Guarding Gable

by Nat Segaloff

Guarding Gable -an original audio novel by Nat Segaloff-starts with an actual event in the life of the screen's number one star and becomes a story worthy of a Hollywood movie. It's 1942 and World War Two is just beginning. Beloved actress Carole Lombard is killed in a plane crash while returning from a bond-selling tour and her husband, Clark Gable, is beyond consolation. Depressed to the point of suicide, he enlists in the US Army Air Corps, telling his bosses at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that he doesn't care if he ever comes back. Naturally, MGM is apoplectic at the prospect of losing their top box office attraction. In desperation, studio head Louis B. Mayer leans on a lowly publicist, Alan Greenberg, to enlist with Gable with orders to keep him alive during World War Two. That's hard to do when Gable insists on flying combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe. Not only that, he and Alan fall in love with the same woman-and, if you're Alan, how do you win the girl if your competition is Clark Gable? Guarding Gable is a story of love, war, and humor. This enhanced audiobook combines narrative with sounds of war, environments, and excerpts from the training film that Gable made while reluctantly grounded. There's also a little rough language; after all, this is the Army. Guarding Gable runs approximately five hours and is told and produced by the author, Nat Segaloff. It's a special presentation by Blackstone Audio from Bear Manor Media.

6 pages, Audio CD

Published April 17, 2018

About the author

Nat Segaloff is a writer-producer-journalist. He covered the film industry for The Boston Herald, but has also variously been a studio publicist (Fox, UA, Columbia), college teacher (Boston University, Boston College), and broadcaster (Group W, CBS, Storer). He is the author of twenty books including Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin, Arthur Penn: American Director and Final Cuts: The Last Films of 50 Great Directors in addition to career monographs on Stirling Silliphant, Walon Green, Paul Mazursky and John Milius. His writing has appeared in such varied periodicals as Film Comment, Written By, International Documentary, Animation Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Time Out (US), MacWorld and American Movie Classics Magazine. He was also senior reviewer for AudiobookCafe.com and contributing writer to Moving Pictures magazine.

In 1996 he formed the multi-media production company Alien Voices with actors Leonard Nimoy and actor John de Lancie and produced five best-selling, fully dramatized audio plays for Simon & Schuster: The Time Machine, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, The Invisible Man and The First Men in the Moon, all of which feature Star Trek casts.

Reviews

[Wesley Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first glance, it might seem an exploration of actor Clark Gable's World War II service in the Army Air Corps after the death of his beloved wife, Carole Lombard, might be best suited to a non-fiction treatment. Happily, author Nat Segaloff chose to write an imaginative memoir featuring Gable's years in uniform as told from the Point of View of the apparently fictional Alan Greenberg. Greenberg is a junior publicist assigned by MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer to make sure Gable doesn't get into any dangerous situations, especially since the death of his wife has left Gable in a suicidal mood. So we see a friendship between star and publicist grow as well as a love triangle between them and a British publicist named Mavis Roberts.

Few authors can come close to having the credentials to pull off this novel like Nat Segaloff. Writer/ producer/ journalist Segaloff has penned 16 books on Hollywood subjects, was a studio publicist himself, has written stage and audio-plays, not to mention co-authoring and co-producing TV and radio scripts, many with a sci-fi bent. And these are but a few of his career highlights.

Not surprisingly, Guarding Gable is full of Segaloff's awareness of how a star of Gable's magnitude would be treated in the 1940s by the studio, the military, and the public. On top of that, what was most impressive to me were the many scenes of Gable flying over the continent in various bombing missions despite orders to stay on the ground. The detail Segaloff provides about the huge planes and the fliers who manned them in the Army Air Corps gives the book a level of excitement and suspense it wouldn't have had if Gable had followed orders. Or if Segaloff had given us a nonfiction book reliant on material necessarily cited from research sources.

The depth of the relationships Segaloff paints is first rate, especially between Gable and Greenberg as the star of Gone With the Wind gains more and more respect for his "orderly." The romance between Greenberg and Roberts is far from a typical one and is also handled very deftly as the story progresses. The numerous supporting characters are vividly sketched and all entirely believable.

So who is the primary audience for this novel? Certainly Gable fans and enthusiasts of the 1940s era in Hollywood. So too World War II buffs interested in the Army Air Corps in Europe. But I'd go further and say anyone who enjoys a good story that is vivid, richly detailed, fast-paced, and illuminating should enjoy this one.

While I didn't get to hear it, I understand the audiobook for Guarding Gable is enhanced with sound effects and dialogue from the actual films Gable made during the war. Sounds like a fun way to go if audiobooks is your thing.


This review first appeared at BookPleasures.com on Feb. 9, 2019:
https://waa.ai/oclw