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28 One Last Adventure at MGM With Gable, the MPA catalyzed an embarrassing episode, one that betrayed him as a great star in need of great filmmakers. Upon his return from duty overseas, he became the featured speaker at an MPA gathering. McGuinness (who bore a broad resemblance to Gable) wrote a dunderheaded speech for him, which Gable dutifully read. “It has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes. There were no communists either in the foxholes where I was,” said Gable. “The boys sit around and talk about home and what they want to find when they get back—and it’s not communism.” Since Gable was still on active duty, his commanding officer had to face objections that the actorsoldier had, in the words of a protesting letter writer, “cast aspersions on the Allies.” At a meeting of motion-picture industry union officials in May 1944, Mary McCall, then head of the Screen Writers Guild, was reported to crack, “Put them wise to Gable, the foxhole flier.” Gable left the service in June seeking a career tune-up. In July 1944, MGM announced a Gable-Fleming film called This Strange Adventure. The source material was way off base for his persona. Clyde Brion Davis’s Anointed was a wry, plainspoken novel about a walking tabula rasa named Harry Patterson who sets out to sea at age fourteen and makes it his quest to cross the Black Ocean and find “the reason for everything.” The Anointed, like other weird, wispy, and distinctive properties, might have turned into a magical big-studio fluke (à la the Lighton-Hathaway-Cooper Peter Ibbetson). The resulting film, Adventure , was mighty odd, but not affecting or true to the book. Aside from some character names and a quest to find the meaning of life, the script derives only a handful of scenes, subplots, and lines from the novel. There are bar brawls and a glamourized version of the book’s San Francisco librarian (Greer Garson) and a parade of romantic/marital Srag_9780375407482_3p_07_r2.z.qxp 10/13/08 10:37 AM Page 436 spats between her and Gable’s long-in-the-tooth but also childish Harry Patterson. There’s a shipwreck; plenty of chatter about God, the final judgment, and the immortal soul; and a few scraps of Davis’s imagery (a lot is made of water, smoke, and vine curling clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, counterclockwise in the Southern). An understandably befuddled Gable went to Frances Marion for advice. She marched to her old friend Vic and berated him for casting Clark and Greer Garson in “a studio plot to kill off two stars.” She advised Fleming that Adventure was “a great title” with “a false promise.” Marion ’s tale seems exaggerated when you learn that Garson fought for her role and that, during filming, the movie was called Strange Adventure or This Strange Adventure or The Big Shore Leave. But Marion was spot-on about the “mish-mash” quality of Gable’s role and indeed the entire production. MGM first considered mounting a movie version of The Anointed in 1938, to star the age-appropriate Freddie Bartholomew, but the studio announced the film in 1941 as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy. Three years later a battery of writers, including John Huston’s then-favorite co-writer, Anthony Veiller, conspired with Fleming and the producer Sam Zimbalist to turn Harry Patterson from a wandering teenage naïf into a take-charge merchant marine boatswain fit for Gable. The adaptation was difficult, and the process made Vic think, seriously this time, of retirement. Fleming’s contract ran out on December 31, 1944, and MGM couldn’t get him to renew it. The production executives were so eager to retain one of their most expert and consistent moneymakers that they extended the contract to March 15, 1945, and then continued to pay him at his highest contract rate while he worked on Adventure. Word may not have trickled down to each guard on the MGM lot. Early in April, an MGM gate cop stopped him from entering the studio and asked for his pass. Fleming, insulted, turned around and went home. Vidor sympathized with this kind of gruffness. When you worked as hard as Vic did at MGM, Vidor said, “You felt like you built the buildings.” When asked for his name or a pass, Vidor “would continue on and try to get where I was going, but [Vic] would just...

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