1951: The Girl Who Won Gable Back
By Linda Griffin
Modern Screen magazine, November 1951
Two years ago, Modern Screen called Virginia Grey the girl Clark Gable always came back to—now it looks as if he’s back to stay.
The night she heard of Clark Gable’s marriage to Sylvia Ashley, she cried her eyes out.
Later, her sister came by, took one look at her and asked, “Do you love him that much?”
“I’ve been in love with him for six years,” Virginia Grey said. And the tears came again.
Virginia had not expected Clark Gable to marry Sylvia Ashley. She’d hoped that if he ever married again, he’d make her his bride. As a matter of fact, no one expected Gable to marry Sylvia—not even Gable himself. He proposed in a moment of self-delusion, and a year later realized his mistake.
But what about Virginia Grey, this 34-year-old actress with the sky-blue eyes, the soft auburn hair? Why did Gable turn to her after his fourth wife filed for divorce?
Will Virginia ever become the fifth Mrs. Gable?
A friend of Clark’s who once owned an automobile agency—strangely enough, Gable has very few close friends—said recently, “If Clark can ever get divorced from his present wife (and I don’t think it will be easy—it will probably drag on and on and on)—he’d be a darn fool if he didn’t marry Virginia Grey. Here’s why:
“This girl wants absolutely nothing from gable, no money, no position, no false prestige. She is one of the few thoroughly honest women he’s ever known. She only wants to love him.
“She has known him for years, and yet she’s never asked him to use his influence to get her any sort of a job. She’s been in more than a hundred pictures since the age of nine, and she’s taken her chances with the casting directors like any other girl. She’s a fine actress, she knows the business, and whenever Gable’s found the going tough, he’s usually ended up at her house out in Encino, letting off steam.”
Even in Hollywood, few persons know anything about the Gable-Grey entente.
They can tell you all about Gable and Dolly O’Brien, Gable and Iris Bynum, Gable and half a dozen other beauties. But Virginia Grey is a part of Clark’s life he’s kept to himself.
If you ask him about Virginia Grey now, as one reporter recently did, he says, “Good actress.” If you ask him please to elaborate, he says, “Nice kid.” If you ask him whether he’s in love with Virginia Grey or has been in love with her, he grins and says, “Nice day for fishing.”
Similarly, Virginia Grey will say very little about Gable. When Clark was married to Lady Ashley, Virginia told a friend, “Mrs. Gable is a very lucky woman. In Pay” (that’s her nickname for Clark) “she has one of the nicest human beings God ever made.”
Once, when a studio executive expressed the opinion that Gable was pretty tight with a dollar, in fact, still had the first nickel she’d ever made, Virginia happened to hear the crack. Executive or not, she let the big shot have it, but good.
“Listen Mr. Big Mouth,” she said, “I’m no authority on Clark Gable, but I can tell you he’s one of the most generous men who ever lived. When Otto Winkler (a press agent) was killed in that plane crash with Carole Lombard, who took care of Otto’s widow? Maybe you don’t know it, but it was Mr. Gable who built a house in the valley for her.”
Basically a gentle, refined sort of a girl, Virginia Grey isn’t given to outbursts—but when she finally lets loose. Brother! Watch out! She shots straight and hard
She let loose that day, but the executive who was on the receiving end of her blast took it nonchalantly. “She’s obviously in love with the guy,” he explained. “If Gable were to hold up the Chase National Bank tomorrow, she’d want him to be awarded the Legion of Merit.”
There is not doubt that Virginia Grey is in love with Gable. Long before Sylvia Ashley dazzled him with her British accent and her imperial social manner, Ginny and Paw used to dine on meat and potatoes at Paw’s ranch house in Encino.
It was during these homey meals that Ginny learned all about Clark’s days as an oil-well driller, a lumberjack, and a stock actor. She learned how genuinely Clark admires talent, how he comes by his Dutch stubbornness through both his parents, William and Adeline Hershelman Gable.
She learned that basically Gable is a shy, retiring man; that despite his years of stage experience, he actually trembles when he has to appear in front of a microphone.
She learned that Gable shies away from people, because over the years so many people have tried to capitalize on him, to take advantage of him. She learned that the old tale of his keeping Carole Lombard’s room exactly as it was at the time of her death was completely untrue.
In short, she learned more about Gable than any other woman ever has. And learning about him, she got to understand him, his basically conservative yet generous nature, his insistence upon remaining down-to-earth. She came to understand why he attributed his acting success to luck, and why he’s hung his dressing room with photos of the days when he was a starving young actor. Across these photos, Gable has written one inscription, “Just to remind you, Gable.”
Virginia Grey first met Clark in 1937. She was 20, a child star turned adult. He was 36, the heart throb of the nation. He was very much in love with Carole Lombard, the best screwball comedienne in the business, and he looked upon Virginia as a talented young girl who might one day reach stardom.
In 1937, Gable was making “Saratoga” with Jean Harlow when she suddenly took ill and died. The front office didn’t know what to do with “Saratoga” since it was almost finished. They decided to test three actresses for the Harlow role, figuring that judicious use of close-ups and long shots might yet complete the film without the fans realizing that another actress had been substituted for Harlow.
The three actresses tested were Rita Johnson, Virginia Bruce, and Virginia Grey.
“Because he thought I had ability and for no other reason,” Virginia Grey has said, “Gable agreed to make the test with me. He was very kind and very helpful, and I think we worked well together. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the role.
“Clark was very apologetic. He realized that when a girl is 20, she dreams and hopes a lot, so he came up to me one day and said, ‘I’m sorry, kid, that it didn’t work out. But there’ll be other pictures.’ And there were, too.”
“When Clark made ‘Test Pilot’ and ‘Idiot’s Delight,’ I had small roles in them. I’m sure I got them because he spoke for me. He didn’t have to. I meant nothing to him. He was engaged to Carole Lombard at the time. He was just being the nice, sweet guy he’s always been. We’d see each other around the lot, and he’d always have a kind word.
“After he married Carole in 1939, I’d still run into him at the studio, but less frequently. He’d ask me how things were coming along. I’d tell him, and we’d go our separate ways. Just professional acquaintances.”
Less than three years later, Carole was killed in an airplane crash near Las Vegas.
Gable was really shattered by Carole’s death and announced that he was quitting pictures for the Air Force. “I want to be a machine-gunner on a plane,” he said, “and I want to be sent where the going is tough.”
Shipped to England in 1943, Gable was put to work producing a film to attract recruits for aerial gunnery training. With the help of a six-man crew, he shot 50,000 feet of film showing combat conditions over Antwerp, the Ruhr Valley, and southern France.
When he returned to Hollywood to edit his film, he met Virginia Grey once again. The date was December 20th, 1943. Ironically enough, six years later, on that very same date, Gable was to marry Sylvia Ashley.
In 1943, however, marriage was farthest from Gable’s mind. He was happy that he could spend Christmas in the United States. When Jill Winkler, Otto’s widow, invited him over for a little Christmas cheer, he was genuinely thrilled. When he found, too, that Virginia Grey was also there, he was overjoyed.
He rushed over to her, picked her up in his arms, and gave her a big kiss. “Gosh,” he said, “It’s good to see you.”
That was the beginning.
In uniform and out, Clark started seeing lots of Virginia Grey. They would dine either at his house or hers, never in public. During six years, Gable and Grey were seen by the Hollywood public only three times, twice dining at the Beverly Club, and once at the Los Angeles Tennis Club matches.
Yet they dated each other several times a month.
The idea of going out in public was never discussed between them. When Virginia was asked by a friend why she didn’t make Clark take her to the hotspots and the previews, she answered, “I’m content doing anything he wants to do. If he likes fishing, I like fishing. If he wants to go hunting up around Bakersfield, I want to go hunting. If he wants to park the car at the airport and watch the planes come in, I want the same thing. It makes no difference to me whether we’re seen in public or not. I just like being with him any place any time.”
Gable regarded Ginny as “the old reliable,” the girl who would always be there. For a time, there was talk that Ginny would marry Richard Arlen, but that came to nothing.
There was talk, too, that Gable would marry again, but as far was Clark was concerned, marriage was out. He had and still has a faithful secretary in Mrs. Jean Garson, a former secretary to Carole Lombard. The daily housekeeping routine of paying bills, ordering food, answering mail, and all the rest of it is still taken care of by her.
Many people insist that one cause of the present breakup between Lady Sylvia and Clark was Sylvia’s inability to get along with Mrs. Garson.
Anyway, as long as he had Mrs. Garson to look after things, Gable was never in a hurry to get married. He never proposed to Ginny.
Had she been more ambitious, more devious, Ginny might have forced the play. She isn’t the type.
“Sure, I love him,” she confessed to her sister, “but thousands of people have been trying to marry him off for years. Why don’t they just stop matchmaking? When the right time comes for Clark to marry, he’ll get married, but not before.”
Gable kidded himself into believing that December 20, 1949, was the right time for him. That was the day he and Sylvia Ashley were married at Alisal Ranch. They went to Honolulu on a honeymoon, while Virginia Grey remained at Encino, and wept.
Like all good troopers, however, she went back to work. Whenever reporters asked her about Gable, she insisted that he was a wonderful man, and that she hoped he was very happy.
But Gable wasn’t very happy. Early this year, it was no secret that his fourth marriage was on the rocks.
Just before leaving for Honolulu aboard George Vanderbilt’s yacht, Sylvia Gable filed a divorce action charging grievous mental cruelty. That was in June. On her return to California, she moved out to her beach house, and Gable went to work in “Lone Star,” with Ava Gardner.
He got lonely. After a hard day’s work, there was an empty house to greet him, and no one to visit but Howard Strickling, the MGM press director who lived across the road. But he saw Howard practically every day at the studio.
It might take years before he could technically call himself a single man, but certainly Clark had no wife to come home to.
What was more natural for Clark than to call up Ginny Grey, the girl he could depend on for loyalty and friendship? Well, he called her, and now they take rides together and swap stories, as they did in the old days. No one ever sees them in public, because Clark likes to give the impression that he’s through with women.
There are some who insist that Gable loves Virginia Grey as he might love a kid sister. Others say that if he did love her at all, he would have married her years ago. The smart money, however, points out that Clark didn’t realize what a gem he had in Ginny until he went ahead and married someone else. They say that by remaining herself, Ginny had won back the King.
Whether she has or hasn’t only time will tell. But if there’s a fifth Mrs. Gable it may well be Virginia Grey.
She’s the best thing in Gable’s life since Carole Lombard.