Free Hollywood by Garson Kanin Page B

“I’m in this picture.”
    She wanted to be around, to stay with the feel of things. She did not want to lose the momentum of work. On these days, she would hang around the set, watching; come along and look at the rushes; talk to various members of the cast. She was valuable.
    I thought her a fine actress, one of the finest I had ever encountered. She was completely untrained, had never appeared on the legitimate stage. She came to Hollywood from Fort Wayne, Indiana, became a child actress, and later went to work for Mack Sennett as one of his bathing beauties. But the movies were growing, the business was burgeoning, and there was room at the top for a beautiful, talented girl.
    Tremendously versatile, one of her successes was My Man Godfrey , a so-called screwball comedy, in which she struck new and original comic notes. But she was equally comfortable in serious drama. I remember an early talkie called Ned McCobb’s Daughter , from the play by Sidney Howard, who also wrote They Knew What They Wanted . Her performance in Twentieth Century , opposite John Barrymore, is one of the best ever seen on the American screen. I once complimented her on her admirable range.
    “It’s the guys. It’s all those goddamn, different studs I’ve knocked around with. You know how it is. You always try to get in solid with the son of a bitch by playing his game. So when I was around with Bob Riskin—the prick never wanted to marry me, can you feature it?—I started in reading books. I don’t mean just bullshit. I mean book books. Aldous Huxley and Jane Austen. Charles Dickens. William Faulkner. Because Bob, he was an intellectual. My first. Brainy as a bastard. And I felt I had to keep up. You know how it is. And then with Russ Colombo, he—Jesus Christ, he was a handsome hunk— with him, I got to know all about music and songs and songwriting and publishers. And about records and recordings and which was the best key and big bands and sidemen and drummers. I even started writing songs. Sometimes with him. We’d be in the hay and in between we’d make up songs. Can you imagine it? Listen, there were a few times there we got so interested in the songs we forgot to get our ashes hauled!” She laughed.
    Has there ever been such a laugh? It had the joyous sound of pealing bells. She would bend over, slap her perfect calf, or the floor, or a piece of furniture. She would sink into a chair or to the ground. She would throw her head back. And you would be riveted by that neck. That throat.
    “And not only music. With Russ, I became just about the best goddamn Italian cook there is. I can do anything in that line because I used to do it for him. Learned it. Chicken Cacciatora. Eggplant Parmigiano. Veal Marsala. Squid. Anything. You name it. Now, with Philo it was different. Because, after all, Philo. It was legitimate. We were married.” (Philo was her name for William Powell because he had once played the detective Philo Vance.) “With him, it was wife stuff. That’s when I learned how to put a house together, and have everything supplied. And how to take care of his clothes. And what had to be dry cleaned and what not. I mean, I was the best fuckin’ wife you ever saw. I mean a ladylike wife. Because that’s how Philo wanted it.
    “And now with Clark, it’s the ranch and the horses and the fishing and the shooting. The only trouble is—about the shooting, I mean—I’ve gotten to be so much better than he is that I’ve got to hold back. I can shoot like a sonofabitch, y’know. Anything. So when you say ‘versatile’—well, I owe it all to the boys. They made me what I am today.”
    “Isn’t it crazy?” Carole said one day over coffee in my trailer. “I just think about that husband of mine all the time. I’m really stuck on the bastard. That’s something , isn’t it?”
    “Not so remarkable,” I said, “considering he’s Clark Gable, and sixty million other women are stuck on him. Now, if you happened to be