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Clark Gable

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Clark Gable with 8th AF in Britain, 1943
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Clark Gable with 8th AF in Britain, 1943

Clark Gable (February 1, 1901 – November 16, 1960) was an Academy Award-winning American film actor and the biggest box office star of the early sound film era.

Contents

Early life

Cornell Capa's portrait of Clark Gable
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Cornell Capa's portrait of Clark Gable

Clark Gable was born in Cadiz, Ohio, on 1 February 1901 to William H. Gable, an oil-well driller and prospector, and Adeline Hershelman. Gable had German ancestry from both sides of his family tree; his maternal grandfather, John Hershelman, was German, as were Gable's paternal great-great-grandparents, Johan Frankenfield and Catharine Haupt. Contrary to popular belief, Gable never had a middle name but was registered simply as Clark Gable. He temporarily adopted his father's name as a teenager only to drop it again a few years later. (Spicer, Clark Gable, McFarland, pp. 7, 30)

When he was six months old, his sickly mother had him baptized Roman Catholic. She died when he was ten months old, probably as the result of an aggressive brain tumor. Following her death, Gable's father's family refused to countenance any notion of raising the child a Catholic, provoking an enmity with his late mother's side of the family. The dispute was resolved when the Protestant side agreed to allow young William Clark Gable to spend more time with his mother's Catholic relatives.

In April of 1903, Will Gable married Jennie Dunlap whose family came from the small neighboring Ohio town of Hopedale. Will purchased land there and built a house and the new Gable family settled in. By 1917 Clark was in high school when 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, but Clark had trouble settling down and soon left school to work in Akron's tire factories.

After seeing a play which impressed him, he formed an ambition to be an actor, but he was not able to make a real start until he turned 21 and could inherit money that had been left to him. By then, Jennie had died. 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 tie salesman in a department store. While there he met the grandson of the well-known actress, Laura Hope Crews, who encouraged him back onto the stage and into another theater company. His acting coach was Josephine Dillon, 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, they went to Hollywood where she became his manager and his first wife. Although he found work as an extra and bit player in such silent films as The Plastic Age starring Clara Bow, Gable was not offered any major roles and so returned to the stage. It was only after his impressive appearance as the seething and desperate character Killer Mears in the play The Last Mile that he was offered a contract with MGM in 1930. 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 great amount of fan mail as a result of his powerful voice and appearance, which forced the studio to take notice.

He worked mainly in supporting roles, often as the "heavy', building his fame and public visibility during 1931 in such important movies as A Free Soul, in which he played a gangster who slapped Norma Shearer (Gable never played a supporting role again as long as he lived after that slap), [[Susan Lennox: Her Rise and Fall]] with Greta Garbo and Possessed in which he and Joan Crawford steamed up the screen with some of the passion they were sharing in real life. To bolster his rocketing popularity, MGM was now frequently pairing him with well-established female stars, such as Jean Harlow. An enormously popular combo, Gable and Harlow were paired together in six films, the most notable being "Red Dust" and "Saratoga", during production of which Harlow would die of kidney failure. In the following years, he acted in a succession of enormously popular pictures which levitated him to megastar status, 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.

When MGM head Louis B. Mayer decided that Gable was getting difficult and ungrateful, he got a brilliant idea: loan Gable out to the lower-rank Columbia studio; that would teach him a lesson. The result: Gable won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1934 performance in the film It Happened One Night. He returned to MGM a bigger star than ever.

Gable was once involved in a traffic accident while intoxicated. A pedestrian was killed. Supposedly, Mayer used his influence to get the incident hushed up. [source: CJAD Radio, May 14/ 06]

In 1930, Clark and Josephine Dillon were granted a divorce. A few days later, he married Texas socialite Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham. After moving to California, they had to be married again in 1931, possibly due to differences in state legal requirements.

Most Famous Roles

Despite his reluctance at the time to appear in the role, Gable is best known for his performance as Rhett Butler in the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. At the time, Gable was wary of potentially disappointing a public who had decided no one else could play the part.

A few years before, he had also earned an Academy Award nomination for his role as Fletcher Christian in 1935's Mutiny on the Bounty. In addition, Gable was one of the few actors to play the lead in three films that won an Academy Award for Best Picture. 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.

Marriage to Carole Lombard and World War II

Gable's marriage in 1939 to his third wife, successful actress Carole Lombard, was reportedly the happiest period of his personal life. They purchased a ranch at Encino and once Clark had become accustomed to her often blunt verbal expression, they found they had much in common.

On Jan. 16, 1942, the idyll ended. Lombard, who had just wrapped 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 travelling in crashed into a mountain near Las Vegas. Upon hearing the news, Gable flew to the scene and had to be forcibly restrained from climbing the snowcapped mountain himself in an effort to rescue her. After Carole's body, along with the bodies of her mother and 19 others, was discovered, he reportedly sobbed, " Oh, God! I don't want to go back to an empty house..."

Lombard's death, declared the first war-related female casualty the U.S. suffered during WWII, was the worst loss her husband ever endured. Gable lived out his life at the couple's Encino home, made 27 more movies and even remarried twice. "But he was never the same," says Esther Williams, "His heart sank a bit."

Gable was devastated by the loss of Lombard, and, inconsolable, he soon 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. He left the Army Air Forces with the rank of Major.

When Gable died of a heart attack in 1960, his fifth wife, Kay, agreed to have him buried in LA's Forest Lawn Cemetery, right next to Carole Lombard.

After World War II

His first movie after returning from service in WWII was the 1945 production of Adventure. It was a critical and commercial failure and, despite some subsequent popular successes such as Mogambo (a remake of Red Dust, which he had made two decades earlier), Gable became increasingly unhappy with the mediocre roles offered him by MGM as a mature actor. He refused to renew his contract with them in 1953 and proceeded to work independently.

In 1949, Clark married Sylvia Ashley, a British divorcée who also was the widow of Douglas Fairbanks. Unfortunately, this relationship was profoundly unsuccessful and they divorced in 1952.

His fifth wife, married 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. She was the mother of Gable's son, John Clark Gable, born on March 20, 1961, four months after Clark's death. She also had two children from her third marriage, Joan and Adolph Spreckels III (nicknamed "Bunker").

Gable also had a daughter, Judy Lewis, born in 1935, the result of an affair with actress Loretta Young, begun on the set of Call of the Wild. In an elaborate scheme, Young took an extended vacation and went to Europe to give birth. On her return, she claimed to have adopted Judy (a gambit that got stranger when the child grew to look eerily like her mother, only 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 Young's death.

Death

Gable's last film was The Misfits (written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston), which co-starred Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. The Misfits would prove not only to be Gable's swan song, but it would also mark the final completed performance by Marilyn Monroe. Many critics regard Gable's performance in his final film to be his finest. Gable died in Los Angeles, California in November 1960, the result of a fourth heart attack. He was 59.

There was much speculation about Gable's physically demanding Misfits role (which required yanking on and being dragged by horses) having contributed to his sudden death soon afterward. In a widely reported quote, Kathleen Gable blamed it on stress caused by "the endless waiting... waiting (for Monroe)". Monroe, on the other hand, claimed that she and Kathleen had become close during the filming and would refer to Clark as "Our Man". (Spicer, Clark Gable, McFarland, pp. 300-301). Others have blamed Gable's crash diet before filming began; for years, Gable's head would sometimes shake from the diet pills he would take to strip off pounds before making a film, a practice which may have contributed to his early death. It should be noted that Gable was in poor health when filming began from years of heavy smoking and drinking, and in the previous decade had suffered two seizures which may have been heart attacks.

He was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California, beside his beloved Carole Lombard.

Filmography

Feature films

Documentaries and short subjects

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Trivia

References

Spicer, Chrystopher J. Clark Gable: Biography McFarland, 2002

External links

 

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