WHEN MARK ROTHKO AND CLARK GABLE SHARED A STAGE

Sarah Bay Gachot

Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas (photo by Hickey-Robertson)

PORTLAND, Oregon — Mark Rothko was born 113 years ago on September 25, 1903. By the 1950s he would become a giant in the pantheon of 20th-century Abstract Expressionism, painting colors in swaths, rectangles, and squares that overlap and embrace each other. His canvases are hypnotizing in their large scale, and unmistakable in style. In the early 20th century he was decades away from the painter we know, but unwittingly developing the character of a “tortured artist.” There was a fair amount of frustration in Rothko’s early years. But he was not yet “Rothko.”

Mark Rothko (photo by Consuelo Kanaga via Wikimedia Commons)

His name was Mark Rothkowitz. In 1923 he gave up on a scholarship to Yale University after two years, fueled by an intense distaste for the school’s country-club-esque environment that felt, to him, antithetical to learning. Rothkowitz returned to his childhood home of Portland, Oregon, a city to which his family had immigrated from Dvinsk, Russia, when he was 10 years old. His mother was still alive, and he had three siblings that were older, out of the house, and working. His father had died long ago from cancer, just months after Rothkowitz arrived in the United States.

Here, in Portland, he was not a painter yet. He, like his artist friends and inspirations, had other avenues to explore. Paul Klee, for example, began as a gifted violin player at the behest of his music-teacher father and singer mother. Milton Avery, later a friend and mentor to Rothko, worked in a manufacturing and insurance company into his thirties. Barnett Newman, also a friend, worked for his father’s menswear company until the Depression devastated the business. Rothkowitz likewise immersed himself in a world that was not his future career, but one that would inform his life as a painter. He joined an acting troupe.

It was then that two artists of very different mediums with very different backgrounds met under temporary circumstances, finding themselves in the same place for that same brief moment. Mark Rothkowitz and the actor Clark Gable, then known as William C. Gable, were both dabbling in dramatics at the Portland Theater Guild in Oregon.

Rothkowitz had studied drama in grade school and expressed to friends at Yale his interest in the theater. But the stage didn’t stick. By the time Josephine Dillon, director of the Portland troupe, left for Hollywood in the summer of 1924 with Gable on her heels, Rothkowitz was considering returning to New York City. He would enroll in the New School of Design and, later, the Arts Students League. He would shorten his name.

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh on the cover of Silver Screen for ‘Gone With the Wind ‘(1939) (image courtesy the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) (click to enlarge)

Gable was also still young and not famous. Between the fall of 1923 and the spring of 1924, Rothkowitz and Gable were in at least two plays together, as advertised in the Oregonian. In the scope of Rothko’s life, the meeting of these two men takes on a mythical significance. “I was a better actor than Clark Gable,” said Rothko, according to James E. B. Breslin’s Mark Rothko: a Biography. In later years, during Gable’s ascension as a shimmering celebrity following his role in Gone With the Wind, Rothko claimed that Gable had been his understudy, though I found no evidence of this.

Gable grew up on a farm. His father called him “Sissy,” though Gable preferred his middle name, William, or Billy. During Gable’s teens, father and son worked on an oil field together in Bigheart, Oklahoma — 12-hour shifts as a tool dresser “on the business end of a sixteen-pound sledge,” said Gable to the New York Herald Tribune decades later in 1956. Soon, Gable ended up in Oregon quite by accident, having joined a traveling theater troupe to get the hell out of Dodge, as they say. The ensemble stalled out and folded in the face of a snowstorm in Montana. Gable and the troupe’s piano player hopped a freight train bound for Bend, Oregon, where the piano player had an uncle. When they arrived, the uncle was nowhere to be found, so Gable made his way to Portland. He worked various day jobs and pursued acting by night. The next year he followed his mentor Josephine Dillon to Hollywood to try it in the movies. He would marry her in December of 1924.

As a leading man, Clark Gable may not ping on the radar of classic Hollywood stars with the same hypnotic pitch of, say, Cary Grant, or even Jimmy Stewart. With his dark pomaded hair, confident smirk, olive skin, and pencil moustache, Gable’s power was his iconic swagger that trundled through classic cinema. He was not a particularly good actor, but he was a good movie star. His most famous line is likely remembered because it’s true: “Frankly, my dear Scarlett, I don’t give a damn,” he says as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. Along with Scarlett, Gable didn’t seem to “give a damn” about his big ears, ham hands, or casual, loping gait that he snuck into some of his roles, especially early on in his career……………….

Clark Gable (image courtesy the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) (click to enlarge)

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