William Clark Gable (February 1, 1901 –
November 16, 1960) was an Academy Award-winning American film actor. In 1999, the American
Film Institute named Gable seventh among the Greatest Male Stars of All
Time. He has been nicknamed "The King of Hollywood." His most famous role was in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien
Leigh.
Early life
Clark Gable was born in Cadiz, Ohio, on
February 1, 1901 to William Henry "Bill" Gable, an oil-well
driller,[1][2] and Adeline Hershelman, both of German descent.[3] He was mistakenly listed as a female on his birth certificate. His original
name was probably William Clark Gable, but birth registrations, and school records, and other documents contradict one another.
"William" would have been in honor of his father. "Clark" was the maiden name of his maternal grandmother. In childhood he was
almost always called "Clark"; some friends called him "Clarkie," "Billy," or "Gabe."[4]
When he was six months old, Gable's sickly mother had him baptized Roman
Catholic. She died when he was ten months old, probably of an aggressive brain tumor.
Following her death, Gable's father's family refused to raise him as a Catholic, provoking enmity with his mother's side of the
family. The dispute was resolved when his father's family agreed to allow Gable to spend more time with his mother's Catholic
relatives.
In April 1903, Gable's father Will married Jennie Dunlap, whose family came from the small neighboring town of
Hopedale, Ohio. His father purchased land there and built a house and the new Gable
family settled in. In 1917, when Clark was in high school, his father's business had financial
difficulties. Will decided to try his hand at farming and the family moved to Ravenna,
just outside of Akron. Clark had trouble settling down; he soon left school to work in
Akron's tire factories.
Gable was inspired to be an actor after seeing a life-impressing play The Bird of Paradise, but he was not able to make
a real start until he turned 21 and inherited money left to him. By then, his stepmother Jennie had died. He toured in stock
companies and worked the oil fields. Deciding not to follow his father, Clark found work with several second-class theater
companies and worked his way across the Midwest to Portland, Oregon, where he found work as a necktie salesman in the Meier
& Frank department store. While there, he met actress Laura Hope Crews, who
encouraged him to go back to the stage and into another theater company. His acting coach was a theater manager in Portland,
Oregon, Josephine Dillon (17 years his senior), who had his teeth fixed and after some rigorous training, eventually considered
him ready to attempt a film career.
Hollywood
In 1924, with Josephine's financial aid, the two went to Hollywood, where she became his manager and first wife. Although he found work as an
extra and bit player in such silent films as The
Plastic Age (1925), which starred Clara Bow, Gable was not offered any major roles
and so he returned to the stage, becoming lifelong friends with Lionel Barrymore. In
1930, after his impressive appearance as the seething and desperate character Killer Mears in the play The Last Mile, he was offered a contract with MGM.
Gable's first role in a sound picture was as the villain in a low-budget William
Boyd western called The Painted
Desert (1931). He received a lot of fan mail as a result of his powerful voice and
appearance; the studio took notice.
In 1930, Clark and Josephine Dillon were divorced. A few days later, he married Texas socialite
Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham. After moving to California, they were
married again in 1931, possibly due to differences in state legal requirements.
"His ears are too big and he looks like an ape." So said Warner Bros. executive
Darryl F. Zanuck about Clark Gable after testing him for the lead in Warner's gangster
drama Little Caesar (1931).[5] After several failed screen tests for Barrymore and Zanuck, Gable was signed in 1930 by MGM's
Irving Thalberg.
Gable then worked mainly in supporting roles, often as the villain. Joan Crawford asked
for him as her co-star in Dance, Fools, Dance (1931). He built his fame and
public visibility during 1931 in such important movies as A Free Soul (1931), in
which he played a gangster who slapped Norma Shearer (Gable never played a supporting role
again after that slap), Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931)
with Greta Garbo, and Possessed
(1931), in which he and Joan Crawford steamed up the screen with some of the passion they shared for decades in real life. Clark
and Garbo disliked each other. She thought he was a wooden actor while he considered her a snob. To bolster his rocketing
popularity, MGM frequently paired him with well-established female stars.
His unshaven lovemaking with bra-less Jean Harlow in Red Dust (1932) made him MGM's
most important star. After the hit Hold Your Man (1933), MGM recognized the goldmine of the Gable-Harlow pairing, putting
them in two more films, China Seas (1935) and Wife vs. Secretary (1936). An enormously popular combination, on-screen and off-screen, Gable and
Jean Harlow made six films together, the most notable being Red Dust (1932) and Saratoga (1937). Harlow died during
production of Saratoga of kidney failure. Ninety percent completed, the remaining
scenes were filmed with long shots or doubles; Gable would say that he felt as if he were "in the arms of a ghost".[6]
In the following years, he acted in a succession of enormously popular pictures, earning him the undisputed title of "King
of Hollywood." Throughout most of the 1930s and 1940s, he was arguably the world's biggest movie star.
Gable had a reputation as an outdoorsman. At first, it was an image conceived by the MGM publicity department, but Gable found
that he liked the lifestyle, and spent time in the outdoors whenever he could.
David Bret's book Clark Gable: Tormented Star claims that Gable had relationships
with openly homosexual men and was "gay for pay" in his early career. It claims that Gable was branded a "sissy" by his father as
a child, prompting him to adopt a macho image and denounce homosexuality.[7]
Most famous roles
It Happened One Night
According to urban legend, Gable was lent to Columbia Pictures, then considered a second-rate operation, as punishment for refusing roles; however,
this has been refuted by more recent biographies. MGM did not have a project ready
for Gable and was paying him $2000 per week, under his contract, to do nothing. Studio head Louis B. Mayer lent him to Columbia for $2500 per week, making a $500 per week profit.[8]
Gable was not the first choice to play the lead role of Peter Warne. Robert
Montgomery was originally offered the role, but he felt that the script was poor.[9] Filming began in a tense atmosphere; Gable and co-star Claudette Colbert agreed that the script was below standard, but soon found that the script was no
worse than those of many of their earlier films.[10] Both
Gable and Frank Capra enjoyed making the movie.
Another persistent urban legend has it that Gable had a profound effect on men's fashion, thanks to a scene in this movie. As
he is preparing for bed, he takes off his shirt to reveal that he is bare-chested. Sales of men's undershirts across the country
allegedly declined noticeably for a period following this movie.[11]
Gable won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1934 performance in
the film. He returned to MGM a bigger star than ever.[12]
The unpublished memoirs of animator Friz Freleng's mention that this was one of his
favorite films. It has been claimed that it helped inspire the cartoon character Bugs Bunny.
Four things in the film may have coalesced to create Bugs: the personality of a minor character, Oscar Shapely and his penchant
for referring to Gable's character as "Doc", an imaginary character named "Bugs Dooley" that Gable's character uses to frighten
Shapely, and most of all, a scene in which Clark Gable eats carrots while talking quickly with his mouth full, as Bugs
does.[13]
Gable also earned an Academy Award nomination when he portrayed Fletcher Christian in 1935's Mutiny on the Bounty. Gable once said that this was his favorite film of his
own.
Gone with the Wind
Despite his reluctance to play the role, Gable is best known for his performance in Gone with the Wind (1939), which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best
Actor.
Gable was an almost immediate favorite for the role of Rhett Butler with both the public
and producer David O. Selznick. But as Selznick had no male stars under long-term
contract, he needed to go through the process of negotiating to borrow an actor from another studio. Gary Cooper was thus Selznick's first choice.[14] When Cooper turned down the role, he was passionately against it. He is quoted saying, "Gone
With The Wind is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. I’m glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling flat on his
nose, not me".[15][16] By then, Selznick was determined to get Clark Gable, and eventually found a way
to borrow him from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Gable was wary of potentially disappointing
a public who had decided no one else could play the part. It was his first film in Technicolor. Also appearing in Gone With The Wind in the role of "Aunt Pittypat" was Laura Hope Crews, the grandmother of the friend in Portland who had coaxed Gable back into the
theater.
During filming, Vivien Leigh complained about Gable's bad breath, which was apparently
caused by his false teeth. They otherwise got along well. His famous line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," caused an
uproar since it was in violation of the Production Code in effect at the time. Gable
didn't want to shed tears for the scene after Scarlett (Leigh) has a miscarriage. Olivia de
Havilland made him cry, later commenting, "... Oh, he would not do it. He would not! Victor (Fleming) tried everything
with him. He tried to attack him on a professional level. We had done it without him weeping several times and then we had one
last try. I said, "You can do it, I know you can do it and you will be wonderful ..." Well, by heaven, just before the cameras
rolled, you could see the tears come up at his eyes and he played the scene unforgettably well. He put his whole heart into
it."[17]
Decades later, Gable would say that whenever his career would start to fade, a re-release of Gone with the Wind would
instantly revive everything, and he continued as a top leading man for the rest of his life. In addition, Gable was one of the
few actors to play the lead in three films that won an Academy Award for Best
Picture.
Marriage to Carole Lombard
Gable's marriage in 1939 to his third wife, successful actress Carole Lombard, was the happiest period of his personal life. They purchased a ranch at Encino and once
Clark had become accustomed to her often blunt way of expressing herself, they found they had much in common. This was despite
the fact that Gable was a conservative Republican and Lombard a liberal Democrat.
On January 16, 1942, Lombard, who had just finished her 57th
film, To Be Or Not To Be, was on a tour to sell war bonds when the
twin-engine DC-3 she was traveling in crashed into a mountain near Las Vegas. Gable
flew to the site and had to be forcibly restrained from climbing the snowcapped mountain himself in an effort to rescue
her.[citation needed] After her body was recovered,
he sobbed, "Oh, God! I don't want to go back to an empty house..."[citation needed] Lombard was declared the first war-related female casualty the U.S.
suffered in World War II.
Gable resided the rest of his life at the couple's Encino home, made 27 more movies, and married twice more. "But he was never
the same," said Esther Williams. "His heart sank a bit."[18]
World War II
Clark Gable with 8th AF in Britain, 1943
In 1942, following Lombard's death, Gable joined the U.S. Army Air
Forces. As Captain Clark Gable, he trained with and accompanied the 351st Heavy Bomb
Group as head of a 6-man motion picture unit making a gunnery training film. While at RAF
Polebrook, England, Gable flew five combat missions, including one to Germany, as an
observer-gunner in B-17 Flying Fortresses between May
4 and September 23, 1943, earning the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying
Cross for his efforts. Adolf Hitler esteemed Gable above all other actors, and
during the Second World War, offered a sizable reward to anyone who could capture and bring Gable unscathed to him.[19] He left the Army Air Forces with the rank of
major.
After World War II
Gable's first movie after returning from service in WWII was the 1945 production of
Adventure. It was a critical and commercial failure. However, Gable was acclaimed for his performance in
The Hucksters (1947). That was followed by the popular success of
Never Let Me Go (1953), opposite Gene
Tierney. Tierney was a favorite of Gable and he was very disappointed when she was replaced in Mogambo (due to her mental health problems) by Grace Kelly.
Mogambo (1953) was a Technicolor remake of his earlier film Red Dust, which had
been an even greater success.
Gable became increasingly unhappy with what he considered mediocre roles offered him by MGM, while the studio regarded his
salary as excessive. In 1953, he refused to renew his contract, and began to work independently. But his subsequent films did not
do well at the box office.
Gable's last film was The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, and co-starring
Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. This was
also the final film completed by Monroe. Many critics regard Gable's performance to be his finest.
In 1949, Clark married Sylvia Ashley, a British divorcée and the widow of
Douglas Fairbanks. The relationship was profoundly unsuccessful; they divorced in
1952.
Gable's fifth wife, whom he married in 1955 after an on-again, off-again affair spanning thirteen years, was Kay Spreckels
(full name Kathleen Williams Capps de Alzaga Spreckels), a thrice-married former fashion model and stock actress.
Children
Gable had a daughter, Judy Lewis (b. 1935), the result of an affair with actress
Loretta Young begun on the set of The Call of
the Wild (1935). In an elaborate scheme, Young took an extended vacation and went to Europe to hide the fact that she was pregnant. After a few months she came back to California and gave birth to
their child in Venice. Nineteen months after the birth, Loretta claimed
to have adopted Judy (a gambit that got less believable when the child grew to look much like her mother, with ears sticking out
like Gable's).
According to Lewis, Gable visited her home once, but he didn't tell her that he was her father. While neither Gable nor Young
would ever publicly acknowledge their daughter's real parentage, this fact was so widely known that in Lewis's autobiography
Uncommon Knowledge, she wrote that she was shocked to learn of it from other children at school. Loretta Young would never
officially acknowledge the fact, which she said would be the same as admitting to a "venial sin". However, she finally gave her
biographer permission to include it only on the condition the book not be published until after her death.
On March 20, 1961, Kay Spreckels gave birth to Gable's son,
John Clark Gable, born four months after Clark's death. She also had two children from her third marriage, Joan and Adolph
Spreckels III (nicknamed "Bunker").
Death
Gable died in Los Angeles, California in November 1960, the result of a fourth heart attack. There was much speculation that Gable's physically demanding Misfits role,
which required yanking on and being dragged by horses, contributed to his sudden death soon after filming was completed. In a
widely reported quote, Gable's wife Kay blamed it on stress caused by "the endless waiting... waiting (for Monroe)". Monroe, on
the other hand, claimed that she and Kay had become close during the filming and would refer to Clark as "Our Man".[20] Monroe's claim is supported by her being specifically
invited by Kay to Gable's funeral, where contemporary newsreels showed the two of them sitting together in the church.
Others have blamed Gable's crash diet before filming began. The 6'1" (185 cm) Gable
weighed about 190 pounds (86 kg) at the time of Gone with the Wind, but by his late 50s, he weighed 230 pounds (104 kg).
To get in shape for The Misfits, he dropped to 195 lbs (88 kg). For years, Gable's head would sometimes shake from the
diet pills he would take to shed pounds before making a film, leading to rumors he had Parkinson's disease.[citation needed] In addition, Gable was in poor health from years of heavy smoking (three
packs a day over thirty years) and drinking (he liked whiskey), and in the previous decade, had
suffered two seizures which may have been heart attacks.[citation needed]
Gable is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in
Glendale, California, beside Carole
Lombard.
Filmography
-
References
- ^ (2002) Clark Gable:
Biography, Filmography, Bibliography. McFarland & Company, 7, 30. ISBN 0-7864-1124-4.
- ^ Clark Gable Dan Van Neste (1999). Reconstructed Birthhome: "Fit For A King".
- ^ Clark Gable- vintage articlesFaith Scott, Source: Times-News Meadville Bureau
- ^ Harris, Warren G. (2002). Clark Gable: A Biography. Harmony, 1. ISBN
0-609-60495-3.
- ^ TCM Film Guide on The 50 Most Unforgettable Actors of the Studio Era:
Leading Men, p. 10.
- ^ Harris, p. 179.
- ^ Clark Gable:
Tormented Star David Bret, JR Books, 2007
- ^ Harris, Warren G. (2002). Clark Gable, A Biography. Aurum Press, pp 112-114. ISBN 1 85410 904
9.
- ^ Kotsabilas-Davis, James; Myrna Loy (1987). Being and Becoming. Primus, Donald I Fine
Inc, p 94. ISBN 1556111010.
- ^ Harris, Warren G. (2002). Clark Gable, A Biography. Aurum Press, pp 112-114. ISBN 1 85410 904
9.
