Oscar Show 1935: How Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night) was Dragged from Union Station the Night of the 7th Awards
Shirley Temple and Claudette Colbert at the 1934 Academy Awards.
The 7th Oscars, held 86 years ago on February 27, 1935, took place, like this year’s will, in downtown Los Angeles, specifically at the Biltmore Bowl, a magnificent two-story, 1,000-seat ballroom within the Biltmore Hotel, where the show had been held once before and would be held six times thereafter before being destroyed by a fire in the 1950s.
That night marked the first time that a single film dominated the awards: Frank Capra’s romantic-comedy It Happened One Night, a production of Harry Cohn’s Poverty Row operation Columbia Pictures, swept the top five honors — picture, director (Capra), screenplay (Robert Riskin), actor (Clark Gable) and actress (Claudette Colbert) — something that only two other films, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, have done since.
Gable and Colbert: Reluctant Stars
Nobody had expected much from It Happened One Night, including its stars. Gable had been sent by M-G-M, where he was under contract, to Columbia as a punishment, and Colbert, who had clashed with Capra on their 1927 film For the Love of Mike, had refused to do the film unless her salary was doubled and the film was completed in just four weeks.
The film, which was originally titled Night Bus and was shot in 1933, during the Great Depression, centers on a spoiled heiress (Colbert) who runs away and is pursued — first for a story, and eventually for love — by a working-class newspaperman (Gable).
Upon the film’s completion, Colbert told a friend, “I just finished the worst picture in the world.”
But critics and the public vehemently disagreed, as It Happened One Night garnered rave reviews and became Columbia’s biggest box-office hit to date, not least due to its sexual overtones, which were risque for its day (e.g. Colbert hitchhikes a ride by lifting her skirt above the knee, Gable donned just an undershirt and the two sleep together separated only by “the walls of Jericho”).
The members of the young Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences nominated it for five Oscars, just one behind the field-leader One Night of Love and as many as were accorded to Cleopatra and The Gay Divorcee.
Colbert did not alter her longstanding plans to embark for a vacation in New York on the very night of the Oscars ceremony, figuring she stood no chance against fellow nominees One Night of Love‘s Grace Moore and The Barretts of Wimpole Street‘s Norma Shearer (the wife of MGM production chief Irving Thalberg), but also Bette Davis, who was denied nomination for Of Human Bondage causing outcry that led to allowing write-in votes for the first time.
Consequently, when Oscars host Irvin S. Cobb announced at the Biltmore Bowl that Colbert had won the best actress Oscar, she was at Union Station, already seated in her compartment aboard the luxury Super Chief train, waiting to depart for Chicago and then New York.
With It Happened One Night‘s sweep progressing, Cohn, anxious for photographs to publicize his film, reportedly screamed at Columbia publicists, “Find her!”
Three of them, accompanied by publicist Leroy Johnston, hopped into a limousine and, with motorcycle escorts, rushed to Union Station a mere 1.7 miles away.
There, they located Colbert and told her to come with them. “I’ll miss my train!” she protested, but they had convinced the Super Chief to delay its departure. “I’m not dressed!” she continued, to which Johnston reportedly replied, “It’s the Nobel Prize of motion pictures!” Colbert reluctantly acquiesced, joining them in the limo for a quick trip back to the Biltmore.
Self-conscious about being in a traveling skirt-suit (designed for her by the great Travis Banton) rather than a gown, she insisted on accessing the podium not through the crowd, but rather via a side entrance, and holding her mink coat up in front of her.
Shirley Temple, who received a special “juvenile award” later in the ceremony, was set to make the presentation, and was put on a chair to do so.
“I’m afraid I am just going to be very foolish and cry,” Colbert said as she accepted the award. Then she posed with Temple for a few photos, before excusing herself and being rushed back to Union Station, where she caught her train and where, on Sunday, the 93rd Oscars will be held.
