Clark Gable, Doris Day. . .and me!

The caller said she and her husband were writing a movie script, “Teacher’s Pet,” about a New York City newspaper city editor and a college journalism teacher – Clark Gable and Doris Day. Would I like to help?

Things like that fall out of the sky when you’re a newspaper reporter struggling to make a living for a wife and two children. It was 1957.

Fay Kanin and her husband, Michael, legends as writers for the screen and stage in Hollywood and on New York’s Broadway, had read a series I had just written in the old Los Angeles Mirror. It was about African-Americans in our city: their problems getting housing, education, employment and justice in L.A.

The working script arrived at my desk shortly – one of the memoirs I have socked away in my files to this day. It was an effort to get away from the traditional way newspaper reporters had been depicted on the screen. I liked that.

The facts ought to be up front. But in the then-required way of reporting the who, what, why, where, when and how in a story, the why is often terribly neglected.

“What can you tell us about that?” the Kanins wanted to know. “See how we could weave it into the script.”

I had a field day describing how a city room ought to look, how the reporters shout, “Copy boy!” when they are up against deadline and summon the copy boy – or girl – to deliver a “take” of their story a piece at a time to go to the city desk for quick editing and then on to the composing room to be set in type.

But then we got to the meat of the plot: Clark Gable was depicted as sort of a hit-and-run guy, getting shallow coverage of a crime, while he had a copy boy played by Nick Adams, whose mother wanted Clark to fire him so she could get him a broad education first.

Gable frowned on that, but then got assigned by his publisher to go to a class in journalism, taught by Day, playing the role of the daughter of a country newspaper editor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for an editorial he had written.

Eventually Gable sees the light, falls in love with Doris. (I didn’t even try to dabble with that part of the plot.)

The Kanins won a nomination for the Oscar that year for the best original plot written for the screen. And Gig Young, who played the role of a noted psychology professor – and the boyfriend Doris eventually kissed off for Clark – won an Oscar for the best actor in a supporting role.

I kept in touch with the Kanins and once asked if they could help me get my talented son a role as an actor. And when I was working later for RAND, the think tank, they asked me if I could get their son a job there. Neither of us was successful.

When I decided to write this piece, I got out my old copy of the film where I was identified on American Movie Classics as a technical consultant, and compared it with the script.

I don’t know how much the Kanins or Gable and Day got from the highly successful film – but, by golly, the $500 I got didn’t compare with the fun I got from playing my role.

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