From Glamour Girl to Mud Lover
Clark often gets blamed for changing Carole to his liking. After all, before they got serious, she was a lounge lizard, a party animal, the go-to girl for a good time in Hollywood. After falling for Clark, she started hunting, fishing, skeet shooting, gardening and farming with the best of them. She always said, “Whatever makes my Pappy happy!” I don’t see Clark forcing her to do these things—really, do you think Carole was the type that could be forced to do anything?!–I think she wanted to be the ideal woman for Clark and she really wanted him to be happy. And every once in a while he did put on a tux and accompany her nightclub-hopping.
From February 1939:
We’ve decided Carole Lombard is absolutely the ideal girl for Clark Gable. Here’s why we think so.
Completely unselfish, Carole forgot her likes and dislikes and took up, wholeheartedly, the sport best liked by Clark–shooting. First, by endless hours of practice, she became an expert at skeet shooting.
Next, she turned her attention to duck shooting, Gable’s favorite sport, and became equally proficient. Even if it meant getting up at four o’clock of a cold, foggy morning to get to the blinds by daybreak, Carole was up at 3:30 and had the sandwiches prepared for the day.
“She’s a better man than any of the crowd who go,” a friend told me, ” and the last to say ‘Let’s rest’. She goes out wading after her own ducks and once when Gable suffered an injured leg she went after his ducks, too. If necessary, she’ll clean her own ducks like the rest of us and light her own cigarettes. She asks and expects nothing in the way of favors.”
“Sometimes I look at her traipsingdown the long dusty roads, the seat of her hunting trousers bagging behind, her hunting cap (the darndest I’ve ever seen) plopped squarely on her head and I think ‘There goes Hollywood’s glamour queen. And there goes, by gum, the best sport with the stoutest heart of anyone in Hollywood.”
New article in the archive about Miss Lombard: Blonde Beauty Grows Up–about her childhood in Indiana
2 Comments
rkiry
No way Clark ever “forced” Carole to do anything. She wasn’t the kind of woman to be “forced” into anything she didn’t want to do. The 1939 article about if the Gable/Lombard romance would last made some interesting points – namely that Carole set her sights on Gable as early as 1932-even though they were both married. Seh fell for him on the Set of No Man of Her Own and it took both of them a while to get untangled from other people. Couple that with the 1935 photo of her and Gable and Grant and somebody else (Stewart? Flynn? I’d have to look again) plus the article that said she bought the ranch as early as 1937 and you pretty much have the story of their romance. She wanted him and she did whatever it took to get him. Kay did the same thing 13 years later.
admin
I agree, Clark didn’t force her into anything. She would have told him to take a hike. I am not sure if Carole did fall in love with Clark in ’32 as the article claimed. I have always had suspicions that their romance started a bit earlier than that 1936 Mayfair Ball. There are several pictures of them (like the one you mentioned, Gable, Grant and Herbert Marshall) that are suspicious plus in 1940, Carole, in passing, mentioned to a reporter that her and Clark had been together for “over five years” which wouldn’t add up. There is also talk of photos of Clark and Carole wearing their matching ID bracelets they bought each other in 1935, way before the Mayfair Ball.
Kay and Carole had a lot of similarities, which I think is why they are the only two of his marriages that were actually “functional”.