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Gossip Friday: It’s Going to Be Murder
From February 1950: Clark Gable hasn’t been in the Metro commissary since he wed. He did show up once in the studio barber shop. Clark’s got a pretty fair idea of what his buddies will do to him. Its going to be murder. Among other things, he’ll get an Ashley crest gone rusty with a note: “Maybe you can shine it up and use it on your car door like Doug Fairbanks did when he was married to Sylvia.” Clark’s next-door neighbor in the valley was asked if he wouldn’t sell his home. Seems Sylvia wants it for her sister, husband and two children.
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Gossip Friday: Didn’t Have a Chance
From January 1950: Yep, Clark Gable and Sylvia Ashley stole a march on everyone. Five days before the wedding, one scribe wrote that Clark had been seeing Sylvia frequently, “but it is no romance. Neither Sylvia nor Clark is marriage minded. Sylvia ever has cared for anyone but Douglas Fairbanks and Clark cannot forget Carole Lombard.” On Clark’s wedding day, a friend moaned to me, “It’s bad, but it would have been worse had he married Paulette Goddard.” Well that’s debatable. Another friend said, “Sylvia didn’t have a chance when he was wooing Dolly O’Brien, who kept saying no; but when Sylvia returned here three months ago, she rolled up…
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Gossip Friday: Nothing is Sacred
From January 1950: Sylvia Ashley, Gable’s missus, avers that she went to see a Carole Lombard movie, Nothing Sacred, a month before her marriage to Clark. And that did it. She’s now doing over the Gable ranch house–with plans for entertaining on a more formal scale. She’s ordered expansion of the living room to include a grand piano. ___ Well that’s disturbing.
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{New Article} 1950: Clark and Sylvia
New to the website is a series of syndicated newspaper articles written 74 years ago this week. The media was in a frenzy because, out of the clear blue, Clark Gable had hurriedly gotten married just before Christmas 1949 and hightailed it to Hawaii. The game of “who would be the next Mrs. Gable” had been played practically since Carole Lombard’s funeral eight years prior. Any woman Clark was pictured out with was declared to be the one. The British, thrice-married widow of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was a shock then and it’s still a shock now. 74 years later, it still isn’t clear what on earth Clark was thinking. There…
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Gossip Friday: Surprise of the Month
From November 1950: Surprise of the month was seeing Clark Gable at the local opening of the San Francisco opera. And in tails! Maybe you don’t think the king’s marriage to Sylvia Fairbanks hasn’t changed him. Another surprise twosome was George Jessel and Jane Wyman.
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Gossip Friday: Wants Not a Cent
From July 1951: Clark Gable, who plonked out $350,000 to get his freedom from Ria Gable, can relax. Sylvia wants not a cent from him—nor any part of his property. She sent word to me from Honolulu where she had fled after the bitterness of their parting. “Why should I ask for part of his 20-acre ranch in Encino when I own 4,000 acres in Del Mar?” Sylvia asked. Although Clark remains as mum as an oyster, he told a mutual friend that he has never spent as much money in his life as he did during the year-and-a-half he was married to the former Lady Ashley. He says he…
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Gossip Friday: Keeping it Refined
From May 1952: Mrs. Clark Gable’s furnishings are selling at auction today–but the auctioneer bemoaned that the event is the quietest in Hollywood history because “she wants to keep it refined.” The former Lady Sylvia Ashley decided to auction off $250,000 worth of her antique furnishings, paintings and dishes after she bid farewell to Gable in a divorce court. Every night for two weeks, collectors and dealers will jam the American art galleries to bid happily on such items as an English mahogany washstand and an antique Georgian solid silver kettle. But the disappointed curiosity seekers found only a handful of Lady Sylvia’s mementoes from her string of famous husbands,…
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Gossip Friday: No Notes
From November 1950: Fan magazine and newspaper feature writers are getting the icy treatment from MGM on articles dealing with the married life of Clark Gable and his Sylvia. One writer who merely wanted Sylvia to make marginal notes on a profile of Clark was turned down.
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For Us, The King Will Never Die
Clark Gable died 62 years ago today at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles. A heart attack claimed The King of Hollywood at age 59. This pictorial layout appeared in Modern Screen magazine after his death: Clark Gable 1901-1960 For us the King will never die A poor boy…a nobody…with big ears and a magnetic charm, a he-man ruggedness…Clark lived his life, said little, and we loved him. lovers: In Clark’s life there were five wives and no scandals. But on the screen his amours were messy–and with the greats of filmland’s Golden Days. Shown in his arms are Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow and Vivien Leigh, the lovely…
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Gossip Friday: Home by Five
From August 1950: Clark Gable seen dashing off the golf course because, “I’m a married man now and promised to be home by five!”
