he died.
“It’s hard enough to act without going into all those monkeyshines,” he said. “I just want to act and get the money. Let them take the grief.”
Clark loved money all his working life. I don’t remember that he ever gave a party. He nursed a grievance against Metro from the time Mayer loaned him to David Selznick to make Gone With the Wind. Clark thought he should have received an extra bonus for that, not simply continue on his salary of $7000 a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
When he cast off from Metro in 1954 and entrusted his business affairs to MCA, he boasted that he had “never really made any big money” until then. Like the rest of the monarchs of the movies, he wanted what they call “the most”—highest salary, biggest percentage.
“Why do you fight so hard for those enormous salaries?” I asked him, as I’ve asked them all. “Why can’t you put back some investment in the industry when it’s done so much for you?”
“I want the most because you’re only important if you get it.”