{New Article} 1942: How Clark Gable is Conquering Loneliness

Here is a new article that will isn’t exactly the most uplifting, but it sheds some light on how Clark was struggling in the months following Carole Lombard’s death.

This is the truth considering Clark Gable today; he is not going into active military service. He is not selling the ranch. He is going on with pictures. But the reasons that have determined these decisions reveal the changed Gable, this strong and complex man who after his exquisite wife’s death discovered through his tragic loneliness that he had loved her even more than he had ever realized.

Well, by the time this issue hit newstands in August of 1942, Clark had indeed enlisted. And he told reporters he didn’t want to continue in pictures as long as “our boys are fighting.” And, most say, he didn’t care if he came back or not.

Six months of lonely nights and bitter days have left their mark on Clark, as you observe when you see “Red Light”. To take merely one slight example; until now he has always had trouble keeping his weight down. Yet within one week after Carole’s loss, he dropped twenty pounds and he hasn’t yet been able to regain even half of that.

“Red Light” was what they changed the title of Somewhere I’ll Find You to after Carole’s death. There is definitely a difference in Clark if you watch the film. His weight fluctuations are very evident, as is a weary look in his eyes.

That night Al Menasco went home to that Encino house with him. “I’ve got to get out of here,” Clark said.

“Sunday I’ll go look for a new place.”

“You bet,” said Al. “I’ll help you.” He did help too. On Sunday, he drove Clark all over the San Fernando Valley and every place they looked at, he’d point out the advantages. He told Clark that there would never be a thing on any of these ranches to remind him of Carole, never a stable where they hung up their tack after their long rides, never a barn where he’d remember the first cow he bought, which hadn’t given enough milk, and how, when he’d sent the animal back to its original owner, Carole had said it must be the most humiliated cow in all of California. He kept pointing out these advantages. Gable finally gave him a look from beneath those brows of his.

“So ok,” he said very sharply. “So turn around and I’m not leaving the old house.”

Can’t you just see the look Clark gave him? He put the ranch on the market a few times. Once around this time, the summer of 1942. Again after he returned home from the service, and once again right before he married Kay. But he could never bring himself to sell it. It really was his one and only home, and I think to him a home without the memories of Carole wasn’t a home at all.

Clark loved Carole with the passion that only a strong man of temperament, intelligence and imagination can love the woman who inspires the best in him. She was superior, beautiful, laughing, generous person, this Carole, and Clark knows he can never replace her image in his heart.

No, he never did. He tried but I believe he was always a bit haunted by her.

Also new is a short piece from a few months later that year, Open Letter to Clark Gable, a touching article where the editor of Photoplay magazine addresses Clark after he joined the armed forces.

Now that you’ve bought your ticket, here is a thought to take with you on the journey ahead. In the movies you have represented a man that every woman—at least practically every American woman—could love as a son, as a brother, or as a man.

And that’s what you mean now that you’re in Uncle Sam’s Army. You are Everyman, every American man who is the center of Everywoman’s thought today, her prayers, her hopes. She prays that Everyman will eat well, sleep well, and above all, keep well. She prays that he’ll get the most out of his training to be a soldier, prove his mettle as a man among men.

She hopes that he’ll think of her now and then, maybe send her a letter or postcard soon. She knows that he’ll take that trip to a foreign field one of these days—and when he does, she’s ready to keep quiet and keep smiling. She goes on working at her job so that he won’t worry about her and she sends him letters and little remembrances that will make him a happier soldier.

And then, at night, she prays that he’ll do the job he’s set out to do—to save his country from murder and rape and starvation—and that someday, even if it’s years later, he’ll come back to her, be she mother, sister, sweetheart or wife, and start again where they left off.

That’s what you’ll be meaning to all of us. We’ve heard about a few of the snipers who have been writing, “What do you mean by saying you’re starting from the ground up when you’re a corporal?” Those people don’t know that in your unit the lowest man is rated as a corporal for purposes of admission and that once he’s in, he loses his rating until he finished his officer’s training. So you’re still just “Mister Gable” when anyone addresses you.

But we’ve also heard what your teammates down in Miami are writing home; things like “…he gets the same treatment as the rest of us and there isn’t a man in the outfit whose respect he hasn’t won…great guy…”

Furthermore, we know you haven’t lost your sense of humor; not when you can write as you did to one of the boys at your studio:”They’re cutting my hair tomorrow. Brother, oh, brother, when they get down to those Gable ears they’ll fly me across the Atlantic as the latest thing in bombers!”

Most of us would have been perfectly happy if you’d stayed on as Clark Gable of the screen, who knew how to make an hour and a half pass in the theater like a few minutes. But you didn’t see it that way and we know why.

You’re going to do a terrific job for Uncle Sam—just as Jimmy Stewart and Tyrone Power and Doug Fairbanks Jr. and Henry Fonda and all the rest of the Hollywood boys are doing—and will do. Maybe, remembering that you’re Everywoman’s Everyman you’ll do even a touch more than your best—and believe me, pal, that’s tops so far as we’re concerned!