Goodbye, Mr. Gable

Clark Gable died fifty-nine years ago today, on November 16, 1960. He was fifty-nine years old. He has now been gone for as long as he lived, which is rather startling to realize. Married to Kay with a baby on the way and proud of his recent performance in The Misfits, Clark was very content and not ready to go. But such is life.

From Life magazine in January 1961:

Thirty years ago, Clark Gable slapped Norma Shearer’s aristocratic face in A Free Soul and launched his own personal era of heroes who take no nonsense from women. In his heyday, he was lusty, challenging, unsophisticated. He grew more stolid and thoughtful after the war years, but a glint of hell-raising humor remained. The millions of people who paid $500,000,000 to see his 60 or more movies never wavered in their affection. Wives took their husbands to see Gable pictures, and fathers took their sons, because they admired him as a man.
There was no one anywhere who ever looked quite like Gable, or who could approach the cumulative dignity and glamour of his life and career. “He’s not a man—he’s an institution,” a Hollywood producer once said. As with royalty, Gable was regarded by many people as a personal friend, but few in the crowds that always surged around him dared touch him or call him anything but “Mr. Gable.”
Millions of words were written about him throughout the world. Everybody knew the vital statistics of his life: his beginnings as a farm boy, his roustabout years before getting established, the vicissitudes of his five marriages, his war record, the enormous sums of money he earned (for his last picture, United Artists’ The Misfits, he got more than $800,000). But Gable was never an easy man to know or understand. In the early days, he talked freely about himself. As the years went on, when questions turned to his private life, he would make little comment…

At his funeral, all the stars of Hollywood gathered silently to pay tribute. Among the honored guests was the egg man, who delivered two dozen eggs every Saturday morning to the Gable home and had always stopped in to chat. Even his funeral followed the Gable pattern of brevity and simplicity. He used to say, “If anything ever happens to me, don’t let them make a circus out of it.” He had underestimated his world of fans. As in his lifetime, no one would have dared to mar his final dignity and privacy.