HAMMOND, Michael

‘Sturdy Companionship’: Carole Lombard and Clark Gable

 

Frederick Lewis Allen’s account of the nineteen thirties, Since Yesterday, spent a good deal of attention on the changes in the ideal modern woman from the previous ‘reckless’ decade of the 1920s. Compared to the ‘bored-looking’ affectation fashionable in that decade the woman of the early nineteen thirties was ‘alert looking’. ‘She had a pert, uptilted nose and an agreeably intelligent expression … She conveyed a sense of competence … This was the sort of girl who might be able to go out and get a job … when her father or her husband’s income stopped’. (Allen, 1940 118.)  He could have been describing Carole Lombard’s star persona throughout the 1930s. Photoplay was more succinct. “She’s as delectably feminine as Eve but watch out! That’s no apple in her hand, it’s a blackjack!” (Seymore 1937, 12) Her husband, and  ultra-emblem of 30s masculinity, Clark Gable described her: ‘You can trust that little screwball with your life or your hopes or your weaknesses, and she wouldn’t even know how to think about letting you down.’ (Harris 2002, 182) His comment seems to endorse the image of Lombard as both screwball comedy queen, male buddy and implicitly, a guardian of a threatened masculinity. Their relationship, as presented in the fan press, offered a model for childless working couples that was both utilitarian and modern. Photoplay called it a ‘sturdy companionship’. Through an analysis of fan magazines this paper will explore the resonances that the Gable/Lombard couple had for shifting concepts of relationships in and out of marriage during the Depression and for the language of recovery of the New Deal.

 

Dr Michael Hammond is a Senior Lecturer in Film History at the University of Southampton.