A new word was entering America’s vocabulary 90 years ago: teenagers.
True, adolescents had been around since the dawn of time. But surprisingly, they weren’t called “teenagers” until the 1930s, when researchers first noticed the demographic was emerging as a source of spending power. Tinseltown pounced on the prospect, targeting its movies — and the stars who kept theater seats filled — to them.
In the case of one girl, Hollywood succeeded a little too well.
Fifteen-year-old Martha Vichnes was, in her family’s words, “movie crazy.” And she was in love, too. Not some passing crush on a high school jock, but a deeply passionate, intensely burning love.
Martha was in love with the king of Hollywood.
The minute he first appeared on the silver screen in 1931, Clark Gable made it his home. A popular actor from the start, his breakout role in 1934’s It Happened One Night propelled him to superstardom. Women were drawn to his combination of rugged vitality and smooth, graceful charm. Men saw him as one of their own: a man’s man.
Martha dearly loved Gable. She spent hour after hour in her family’s Brooklyn apartment writing hundreds of gushing letters to him. Although Gable never answered even one of them, she eventually believed that he loved her, too. By the summer of 1936, she decided it was time they went on a date.
Although Martha may have viewed herself as starlet material, nobody else did. “She began to imagine she was beautiful,” her mother later told reporters, “which she really isn’t. She’s what we call a mud-gutter blonde.”
What she lacked in looks, the teenager more than made up for in moxie. If her king wouldn’t come to her in Brooklyn, she would go to Hollywood for their first date.
Her father had just received a $500 bonus for his military service in France during World War I. He spent $100 paying bills and stashed the remaining $400 (worth almost $10,000 today) in a bureau drawer as savings.
Martha secretly swiped it. Then, when her parents were at an American Legion ball one night, she tucked her 6-year-old brother, Harold, into bed and whispered, “I’m going to California. Don’t tell anyone.”
With that, she hopped on a plane and headed to Hollywood — and was probably disappointed when Gable wasn’t waiting at the airport.
Undeterred, Martha took a room in the posh Roosevelt Hotel befitting her status as a starlet-to-be. Then she immediately went stargazing.
It started with a visit to the Trocadero Cafe, where the head waiter pointed out Robert Taylor. Martha found him handsome enough, but no Clark Gable. She later spotted Joan Crawford. Her verdict? “The actresses really aren’t much. They use too much mascara and greasepaint.”
A shopping spree followed the next day. With $65 for an evening gown, a $7 pair of matching sandals and a hat for $2, daddy’s money was going fast. “The champagne cocktails cost $3.50, and I had to give the waiter a dollar tip — think of it!”
Martha finally got to see her beloved Clark Gable the day after that. She bought a ticket at the legendary Chinese Theatre and watched him in San Francisco, his latest blockbuster, which she pronounced “simply swell.”
Back in Brooklyn, the teen’s parents had discovered Martha was missing. Six-year-olds aren’t the most trustworthy confidants, and Harold blabbed. The father frantically called the American Legion in Los Angeles and shared his daughter’s physical description. Members then fanned out looking for her.
By the time they eventually caught up with her, Martha had blown through all but $6 of her father’s money. Legionnaires chipped in and bought her a one-way train ticket home.
“Forget it,” was all indulgent Joseph Vichnes said when reporters asked about his prodigal daughter. Her mother placed the blame squarely on Papa. “That’s the trouble. She’s daddy’s girl. He’s petted her entirely too much,” though she admitted Martha was “the best girl in the world.”
And what about the lovestruck teenager herself? “I had a swell time,” she confessed when she was finally home and all was forgiven. Would she do it again, a reporter wanted to know. Maybe, Martha said, though with the caveat that she should “think twice” before any other such adventure.
Her father may have been surprisingly forgiving, but his compassion didn’t extend beyond the family circle. He later sued the airline for the $167 cost of the plane ticket for having sold it to a minor. Vichnes lost both that case and an appeal.