Why Clark Gable threatened to quit ‘Gone with the Wind’: “You won’t have a Rhett Butler”
Much has been said about the lengthy search for the right actor to play Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind. It took two years to finally alight on Vivien Leigh after producer David O Selznick narrowed the pool of contenders to 30. Less has been made of the casting process for Rhett Butler. Selznick wanted Clark Gable from the beginning, believing him to be the only perfect option, but when the actor’s studio, MGM, refused to loan him out for the film, Selznick had to look elsewhere.
Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn were considered, but the producer had his heart set on Gable and eventually made several concessions to ensure that he secured him. Selznick made his appeal directly to the head of MGM, Louis B Mayer, who, conveniently, was his father-in-law. In return for loaning out Gable and providing a third of the production budget, Selznick would hand over half of the film’s profits to MGM and pay Gable’s weekly salary.
Given the lengths to which Selznick went to get the actor, it must have felt catastrophic when Gable threatened to quit the picture on the very first day of shooting. Instead of being the erratic act of a prima movie star, Gable’s ultimatum was about demanding equality behind the scenes.
Gone with the Wind revolved around slavery, and although one of its supporting stars, Hattie McDaniel became the first Black person to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy, its racist portrayal of Black characters remains a blight on its legacy. Blatant bigotry wasn’t just taking place in the script, though. Lennie Bluett, who played a soldier in the film, showed up to set on the first day and found, to his astonishment, that the toilets for the cast were segregated. When he voiced his anger to his fellow background actors, they told him, “Look, Lennie, we’ve got babies at home. We’ve got kids at home we’ve gotta feed. They could kick us off the film if we raise a ruckus about this problem.”
He wasn’t satisfied with this answer, so he decided to take the issue to the film’s star. He knocked on Gable’s door, told him there was an issue, and asked him for two seconds of his time. He led the actor to the toilets, where the signs designating ‘coloured’ and ‘white’ were clearly visible. Gable immediately leapt to action.
“He got on the phone, one of those portable phones they rolled up to him,” Bluett remembered. “And called Victor Fleming, the director… And he called the property master. And I don’t know who else he called, but he cussed like a sailor, and he said, ‘If you don’t get those [God damn] signs down, you don’t have a Rhett Butler in this film.’”
It worked. Although it didn’t fix any of the issues with the portrayal of Black characters in the film, it ensured that the checkered legacy of Gone with the Wind had more to do with what happened on-screen than off.
