Articles
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{New Article} 1945: Gable!
This one is a little piece written on the set of Adventure—a period of time when Clark Gable wasn’t offering too many interviews. The article starts out promising, as it appears she is the first to get “the big scoop” on Clark since his return to the screen. In actuality, it’s really just a girl reporter gushing about Clark–rather cutely–and then recapping what he’d been through the last few years since Carole Lombard’s death. Well, says I, here’s the great Gable. Take a good look. Yep, he’s heavier. Betcha he weighs 200 if he weighs a pound. He’s taller than I thought he’d be. He barks when he talks before…
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{New Article} 1935: I’m No Ladies Man, Says Clark Gable
Next up–Clark Gable declares he is no ladies man! (Yeah right) “Most boys learn about women from their mothers,” he says. “They unconsciously form their image of the girl they hope to marry someday by patterning their ideal after the one woman they know best. However, my mother died when I was only seven months old.” Isn’t that rather sad! Actually he was ten months old when his mother died, but whatever… “Naturally, after such a life as mine, I’m more at home with men than I am with women. But I think most men are. They talk the same language. When a man says anything, no matter whether…
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{New Article} 1935: This Belongs to You! This Belongs to Me!
Let’s begin our birthday month article-palooza with this one from 1935. The focus here is that Clark wants a personal life and a professional life and he wants them separate! No matter how pleasant the impression you get from the finished picture, it represents work, hard work, not only on the part of the director, cameraman, author, electrician, prop man and many others, but work on the part of the actor. My feeling, therefore, is that we earn our salaries by our work in pictures, and we shouldn’t have to continue working every minute we are away from the studio. Don’t raise your eyes at that remark and say you…
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Remembering Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard Gable died 73 years ago today, at the young age of 33. Her sudden death in a plane crash shocked the nation, stunned Hollywood and devastated her husband. This article that was published a few months after Carole’s death, appears in the Article Archive, What the Loss of Carole Lombard Means to Clark Gable: Gable was working on that fateful afternoon of January 16, 1942. He felt wonderful about it. He’d had five months lay-off since the production of “Honky Tonk,” the longest vacation he’d experienced since his first real click in 1931. It was swell to be back and he liked the new picture. It was…
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Happy Veterans Day
There are a lot of misconceptions about Clark Gable, but one of them that I really can’t tolerate is anyone who says his Army service wasn’t the selfless and heroic act that it was. Today is Veterans Day and therefore the perfect opportunity to revisit this 2008 article that was published in World War II magazine: Captain Hollywood Miami Beach can be miserably hot during the off-season, and in the summer of 1942—long before air conditioning became commonplace—it was an inferno. It was definitely no seaside paradise for the men of the US Army Officer Candidate School who lived there. Barracked in waterfront hotels that the federal government had stripped…
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{New Article} 1939: The Clark Gables at Home
What we have here is a largely fictional article written to prove that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had a simple home life–just like you do, the American public! When Clark and Carole bought that ranch and set up their home miles from Hollywood, spending time feeding chickens and mowing grass rather than attending premieres, the studio publicity depts and fan magazines decided to just play that up. So what you find are endless amounts of articles about their rustic domestic tranquility. This one is written by “Liza,” one of those first-name-only fan magazine writers that is probably not a real person. Nonetheless, it’s a cute little article: I drove…
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{New Article} 1942: A Letter to Heaven
This article is one of many memorial pieces printed in April 1942, the first month after Carole Lombard’s January death that most of the magazines caught up to the news. It is written by someone named “Romayne,” who says they worked with Carole. Pretty sure that’s a pseudonym, but a touching piece nonetheless… Carole Dear: You said you were coming to our set to visit us next week. You said we’d have fun like we had before. So I looked forward to a lot of laughter. You said that Clark, Ruggles, you and I would have our pictures taken together and that we’d call that ‘little number our anniversary.’ That…
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{New Article} 1950: Just Call Him King
Earlier in the week we looked at the essay Clark Gable wrote about his co-star, Loretta Young, as publicity for Key to the City. An innocent idea, certainly, except of course when said co-stars had a secret child fifteen years earlier. So let’s see what Loretta had to say about Clark, shall we… I first met Clark Gable about twelve years ago when we co-starred in a woodsy drama entitled “The Call of the Wild.” Although we were given top billing, the real star of the picture was a massive dog named Buck. The rest of us, compared to the instant attention Buck’s slightest bark commanded, were no more impressive…
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{New Article} 1950: Meet a Great Lady
Sometimes work duties can be awkward. Like, say, when you are required to pen an essay detailing why your co-star is so great, and you and said co-star had a secret baby out of wedlock fifteen years earlier. Yeah. That’s awkward. During the press circuit of To Please a Lady, Clark Gable and Loretta Young were asked to do just that. The whole story of their secret baby was known widely around Hollywood but not so much in the households of moviegoers. I’ve often wondered why the producers even proposed starring them together, if it was such a widely known fact. It doesn’t surprise me one iota that neither Clark…
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{New Article} 1961: Clark Gable’s Baby: This is a Story of Faith and Immortality
Sometimes, when I find a new article for the site, I sit down and read it, jot down some notes, and then put it in the pile to type. Other times (often when I’m backlogged!), I don’t read the article until I am actually typing it up. This article is one of those and I must say that while I was typing it I had to stop several times and re-read what I typed, shaking my head, “What the heck is the point of this article?!” I’m still not sure. Kay Gable ignored the advice of her doctor. “Your own heart’s not in such great shape, you know,” he’d said.…