The studio brass made their decision with the same casual ruthlessness they used when choosing which actors to send to pasture: they picked up the option on the Jonny & Boris Detective Agency picture. A real prestige number, they said. A velvet-rope crowd-pleaser. And for something like that, only one name could tower above the marquee in foot-high lights—Gable. The king of MGM himself, all teeth and tailored charm. Jonny didn’t give a damn who played him on the silver screen, but the studio cared plenty, so they hauled Gable out to the mean streets of Van Nuys for a “ride-along,” the kind they thought toughened up their leading men. He even brought along his brand-new bride, Carole Lombard, because in Hollywood the honeymoon never ends—it just gets new lighting.
Boris took one look at the pair—Gable in a fresh suit still creased from the wardrobe department, Carole smiling like she was hosting a radio charity drive—and he knew trouble had come knocking with a florist’s ribbon around its neck. Gable carried himself like a hero in a three-reel newsreel, but beneath the movie-star jaw he had the constitution of a cream puff you’d find in a Chinese bakery window. And that was rotten news, because this was the night Boris had promised Big Tim—yes, THAT Big Tim—that he’d finally knock a certain rival’s face clean off his skull and send it skipping down Victory Boulevard like a misplaced hubcap. It was hard honest work, and Boris doubted Clark would stomach the sight of his own shadow once things got messy. The man was built for close-ups, not close quarters.
But Jonny wasn’t worried—not about the job, not about the King of Hollywood, not about anything except Carole. She might’ve been a starlet to the rest of America, but to Jonny she was something rarer: a woman who’d spent so long propped up on a golden pedestal she forgot what real hands felt like. She’d married Gable thinking he was the last of the real men, a walking slab of swagger, but one brush with Van Nuys grit made her see the truth—he was just another studio mannequin, painted heroic for the paying customers. Then she spotted Jonny leaning against the streetlamp, a modern-day Neanderthal with a moral compass held together by scotch tape and bad intentions, and she knew in that instant that her Hollywood dreams were about to get trampled under the boots of something far more dangerous: the real thing.