1939: World’s No. 1 Honeymooners: The Clark Gables!
By Ed Sullivan
Syndicated Newspaper, October 15, 1939
The most discussed marriage of the year was the elopement of Carole Lombard and Clark Gable. On this, the 200th day of their marriage, Mr. Sullivan takes you into the Hollywood home of the newlyweds to tell you for the first time the true story of their elopement. He describes their home life, their plans for the future, their likes and dislikes, their hopes for happiness. This is the first of a notable series on Hollywood private lives by the ace reporter of the film colony. Read them in this section
On the road maps it is route 101, the Los Angeles natives refer to it more familiarly as Ventura boulevard, the ribbon of concrete which meanders north to San Francisco thru the hot and fertile valleys and foothills of California.
I have identified Ventura boulevard at some length because if you followed it for ten miles out of Hollywood to the town of Encino and turned left on an informal country lane which goes under the formal name of Petit avenue, and then turned right and passed thru a gateway, you’d find under the trees the house were “Pa” and “Ma” live.
No ordinary farmers are these two, because Pa is Carole Lombard’s name for Clark Gable, and Gable calls his glamour girl Ma.
On this 15th day of October in the year of our Lord 1939 Pa and Ma are celebrating the 200th day of their marriage. Today they have been married exactly seventeen days and six full months, because it was on March 29 that they eloped to Kingman, Ariz., for the most discussed marriage of the year.
The Gables live in a home that is a copy of a Connecticut farmhouse on twenty acres of lush and hilly land. Gable bought it from Director Raoul Walsh for a reported price of $40,000 cash, and if he got it for that comparatively small sum of dough Gable won one of the A1 bargains of all time. Other movie stars who live in the San Fernando valley, and who paid as high as $150,000 for their properties, will tell you that the Gables must have paid Walsh much more than $40,000, a for of envy that is understandable. If your wife buys a dress for $75 and then sees a copy of it on another girl who paid $18.95 you don’t blame your wife for sniffing her disbelief in the other girl’s story. The mechanism is purely defensive.
Living on the grounds with Pa and Ma is a heterogeneous collection including chickens, turkeys, ducks, two cows, four horses, three cats, three dogs (a pointer, a dachshund, and a boxer), and a mule which goes by the name of Judy. The second cow is a recent addition. Fred, the farmer who acts as a caretaker, recently became the father of a baby, so Gable told Mrs. Fred that he would buy her a cow so that the baby would have ample supplies of fresh milk.
There is no swimming pool on the heavily wooded twenty acres. With complete sanity Farmer Gable and his wife Carole determined that it would be wiser to safeguard their happiness by anticipating the thrill of luxuries. Next year, therefore, they will build a swimming pool below the house.
Farmer Gable, when he engaged Fred and his wife and built a nice home for them on the property, told Fred that he would be required to put in a full day’s work. At 6:00am the two of them are up and at work taking care of the livestock and tending to the citrus trees, the walnut trees, and the grapevines. There was one acre that was sterile. Gable called in the government farm experts, and they prescribed a chemical to mix with the earth after it had been plowed up. Gable is prouder of the reclamation of that sterile acre than he is of his performance as Rhett Butler.
You may well suggest that in this set-up Carole Lombard Gable, as the wife of Farmer Gable, has no apparent point of contact. Carole’s department, however, is the poultry. No one else can make any decision regarding the turkeys, chickens or ducks without Carole’s ok. While the government farm aids were showing Clark how to improve his trees and the good earth, they also showed Carole certain tricks of diet and cooping guaranteed to add pounds to her birds, and the results have been little short of astounding. Immediately the chickens started laying eggs in such quantities that it appeared Carole had a corner on the market.
Most of the eggs are given to hospitals. The Gables now plan, in addition, to have a box made up so that they can send their friends a dozen eggs at a time. “We can call them Parnell eggs,” ad-libbed Gable, “in memory of the egg I laid in that picture.”
This home of the Gables, hidden away from Hollywood, and the exact antithesis of glamour, is part and parcel of a definite psychological pattern. Carole has been in pictures since 1915; Gable had been a star for the last ten years. Neither has had any degree of privacy and this farm gives them privacy. Additionally, remember that Carole Lombard was Carole Jane Peters of Fort Wayne, Ind., and that Gable was the son of a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer who had settled at Ravenna, O., near Atwater, and this Encino farm becomes completely understandable. Two midwestern youngsters, one from Indiana, the other from Ohio, first earned money enough to go from farms to the big cities—then earned enough money to go back to the farm.
Understandable, too, is their reluctance to let Hollywood intrude on their property. It was with the greatest of difficulty that the MGM and RKO studios persuaded the Gables to admit photographers to their grounds following the marriage. “We’ll pose for pictures at the studio,” they countered, “but no pictures out here.” The studios finally won them over, but there was one point on which the Gables were adamant—no pictures were to be taken within the house itself.
No amount of studio argument changed that. No pictures were taken in the house, so let me describe it to you. Keeping in mind the low, homey lines of a Connecticut farmhouse, let us go to the door and ring the bell. It is a white door, and in an upper panel there is a door knocker made out of the brass figure of an American eagle. In response to the metallic rapping a maid regards you thru a square slit in the left upper half of the door—just such a peephole as owners of speakeasies during prohibition. As the maid opened the peephole and surveyed me I was tempted from force of habit to say, “It’s ok—Joe sent me.”
You enter a Connecticut farmhouse that the top squire of the countryside might have owned. A farmhouse streamlined by every modern ingenuity that good taste and money make available. Directly in front of you is the staircase that leads to the two bedrooms on the second floor. To your right and left are the barroom, the office, the den, the living room, and the dining room. Thru the windows you see the charming patio that has been laid out under three giant pepper trees, and to the left and beyond can be seen the stables which Horseman Raoul Walsh constructed when he built the place.
It is a home which impresses you at once with its livable character. The chintz drapes, the kerosene lamps attached to the walls, the hurricanes that guard the candles, the old English prints, the rugs—all contribute to the warmth of a real home in excellent taste. In Gable’s den one wall is covered by a large glass case thru which can be seen his collection of arms. Just for fun I counted them—nine revolvers, eleven guns.
On the wall above Gable’s favorite armchair is a print of the Sayers and Heenan bare-knuckle fight; another print of the “Five Courts.” On the stand, compressed by book ends, were five books—Noel Coward’s “Present Indicative,” “The Citadel,” Absury’s “The French Quarter,” “Cosmopolitans,” and “Absalom, Absalom.” A tiny gold dust scale such as was used in the early days of this state is an interesting museum piece.
The arsenal of guns is not for effect pictorial. Gable is one of the best gunners out in this neck of the woods. He is a duck hunter par excellence, and he is a better than average trap shooter. So is Carole. Gable’s favorite rifle is one that has telescopic sights. He plans to use it some day on an African trip.
This is the home in which Clark Gable and his Carole are working out their happiness, such a happiness and such a home as neither of them dreamed of when they played opposite each other in “No Man of Her Own” in 1932. Their romance didn’t start in that picture. It started when they met for the first time at a Mayfair dance out here. Gable thought she was too fresh; she thought he was too conceited, and they had a spat immediately. The next day humorous Miss Lombard sent him by special messenger a white dove in a cage as a flag of truce. The next time they quarreled Gable sent her a white dove. By the time the romance was well under way they had quite a collection of caged doves.
Gable at no time ever enjoyed the social demands of Hollywood, and a contributory factor to his previous marital difficulties was grounded in his reaction to Hollywood parties and soirees. If he went he went under compulsion, and to get even for his inconvenience he would get “high.” The amazing fact—amazing to him—that Carole abhors Hollywood parties and night clubs just as strenuously as he dislikes them made for a sympathy of interests that presaged their marriage at Kingman, Ariz.
Much has been written about that important elopement on the 29th of March, and the fan magazine writers really knocked themselves out in their saccharine reports. In ten stories I read that Gable piled Carole into his roadster and drove nonstop to the judge’s chambers. That is fiction. The elopement of a Gable and a Lombard never could have been accomplished so easily.
First it was necessary, above all else, not to use his car or Carole’s car, both of which would be spotted in a minute by the news hawks assigned to a twenty-four-hour patrol. Gable, who was then living at Rex Ingram’s house in the valley beyond Universal City, picked up Carole at her Bel-Air home at 7 o’clock on the morning of March 29. He then drove directly to the Hermosa beach home of Otto Winkler, MGM publicity man assigned to Gable for press and magazine contacts. Gable and Carole left their Lincoln Zephyr parked in Winkler’s garage and climbed into his De Soto, which had only temporary cardboard license plates because it was a new car. As it would have been unwise for them to stop to eat along the road, Jill Winkler, herself a bride of two weeks, made up a parcel of sandwiches to provision the elopement party.
Gable and Winkler took turns at the wheel on the 450-mile trip, and they reached Kingman at 4 o’clock. As they drew up in front of the marriage license clerk’s office Winkler spotted a local newspaper man emerging from the building. He came right next to their car to climb into his own and looked directly into Winkler’s car. If he thought that it was suspicious that the three occupants of the car averted their heads he didn’t register. He climbed into his car and drove away. Winkler, after getting the license clerk to fill out the marriage license, took no chances of a leak. He took her along with them. The clerk left a memento of her justifiable astonishment on the marriage license. When she looked up to find Gable and The Lombard standing in front of her she screamed and spilled the ink. The blotch of ink is on the license, because it was the last one she had, and it was numbered, so she had to use it.
Winkler then drove to the home of Methodist Minister Kenneth Engle, a neat little house surrounded by a picket fence. The Rev. Mr. Engle was out making some sick calls. It took almost two hours to find him. When the young minister walked into his house, his arms full of bundles from the store, his pretty little wife said casually: “Kenneth, dear, come in here. I want you to meet Miss Lombard and Mr. Gable.” The Rev. Mr. Engle reacted quite naturally. The bundles spilled out of his arms and all over the floor.
“When I saw ‘Goodbye, Mr. Chips,’” says Gable, “Donat’s characterization of the young professor reminded me forcibly of young Rev. Mr. Engle. And his address to us in the church was one of the finest impromptu addresses I’ve ever heard.” Gable and Carole have an extremely high impression of the youthful cleric who married them. They were most impressed by his refusal to let the photographers take any pictures of him or his wife, who hurried over to the church to play the organ.
The simplicity of the wedding in the tiny church in Kingman, Ariz., has keynoted the conduct of Gable and Carole since then. The twenty-acre farm off Ventura boulevard is an extension of the spirit in which they pledged allegiance in sickness and unto death.
Both of them appreciate the fact that their careers in the movies must come to an end some day in the future. So Pa and Ma found a substitute for glamour back on a farm. Like the characters they so often have impersonated, Clark and Carole intend to live happily ever after.