Happy Birthday, King!

When I started this thing, I made a conscious decision to ignore birthdays. Too many, too often. I can't even keep up on the weekly DVD updates that I'm pretty sure nobody cares about anyway.

But this is the King.

Clark Gable earned that nickname when he was voted the King of Hollywood by some poll; Ed Sullivan crowned him in 1938 and it stuck.

I recently finished the book Deadly Illusions: Jean Harlow and the Murder of Paul Bern by former MGM story editor Samuel Marx and a dancer named Joyce Vanderveen, who was presumably his girlfriend at the time. The book, published in 1983, isn't great. MGM Producer Paul Bern married Jean Harlow in July of 1932. Two months later, his body was found in their home with a bullet through the brain. Officially, his death was labeled a suicide, though that conclusion has been under scrutiny since day one, mostly because several MGM executives (including LB himself) were at the scene several hours before the cops were called. The situation grew even fishier when Bern's brother announced that Paul had never had a secret first wife - even though no one had asked.

It's a fascinating subject for a book, and Marx & Vanderveen uncover a great deal of evidence that the secret first wife - who was scizophrenic - probably killed Bern. But a lot of their evidence is hearsay. The not-entirely-reliable biographer Charles Higham calls Marx out of the blue to say that Howard Strickling, MGM's head of publicity at the time, called him out of the blue about writing his (Strickling's) memoir. Strickling showed up at Higham's and confessed everything about the Paul Bern cover-up - after insisting that Higham neither record the conversation nor take notes. And of course, Strickling died before Higham revealed anything to Marx. Please.

There's a lot of extraneous information (Joyce lost her appetite when the restaurant they went to was decorated with hunting trophies! Parking is hard in Los Angeles!) that has nothing to do with Paul Bern or Jean Harlow. What is ultimately an occasionally dull 260-page book, could likely be trimmed to the length of a fascinating article in Vanity Fair. (Of course, it didn't help matters that I started Deadly Illusions right after reading James Ellroy's My Dark Places, a much better book about a man digging into the past to solve the death of someone close to him.)

And why do I bring all this up on Gable's birthday? Because reading about Jean Harlow made me want to see her in action, so I watched Red Dust last night. Directed by an uncredited (for some reason) Victor Fleming, Red Dust is the film Baby Jean was making when Bern died, but I chose it because it's my favorite Harlow movie and the best of the six films she made with Gable. He owns and runs a rubber plantation in Indochina. She's a "hostess" in trouble with the law in Saigon, hiding out until the heat dies down. Neither can resist the other's raw sex appeal and the sparks and banter fly.

Trouble ensues when the new surveyor shows up from the States with his wife (Mary Astor) in tow, but everything works out in the end. John Lee Mahin's script is packed with indelible dialogue, none of which I can remember at the moment. And if I have to re-watch the movie, I won't get this damn thing posted until tonight and no one will read it until after the King's birthday is over. Suffice it to say that never has a debate between roquefort and gorgonzola been so delightful.

Red Dust is not available on DVD yet (though it does show up occasionally on Turner Classic Movies), but two other Gable/Harlow vehicles are: China Seas and Wife vs. Secretary. Both are included in the divine Clark Gable Signature Collection, as is John Ford's 1953 remake of Red Dust, Mogambo. Re-set in Africa, Mogambo features Gable in the same role, with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly in for Harlow and Astor. Unlike Red Dust, Mogambo was made under the strictures of the production code. And it shows.