The Great Gable Part 3

The Great Gable

Part 3: Clark Thinks Women Are Like Good Whisky—Need Aging

By Jess Stearn

New York Daily News

July 14, 1955

Only recently, 26-year-old actress Grace Kelly’s named was being linked romantically with several of Hollywood’s older stars, and the blonde Academy Award winner was warmly repudiating the reports as mere Hollywood fantasy.

Empathetically, she ticked off a succession of big screen names, her leading men.

Bing Crosby?

“I saw him for lunch once,” she said, “and either my sister or secretary was with me.”

Ray Milland?

“Ridiculous. Worked with him on a picture, and Hollywood gossip columnists didn’t have anything better to write about, I guess.”

Bill Holden?

“Some magazine wrote that Bill Holden ‘drove unashamedly up to Grace Kelly’s home in his white convertible’ to take her out to dinner. Why shouldn’t he drive up unashamedly—he was picking me up so I could have dunner with his wife and family”

Then the $64 question. “How about Clark Gable—the reporters said that you broke down and cried when you said good-bye in London?”

The lovely blonde hesitated only a moment. “If I cried,” she said, “and I don’t remember doing so, it was probably over the fact that I had to leave all that beautiful Georgian silver behind in customs.”

The slim, shapely actress, who shorty before had completed her first picture with Gable, the Africa-filmed “Mogambo,” then hastened to assure her listener that there as nothing disparaging about her remarks. She thought the ageless Gable a wonderful ma with a  remarkable sense of humor.

“Perhaps it might have been different,” she added as if on second thought, “if it weren’t for the difference in ages.”

Even before his marriage Monday to near-fortyish Kay Williams Spreckels, Gable, an admirer of Her Grace’s in a Big Brother sort of way, was hardly likely to espouse a romance with a woman under 30—and Miss Kelly is 26.

“The older woman,” he says, “has seen more, heard more, and knows more than the demure little girl with a pretty face and shapely figure. I’ll take the older woman every time.”

On the other hand, Gable’s fascination for women of all ages is not purely a matter of psychical charm, according to observing males.

“When he’s with a woman,” and intimate notes, “he concentrates on her completely. He makes her feel she’s all that matters, and at the time, it’s probably true. Just as in a business, it takes a single purpose to achieve success.”

Gable’s girls have included many of his leading ladies, who found propinquity with the Great Charmer too much. There were the cool imperturbable Loretta Young, with whom he became friendly during the filming of “Call of the Wild,” the not so imperturbable Lana Turner, and a host of others.

“Whether it’s a wife or a girlfriend,” observers say, “they never leave Gable; they just can’t hold on to him.”

However, there are seldom hard feelings. Gable rarely lost a friend when a romance broke off. Sometimes he keeps coming back to the same girls, like screen actress Virginia Grey, silently devoted to him for years, and the thrice-married Kay Spreckels, the shapely blonde he finally married after a 17-year friendship. Kay, a former model, twice wed to millionaires, is often compared to Gable’s third wife, actress Carole Lombard, killed in a plane crash in 1942.

After Gable’s 1952 divorce from his fourth wife, Lady Sylvia Ashley, former English lingerie model whom he had married three years before, the actor swore he would never wed again—but Kay and loneliness made him forget the value he places on freedom, between marriages.

His three divorces, the first two from wives considerably older than he, cost him more than a half-million dollars. But although he once vowed no woman would ever get a dime out of him, Gable considered himself well out of the Ashley alliance, even though it cost a reported $250,000.

Kay Has Taken The Man in Hand

“You have to pay high for freedom,” he philosophically observed.

Until recent weeks, Gable has been skittish on the subject of marriage. But it was plain he was dating nobody but Kay and that she was seeing no one but Gable as she drove about in his white Thunderbird, received guests with him at his Encino ranch, and turned him out to social functions which he usually loathes.

“In recent months,” a friend observed, “if anybody wanted to produce Clark for a charity affair, or anything like that, they knew the person to approach was Kay—she’d okay it without even checking with Clark, and he’d be on hand.”

Until this gradual change in his relationship with the spicy-tongues blonde, who reminds friends in that respect of Lombard, Gable firmly put down all reports of marriage—to anybody.

“Marriage talk,” a pal observed, “was enough to ruin many of Clark’s beautiful friendships, though he has been known to have a change of heart overnight, as he did with Silkie Ashley.

“But you may have noticed that when Clark was courting the French model, Suzy Dadolle, in Europe a year or so ago, the romance abruptly ended when Suzy announced that Clark had proposed.

“When Suzy made her announcement,” the friend pointed out, “the honeymoon was over.”

For all his fame and charm—perhaps because of it—it has been difficult, friends say, for the Great Lover to meet the kind of girl he might settle down with, instead, they say, he generally encounters the aggressive, predatory type.

“As the so-called idol of women for 25 years,” they say, “Gable has been a sitting duck for any smart, attractive, scheming woman who’s out hunting a soft, glamourous berth.

“All his professional life, he has been haunted by women hounding him in the streets, pounding on his hotel doors, foraging even into the privacy of his California ranch.

“Even at so-called country club get-togethers, it’s the predatory dame who’d break through the admiring circle and introduce herself or take charge of the conversation.

“That has always been the misfortune of the greatest man’s man ladies’ man in the history of the movies. He hardly ever got a chance to meet the right girl, and, as he got older, the situation wouldn’t change.”

When Gable made an impression, the woman generally stayed impressed long after Gable has gone on to new interests. “One female admirer wrote, retrospectively but appreciatively:

“You were a perfectionist. I hope that you will not altogether forget me, that some part of me will remain with you, bringing pleasure and fresh warmth. You gave me happiness when I was with you. The love I have for you is like a rock—a foundation upon which my life is being rebuilt.”

Big Brother Bit A Gable Specialty

He has been capable of Big Brother relationships with beautiful, younger women, though the girls themselves may feel differently.

When Gable, for instance, wanted lovely, lynx-eyed Ava Gardner for the old Jean Harlow role in “Mogambo,” the svelte Ava, over the objections of husband Frank Sinatra, journeyed to Africa, though it meant being away for Christmas—and jeopardized her marriage.

Ava was duly grateful to the Great Gable for giving her a chance in “The Hucksters,” and for tutoring her in “Showboat,” an MGM picture in which he didn’t even appear. “He was the first man,” said Ava, “to give me confidence on a set.”

Another of Gable’s Big Brother relationships, with Grace Kelly, was formed during “Mogambo,” when, near the end of film shooting, Gable took the willowy blonde for some serious hunting in the African bush. Until that time, friends say, Gable had deliberately stayed away from the much younger star.

“The way she pushed through the brush, getting scratched, falling down and not complaining, stirred Clark’s admiration,” an intimate declared. “He came home telling everybody what a trouper she was.

“It was almost as though he were talking about Carole, but the age disparity was too great, 28 years.”

Gable was so impressed by the blonde Philadelphia socialite that he wanted her for the female lead in “Soldier of Fortune,” his first picture after he recently wound up his long career with MGM. But Miss Kelly had prior commitments.

Susan Hayward? Now Who is She?

Instead, Susan Hayward, one of 20^th Century’s biggest breadwinners, was proposed. And Gable, Hollywood’s king for 25 years, drew a blind spot.

“Susan Hayward,” he frowned. “Who is she?”

Amid the resulting, incredulous laughter, Gable realized his blooper.

“All right,” he apologized, “I goofed. I know she’s been big for years—it just didn’t click for a second. After all, you know I never go to the movies.”

In Gable’s early marriages, dabblers in psychology have seen a quest for a mother replacement, since Gable’s own mother died when he was an infant, and his first two wives were considerably older than he. However, the actor’s friends say that it was all very simple and uncomplicated—Gable just preferred mature women, preferably in their 30s.

Gable was 23, working as a telephone repairman between stage bits, when he met and married his first wife, Josephine Dillon, then 37. The meeting must have seemed a work of fate to the struggling young actor. Sent to repair a phone at the Portland (Ore.) Little Theatre, he got immersed in theatre talk with the stage director, Miss Dillon.

A romance developed, and they were married shortly thereafter, in December 1924. Josephine, who had played on Broadway and been a leading lady to Edward Everett Horton, cut an impressive figure to an ambitious neophyte, and he is duly grateful for what she taught him about acting.

Josephine, who has never spoken unkindly of Gable, says that after seven years of marriage he told her he wanted a divorce to marry another woman, socialite Maria (Ria) Langham, 11 years older than he. He had met Ria while playing stock in Houston.

“In those days,” reminisced Josephine, who now lectures on the theatre, “he was hard to live with because his career and ambition always came first.”

“During his marriage to Ria,” a longtime friend asserts, “Clark gained social grace and poise, mixing with Ria’s set ad even being accepted into a Los Angeles country club which was death on actors.”

In 1936, Ria Gable became a grandmother through a daughter by a previous marriage, making America’s screen sweetheart a step-grandfather at 35.

The marriage limped along for another three years, with Clark once taking off on a 25,000-mile tour around the Cape of Good Hope because of what was described as difference in temperament.

The divorce, costing Gable a reported $250,000, went through in 1939, paving the way for Gable’s marriage to Carole Lombard.

The reason for Gable’s early marital failures was quite simple, a friend explains. “The truth of the matter is that both of these wives just ran out of steam. Here was Gable reaching the peak of his form—and believe me, that’s plenty—and his two wives were becoming middle-aged. It was just a question of not being able to keep up.”

However, except in the case of the Lady Ashley, in which he balked at being made over into a “gentleman,” gable had always gallantly taken the blame for his breakups.

“I’m not the easiest person in the world to live with,” he once observed. “Sometimes I wonder how I get along with myself.”