1956: The Great Gable
The Great Gable
By Joe Hyams
Syndicated newspaper series, November-December 1956
MASCULINITY SEEN KEY IN GABLE’S SUCCESS
One day recently Clark Gable received a parking ticket in Monterey, Calif. He went in person to pay the fine at the courthouse. Within minutes the word was out, “Clark Gable is here.”
Office workers, secretaries and bosses appeared as if by magic from all corners of the building. The girl in the cashier’s cage acted as most girls do when confronted by Gable in the flesh. Her hands shook.
Later, a newspaper reporter polled the people in the courthouse. He asked one question: Was Clark Gable a disappointment?
Ninety-five percent of the men and women polled said he wasn’t. One girl who spoke for the minority said that it wasn’t so much that he was a disappointment. It was just that no one, not even Gable himself, could live up to the image she had always had of him.
As Mervyn LeRoy, who has directed Gable in many pictures, said recently, “When you talk about Gable you aren’t talking about a man, or even an actor. You’re talking about a symbol. Gable is an institution.”
Clark Gable at 55 is still very much the man every man would like to be and the man every woman would like to have.
The secret of his success lies not in his ability nor in his affable and honest personality on the screen. It can best be explained by the fact that to millions of Americans he is the symbol of masculinity. He is the one male star who is never a disappointment to his fans. His all man!
At a time when youth’s national film heroes are boys, Gable stands alone as a man of action. There’s nothing neurotic about him. Women don’t want to mother Clark Gable. They want to make love to him.
Today his hair is graying at the temples, his face is lined, his voice is mellow and mature. But when he looks at an actress, right eyebrow cocked quizzically, and says, “Come here, baby,” the audience knows he means business.
Now in his 25th year as a film star, Gable is still the actor most in demand in Hollywood. Despite a handful of mediocre pictures in the 17 years since “Gone with the Wind,” he is the most popular actor in the world.
Two years ago he quit MGM, severing a relationship more than 20 years old because, he says, “I wanted to make my own mistakes. If I appear in a bad picture from now on, it’s my own fault.”
On the day he left the lot he expressed regret about only one thing. Robbie Roberson, his makeup man, wasn’t coming with him. The next day Robertson quit to join his old boss.
As a freelance actor Gable has his pick of parts despite the fantastic percentage he demands—and gets—for a picture. Last year, for example, he made two pictures for Twentieth Century Fox, “Solider of Fortune” and “The Tall Men.” He owned 10 percent of each picture’s gross earnings before expenses were deducted.
Darryl Zanuck, who was Fox production chief, is reported to have remarked gloomily, “Gable now owns half of our studio.”
This year Gable has appeared in only one picture, “The King and Four Queens.” He is a partner with Jane Russell and Bob Waterfield in the production which, if successful, will bring him close to $1,000,000.
Although he spends much of his time reading scripts submitted to him, Gable admits he is not anxious to make more than one or two pictures a year.
“I think I’ve made enough pictures so that instead of taking one month off I can take three or four. I’d like to enjoy life a little. I think I have earned it.”
When he’s not working Gable sends most of his time at his 20-acre home in Encino, Calif., with Kay Spreckels, his fifth wife, and her two children, Adolph Spreckles III, six, and Joan, four. Mrs. Gable has a heart condition. She and Clark lead a quiet family life loafing, reading and swimming.
On weekends he is likely to take the station wagon and go dove shooting with “the boys,” a group including such unlikely youths as Fred MacMurray, Gary Cooper and Robert Stack.
During the years he was at MGM Gable was considered inaccessible. The studio built a wall around him. Would-be interviewers were told, “He’s impossible” or “Even if he does talk to you it will be about hunting and fishing and you can’t print that.”
For this series Gable agreed to open up. He said, “It’s time to set the record straight.” He agreed to these interviews, most of which were conducted in his home.
On screen Gable appears to be a perfect gentleman. At home he is the perfect host. He is so determined to make his guests comfortable that his solicitude can become embarrassing.
His memory is remarkable. He is able to recall dates, places, names of people and theaters with amazing accuracy. Occasionally when asked a question he doesn’t wish to answer he will smile quizzically as if to say, “You really don’t expect an answer to that do you?”
But in the end he answered all, or almost all, my questions, And he answered them graciously.
STOCK SHOW SPARKED GABLE’S DESIRE TO ACT
According to Hollywood legend, Clark Gable was first called “King” by Spencer Tracy. Like most Hollywood legends, it is false.
The title was actually given him 19 years ago by columnist Ed Sullivan. Gable was winner of a newspaper contest conducted by Ed Sullivan to discover “The King and Queen of the Motion Picture Business.”
The fact that the crown fit is borne out by the fact that no one can recall who the Queen was.
Four marriages with unhappy endings, 57 motion pictures, distinguished fighting in World War II and countless love affairs have made Clark Gable a legend.
Gable rarely reads anything about himself. He has never read a scandal magazine, not even the one which recently blasted him for “forgetting” his first wife. He pays no attention to printed inaccuracies because, he believes, people will form their own opinions of him.
“I don’t think stories of any kind can change the attitude of my friends toward me. The other people I don’t care about,” he says.
There are many legends about Gable. There is the belief that he is a product of the Ohio oil fields. Another, that he was a passionate Paul Bunyan pulled down from a telephone pole by L.B. Mayer and signed for his first film.
The Gable story begins on February 1, 1901, in Cadiz, Ohio, in the small clapboard home of William H. and Adeline (Hershelman) Gable. His parents were Pennsylvania Dutch with some Irish on his mother’s side.
The Gable heir was described on his birth certificate as a girl. The error was hastily corrected. The amendment is still a matter of record in the probate and juvenile court, Harrison county, Ohio. A red line has been drawn through the word female.
Adeline Gable died when her son was 7 months old. When Gable was 5 his father, an oil wildcatter, married Miss Jennie Dunlap, a milliner and a gentle, cultured person. Gable loved his stepmother, who brought him up as her own boy.
“We lived then in Hopedale, Ohio, and my father was away much of the time digging for oil and looking for the big strike that never came,” Gable said. “When I was about 7 my stepmother became ill. The doctor told my father she needed a quiet life so we moved to a farm near Ravenna, about 15 miles from Akron. We settled down there and my father gave up oil drilling.”
Gable says he was “a clumsy youth with crooked teeth,” He played in the school band and acted as a teddy bear in a school play. He had the only bicycle and only private pool table in town. He was a spoiled only child.
He had two years of high school. His top grade was 94 in spelling. He quit high school at 16 and worked as a timekeeper for the Firestone Ture and Rim company at Akron.
One night he went to the theater where the Ed Clark-Lilly Stock players were presenting “The Bird of Paradise.” He was carried away by his first glimpse of professional theater. He became acquainted with the actors in the stock company by hanging around every night in the restaurant where they ate after the show. Soon he was working for nothing in his spare time as a stage hand and playing occasional walk-on parts.
“I quit my job as a timekeeper and got another in an oil refinery so I could work nights in the theater. Foolishly, I wrote my father that I wanted to be an actor.
“My stepmother died when I was 18 and my father moved to Oklahoma. He wrote and said if I wanted to be an actor I should go out there and he’d get me a job—as a student tool dresser on the business end of a 16-pound sledge, 12 hours on and 12 off.
“On the day I was 21 I walked into my dad’s office and said, ‘I’m still going to be an actor.’ He said, ‘I can’t believe it. I’m going to tell your grandmother.’ His mother was a real rugged old girl and I was afraid of her so I figured I’d better leave—quick.”
Gable went to Kansas City and joined a tent show called Jewell Players. He toured with them through the middle west until the show faded out of business in Butte, Mot., during a blizzard in March, 1922. He was stranded with 26 cents in his pocket. He rode the rods across the Rockies to Oregon, where he worked in a lumber mill for a few months, long enough to stake himself to a job expedition in Portland, Ore.
“By that time I was a pretty husky kid,” he recalls. “When I left Oklahoma I must have weighed 195 pounds, all muscle from swinging that sledge. Of course, piling lumber didn’t hurt, either. Acting jobs were few and far between so I got a job in the want ad department of ‘The Morning Oregonian.’ I would be the first to see job listings when they came in.
“I was there about six weeks when I landed a job as a timekeeper for the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph company and started dramatic school at night. I worked as a timekeeper and lineman for over a year. But I never got it out of my head that I wanted to be an actor.
“Looking back at it all now, I realize that I was getting the background that was going to come in handy on the screen. I’m no actor and I never have been. What people see on the screen is me.
“This talk about my being a legend is funny. I wasn’t a legend in those days. All I can remember is hard work.”
GABLE’S LIFE GREATLY INFLUENCED BY WOMEN
Clark Gable’s life has been greatly influenced by women. He has been married five times and three of his marriages ended in divorce.
There was an embarrassing paternity suit which resulted in the jailing of his accuser for false testimony. There have been many romances.
His first two marriages were to women older than himself. It has been suggested by amateur psychiatrists that he was seeking a mother substitute to make up for the death of his own mother. Gable refuses to discuss either marriage. He subscribes to the theory that he was seeking in older women a wisdom he felt lacking in himself.
He met his first wife, Josephine Dillon, in 1923 in Portland, Ore. A story has it that he was a repairman who went to fix her telephone. Gable says he was actually employed as a lineman and he first met Miss Dillon at a dramatic school she was running.
When he was enrolled in Miss Dillon’s school she was 37 years old, a judge’s daughter and a graduate of Stanford university. He studied with her for almost a year.
Miss Dillon taught him diction and timing. She taught him how to make an entrance and walk across a stage. She found him a job in a local theater.
She went to Hollywood to open a dramatic school and a few months later Gable went to Hollywood too. They were married on December 13, 1924.
In those days the idol of the silent screen was Rudolph Valentino. Gable just didn’t fit into the Hollywood pattern. During his first year in Hollywood he did bit parts.
“I worked a few days,” he recalled, “with Pola Negri and Rod LaRoque in a Lubitsch picture. I held a sword.”
Most of his income came from the stage. Los Angeles theater was flourishing in those days and Gable became one of the city’s most popular leading men. He worked steadily in Los Angeles and then went on the road for 32 weeks. Finally he arrived on Broadway where he appeared in more than half a dozen shows over a three-year period.
Gable is very proud of his stage background. It destroys he legend that he was an untutored lumberjack when he came to Hollywood. Actually he had played in everything from leading men to character parts and comedy.
He returned to Los Angeles from Broadway in 1930 for a road show appearance in “The Last Mile” as Killer Mears—a role created on Broadway by Spencer Tracy.
Lionel Barrymore, who had known Gable in New York, dropped backstage to see him. “He told me I should make some motion pictures,” Gable said. “I told him I had been in the picture business—as an extra. Lionel said it was different now. The big stars couldn’t talk and he was a director. He’d make a test of me.
“I went out to the studio for a test. They stripped me, put body makeup all over, tied a G-string around my middle, stuck a knife in my belt and a hibiscus in my ear and told me to creep around the stage like a bird of paradise.
“Irving Thalberg, who was head of MGM, saw the test and told Lionel he had lost his mind.
“I didn’t get the part, but I went on to Pathe where I played a heavy in ‘Painted Desert,’ starring Bill Boyd, for $750 a week.”
The contract was Gable’s first. He still has it framed in his den.
Minna Wallis, sister to producer-director Hal Wallis, saw the original test and showed it to Darryl Zanuck at Fox. Zanuck said Gable’s ears were too big and he’d never be a leading man.
She arranged another meeting for Gable with Thalberg. The boy wonder changed his opinion and signed him to a contract with MGM for $650 a week.
The Gable personality began to project itself in “A Free Soul.” One morning in 1931, Lionel Barrymore walked onto the set and saw Gable with a woman in his arms. Gable flipped his fiend a casual salute as if he made love to great actresses before breakfast every morning. “He took it for granted,” reported the astounded Barrymore.
Gable stole “A Free Soul” completely away from Miss Shearer, Leslie Howard and Barrymore. A front office executive decided that if Gable hit Miss Shearer the audience would dislike him. The scene was inserted, but when the movie was previewed the audience howled with delight.
“They had me clouting everybody after that,” said Gable. “I didn’t care. I used to laugh at it. I was making good money and I did as I was told. The only one I didn’t clout was Garbo when I appeared with her. She probably would have clipped me back.”
Gable and Josephine Dillon were divorced. A few months later he married Ria Langham, a divorcee he met on Broadway. She was a widow, 11 years his senior and mother of a teenage son and daughter. In one of her rare public statements, Josephine Dillon told the press, “Clark told me when we were divorced he wanted to marry Ria because she could do more for him financially. He is a born actor but a ‘double Dutchman.’ He is hard to live with because his career and ambition always come first.”
When I read Miss Dillon’s statement to Gable he didn’t believe it. “It doesn’t sound like her,” he said.
Almost from the beginning of Gable’s marriage to Ria Langham there were rumors of trouble. He was fast becoming a big star. During one year he made 14 pictures. In 1934, after winning an academy award for “It Happened One Night” he jumped from seventh to second place among the top money-making stars.
Late in 1935 he separated from Ria Langham. One day he greeted her with, “I want my freedom.”
“Is that all you said?” I asked him.
“That’s it,” said Gable. “If you want any amplification you’d better talk to the lady.”
LOVES OF GABLE, MARRIED 5 TIMES
Hollywood sentimentalists are the most maudlin people in the world. They like to believe Clark Gable had only one love in his life and that he never recovered from her death, Gable has had many loves. His marriage to Carole Lombard is the only one that ended in tragedy.
Gable’s other romances have ended with the woman talking wistfully about what might have been and Gable maintaining a tight-lipped silence. His standard comment: “Let the lady tell it.”
After his separation from Ria Langham in 1935 many women passed through Gable’s life. He was linked with Loretta Young, with a British actress named Mary Taylor and with Elizabeth Allan, a society girl.
In 1937 an Englishwoman made headlines by declaring Gable the father of her 13-year-old daughter, Gwendolyn. The allegation was false. It was refuted in a Federal court. The woman was charged with using the mail to defraud.
Late that same year he met Carole Lombard. He was at the peak of his career. He and Miss Lombard had met before in 1932 when they co-starred in a picture. At that time they were both married, she to William Powell and he to Miss Langham.
Miss Lombard was seven years younger than Gable. Hollywood biographer Cameron Shipp recalls that Miss Lombard liked gags. Once she invited a number of Hollywood figures to a formal dinner party. When the guests arrived in white ties and mink they were ushered into a drawing room from which all the furniture had been removed. The floor was knee-deep in hay.
Miss Lombard was also noted for having the most profane vocabulary ever heard in Hollywood. This fact Mr. Gable recalls with the pride of a teacher. She was a man’s woman.
They went together for three years while waiting for Ria Langham to accept a property settlement Miss Langham got her decree in March, 1939. Gable immediately got a day off from working in “Gone with the Wind.” He and Miss Lombard drove 750 miles to Kingman, Ariz., where they were married in a small Methodist church.
Friends of Gable say that in his marriage to Carole Lombard he resolved himself. He was a mature, celebrated and rich man, not an uncertain country boy from Ohio. At last he had married a woman to whom he had something to give. Gable says no couple were every happier on or off the screen. This peak of his life lasted two years. He called General Hap Arnold, his friend, on the telephone and told him he wanted to enlist in the Air Force as a private.
“I’m 41 years old and I don’t know how to go about it,” he admitted candidly. “I’d like a tough job. Then maybe some of the guys will figure if an old man like Gable can do it, so can I.”
Gable enlisted as a private. Later he was sent to Officer Candidate School. He was commissioned a second lieutenant and sent to England with a bomber group. He took part in the raid on the bombing run that blasted the Ruhr Valley and became one of three “prizes” for whom Hermann Goering offered a price dead or alive.
On missions over enemy territory Gable wore a silver chain around his neck holding a little box. In it were the jeweled ear clips Carole Lombard wore when she died.
Gable won the Air Medal for five combat missions. He came out of the service a major. It was a long time before he married again. There were many items in the gossip columns about his romances—but nothing serious developed.
Seven years after Miss Lombard’s death he married Lady Sylvia Ashley, former wife of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Clark Gable was her fifth husband.
They were married on December 21, 1949. She was 42 and he was 48. Three weeks later Gable’s close friends said he had made a mistake. Less than 15 months after the marriage he changed the locks on the house doors. When Sylvia returned from a trip he told her he wanted a divorce,
Gable refused to discuss why his marriage to Sylvia failed. He agreed to the following summation: “I’m an outdoor man, she’s an indoor woman.” They were divorced in 1952. For the next two years Gable devoted himself to hunting, fishing and puttering about his farm.
When he married Kay Spreckels in July of thus year none of his friends was surprised. They had known each other for 14 years. Not since Carole Lombard has Gable had a companion who suits him so well.
Kay will go along with him on anything. Friends say she has the kind of mind he likes in a woman.
Two weeks after his marriage to Kay Spreckles, Clark Gable held a press conference at his ranch in Encino, Calif. It was the first time he had ever opened his home to the press. Most of the Hollywood correspondents were there.
The conference lasted more than half an hour. Not once was an embarrassing question asked of either of the Gables. The respect and dignity with which he was treated by the press is, perhaps, the greatest tribute Mr. Gable has received in a long career.
Dignity and honesty are the two elements that Clark has parlayed into a winning combination at the box office. In addition, there is a mystery. No man really knows him.
Not even at MGM, where he was employed for 25 years, did his bosses get to know him. Louis B. Mayer would never tell him to come to his office. He would ask him to drop in and have a talk when he was free.
Gable has only a few friends and does not make new ones easily. “I don’t know anybody very well until I’ve known them for several years and seen them under various circumstances,” he says. “Everybody is buddy-buddy in Hollywood. You say ‘hello’ to someone and then believe he’s a close friend. Well, that’s not the way it is with me.”
Everyone who has worked with Gable has a good word to say about him. Howard Strickling, head of publicity at MGM and one of Gable’s oldest friends, put his finger on the Gable personality when he said, “To me, he’s the most sincere, unaffected star I’ve ever known. His dressing room door is always open, he talks to everyone, he likes people and they like him. I think he projects this on the screen and that’s why he’s so durable.
“He’s mellowed over the years. He hasn’t gotten bitter or sarcastic. He’s still just as enthusiastic and interested in life as he was when I first met him.”
At fifty-five Clark Gable is a remarkable man. He’s as fit as he was when he was in the Air Force. He has what sociologists term charisma—the essence of authority. He also has sex appeal, despite gray hair and a lined face.
His physique betrays none of the ravages of age. He stands erect, walks quickly and quietly on the balls of his feet. When he gets up from a sitting position it’s a fast smooth movement without using his hands to push himself erect.
He’s not ashamed of his age and hates the thought of using black dye to touch up his hair. He insists that still photos of him remain untouched. “I’ve always asked the studios not to touch my pictures up,” he said. “I want them to leave the character lines there. Otherwise I look like twenty million other guys.”
Gable is a man’s man in everything he does and says. He’s never run away from either life or a problem. Perhaps that’s part of his screen charm. “I don’t know whether I’m able to cope with all the problems that face me,” Gable admitted recently. “But I am able to face them. There have been many times in my life when I’ve been only able to solve problems half way. I know that everything in life doesn’t have a happy ending.”
Gable is one of the few stars who are not surrounded by gophers—Hollywood term for hangers-on—nor does he have a business manager.
“I handle my own finances,” he said. “If I make a mistake it’s my fault. The fun of having money is handling it yourself. With a smart manager I would have a lot more money. But I don’t care about being rich. I just want to be comfortable.”
No one knows just how much money Gable does have. During most of the twenty-five years he was at MGM his salary was $7,500 a week. He has a paid up annuity of $112,000 as a result of the MGM pension plan. He can figure on earning at least a half million dollars from each picture he makes now that he’s freelancing.
Although he is sentimental about many things, Gable is above all a practical man. He has reels of most of the films he has appeared in with one notable exception, “Gone with the Wind.”
“The studio wanted $3,200 for that one and I just couldn’t see it,” he said.
Some time ago there were rumors that Gable would be retiring soon. He admits that he considered the idea but changed his mind. “I’m getting a kick out of making pictures again,” he said. “Of course, one day motion picture audiences may retire me. But I certainly am not planning to retire myself at this time nor in the near future.
“I think acting gets a little more difficult as time goes by. I don’t know whether it’s because I think people expect more or me or not. I try to give more.”
I asked Gable to look back on his career and explain if he could why his life had gone where it has.
“I don’t know that I can,” he said. “I seem to have pretty much just followed along and tried to make the best of whatever happened. Maybe this will illustrate what I mean. I didn’t want to do ‘Gone with the Wind.’ By the time the picture had started the incredibly romantic Rhett Butler was as alive in people’s imaginations as any of the actual figures of the day. To try to give substance to this dream seemed to me to be impossible. To this day I think the reasoning was correct, although the event has proven me wrong. It just happened that ‘Gone with the Wind’ was…well, was ‘Gone with the Wind,’
“Incidents like this are the story of my life. I’ve always given life its head, maybe tickling it once in a while with a spur and reining it over a rough spot, and mostly just hanging on. Well, maybe that’s not quite right. But I’ve tried to sit the saddle well.”