{New Article}1940: At Home with the Gables

After some rather depressing articles detailing Clark’s emotional spiral after Carole’s death, it’s nice to go back and look at the good times they had together, in their favorite place to be–their Encino ranch.

Carole didn’t marry Rhett Butler. With her eyes wide open, she married a farmer. Clark likes the movies. Nobody forced him into his profession. He wanted to be an actor. But his first and deepest passion is for the soil. He could talk all day about fertilizer and tractors. It’s like pulling teeth to get a couple of words from him on his next picture. Without the movies, he could still be happy. Without a piece of land to plow, he couldn’t. Some day the king may abdicate, but Carole will always be a farmer’s wife.She was aware of this before she married him. You must admit that the gal’s smart. When Clark and Rhea Gable separated, the papers broke out in a rash of speculation. Could any woman hold him? The answers were mostly no. Clark was a lone wolf. He couldn’t pull in harness. Carole knew better. In any successful marriage, it’s the woman who does most of the adjusting. So, wholeheartedly, she adapted herself to his way of life.

True, she doesn’t go out in a sunbonnet to milk the cows, and her hands haven’t grown horny. But she’s assumed responsibilities about the place, and she’s learning all she can about crop rotation and the care of cattle, so that Clark will have an intelligent listener in the home. She thinks a woman’s a fool who doesn’t make her husband’s interests her own. Before she met Gable, a cow was something you passed in a car, and grass was what it stood in. Now she’s on speaking terms with both. Agricultural pamphlets have become exciting literature and the latest in mowing machines is more important than the latest in roadsters. It’s not the kind of life you’d associate with a silken lady of the screen, but it’s the kind that Carole lives for love of her husband.

You know, I hear Clark get a lot of flak for “changing” Carole, which I find utter hogwash. Carole was the type of person who wanted to make everyone around her happy and so she adapted her life to his.  And I honestly think that if she wasn’t happy doing all those things, she wouldn’t have. Plus, she was older, she wasn’t a young nightclubbing party girl anymore. It’s not uncommon for a woman in her early 30’s to have outgrown partying and become a homebody, even in today’s day and age.  And how about that line, married ladies, “a woman’s a fool who doesn’t make her husband’s interests her own”? I don’t fault Carole, she was a product of her time period, but wow. If that were the case I would spend less time on this website and more time watching ESPN and playing poker…

A typical day off for “Pa” Gable:

A day when he’s not on call at the studio is to Clark a day off. He gets up at eight, doesn’t bother to shave, dons khaki pants, boots and open shirt and has his breakfast of orange juice and coffee. If Carole is down, she breakfasts with him. Sometimes she’s off to the studio before he’s up. Sometimes she has breakfast in bed—“setting up an example to other farm women,” she calls it.

After breakfast he heads for the stables, the dogs at his heels. Bobby and Fritz, the hounds, follow a little way, then start chasing squirrels. Toughie, the bulldog, watches for a while, then curls himself up and goes to sleep. Toughie’s well named as far as appearances go. His jowls hang, “and he’s got a head on him,” brags his master, “bigger than mine.” He scares visitors unacquainted with his personality. Actually, he’s too good-natured to bite a steak. His chief business in life is to provide the boss with laughs. Despite persistent discouragement, Toughie still yearns to be a lapdog.

There are three horses in the stables, two for Clark, one for Carole. They were a little head-shy when he got them, but patience and soothing talk have won them over. He wouldn’t have a whip around the place. Business permitting, he and Carole ride in the cool of the day. He’s perfectly willing to have his friends use the animals, provided they know how a horse should be handled.

“When they get back they’ve got to sponge the horse off, rub him, blanket him and walk him around till he’s dried out.” (That’s one thing he wouldn’t let Carole do, though. He does it for her.) “Suppose you’d been out working in the sun and didn’t wash your sticky face and neck. A horse can’t do it for himself, but he feels the same way. Besides, how’s he going to get to know you if you don’t take care of him? You might as well hire a stranger from a riding academy.”

His first job of the day is to turn the horses loose in the paddock and, in hot weather, to spray them for flies. Then he cleans the stalls and the barn. After that there are weeds to be cut, and the citrus to be mowed. The alfalfa bed has to mowed for a month or so, because the livestock doesn’t eat it all down. So he’ll hitch the mule to the mowing machine and take a snooze while she paddles along. The horses are always pushing the fences around. Or, in good repair, they may need painting. In which case he hikes his portable painting machine to the tractor and with a high-pressure hose restores the fences to their pristine whiteness. You may find these agricultural details dull. Carole doesn’t. She appears at intervals with water, beer or milk for Clark and Fred. To hear her tell it, she spends more energy running after Clark than he spends working.

The early part of the afternoon may be given to a general check-up, in the course of which a hundred notes will be made. If they have time to prop a tree, they prop it. If not, they make a note. Milking time comes along before you know it, and while Fred does that chore, Clark waters and feeds the stock, gets the barn into shape. After dinner he returns to blanket the horses and, for all know, to tell them their bedtime story.

Dinner is at seven. No, they don’t dress. Carole doesn’t even insist on Clark’s shaving, and there’s a test of love. She’s doing well if she can get her toil-worn husband to wash his hands. That’s her story. 

It seems so tranquil, doesn’t it? And you can just envision it.

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