Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (7 page)

Trouble in Paradise

Doug also, lest we forget, launched his bride in society, making her a mainstay at the royal court of Pickfair. But it was her long days and nights as a lady-in-waiting at the manor that led to the first fracture in their marriage. When Joan, always a quick study, had acquired and assimilated all she needed to know about becoming a lady, she became increasingly bored with dinners at Pickfair. "The chit-chat at table was vapid," said Edward G. Robinson. 'After dinner, while the men had cigars and brandies and spoke about politics, the ladies talked about the servant problems, the length of skirts, Bullocks Wilshire versus Magnin's, and varieties of roses—whether or not the flowers in a garden should be all white or variegated." It was the ritual of weekends at the manor that eventually caused the opening rift between Joan and Doug. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons when they visited, it was the custom for Doug Sr. and Jr. to take off for a spot of tennis or golf at their club, leaving Joan alone in the main drawing room, knitting and crocheting, while Lady Mary remained upstairs in the main bedroom, napping. "One Sunday afternoon," said one source, "while Mary napped and the men played golf, a lonely Joan stood at the window, and realized it was Lucille LeSueur or Billie Cassin who was meekly waiting for her betters to drift in and toss her a few leftovers of love." Reverting to her former self, Joan said, "F__ this." She set her jaw, went to the hall phone, and called for her own car.

Another item of dissension between the couple was the disparity in their careers. Equal when they married, Joan's career escalated while Doug's lagged behind, at a pace of his choosing. "Movies are not the end-all and be-all of life," he said, words of blasphemy to Joan. "Doug never had to fight his way up the way I had, and had no taste for it either," she stated. He lacked her discipline and could not understand why they had to be in bed at ten each night when she was working. The tension in their marriage increased when Joan was making
Grand Hotel.
Burdened with the double duty of playing Flaemmchen, her first serious role, and the strain of trying to derail the indomitable Garbo, Crawford would come home and yell at her ebullient and always cheerful husband. "Don't talk to me," she would say, only to cry out minutes later, "For God's sake, say something!"

She was "a creature of her mood," Doug wrote in
Vanity Fair.
"When she is depressed she falls into an all-consuming depth of melancholy, out of which it is practically impossible to recover her. At these times she has long crying spells. When it is over she is like a flower that has had a sprinkling of rain and then blossoms out in brighter colors."

Doug also had his gloomy moments and neuroses, Joan claimed. "He might be painting. Suddenly he would think of a suit he hadn't worn in two or three years. Everything would be dropped until I found the suit for him. If we couldn't find it, he would go into his closet and throw every suit out in the middle of the floor, until he found the one he wanted."

While America wept and sympathized with Joan or Doug or both because they couldn't make their fairy-tale marriage work, a few jaundiced members of the press and the Hollywood establishment, including Bette Davis, snorted "Bullsugar!" The main reason for the split was the extracurricular hanky-panky the pair had been practicing for the past two years. "Chiseling with an extra girl, with whom he was seen motoring in broad daylight on Wilshire Boulevard," Doug was said to be busy on his own, while Joan carried on a lengthy torrid affair with M-G-M's hottest new leading man, Clark Gable.

"Yes, Clark and I had an affair, a
glorious affair, and it went on a
lot longer than anybody knows.
He was a wonderful man. Very
simple, pretty much the way he
was painted ... forever the
virile, ballsy folk hero."

—JOAN CRAWFORD

"Peasants by nature," she and Gable had a lot in common, said Joan. He was once called Billie (born William C. Gable). Both grew up poor, ignored, and uneducated. Both became M-G-M stars, glamorous, popular, durable; both had a compulsion about cleanliness. "He won't take a bath because he can't sit in water he's sat in. He will only shower, and does so several times a day. His bed linens must be changed several times a day. He shaves under his arms. He is so immaculately groomed and dressed, you could eat off him," said author Lyn Tornabene.

Gable arrived in Hollywood in 1925, the same year as Crawford. They appeared as extras in
The Merry Widow
but never met. Handsome and ambitious, intent on getting launched in pictures, the actor, it was said, "accommodated anyone important who could help his career." Coached by Josephine Dillon—his first wife, and seventeen years his senior—Gable at twenty-four was hired to tour with the Louis MacLoon Repertory Company, which featured Pauline Frederick, age forty-four, who bought him "silk shirts and underwear, and paid to have his teeth fixed." In New York he met Ria Langham, a rich Texas woman, also forty-four, who bought him his first smoking jacket and silk pajamas. Sued by his first wife for desertion, Gable married Langham, and the two returned to Hollywood, where he opened in
The Last Mile
at the Belasco Theater on June 3, 1930. The good reviews brought him an agent, Minna Wallis. He auditioned at Warner Bros. for the second lead in
Little Caesar,
lost the role to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., but was signed shortly thereafter to a one-year contract at M-G-M.

Playing a minor role in
Dance Fools Dance,
Gable made an immediate impact on the star of the film, Joan Crawford. She would forever recall the tingle of the moment when he grabbed her by the shoulders and threatened to kill her brother. "I felt such a sensation. My knees buckled. He was holding me by the shoulders and I said to myself, 'If he lets me go, I'll fall down.'"

They did not become lovers on that picture, Crawford claimed: she was a star and he wasn't. It would take Norma Shearer to balance the boards for Gable. In his next picture,
A Free Soul,
Norma played a rich, bossy New York socialite looking for cheap thrills. Enter Gable, as a dangerous young gangster. ''A new man, a new world," she murmured in a come-on to the handsome hood, who proceeded to smack her around and push her into a chair when she mocked his lower-class origins. "You take it and like it," he snarled in the scene that made women swoon and men applaud. ''A new trend in movie heroes was born," said writer Bill Davidson, "a breed of rough-hewn gents who assault their women with grapefruits, knuckles and brawn."

A Free Soul
brought Gable a new contract and the women of Metro, including Greta Garbo and Marion Davies, lined up begging to sample some of his onscreen "tough kind of loving." Offscreen, his affection, it was said, belonged to his respected wife, while the rest of him belonged to Joan Crawford.

In 1931 Joan and Clark made two pictures together,
Laughing Sinners
and
Possessed.
In a
Photoplay
article we learn of the vulnerable state of Joan's heart at this time. "Already disillusioned with Douglas Fairbanks, because her dream life had failed, she was still fond of Dodo, she was still the loyal wife, but her heart was empty. And to Joan, an empty heart meant she must seek a new tenant."

Clark also had a "For Rent" sign hanging out, and not always over his heart. Publicist Billie Ferguson stated: "He was a horny son of a gun. He seldom let a good-looking girl get by his dressing-room door without trying to make a pass at her." Sitting in a car, Gable once tried to fondle Myrna Loy. "With his wife sitting on the other side," said Miss Loy.

But it was in Joan Crawford that he found his match. "Never in his young life had he known such a thrilling and wonderful passion," said
Photoplay.
"Joan was aggressive," said Adela Rogers St. Johns. "She never played flirty games with men. If she wanted a guy, she let him know it straight out. And Clark was the same way. He didn't believe in poetry or small talk. It was always straight to business."

The initial phase of their lusty affair was conducted discreetly, in a cottage Joan had rented at Malibu. "We clung to each other, commiserating on how we were being abused and typecast by the studio," she said. At the studio they met in the mobile deluxe dressing room that Doug had given her as an anniversary gift. "In the morning, as soon as Joan arrived on the lot, Clark would go to her trailer," said Bill Ferguson. "You could hear them laughing and exchanging banter, followed by shouts and yelps of passion. You had to be a fool not to guess what was going on." Once Ferguson was escorting a reporter from
The Ladies Home Companion
around the studio. "We were passing by Joan's trailer," he said, "when it began to rock back and forth on its wheels. You could hear these moans and groans going on inside. Then Clark came out, all flushed, followed by Joan. I explained to the nice lady that they were rehearsing a scene for their new picture. Thankfully it never occurred to her to check that they were working on separate pictures at the time."

"I heard rumors that she was
seeing someone, and once, when
trouble arose between us, I
bluffed and said I planned on
having a private detective follow
her. 'Try!' she dared me,
'just try!' "

—DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, JR.

Doug Jr. said he was completely unaware of his wife's affair with Gable. He suspected she had a cottage in Malibu, but she wouldn't tell him where it was or how he could reach her. She liked to commune with nature, she told him, and he was grateful that Joan had recaptured her old zest for life. "Joan these days finds time to do two things she most likes to do—dance and drive," said the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner.
"Twice a week she goes to the Cocoanut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel with Doug Jr. and two escorts as a relief if Doug gets tired of dancing. Joan and her party always sit at table 27 and Joan always dances with a gardenia in her hand. She is always the first to reach the floor and the last to leave it. She adores dancing. And driving a car at seventy to get to work each morning."

Doug began to notice that his wife went to the studio at least an hour earlier than usual and returned home equally late. "She even went to work on her days off, explaining that she was so interested in what the others were doing."

In her autobiography Adela Rogers St. Johns told of one night at the Cocoanut Grove when she "stumbled upon" Joan and Clark Gable, behind the bandstand at the club.
"His
wife and
her
husband were sitting out front at a table, I literally felt stunned," she wrote.

"I was on my way to the ladies room," St. Johns elaborated in 1978. "I
knew
they were somewhere, because I had seen them sitting at the table; then they disappeared. I was well aware they were having an affair; I never wrote about it, because I was very close to both of them. But on this night the club was crawling with press and studio spies, and if Clark and Joan were misbehaving, it would be all over town the next day.

"Misbehaving?"
Adela laughed. "When I went looking for them, I found them literally stuck to each other, behind the bandstand. Clark had his back to me and she had her legs wrapped around him, in a position that only a supple dancer like Joan could assume. I yelled something stupid at them. They straightened themselves out, adjusted their clothes, and Joan, when she saw it was only me, said
'Adela! Darling!'
And Clark gave me one of his rogue grins. I was furious with both of them, and told them so. The next day each one sent me flowers, with a note from Joan that read, 'I bet you were
thrilled
watching!' And you want to know something? I was."

In due time Mrs. Clark Gable learned of her husband's flagrant affair with Crawford but, instead of confronting Clark, she went instead to his boss at M-G-M, Louis B. Mayer. The pious mogul, whose main mission in life was to provide wholesome pictures and untainted stars to the public, was shocked. He called Gable into his office. Metro stars never cheated on their spouses, he said. He reminded Gable of the morality clause in his contract. The affair with Crawford was finished, Mayer insisted. A meek Gable agreed. "He would have ended my career in fifteen minutes," said the future king of the lot. "I had no interest in becoming a waiter."

Joan too, faced with a wrecked career, made the ultimate sacrifice. She agreed to keep her hands off Gable. "Too many wonderful people would have been hurt," she said. L. B. Mayer, to lower the temptation between the two, changed the casting of their next scheduled film. Instead of Crawford, he cast Jean Harlow opposite Gable in
Red Dust,
and Joan was sent to Catalina Island to make
Rain
for another studio, United Artists.