Articles
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Articles are Back!
Thank you everyone for your patience while this site gets a much-needed facelift. I am happy to announce that the Article Archive is back up and running! Here you will find over 100 articles on Clark’s life and career, ranging from 1932 to 2008. Some highlights: Learn about Clark’s favorite pot roast and how to make his favorite pancakes in The Modern Hostess (1934). Read about one lucky contest winner’s date with Clark in I Had a Date with Clark Gable (1936). Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands and Wives (1939) is the infamous article that called out Clark and Carole, among other celebrity couples, for “acting like they are married even…
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{New Article} 2001: A Man’s Man Off the Screen Too
This article is one I found during my recent trip to Los Angeles. It was published in the Los Angeles Times to commemerate Clark Gable’s 100th birthday. I particularly enjoyed this article because it is very casual in style–just the author describing what Clark was like while he talked to him. An interesting glimpse inside the man. Particularly funny is the description of Clark trying to run a simple errand and getting accosted on the street: A few minutes later he came out of the elevator wearing a double-breasted, camel hair wrap-around coat, a tan, wide-brim fedora hat, and the Gable grin. He was taller and more rugged looking than…
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{New Article} 1940: Mr. and Mrs. Gable
Here’s another “look how happy they are and how simple they live” article on Clark and Carole from Ladies Home Journal. I say that like I am sick of that kind of article. But of course I am not! A typical scene between Mr. and Mrs. Gable at home would be at tea or cocktails in Gable’s faintly adolescent gun room with its collection of lethal weapons in a glass case on the wall. Clad in jodhpurs or levis and usually needing a shave, Gable sits back in a large chair. Mrs. Gable starts off by perching decorously enough on a sofa. But soon she is squatting on the floor,…
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New Content Galore and I’m Going Hollywood!
October is here and for me that means that I am heading off to Hollywoodland! I’ve planned this trip for a long time and I am very excited about all it will bring to the site. I will be tracing Clark’s footsteps all over Los Angeles and will be back bursting with new information, pictures and more, I hope! You can follow my travels beginning October 5 on the site Facebook page. In preparing for the trip, I wanted to clean off my desk so for the past month I have uploaded over 150 pictures in the gallery (log in and check out “Last Uploads”) and just today I have added…
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{New Article} 1938: What’s Become of the Good Scout?
This article is lamenting the chatterbox lounge lizard Carole of the past–the pre-Clark Carole! Carole is the needle in the Hollywood haystack, and press, public and photographers all find her hard to track down. What’s happened to that good scout who was always available for a laugh, a picture, a gag or a cocktail? That’s what everyone is asking now. And not only us get-arounds in Hollywood, but fans write and want to know, too. “What about Carole? Why no interviews? Has she gone high hat? Where is she? What is she doing?” Well, here it is finally, not the awful truth, but the very acceptable truth which explains briefly,…
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{New Article} 1940: Two Happy People Part 3
In May 1940, the weekly magazine Movie and Radio Guide featured a new Clark and Carole article every week. I’m posting part 3 of 4, only because the articles came from a scrapbook and Part 3 seems to be the only complete one. While I try to put the pieces of the other parts together, here is Part 3, which is all about life on the ranch. I was rather surprised to learn that the Gables had no swimming pool. A private swimming pool is as much a part of Hollywood existence as ballyhoo, bread and bourgeois. In the South, to judge your social status, they might ask you who…
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Carole Goes Bang! Bang!
“Skeet shooting is Hollywood’s new rage and Carole Lombard is a consistent high scorer. Here she is in action, after a morning of work on the Made for Each Other set.” Click to enlarge:
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{New Article} 1938: Happiness Ahead for Clark and Carole
Here’s another article with the all-too-common theme of “Will Ria ever give Clark a divorce? Will Clark and Carole ever marry?” Today Carole and Clark have put their love to the test of companionship, deep sympathy and understanding and they have found it stronger than either of them. Their heads no longer in the clouds, Clark and Carole know now. In a quiet, deeply happy, strong knowledge they are aware that they have revolutionized each other’s lives to the extent that nothing else matters, not even their careers of the white blinding light of stardom. Their intimates know that serenely and calmly, in the face of all obstacles and gossip,…
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{New Article} 1941: She Knew What She Wanted
From 1941, this article, taking its title from her recent film, boasts the triumphs of Carole Lombard, a gal who knows what she wants and goes out and gets it! What makes Carole Lombard different from Ye Average Woman is that she knows what she wants. What removes her to another planet entirely is that she goes after it—and gets it. Most women lead lives of noisy desperation. They ask everyone, including the corner cop, just which man to marry, what dress to wear today, what car to buy, which recipes to use, and in the end what cemetery to choose for the final collapse. They haven’t the faintest idea of…
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Carole as Her Own Critic
A brief photo-essay from Life Magazine, September 1940: This episode in the making of a movie is a dramatic moment rarely, if ever, photographed before. The movie is RKO’s version of They Knew What They Wanted, from the play that won Sidney Howard a Pulitzer Prize in 1925. The characters are director Garson Kanin, Actors Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton. For two months they have worked like beavers on what they beleive is to be a great movie script. They have had the usual quarrels. On location at Napa, Calif., 550 miles from home, they have run into the usual location troubles: bad weather, delays, throngs of bothersome autograph hounds.…