Holllyweird, Karloffornia

A lot of people will tell you that Clark Gable was the King of Hollywood. It's an easy enough assertion to make, what with that "Gone With The Wind" and "It Happened One Night" resume and winning an Oscar for best actor. Eighty-two films, back in the Golden Age, when stars were stars and publicists were publicists. I first became aware of Mister Gable not as Rhett Butler, but as a caricature in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Those ears. And later, my mother regaled me with stories about how he used to chase poor Vivien Leigh around with his raging halitosis generated by his full set of dentures.
I expect that Boris Karloff eventually surrendered to false teeth, since legend has it that removing his partial upper plate gave the Frankenstein Monster's cheeks that extra sunken appearance. As for the bad breath, one would suspect that since he was stitched together from the remains of a number of cadavers, it wasn't just his breath that stunk. But in real life, Boris was quite the urbane gentleman, and was hardly the monster he portrayed so many times on screen. He also made more than two hundred screen appearances in a career that stretched from 1919 until 1971, two years after his death. That's a pretty neat trick.
What I am suggesting here is that if there was to be a King of Hollywood, why shouldn't it be Boris Karloff? That's certainly the way I viewed the world back when I was ten years old. I watched a lot of really horrible movies on "Creature Features" just because I saw him listed in the TV Guide. I have also seen Bride of Frankenstein more times than I can count, and I consider his turn as the Monster in this film completely Oscar-worthy, but that's not how things got done back in the 1930's. Perhaps ironically, this year also found Mister Gable nominated for Mutiny on the Bounty, along with his co-stars Franchot Tone and Charles Laughton. It was Laughton's wife, Elsa Lanchester who played the dual role of Mary Shelley and The Bride. No Academy Awards for them. They were in monster movies.
The justice, it would seem, comes from the fact that Clark missed out on his second Oscar there, too. Boris Karloff was never awarded an Oscar, not even an honorary statuette. He did receive a Grammy for his recording of How The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. It was that TV special that got him a chance to work with Chuck Jones, animator of Warner Brothers fame. And now it would be an excellent time to point out that Frankenstein's Monster also makes an appearance in that Warner Brothers cartoon, "Hollywood Steps Out" from 1941. Sure, I know we're comparing apples and oranges here, but I never lost a night's sleep because of one of Clark Gable's performances. The same cannot be said of poor Vivien Leigh.