Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty

Chapter 9. Blaze of Noon

146 CHAPTER 9 These were Claudette’s golden days, which would lose their luster by the end of the 1940s. Meanwhile, her fan base increased. According to the New York Times (7 January 1937), the Motion Picture Herald ranked her eighth among Hollywood’s moneymaking stars of 1936; more important, the year before she came in sixth in terms of popularity, after Shirley Temple, Will Rogers, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Joan Crawford. The New York Times (21 March 1937) also reported that seniors at the New York University School of Commerce voted Robert Taylor and Claudette their favorite movie stars. Even young girls liked Claudette; the same paper (14 January 1938) summarized the results of a survey conducted by the Boys Athletic League, in which boys failed to single out any favorite female star, only males. The girls, however, came up with a balanced ten-best list: Shirley Temple, Jane Withers, Tyrone Power, Sonja Henie, Robert Taylor, Loretta Young, Ginger Rogers, Errol Flynn, Claudette, and Clark Gable. When one realizes that 22,416 children between the ages of six and sixteen were polled, the girls evidenced an unusually high level of taste. Blaze of Noon Even Communists were fond of Claudette: “Putting aside their dialectical materialism . . . the Communists, in completely American fashion, selected Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert as their favorite movie stars.” Perhaps the reason was that they interpreted It Happened One Night as an attack on capitalism, with Claudette as an unwitting victim or knew that She Married Her Boss was written by one of their own, Sidney Buchman. By 1936, Paramount was aware of Claudette’s extraordinary appeal; in June the studio rewarded her with an amended contract that called for seven films between 6 June 1936 and 25 April 1939. In October 1937, the number was reduced to five, at $100,000 per picture: Maid of Salem (10 August 1936–17 October 1936), I Met Him in Paris (4 January 1937–13 March 1937), Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (26 October 1937–3 January 1938), Zaza (25 June 1938–2 September 1938), and Midnight (24 October 1938–31 December 1938). She was also allowed to make one film for Warners, which turned out to be Tovarich. In 1938 she became Hollywood’s highest-paid star. The New York Times (23 January 1939) disclosed the salaries of corporation employees, including actors; Claudette’s salary for the 1938 calendar year was $301,944. Her Paramount contract underwent periodic revision, always to her advantage and always including outside productions, a condition of which she availed herself (Drums along the Mohawk, It’s a Wonderful World, Boom Town). If travel was involved, she was guaranteed first-class transportation, including a drawing room. As her popularity increased, so did her salary; by 1943, the year before she left the studio, she was making $150,000 a film. Early in 1940, MGM offered her the female lead in Boom Town with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy as costars. She knew that she would not be top billed, but it was still an opportunity to team up again with Gable. She now appreciated the art of It Happened One Night, even though in 1934 she would never have predicted its inclusion in the pantheon of film comedy. The proof came in August 1940 when the Museum of Modern Art opened its retrospective “Forty Years of American Film Comedy” with It Happened One Night. BLAZE OF NOON 147 Although Claudette was third billed after Gable and Tracy, and the director was the “aggressively heterosexual” Jack Conway, it was amazing that she could neutralize the high testosterone level that threatened to overwhelm the film, especially since her character, an English teacher tired of teaching poetry to hormonal adolescents, was only a plot point. Boom Town is the story of two oil prospectors or “wildcatters,” Gable and Tracy, as “Big John” Macmasters and Jonathan Sand, respectively, whose relationship runs the gamut from male bonding to schadenfreude, as their fortunes wax and wane—one succeeding at the other’s expense—until at the end they are back where they started, but obviously about to strike it rich again. Claudette’s character, Betsy, is originally Jonathan’s great love, until she gets a look at Macmasters; then it is It Happened One Night all over again. A few hours is all it takes for Betsy and Macmasters—or, to moviegoers , Claudette and Gable...