-
Gossip Friday: Keeping it Refined
From May 1952: Mrs. Clark Gable’s furnishings are selling at auction today–but the auctioneer bemoaned that the event is the quietest in Hollywood history because “she wants to keep it refined.” The former Lady Sylvia Ashley decided to auction off $250,000 worth of her antique furnishings, paintings and dishes after she bid farewell to Gable in a divorce court. Every night for two weeks, collectors and dealers will jam the American art galleries to bid happily on such items as an English mahogany washstand and an antique Georgian solid silver kettle. But the disappointed curiosity seekers found only a handful of Lady Sylvia’s mementoes from her string of famous husbands,…
-
Gossip Friday: He’s in Business
From November 1939: When Clark Gable started raising ring-tailed and Mongolian pheasants on his Encino ranch, he thought it was a hobby Now, with the State’s help, he finds it’s a business. First, he was informed the Fish and Game Commission required him to obtain a license. He did. Now he learns he must keep a record of each bird and chick, whether he eats it, sells it, or gives it to a friend. And with each egg, even if he tosses it at a heckler.
-
Gossip Friday: Ranch Life
From July 1940: Gable Considers Ranch Life Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who have 20 acres in fruit trees near Hollywood, are going into ranching in a big way. They returned from Prescott, Ariz. carrying a 30-day option on a tract of 48,000 acres, which Mr. Gable this week said he would purchase, If so, he will stock it with thoroughbred cattle and point to it as a retirement site when he and Carole decide to quit pictures–which many believe may come much sooner than the expiration of Clark’s contract in 1945. ___ Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned.
-
Gossip Friday: Ode to The Queen
From October 1938: To her husband she’s Minnie. To her public she is Myrna Loy, but to Clark Gable, she is The Queen. They first met during the making of “Night Flight.” That was five years ago and she wasn’t a star then, but Gabe says she has not changed a whit since. They were together also in “Manhattan Melodrama,” “Wife vs. Secretary,” “Parnell,” “Men in White,” and “Test Pilot.” They are at it again in “Too Hot to Handle,” which is flashed on the screen at theatres [soon]. “At first I was a little afraid of her,” Gable admitted. “I thought she was mysterious but I soon learned tha…
-
Gossip Friday: Elastic Man
From June 1958: The most famous male face in pictures is also the most elastic, according to writer-producer-director George Seaton, twice an Academy Award winner and a veteran who should know what he is talking about. Its owner is Clark Gable, of course, and Seaton, who directed Gable in “Teacher’s Pet,” says he learned a lesson from guiding The King through the Paramount comedy release [currently playing]. “Most people don’t realize, and I certainly didn’t, that Mr. Gable can wordlessly run through the gamut of emotions and register, authentically, just about every reaction in the books,” said Seaton. The screenplay has the kind of salty man-to-man and man-to-woman humor that…
-
Gossip Friday: The Next Mrs?
From November 1948: One of the hottest rumors around Hollywood has to do with Anita Colby and Clark Gable. Intimates believe if Clark ever marries again it will be to The Face. She is nothing like Carole Lombard, who was one of the town’s great personalities—off screen as a well has on. Carole had a zest for life. She fitted in a duck blind as well as she did in a drawing room. Colby is a business girl, who has made more than average success in executive positions. But the years have changed Gable too. He has grown into middle age and needs a wife about the house perhaps more…
-
Gossip Friday: No Notes
From November 1950: Fan magazine and newspaper feature writers are getting the icy treatment from MGM on articles dealing with the married life of Clark Gable and his Sylvia. One writer who merely wanted Sylvia to make marginal notes on a profile of Clark was turned down.
-
Gossip Friday: The Gift of Trees
From June 1939: Mrs. Helen Stuart Sends Prize Trees to New Gable Home Two prize elm trees which will stand on the grounds of Mr. and Mrs. Clark Gable’s new home in Bel-Air are the gift of Mrs. Helen Kimberly Stuart of Neenah, WI to Mr. Gable and and his recent bride, Carole Lombard. Mrs. Stuart, whose aunt is Miss Lombard’s grandmother, is called Aunt Nell by the actress. Jack and James Kimberly of Neenah are also distant relatives of the new Mrs. Gable, as their grandmother was a sister of Mrs. Gable’s grandmother. The elm trees which Mrs. Stuart sent to the newlyweds are offspring of the tree under…
-
Happy Anniversary, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard
Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were married 84 years ago today, March 29, 1939, in Kingman, Arizona. It was Clark’s third marriage and her second. Clark was hard at work on a little film called Gone with the Wind at the time. Carole had been known as the “Queen of Screwball” for her zany comedies like Nothing Sacred, My Man Godfrey, True Confession and The Princess Comes Across. After she married Clark, she changed course and decided she wanted to try her hand at drama. Desperate to have a baby, she slowed down her work load and only made six films from 1939 until her untimely death in January 1942.…
-
Gossip Friday: Open Season
From October 1941: Carole Lombard went gunning today, not only for birds with feathers on ’em, but also for the radio oracles who claim she’s about to divorce Clark Gable, or die, or both. Miss Lombard will get the ducks when the seasons starts Thursday. On the gossipers she has declared open season. They’re causing her phone to ring so much she’s not getting enough sleep. Last week Miss Lombard and Gable were near Watertown, S.D., hunting pheasants. They went to their cabin after a day’s tramp through the fields and turned on the radio. “And there I was at home in Hollywood in bed, according to the man, about…
