"I can't act worth a damn.  When I die they'll put on my tombstone, 'He was lucky and he knew it.'"  Clark Gable 

 

It's hard to believe a person who appeared in 81 movies, won an Academy Award for Best Actor and was nominated twice besides that would have so little confidence in himself.  It proves one thing.  Clark Gable was not a stuck-on-himself-Hollywood-type, but a regular guy.  And he was a real man that all the women wanted and all the men liked.

Gable was born on February 1, 1902 in Cadiz, Ohio.  His frail mother, Adeline Hershelman Gable, died of a brain tumor when he was just ten months old.  After her death, Bill Gable had his son's birth recorded in Meadville, PA at the Crawford County Courthouse. 

Bill, ill-equipped to care for an infant, left the baby with his late wife's family in Meadville, a small town about 40 miles south of Lake Erie. 

There is a 16-acre tract of land known as Gable Hill near Meadville, but Gable never actually lived there because his paternal grandparents sold the property two years before he was born to avoid foreclosure.

 click on the photo to enlarge it

Gable Hill

Gable dropped out of school when he was 16, taking a job in an Akron, Ohio tire factory.  He went to work for a traveling theater company when he was 21.  Between acting gigs, this 6 feet-2 inch, 190 pound, full-frame man was an oil field rigger, a lumberjack, a telephone repairman, and sold ties and gloves. 

Gable eventually began working in silent films.  As an extra in The Merry Widow (1925), he met Lionel Barrymore (great uncle of actress Drew Barrymore), an already established actor, in New York.  Barrymore pushed to get Gable screen tested.  After the test was completed, movie producer Darryl F. Zanuck declared, "His ears are too big.  He looks like an ape."   Howard Hughes said, "His ears look like a taxi cab with its doors open."  But after another test at MGM, Gable signed a contract, which lasted 23 years. Within a year's time, he'd made 12 films and was well known enough to rank top billing in the movie credits. 

Platinum blond Jean Harlow was in four movies with Gable, the first was Red Dust (1932) where she wore what can only be described as a brief slip dress.  The red hot romance between the two fired the screen, further propelling Gable into stardom. 

Once famous, he had some liberty to choose his scripts.  When he refused to do a sappy film with Joan Crawford, he was loaned out to Columbia Pictures as retribution.  The result was It Happened One Night (1934) with Claudette Colbert in which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor! 

By the end of the 1930s, Gable was America's leading male star and known as The King of Hollywood.

Gable was married five times.  His first wife was drama coach Josephine Dillon, 12 years his senior.  Years later she said, "I always knew that one day Clark would be a big star and not need me anymore.  I told him that if he ever truly wanted a divorce, I would give it to him.  The fact is he has paid off the mortgage and overdue property taxes on my home.  He also had my studio repaired and repainted. … He's a great actor as I knew he would be from the very first day he came to me for acting lessons.  And, he's a first-class gentleman, always was and always will be."

His second wife was Rhea Davis, who was also much older.  She was said to have kept an immaculate house and dressed the part of a movie star's wife, having more than enough grace for both of them.  The trouble was she was too much of a socialite and they parted company. 

You always hear about romance on movie sets.  Gable was a King of Hearts as well as of Hollywood.  Joan Crawford and Gable made eights movies together including Dancing Lady (1933), Manhattan Melodrama (1934), and Strange Cargo (1940) all of which included a real life on-off affair.  It got to be such public knowledge that MGM producer Louis B. Mayer bullied them, saying he'd destroy their careers if they didn't go their separate ways.

While making Call of the Wild (1935), he, along with Loretta Young and the crew of the movie were caught in a blizzard.  Needing to keep warm, the two movie stars turned to one another, which resulted in the birth of a little girl, Judy.  Being a strict Roman Catholic and unmarried, Young pretended to adopt her own child.  It wasn't until the girl was a 15 year old teenager that Gable actually met his daughter - once.  He gave her four one hundred dollar bills and bought her a "decent bed."  When she grew up, he was invited to her wedding, but declined. 

Gable also had a long running romantic relationship with Virginia Grey.  She was a chorus girl in Dance, Fools, Dance (1931) and actually was one of "his women" when he was later married to Carole Lombard.  As the story goes, it was Grey who finally broke off the affair because Gable wouldn't commit to her.

He didn't want to be in the movie San Francisco (1936) with songstress Jeanette MacDonald saying, "It's one thing if you have a voice and can sing back and defend yourself.  It's another if you don't, and I don't."  Eventually, he changed his mind.  The realistic earthquake scenes with co-star Spencer Tracy and Gable's desperate search for his ladylove made it a box office hit.  Tracy envied Gable's sex appeal and Gable wished he could be a better actor.  The two also made Test Pilot (1938) and Boom Town (1940), which was the last film they worked on together.  Word has it that was because Gable's top billing over Tracy left the latter's ego all banged up.

Then came along the opportunity to film Gone With the Wind (1936).  Although he was overwhelmingly the public's choice to play roguish hero Rhett Butler, Gable was reluctant.  Knowing how many people around the world had read Margaret Mitchell's wonderful Southern romance set during the American Civil War, Gable was afraid he wouldn't measure up to task.  He also hated the idea of having to cry on screen when Scarlett, Rhett's wife, miscarries, feeling it was sissified.  (Along those same lines, he thought wearing a pigtail as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) made him appear too feminine, but he was nominated for Best Actor in that movie.)  After much prompting, he was persuaded to do Gone With The Wind because MGM agreed to pay off Rhea Davis, his second wife, who would then agree to a divorce.  During the making of Gone With The Wind, director Victor Fleming suggested they shoot two scenes, one where Rhett would cry and one where he didn't.  Gable could choose which he preferred.  The scene with him weeping beside Melanie Wilkes was the best and he was glad he had done it after all. He was nominated for Best Actor.  He didn't win, but the film won for Best Motion Picture.

Gable was quoted as saying, "You'da thought I'd won a second Civil War for the South. The Atlanta papers called it the biggest news event [Gone With The Wind premiere] since Sherman."

"I'll never forget how I met [author] Margaret Mitchell," he said. "We were all at the Piedmont Driving Club [in Atlanta, GA] and I was anxious to talk to her.  She had helped me so much with Rhett.  But there were so many people about and so much going on.  We finally went into the ladies lounge and locked the door!" 

Gable once lived at 4543 Tara Dr., Encino, California.  Tara was the name of Scarlett O'Hara's plantation in the book and movie.

Gable married wife #3, Carole Lombard, during the shooting of Gone With the Wind.  She was an established actress / comedienne and the love of his life.  The couple had to sneak away in the middle of the night to get married, but once done, they lived happily together.  When away from him, Lombard arranged to have her secretary deliver love notes to Gable periodically.  While she was on a war bond rally tour in 1942, Carole Lombard's plane crashed in the Rocky Mountains, and she, her mother and all 20 passengers on board perished.  Gable had to identify the body.  They say all that was found was one of his wife's earrings, which the actor is said to have worn on a chain around his neck the rest of his life.  Lombard's secretary delivered the final love note after the actress' tragic death.

Although he was 46 and too old for the draft, Gable joined the Army Air Corps to help the World War II war effort and distract himself from his grief.  He earned the rank of major, but the military wanted him strictly for training films and to lift Allied spirits.  He made the training films, but also flew five combat missions as a gunner.  He was known to be a great friend of the enlisted man.  "War's hell," Gable said.  "My biggest concern was that Hermann Goering, that SOB, offered any flier who shot down my plane a promotion, $5,000, and a furlough.  I was always afraid that my crew would be a special target."  When the heel of his boot was nearly shot off by antiaircraft fire, the Air Corps deemed him too valuable a patriotic commodity and he was ordered to come home and make more training films.  He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal in 1945.  

Clark Gable married twice more, Lady Silvia Ashley, widow of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., (a short-lived marriage of a few months) and, finally, sugar heiress, Kay Spreckels Williams.  Both wives were blonde and looked suspiciously like Carole Lombard. 

Kay Spreckels, attended Strong Vincent High School in Erie, Pennsylvania.  Our dad also attended Strong Vincent, although Dad always points out that Kay Spreckels was several years his senior.

A model with the lightest of blue eyes, Kay was a little known actress who was instructed by her studio to be the dinner partner of Gable who was about to be shipped overseas.  She was going through a disturbing on again, off again marriage, and didn't want to involve an upstanding Gable in her turmoil, so she politely declined the studio's invitation.  Six months later, the same kind of invitation arose.  Divorced now, she agreed go out with the famous actor.  She was the first woman to capture his attention for any length of time after Carole Lombard's death two years earlier.  A close friendship developed between the two that included lots of laughter.  When her girlfriends wanted to touch her for luck, she'd laugh and say, "I know.  You want to touch the hand that Gable touched."  She said of him, "Clark is a wonderful person, a fine, gallant, clean, inspiring man who makes you feel glad and happy and grateful that you're alive in the world that he lives in.  Even despite this dreadful war and the sad and hopeless picture it paints, you somehow feel that the world isn't in such a forlorn state when you know a man like him." Perhaps their mutual Pennsylvania background gave the couple common ground on which to build a relationship.  Despite their glamorous image, they liked a simple life void of affectation.  They married in 1955.

Gable's career after World War II and into the 1950s was lackluster compared to his earlier days.  Still there are several memorable movies: 

Mogambo (1953), a remake of Red Dust, now with Grace Kelly (they supposedly had a wild affair) and Ava Gardner,

Soldier of Fortune (1953) with Susan Hayward in Hong Kong.

Band of Angels (1957), a poorly done clone of Gone With The Wind.  Still, it's a pretty period piece to watch with Yvonne DeCarlo.

Teacher's Pet with Doris Day (1958), about a contemporary newspaper editor and writing teacher coming to romantic blows.

Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), the only film in which Gable died on screen.  At this time of his life, he hands and head were shaking.  It was in his contract for It Started in Naples with Sophia Loren (1960), an Italian travelogue with a sexy Loren falling for an attractive older American, that he was not to be photographed after 5 p.m.

Gable and his wife called each other "Ma" and "Pa" and he was a wonderful stepfather to her two children.  When Kay became pregnant, Gable was thrilled.  But his 59 year old heart gave out on November 16, 1960.  Some say it was due, in part, to doing his own stunts in his last movie, The Misfits (released in 1961) with Marilyn Monroe, who received some criticism for making the film project more difficult than it had to be.  Whatever the cause, Misfits was Clark Gable's last picture.  He left behind instructions that he was to have a closed casket because he didn't want strangers seeing his wrinkles and fat belly.  He was interred beside Carole Lombard at Forest Lawn Cemetery in California. 

Four months later, his only son, John Clark Gable, was born, never knowing his father as Gable never knew his mother.  At present time, John Gable is married with two children.  He races cars and motorcycles.  He looks like his father, but is blonde, and has a slighter build.  He does have that distinctive Gable voice, and after constant prodding, John tried his hand as an outlaw in Bad Jim (1990), a little known movie that went quickly to video despite some nice reviews.

Clark Gable left behind a rich film legacy.  He looked larger than life on screen and lived his life with vitality and honest masculinity.  It's not that Gable's film characters didn't make stupid mistakes or the wrong choices.  But compared to today's leading men, I know I would choose Clark Gable in just about any difficult situation.  As the New York Times wrote at the time of his death: "Gable was as certain as the sunrise.  He was consistently and stubbornly all man."

Dare to go Bear