{New Article} 1961: The Secret Clark Gable and Kay Never Shared

Obviously, if you take a gander at the Article Archive, I am a vintage magazine junkie.  I scour Ebay and antique stores and love nothing more than when I find some obscure Gable candid or article nestled in the yellowing pages of a seventy year old magazine. Most of my magazines are from the 1930’s. Clark was top dog then and I know that I can snatch up any magazine, any issue, any year from about 1934-1941 and they’ll be at least one picture, gossip items and, if I’m lucky, an article. By the time Clark returned from war, after the initial “he’s back!” hubbub, the coverage of him lessened and lessened, giving pages to Frank Sinatra, Van Johnson or Eddie Fisher instead.

This is why, while I buy 30’s magazines in bulk, I only buy magazines from the 1950’s if I know for a fact there is a Clark Gable article in them. Otherwise it is an utter waste, as he just wasn’t the top of the news anymore. I’d heard of this article titled “The Secret Clark Gable and Kay Never Shared” before and I was curious. I got my hands on the issue and…color me disappointed.

I am not so sure exactly what this “secret” is. The article spends most of its time discussing (usually incorrectly) Clark and Carole Lombard’s courtship and her subsequent death. Then at the end it says, “His secret was a simple one—he loved two women deeply in his lifetime.” That’s a secret? Really? Talk about ridiculous.

There’s so much wrong information in this article I thought I’d just point it out.

Clark first met Carole in 1932 when she was his leading lady in “No Man of Her Own.” She was twenty-three, slender (her best friends called her “skinny”), frail, knock-kneed, with two small but noticeable scars on her face, the aftermath of a car accident. She’d had a nervous breakdown just before starting the picture with Clark, and somehow her pain seemed to bring a beauty to her, a quality to her magnificent flashing eyes and a sauciness and zesty irreverence that was irrepressible and irresistible.  Whatever Clark felt, he never said, for at that time Carole was married to William Powell; and he was married to his second wife, wealthy Maria Langham.

It was not until three years later when they met again at a dance, that they found things had changed. Carole was divorced, and Clark’s marriage had ended. A property settlement was all that was holding up his own divorce.

So they danced together—perfectly, as if they’d been in each other’s arms since time began. But some time during the evening she said something—or maybe he said something—and whammo! The sparks flew. Her ladylike voice let loose with some most unladylike words, and a minute later she flounced off the floor and out of the hall, leaving him alone in the middle of the room, red-faced from anger and embarrassment.

The next morning, at an unearthly early house, there was a knock at Clark Gable’s door. There stood a messenger boy, and in his hands was a peace offering from Carole, a crate of doves. Months later there were doves all over—marking the many times they’ve quarreled and the many times Carole had made up.

When he asked her to marry him—one month after his divorce became final—he said it was only because there wasn’t room in his place for any more doves. On March 29, 1939, he packed her into his white roadster and drive 750 miles to Kingman, Arizona, where they were married. She’d brought along a wedding cake in a perforated hatbox (“I don’t want it to get stale”), and when he opened it at their wedding supper, two doves flew out and fluttered around the room.

Things wrong with that excerpt:

1. Carole had a nervous breakdown in 1931 or 1932? Says who?
2. The “dance” they met at was The Mayfair Ball. And she didn’t leave him alone and embarrassed on the dance floor. They left and ended up having an argument in the car.
3. There was no messenger boy who arrived with doves. Clark was living at the Beverly Wilshire at the time and Carole had bribed the bellboy to leave them in his room. So he woke up to doves cooing and found them already in the room–some accounts say in a cage, others say flying around the room.
4. First I’d heard of Carole bringing a box along with doves in it. And they didn’t have a wedding supper.

Onto Carole’s death…

 

When they brought the bodies down, Clark rushed forward like a madman towards the silent forms. Eddie Mannix, who had torn his feet ascending and descending the rocky, snow-covered slope, tried to stop him.

“No,” he said. “Don’t, Clark…for her sake, you mustn’t.”

But Clark pushed past him. “I have to see her…I have to.”

He looked. For a long time. Then he buried his face in his hands. Yet he could not cry.

When Carole was buried five days later in a crypt at Forest Lawn Cemetery, he still could not cry.

He managed to finish “Somewhere I’ll Find You,” the picture he was making at Carole’s death. His co-star, Lana Turner, said, “I’ve never known anyone to suffer so much.” And the picture was over, he heeded Carole’s last request and joined “this man’s army,” enlisting as a private. While flying bombing missions over Germany, he wore a chain around his neck. Attached to it was a small box in which were Carole’s jeweled ear-clips. They’d found them up on the mountain beside her body.

Kay never knew if this story had anything to do with what happened next, but one night, just about a year after they had started seeing each other, he asked Kay to drive him to the airport—he was going on location for “Homecoming.” She kissed him goodbye. He kissed her. Then the plane took off.

She did not hear from him—or see him again—for ten years. He just walked completely out of her life.

1. Clark did not look at Carole’s body. I have read numerous accounts where he was told the condition of her remains and did not want to see her in pieces so he refused. And I believe that. It seems unlike him to want to see her that way.
2. I’m nit-picking now, but it wasn’t a “small box.” It was a locket and they weren’t earrings, they were jewel clips that she wore on her hats or lapels.
3. After Carole’s death, Clark was afraid to fly. I do believe the first time he flew after her death was to Africa from Europe to make Mogambo and that was in 1953. I know for a fact he didn’t fly before 1950 because when he went to Indianapolis to make To Please a Lady, he took a train.

You can read this article in its entirety in the Archive.