Gossip Friday: Still No Queen

From November 1954:

Rumor or No: The King hasn’t chosen his Queen!

When Clark Gable made a fast trip to the hospital to pick up his old friend Kay Williams Spreckels who had suffered a slight accident, many people jumped to the conclusion that romance was in the air. Actually, Clark maintains friendship of longstanding with Kay, as with Virginia Grey, and if he ever talked of marriage to either, no one says so.

Clark, who will be fifty-three on February 1, has confided to intimates that there is only the slimmest chance that he’ll ever wed again. Furthermore, he is not going to dispose of his ranch on Petit Avenue in Encino, as rumored. “Every time I think maybe I’ll let it go because it’s a huge place for one man to rattle around in,” Clark has said, “I visualize other people living there, and I just can’t bring myself to put it up for sale.”

About ten years ago, this place was considered way out in the country, and he liked it that way, with the mountains between himself and the studio, but the San Fernando Valley population has grown so swiftly that the Gable ranch is is now considered the center of town. The only way Clark’s life has changed is that he no longer hangs out on a Sunday morning with the hot rod car specialists who used to count him one of their regulars. Too many Sunday drivers spotted him and clustered around for autographs.