1949: The Story Behind the Gable Legend

By Jack Wade

Modern Screen, October 1949

Movie idols come and go, but for twenty years Clark Gable has reigned supreme in Hollywood. Despite the onrush of time and mixed fortune, his public remains vast and loyal. What’s the secret? What’s the magic of his personality? Few people really know. Even his close friends seem baffled by his perpetual popularity. Here, in a penetrating story, Modern Screen presents an analysis of Gable the man—and why he is King.

A few days before he checked back in at MGM to make “Key to the City,” Clark Gable fished the big-game waters off Guaymas, Mexico, seeking the king of the seas, black marlin. One bright blue afternoon, using light tackle, he tied into a 250-pounder. For the next two hours Clark had his big hands full, in a one-man battle against the fighting-est fish that swims.

Twelve times the swordfish broke water, tail-dancing, whipping every steel muscle in his body to free himself from the straining line that Clark’s aching muscles held in the boat. Nine times Clark had him up close to the boat only to be forced to play the line out again and watch his catch zip away in a charging rush for life.

Halfway through the churning scrap, Clark started talking to his opponent. “Nice going kid…what a fighter!.. Boy, you can take it!…Beautiful…Beautiful…” When he reeled him in at last, played out and conquered, Clark’s eyes were sweat-blinded, his bulging arms trembled, cigarettes had burned blisters on his lips, his bare shoulders were roasted red. But he had his prize.

“Say, Skipper,” said Gable, “suppose you can unhook him in the water?”

The Mexican boatman almost dropped his gaff. Was this Yanqui sportsman loco? Some people, they spent lives chasing a marlin and never got a strike. And here, this man had caught this beautiful big one, this rare one, and wished to let him go!

“I think so, Senor—but…”

“Okay,” said Clark. “Let him go. A fighting guy like that deserves his freedom.”

Clark Gable’s sporting sympathy with the swordfish he’d hooked is understandable. For a long time his own position has been somewhat similar. Not for two hours but for almost 20 years, Clark’s been fastened to Hollywood by a taut, spinning string of great box office pictures, great popularity, great fame. He’s the undisputed king of the movie seas, a big-game guy, peerless, the champ.

He’s made spectacular leaps, likewise a flop or two, but they’ve never bothered his box office. He’s still tops., he’s terrific, he’s sought after, respected. Like his swordfish, too, Clark Gable prizes his freedom above everything else he has. But there’s one very striking difference. Nobody’s thinking of letting Clark Gable go.

Since he made “A Free Soul,” which sent Clark off to the races, he’s stayed annually in the top box-office 10, excepting on year during the war when his pictures ran out. He not only starred in the greatest money-maker in film history, “Gone with the Wind,” but in bonanzas like “Test Pilot,” “It Happened One Night,” “Boom Town,” “San Francisco,” “Red Dust,” and “Hell Divers.” “Adventure,” which the critics panned, made five million dollars. So did “Homecoming,” which got the same review ribbings. No recent Gable movie has been a critical rave—“The Hucksters,” “Command Decision,” or “Any Number Can Play.” But they’ve all been good Gable—so enough said. They’ve all made big money. “It Happened One Night,” which won Clark his Oscar, has been reissued nine separate times.

He’s launched a double-dozen young actresses to fame through being his leading lady. He’s been a man’s hero, too. No clotheshorse ever, when he wore turtlenecked sweaters, everybody started wearing them. When he sported a Tyrolean hat, the same. He boosted along the popularity of skeet-shooting by taking it up. He helped boom hunting and fishing. He’s the original hot-rod kid. He aided mightily in glamorizing the Air Corps. During the war, Hitler dangled prizes before his Luftwaffe for the Nazi pilot who could bring him down.

Come December 4, 1950, which is only a year away, Clark will have been on MGM’s payroll 20 years. (He signed up first for two.) Yet he’s just getting his second wind as Mr. Hollywood. Why and how come? What’s the Gable magic? Why is his popularity perpetual, his worldwide audience unlimited, untired, unsatisfied, unrelentingly loyal, militantly devoted—in spite of time and times, good and bad, and Gable pictures the same? How does the guy do it?

Even some of Gable’s close friends seem baffled when they try to put a finger on just what the magic is. But long ago, the late Irving Thalberg, MGM’s great producing genius, summed up his ten-new star pretty pithily: “Gable is manhood, personified,” he appraised. “He’s what every man admires, every woman loves, every boy would like to grow up to be.” You could say the same thing today. Since then Clark Gable and the Gable charm both have been analyzed curiously from every angle because there’s never been anyone remotely like him. In fact, the oft-tried Hollywood beginner’s ballyhoo, “He’s another Gable,” has always boomeranged as an absurd and blighting career kiss-of-death. There’s no such animal, never will be, and every candidate posing as such has been rudely laughed off screen.

Clark himself has consistently snorted his perennial, “I’m lucky,” explanation and gone on being himself, on the screen and off. Still, there’s more to the Gable power than a rabbit’s foot—more, too, than Thalberg’s triple-threat theory of virility, sex-appeal and hero stature.

For one thing, Clark Gable knows his business from the ground up—which is where he started as an extra. Maybe he ought to, after all these years. But there are plenty of other star veterans who still don’t, who haven’t had the enthusiasm, the curiosity and the conscientious competence that Gable owns as much today as when he began.

Though he won an Oscar for “It Happened One Night” (and gave it away to a boy admirer),  he’s not a great actor, if you believe either the critics or most directors. But Mervyn LeRoy, one of his longtime boosters and part discoverer, disagrees. “Don’t ever kid yourself,” he told me. “Gable’s as good as they come on the screen. He can handle any scene in a way that pulls every eye right to him, and that, like nothing else, is movie greatness.”

Clark knows everything about making movies—in every department. He’s never in his trailer dressing room between takes unless absolutely necessary, and then the door’s never closed—he might miss something. He’s out in the center of things with the people who are putting him on film. When a camera breaks down, he’s got his head poked inside and his fingers fiddling until the bug’s licked. “Shug” Keeler, a hunting pal of his, who’s worked on dozens of Gable films, told me: “Clark could take out a card in darned near any studio union today. He could handle almost any job—electrician, carpenter, prop, grip, camera crew. He’s learned by being curious as a cat.”

“Clark Gable’s stayed great because he has the common touch,” one of his best pals, the late director Victor Fleming told me once. “He likes people as much as they like him. I’ve never seen him bored or blasé in any setting.” Victor Fleming directed Gable in “Gone with the Wind” and “Test Pilot.” Fleming was a rugged man like Clark, and the pair used to roar over the California countryside on motorcycles playing a sort of follow-the-leader on the highway. Often Gable disappeared and Vic would find him back somewhere chummed up with other Sunday motorbike clubs made up for factory workers, mechanics and store clerks.

“People see and admire in Clark whatever they want to,” thinks Howard Strickling, MGM official and Gable’s close friend and ranch neighbor in the San Fernando Valley. Howard’s travelled a lot with Clark. “They feel they know him. After all, they’ve either grown up or grown older with Clark. They’ve watched him fight, make love, eat, drink, sleep, shave, dress, get in jams and out of them, laugh, play, and get smacked around by life, just as they do—only on the screen. They’ve formed their ideas long ago about what he’s like and he doesn’t let them down. When he meets them, he’s the same guy they think they know.”

Gable loves to meet the people—whether they’re Long Island society smoothies or Texas ranch hands. He has the happy gift of being equally at ease at both. By all odds the most glamorous man in the world, he doesn’t carry the gloss with him in person. Nothing sets him apart as an out-of-this-world demigod. Hollywood seems to roll off him the minute he rolls out of Hollywood. He’s easily recognized wherever he goes, enjoys the recognition and sops up the friendly admiration even when it inconveniences him.

Gable’s a dream tourist and sightseer wherever he goes—and he goes just about everywhere. He keeps his viewpoint fresh and his perspective straight that way. This last stretch after “Any Number Can Play,” for instance, he drove to Oregon to his Rogue River shack; flew to New York to catch the new Broadway shows; drove to Phoenix, Arizona, to see Betty Chisholm, a girl he likes, and to take more lessons from a golf pro he also likes at the Arizona Biltmore. From there he bumped over the chuck-holed roads of Lower California to Guaymas and his marlin. Wherever he went, he saw all there was to see and what he could cram in to do—whether it was a whirl at the Stork Club with his Long Island friends, or a rodeo in a desert cow-town.

He rolls into a new town, maybe only pop. 2,500, rubbernecking all around, strolls into a highway café and kids the waitress.

“What’s cookin’ Sweetheart?” Clark drawls with his elbows on the counter. “What do you do for excitement in this town?” And she tells him, or the local cop does, or a garage grease-monkey does. Before he’s through with them he knows all about their burg, and he’s told them practically nothing about Hollywood or himself. If there’s a carnival in town, a turkey-shoot or an election with free lemonade and fireworks, Clark’s there and having a terrific time. Going East, he never misses taking in the zoos in New York and Chicago. Last year he spent all afternoon at a model coalmine in Chicago. He’s toured all the national parks, even Yellowstone, gaping at the geysers, including the one that could have been named after himself, Old Faithful.

Oddly enough, although Clark’s popularity has long since surpassed the fabulous Valentino’s, he almost never gets mobbed or swarmed, heckled or embarrassed in public. “There’s some kind of native dignity and respect that guy packs that keeps them from it,” says an MGM chaperone who’s travelled a lot with Clark to benefits and openings. “They treat him like a human being instead of a Hollywood god.”

Clark has an alert nose for trouble and has always ducked with rare good sense instead of playing the hero out in public without drawing a salary for it. One reason is that he’s powerful—a rough, slugging hitter from his oil fields days—ad he doesn’t trust himself to get lured into a spot where he might hurt, possibly kill, someone. He’s laughed his way good-naturedly out of many a café commotion in both New York and Hollywood in his time; many an emboldened drunk has peeled off at him with, “So you’re the great Gable. Let’s see if you’re so tough!” Clark’s either moved on or kidded him out of his folly.

In all the years Gable’s been in Hollywood, no scandal of any sort has stuck to his name.

Clark went through the divorces from his first two wives, Josephine Dillon and Rhea Langham, without any dirt-dishing, recriminations, or sordid facts and figures. He’s still friends with them both, although they’re long ago out of his life.

Physically, Clark has bowed to time amazingly little, He’s still ramrod straight, weighs 195—he tipped 175 at the start. He hasn’t lost a hair of his thick black mop, although it’s streaked with silver here and there. His muscles still bulge like a boilermaker’s. And they’re hard. His waistline’s well under control. The Gable grin and the gray-blue Dutch eyes pack the same candlepower as always.

But his Ponce de Leon secret’s not all a matter of Gable in the flesh. That curiosity and boyish interest in life has helped plenty. Clark reads and listens and looks, and as Mickey Rooney used to say, “The King’s hep.” Gable hates that tag, “King” by the way—and only a few friends can get by using it without a black scowl. He prefers just “Clark” or sometimes “Moose,” hasn’t heard “Billy” since his dad died and left him without one surviving close relative.

Clark has always ridden some rejuvenating hobby hard and still does. He’s taken all-out turns with horses, dogs, shooting, hunting, fishing, ranching, stock-raising—even cooking and flower growing. Lately, he’s gone back to golf seriously, and again shoots in the 70’s. He still nurses the fast motor craze he’ll have until he dies. His hobbies have been absorbing preventatives for any worry warts about his Hollywood fate or fortune. Clark himself expressed his philosophy on that a long time ago. “If they want me, they can still have me,” he laughed to me once. “I’m available until they kick me out. And if they ever do—I’m still a darned good mechanic.”

Clark will probably never have to fret financially. His colossal paycheck, like most jumbo Hollywood salaries, goes mostly to Uncle Sam, but he’s been drawing one almost that big for years and he has plenty salted away by now. He’s never been a big spender. His frugal Dutch blood forbids that. For a star of his magnitude and income, he lives in near-Spartan simplicity. He’s still wearing the suits he had tailored before the war, which hung, mother-proofed, in his closets while he sported Air Force cords and pinks. He buys the best clothes and wears them forever. He doesn’t tip lavishly or toss his money around. Yet he’s a notoriously soft touch when he hears of any studio worker in distress. In this he’s direct and man-to-man, usually with a $100 bill, or whatever he thinks the situation calls for, jammed quietly into the hand of the guy with a curt, “Forget it.”

He’s gone overboard on deluxe shooting irons, with an arsenal at his ranch that represents thousands of dollars. Incidentally, that’s the only room at Encino he’ll let be photographed. Clark explains, “It’s the only thing that’s really all mine.” Rest of the place he still regards sentimentally part his, part Carole’s—and her touches have never been altered or disturbed.

Autos are a weakness like the guns. Gable has probably owned more cars than any star in Hollywood. He tried one out then trades it in as motor dealer Al Menasco says, “before it needs a wash job.”  One year Clark traded in eight cars for different models. He’s owned almost ever make manufactured. Right now he’s crazy about the inexpensive Plymouth that he drove on his Mexican fishing trip. His pet is a foreign Jaguar, but mostly for tune-up and tinker purposes. He runs it more in his garage than on the road. His television set is the first machine Clark has let alone. It’s so complicated, he’s afraid to touch it.

Clark’s living set-up at Encino has changed practically none in the past seven years. He has the same two servants and a secretary, Jean Garceau, to handle his affairs and still-flooding fan mail. Since “Pop” Gable died a couple of years ago, Clark seems more anxious to get away evenings. He’s had more dates for Ciro’s and Mocambo and when he sees his old friends it’s usually at their houses, not his. They’re still the same old Gable standbys—Chet Lauck and Tuffy Goff, Al Menasco, “Fieldsie” and Walter Lang, Howard Strickling, Bill Powell, Spencer Tracy, Howard Hawks, Jack Conway, Johnny Mahin. He lost one of his best last year, when Victor Fleming died. Clark seldom adds a new friend, never drops an old one.

The recurrently recharged enthusiasm, for life and the particular labors it has tossed into lucky Clark’s lap probably explains as much as anything the secret of Old Indestructible and how he still works his Mighty Medicine.

He was all steamed-up about playing “Key to the City,” a comedy with all the stops out. On the set, the first day, Clark was describing to co-star Loretta Young his idea of their job.

“Let’s do it strictly for fun all the way,” he plugged. “Something like ‘It Happened One Night.’ Do you remember it—or was it before your time?”

Clark and Loretta starred together 12 years ago in “Call of the Wild,” he was sure of that—but “It Happened One Night” was 17 semesters past and sometimes Clark gets the idea no one’s as ancient around Hollywood as he is. He got his big ears pinned back fast.

Loretta nodded. “I seem to,” she replied. “And I remember being so pleased to see such a promising young man get a break.”

“Promising young man?” Clark sputtered. “Why, I was an old-timer then. I’d been around for years! Say—how long have you been in pictures?” he challenged.

“Since I was four,” answered Loretta, “which was 10 years before you started—Junior.”

Considering his ageless career and the fact—believe it or not—that Clark even wears a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit in “Key to the City”—maybe Loretta had something. Maybe “Junior’s” a better nickname for Clark Gable than “King.”