Chapter Twenty-One #3
“You know it better than you think,” Mazelle assured her, hoping that was true.
Miss Hattie almost looked convinced. “Just stay out of sight. If anyone asks, tell ’em you’re an extra and you’re my guest. But don’t get in anyone’s way—hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mazelle said.
Miss Hattie had brought Mazelle to that morning’s shoot although Mazelle had no business being here, so Mazelle was determined to keep out of sight and bring her no trouble.
She was wearing the tattered dress she’d worn during her Atlanta evacuation scene weeks earlier, her head wrapped like Miss Hattie’s.
Mazelle figured she would bring less attention to herself if she blended in like a prop. A slave costume made her invisible.
But as soon as Miss Hattie left her to join the director on the set, a white crewman breezed toward Mazelle, startling her.
She parted her lips to explain herself, but he only handed her a long-handled broom.
“Put that away somewhere, will ya?” he said, barely looking at her.
Mazelle hesitated, and the crewman shot her an impatient look.
“Yessir.” Grudgingly, Mazelle took the broom. Served her right for dressing the part! But hell, she might get offered screen time if she held the broom, making her costume complete. She just hoped no one would make her start sweeping.
Mazelle forgot her irritation when a man’s voice boomed from beyond the partition, deep and familiar. “Tell Selznick they finally got the fit right. All he had to do was call my tailor.”
Clark Gable! She would know his voice in the dark.
Mazelle couldn’t resist a peek around the corner.
Everyone called Gable the King of Hollywood, and he cut an impressive figure with his height, mustache, and dark hair slicked back.
She was surprised at how honeyed Gable’s skin looked against his white shirt collar.
His heavy smoking jacket was a deep sangria red, with a slightly lighter quilted collar.
“Thank God—I’m drowning in memos,” Mr. Fleming said, striding to Gable to examine the fit. They were the same height, taller than six feet. Fleming’s hair was streaked with white.
Miss Hattie had her own chair with her name printed on it near the set, but now she was standing beneath the portrait of Vivien Leigh, literally overshadowed as she awaited her instructions.
Mazelle hadn’t heard the director address Miss Hattie when she walked on the set after he called for her, but Miss Hattie was preoccupied, her brow knitted, her lips moving slightly.
She was still mentally running her lines.
“There she is,” Clark Gable said, greeting Miss Hattie warmly. “My favorite gal!”
Mazelle thought of how envious most women would be at the way Clark Gable was grinning at Miss Hattie.
Fayard Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers was more handsome to Mazelle, but she couldn’t deny the electricity in Clark Gable’s smile.
He exuded a gentlemanly grace he might have worked years to refine.
Mazelle realized she was holding her breath.
“Guess we can start now that you finally showed up,” Miss Hattie teased him.
Mr. Fleming said he wanted to work on the blocking one more time, and Mazelle ducked out of sight when they turned to walk closer to her.
Clinging to her broom with excitement, Mazelle stole gazes at the rehearsal as Mr. Fleming walked Clark Gable through how and when he should pick up and light his cigar, then cross to the portrait to grab the beveled bottle and offer Miss Hattie a matching glass of the brown tea doubling as sherry.
Mazelle heard her mutter she wished the tea had sugar like her sweet tea at home.
Then it was time to shoot. The set went tomb-quiet and Fleming said, “Action!”
“… I’d like to apologize, Mr. Rhett, about it’s not being a boy.” Mazelle heaved a relieved sigh when Miss Hattie remembered the line that had tripped her up.
Mazelle mouthed the dialogue along with Clark Gable as he answered her with all of Rhett Butler’s excited swagger: “Oh, hush your mouth, Mammy. Who wants a boy? Boys aren’t any use to anybody. Don’t you think I’m proof of that? Have a drink of sherry, Mammy…”
Miss Hattie looked scandalized by his offer. After a glance away, as if someone might scold her, she belted back the drink from the glass he’d given her just as she had many times during the rehearsals.
But this time, Miss Hattie coughed the way Mother would, wiping her mouth. She looked at the glass in her hand with accusation.
Everyone on the set burst into raucous laughter at Miss Hattie’s eyes wide with shock.
After the day’s shoot, Miss Hattie was stern-faced and quiet, not her usual jovial self. She still wore her headscarf after changing her clothes, but although she had shed the thick skirts for a contemporary black dress, she still walked as if she were carrying a heavy load.
“Let’s stop by the card room,” she told Mazelle.
The shoot had only gotten worse after the prank with her tea, which Clark Gable had switched to scotch to surprise her.
Miss Hattie had been so knocked off balance after the prank that she forgot to walk away and rustle her skirt so Rhett would demand to see her red skirt hidden underneath—and they had to do yet another retake.
Mazelle wasn’t surprised that Miss Hattie wanted to collect herself somewhere she wouldn’t run into anyone from the cast or crew who had been laughing at her.
Just like during real slavery days, most Negroes avoided showing their true feelings at their jobs.
Otis and a couple of other Negro extras had improvised the card room in a cramped supply closet: a small table and six wooden folding chairs.
Sometimes Butterfly McQueen and Everett Brown, who played Big Sam, stopped by the card room too, but today it was only Mazelle, Miss Hattie, Otis, and an older extra everyone called Snow, with grizzled gray hair.
Mazelle wasn’t much good at poker, or even bid whist or spades, but she cherished the fellowship of the other Negro actors.
Before now, she had never been on a set where she wasn’t the only Negro in sight—another reason she was glad she’d been promised a screen test by Dark Dream Pictures after Miss Hattie suggested her.
Hattie had laid down strict rules for the card room, which was a closely held secret among the Negro cast: No smoking or drinking.
No loud talking or laughing. No music. No big bets.
The card room was simply their private space to be left alone, where they didn’t have to worry about every word and action.
As soon as they were all seated around the cramped table, the door flew open without the customary triple knock, which was the unofficial code. Quick as a blink, Snow hid the unopened deck beneath the table, but Mazelle and Otis froze like caught schoolchildren.
Clark Gable’s frame filled the narrow doorway. Like Miss Hattie, he had taken off his heavy smoking jacket after the shoot. His white costume shirt was halfway unbuttoned.
When Miss Hattie rose to her feet, at first Mazelle thought it was a formality. It wasn’t.
“You’re a damn fool!” Miss Hattie sounded like Mammy talking to Rhett, except Mammy would not have dared to cuss at him. And Miss Hattie pronounced words more carefully in true life, not chopped up like Mammy’s dialect. “A damn fool to the bone.”
“Can’t argue with you on that one,” Clark said, chuckling as he took an empty seat at the table. Otis and Snow scooted aside to make more room for him. “Don’t tell me you can’t take a joke, darlin’. Come on, now. If you could have seen the look on your face!”
The whole set was buzzing about his prank on Miss Hattie: He had asked his assistant to secretly replace the brown prop tea in the decanter with scotch so strong that it stung her mouth and eyes.
With the press documenting every step of progress on the shoot, Mazelle was worried the incident might make the papers.
Clark cut a private look to Otis and whispered, “Is she really this mad?”
Otis nodded emphatically.
Clark turned back to Miss Hattie. “There you go again, trying to make me take stock of my actions. Think about consequences.”
“Somebody’s got to. The way you step on folks’ toes and keep on walking…”
Snow’s deck of cards reappeared on the table—maybe he hoped to lighten the uncomfortable mood—so Clark nodded to Snow to deal him into the hand.
Snow quickly fanned out cards to each of them, face down.
Despite the irritation Mazelle shared with Miss Hattie, her heart flew at the idea of playing poker with Clark Gable.
All Mazelle had in her pocket was loose change, but it would have to do.
“I don’t suppose you heard about the ribbing I got trying to learn that damn dance,” Clark said to Miss Hattie. He hesitated, not picking up his cards yet. “What’s wild?”
“You’re wild,” Miss Hattie said.
“Whatever you want, Mr. Gable, suh,” Snow said, his dialect so thick that Mazelle wondered if he had unconsciously slipped into character.
“Nonsense, I’m only a guest,” Clark said.
“Whose guest?” Miss Hattie snapped.
“Deuces wild,” Mazelle said, speaking up for the first time since Clark’s arrival in the doorway, using a card term she had only recently learned. She hoped he would glance at her, but he wouldn’t look away from Miss Hattie. His face was drawn and weary, joking forgotten.
“Now, Hattie,” Clark said, “you’re making me feel bad, if you’re really this sore about it. I didn’t think one belt would hurt. You’ve never been afraid of a drink—”
Miss Hattie moved closer to Clark to stand over him, and Clark drew back a bit from her fury. She whipped off her white headscarf as if to be certain he knew he wasn’t talking to Mammy. Her hair was matted down with a hairnet.
“Every single one of them was laughing,” she said. “From Fleming on down to whoever put those ‘White Only’ signs on the bathrooms, every one of them was laughing at me.”