FRANKLY, MY DEAR...

By ADA CALHOUN
The New York Times, 3/30/08

CLARK GABLE
Tormented Star

By David Bret
Illustrated. 287 pages
Carroll & Graf Publishers. $26

David Bret’s angle on Clark Gable is this: Gable was “gay for pay” and “rough trade,” and he enjoyed having sex “for bucks.” In addition, he “would sometimes scrub his penis until it bled” and used a device to prolong erections. If these tidbits from the book’s first few pages aren’t too much information for you, you’re in luck. This breathtakingly trashy biography does not skimp on sordid anecdotes.

How does Bret, the author of numerous celebrity biographies, know so much about Hollywood stars’ sex lives? Judging by this new book’s convoluted wording, he really doesn’t. “Clark Gable: Tormented Star” hedges its bets with lines like “Indeed, unlikely as this seems, the two may even have been lovers,” and “It was alleged that a threesome took place.” The effect is “Hollywood Babylon” lite.

For all its smut, the book is painfully unsexy. Bret accuses Gable of having had halitosis, hepatitis, rotting teeth and “shovel-like” hands. With clear disgust, he also calls Gable a hypocrite for maintaining a macho sex-symbol image and for engaging in “homophobic rantings,” even though he’d slept with men.

And yet Bret undermines his own arguments. Why would Gable have been “tormented” by his bisexual past if Hollywood were as overrun by gay stars as the book implies? If Gable used gay sex for career advancement, why would he have bedded men like the aspiring actor Earle Larimore, who had no more than an aunt on Broadway to his credit, and the “slab of beefcake” Rod La Rocque, hardly a studio bigwig? If a voracious Gable had such “overworked genitals,” why should it be so shocking that there were some men among his countless conquests?

“Clark Gable” teems with innuendo and exclamation points, but still presents a thoroughly joyless view of old Hollywood. When Bret looks at Fred Astaire, he sees “long, bony legs.” When he writes of Marilyn Monroe, it’s to say she “never wore panties, even during her menstrual cycle.” And when he considers Gable, it’s only as “the archetypal repressed bisexual,” a “testosterone-charged stud” or — as the introduction’s clunky title has it — “A Hunk of Rough.”

Bret doesn’t just disapprove of Gable as a man; he finds him lacking as an actor, and even offers this condescending note on Gable’s style: “He would quite unnecessarily overplay the machismo and take immense pains to conceal a feminine side that if brought to the fore would have made him a great actor instead of an inordinately good one.”

But Bret has even less regard for Gable’s fans. Who among us requires an eight-page plot summary of “Gone With the Wind”? (Sample line: “For once Scarlett is innocent, yet Rhett insists on her wearing a scarlet — in other words, a whore’s — dress when they attend a party at Twelve Oaks.”)

And who among us could love Clark Gable only if he’d never kissed a man?

To read a New York Times review of a bio of Ava Gardner, one of Clark Gable's most incendiary leading ladies, click here.