{"id":3614,"date":"2012-01-20T23:56:34","date_gmt":"2012-01-21T04:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dearmrgable.com\/?page_id=3614"},"modified":"2012-01-20T23:56:34","modified_gmt":"2012-01-21T04:56:34","slug":"1961-the-fabulous-life-and-loves-of-clark-gable","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dearmrgable.com\/?page_id=3614","title":{"rendered":"1961: The Fabulous Life and Loves of Clark Gable"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"clark<\/a><\/p>\n

The Fabulous Life and Loves of Clark Gable<\/h2>\n

by Maxine Block
\nScreenland magazine<\/strong><\/em>, March 1961<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can say the King is dead but we can\u2019t cry \u2018Long Live The King\u2019 because there is no one to take his place. And the belief is that no one ever will.\u201d Charlton Heston for all of us spoke these words. <\/p>\n

For three decades of movie-goers Clark Gable was not only the undisputed King of Hollywood but he also remained that rare combination\u2014a man\u2019s man and a lady\u2019s man, both on and off the screen. He portrayed the hard-muscled, lusty, wise-cracking, masterful man of action. On screen and off, he was uncomfortable in a drawing room, more at ease as the kind of man with whom men could cast a fly in a mountain stream, draw a bead on a flying duck, empty a jug, play poker and use four-letter words. At the same time, to women, the pitcher-eared, six-footer with the natty mustache, quizzical expression and lopsided grin epitomized both brutal and tender masculinity. Even when wrinkles aged his face and crow\u2019s feet etched his eyes, when his hair grayed at the temples, Gable had only to cock his eye at an actress, say \u201cOkay, baby,\u201d in that hoarse, organ-deep voice, and immediately every woman in the audience trembled with delicious anticipation. <\/p>\n

For 30 years, come the depression, world war, cold war and television, Clark Gable remained the biggest movie box-office attraction of all time. An estimated two billion people saw his movies in every nation of the world where there are theatres. To the discrimination, some of his 65 pictures have been little short of terrible, but nothing could shake his popularity. He\u2019d become an institution and a legend in his own time. As often happens with those who spend their days in the white heat of fame, the real Gable was lost in the glare. The myth of the tough, self-assured guy who could thrash the villain, resolve every situation with a flick of the hand and bring the heroine to his feet, took over. But it wasn\u2019t Gable.<\/p>\n

In reality, he was a self-conscious, basically insecure man who had few intimate friends and who was nervous in crowds. He stayed with one studio a record-breaking 24 years, afraid to strike out on his own, lived for the last 23 years in one house, married two women many years his senior, wooed a woman for many years who was five times a grandmother, only once fell in love with and married a young girl. The ruggedly handsome actor was a quiet, hard-working, publicity-shy guy who came on the set prepared\u2014a business man who in an industry of wildly temperamental creatures, insisted on 9 to 5 hours, did his job and went home. <\/p>\n

Once at a party, this reporter overheard a be-ruffled, middle-aged magazine writer coo, \u201cClark, how does it feel to be the screen\u2019s Great Lover\u2014the most desired man in Hollywood?\u201d The screen\u2019s Great Lover and most desired man squinted down at her to see if she was kidding. Then he flashed his famous grin, tinged with sheepishness, and observed laconically, \u201cWell, it\u2019s been a living.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though his personal romances were formidable in number, and he was five times married, Gable was uncomfortable in his public image as a mythical \u201che-man\u201d cutting a swath through feminine hearts, swaggering through boudoirs like Don Juan. On screen he made females swoon in the days before anyone ever heard of bobby-soxers. Clark once said he had received some 5,000 marriage proposals by mail. \u201cThey almost always enclose a picture with their letters,\u201d he explained, grinning self-consciously. \u201cAnd let me tell you, the toughest job a man ever had is saying \u2018no\u2019\u2014politely\u2014to 5,000 women!\u201d<\/p>\n

The man who was a masculine symbol of supercharged virility to several generations of women reached beyond the grave to prevent the curious from turning his funeral into a circus such as occurred at Tyrone Power\u2019s rites. \u201cClark told me many times of his fear that his funeral might become another macabre Hollywood spectacle and his body a freak for morbid strangers,\u201d sobbed his widow Kay. \u201cHe wanted simple and dignified rites with the casket closed during the services and I followed his wishes.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Clark Gable\u2019s shocked and grieving fans all over the world there was some consolation that their idol did not suffer during the only serious illness of his life\u2014the heart attack which came in his 59th year. The unbearable sadness of his sudden death on November 16, 1960, is that he was facing the greatest happiness of his life in the baby Mrs. Gable is expecting next March, four months after Clark\u2019s death. A half-year after Clark married Kay in 1955, she suffered a miscarriage. At that time he told a reporter: \u201cYou know what I regret most? I\u2019ve been married five times and I have no family of my own. That\u2019s sad. And now it looks like I never will.\u201d To have a child of his own was the one thing denied the romantic star who had the world at his feet. As a final ironic twist, Clark will not be here to welcome his child just as dashing Ty Power was denied seeing his first son when death came to him also from a heart attack.<\/p>\n

Clark was jubilant when he announced the expected child. In Reno, working on \u201cThe Misfits\u201d with Marilyn Monroe, Clark told reporters: \u201cWhen I wind up this picture I\u2019m taking off until the baby is born. Isn\u2019t that something\u2014and me 59 years old! But then I always was a late starter. This is a dividend that has come to me late in life. I want to be free to enjoy my son.\u201d (It never occurred to Gable that his firstborn would be anything but a boy.)<\/p>\n

When Clark took for his fifth wife, the 37-year-old beautiful blonde actress, Kay William Spreckels, via the highly secret \u201cstandard Gable elopement\u201d, he found at last the contentment and home life he has sought so long. She\u2019d been married briefly to a college student, Parker Capps, and again briefly to an Argentine cattle heir, Martin de Alzaga, then to Adolph Spreckels, heir to a sugar fortune and by whom she had two children. The youngsters\u2014Adolph (Bunker), 11, and Joan, 9\u2014gave Gable a ready-made family. \u201cIt\u2019s fun raising youngsters at this stage of life,\u201d Gable once declared. \u201cI\u2019ve taught Bunker to ride and fish and I\u2019m very fond of Joan who has her mother\u2019s blonde beauty. I\u2019ve always had a weakness for blondes.\u201d
\nClark had met Kay, a ravishingly lovely model, 14 years ago when he was recovering from the tragic death of his great love, Carole Lombard. Physically and in personality Kay bore a striking resemblance to Carole. She was sophisticated, witty, fun-loving and sports-loving. After they\u2019d dated for a year, suddenly, without explanation, Gable terminated their friendship. It was whispered that Kay\u2019s interest in marriage was too obvious to Gable. Hurt and humiliated, she put him out of her heart and mind and later married Spreckels. After Gable\u2019s marriage and divorce from Lady Sylvia Ashley, he again sought out the fun-loving Kay who was estranged from her millionaire husband. At one point Kay and Gable\u2019s friendship became a Hollywood sensation when Spreckels charged in a stormy temporary alimony suit that Gable had intimacies with Miss Williams. The actress denied the allegation and later she and Clark eloped. <\/p>\n

\u201cI am a very happy man,\u201d Gable declared of his marriage. He considered Kay the wittiest woman he knew, laughed explosively at her humor and appreciated her social graces and intellect. When she developed heart trouble he cared for her tenderly and they were apart only when he joined his cronies for hunting in his Stockton, California, lodge. <\/p>\n

The women in a man\u2019s life help reveal what kind of a person he is. In Gable\u2019s case they provide the real means of understanding this fabulous star\u2014a man with a passion for privacy, one who turned the conversation away from his personal affairs. The big guy could have made a fortune from his autobiography but he never discussed the women in his life and remained to the end a gentleman who refused to kiss and tell. <\/p>\n

In love, he was strange and unpredictable. His tremendous success gradually transformed him from the rough oil field hand to a polished \u201csocial\u201d lion, fair game for husband-hunting actresses and socialites. But he shied off like a frightened rabbit when he was pursued too boldly. Strangely enough, Gable\u2019s matrimonial record of five wives, like his many really bad pictures, was seldom criticized because of his friendly, honest manner and his healthy he-manliness. He never gained the reputation of such flamboyant contemporaries as Errol Flynn and Ty Power. Yet he had his share of quarrels with each wife expect Kay because of his roving eye and he traveled openly in Europe with assorted ladies between his marriages. <\/p>\n

Clark Gable\u2019s first marriage in 1924 to Josephine Dillon, now a frail 76-year-old drama coach who lives in a converted barn and ekes out a living on her old age pension and by teaching a few aspiring actors, was as strange a marriage as that of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. Why did a 23-year-old handsome and virile ex-old field roustabout marry a woman 18 years older than he, and later, when he was 30, marry a Texas socialite 11 years his elder? Though he was a man of legendary sex appeal and animal magnetism, the answer seems to lie in Gable\u2019s early life. He never knew his mother, who died when he was a year old, and later, lost his stepmother in his early teens. It\u2019s possible that he sought in these older women a security and comfort he had never known, a mother image and the stability of the permanent home he\u2019d lacked in his formative years. In addition to this security, Josephine taught Clark the rudiments of acting, and his second wife, Rhea Langham, taught the former Ohio farm boy many of the social graces lacking in his poverty-stricken childhood. <\/p>\n

For many years Clark was fascinated by older women of assured social position. He adored an undemanding, mature companion who had the gift of camaraderie, who was amusing, who liked to drink with him and stay up late and enjoy a bawdy story. But he could not abide the neurotic or possessive or demanding type. While Clark was still married to, but separated from, the motherly Rhea, he fell madly in love with youthful Carole Lombard. By then he was evidently secure enough to forsake his fatal preoccupation for women over 40 but later he returned to them. That was in 1935, though Carole and Clark didn\u2019t marry until 1939 because of legal difficulties with Rhea. <\/p>\n

Lusty, fun-loving and beautiful Carole Lombard seemed a perfect match for the quiet, introspective Gable. They\u2019d first met at a party and quarreled; next day, she sent him a cage of doves. That became their way of settling arguments\u2014many based on Carole\u2019s jealousy. An extroverted glamour girl who liked parties and people, Carole drew him out of the shell of his self-conscious semi-seclusion during their brief marriage. Clark\u2019s great love for his third wife overcame his own distaste at participating in the social life of the movie colony. Soon their raucous life together became a legend. To everyone in Hollywood Clark Gable was \u201cThe King\u201d and the name clung. <\/p>\n

Following Carole\u2019s tragic death in an airplane crash in 1942, the film idol lived almost entirely in seclusion. He never quite got over the loss of Miss Lombard. They\u2019d been pals as well as lovers\u2014had gone hunting in Mexico and shot pheasant in South Dakota.<\/p>\n

Many fans have expressed distaste over the fact that Gable was entombed next to Carole Lombard in Forest Lawn mausoleum and that his widow gave consent. But it was the movie idol\u2019s desire and Kay merely followed his wishes. He\u2019d bought the crypt adjoining Carole\u2019s when he made her funeral arrangements. Seven months after her death Gable joined the Army as a private. He rose to the rank of major and flew many combat missions from bases in England. <\/p>\n

After the war, The King resumed his social life, sometimes with mature society figures like Dolly O\u2019Brien, grandmother to five, and wealthy Millicent Rogers, sometimes with glamour girls like Kay Williams, Paulette Goddard, Virginia Grey, Anita Colby and Evelyn Keyes. In 1949 Gable took his fourth plunge in marriage (\u201cI like marriage; it\u2019s my way of life\u201d)\u2014a plunge that took his friends by surprise. He eloped with the thrice-wed Lady Sylvia Ashley who also bore a startling resemblance to Carole Lombard. Gable had unexpectedly popped the question at a party the night before the elopement. It proved to be a wrong impulse, a costly one, and led to his shortest and most unhappy marriage. Within a year he told her: \u201cI wish to be free; I don\u2019t want to be married to you or anyone else.\u201d Sylvia had spent a fortune redecorating Clark\u2019s ultra-masculine Encino ranch house, where he and Carole had lived so happily. Clark hated to see his money spent on feminine fripperies for he had inherited a streak of thriftiness from his Dutch ancestors. Nor could he bear Sylvia\u2019s little lap dog and her chi-chi friends. <\/p>\n

For a short time another beauteous blonde, Grace Kelly, and Gable made a handsome duo after they finished shooting \u201cMogambo\u201d in Africa. They were together in London, they dined in Hollywood, she wept buckets of tears after one parting. But nothing came of it. The Hollywood grapevine rumored that the cool beauty was altar-minded and Gable wasn\u2019t. Some years later still another blue-eyed blonde, Kay Williams Spreckels, played it cool and became Mrs. Gable Number Five.<\/p>\n

Born February 1, 1901, at Cadiz, Ohio, William Clark Gable, a 12-pound baby, had been a rough and tumble oil field worker, hopped freight trains and spent nights in flea-bag hotels before he turned to acting and dropped the \u201cWilliam\u201d. His father, William Gable, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, was a roustabout in the oil fields, his mother, the former Adeline Hershelman, a farm girl. When Clark was 15, he took a job in a rubber factory in Dayton, Ohio, and it was there he saw his first play. He was so stage-struck he quit his job to become an errand boy in the theatre, at no salary. He ate sparingly on the coins actors offered as tips, slept in the wings. When his stepmother died, Clark accompanies his dad to the Oklahoma oil fields. <\/p>\n

The work was discouraging and back breaking\u2014swinging a heavy sledge hammer, climbing rickety wooden towers in a driving wind, chopping wood to keep up steam in the boilers. \u201cI worked like this seven days a week,\u201d Gable once recalled. \u201cFinally, I said to myself, \u2018There must be a better way to earn a living,\u2019 and two years later, in 1922, against my dad\u2019s wishes, I found it.\u201d The stage-struck lad landed a $10-a-week job with a touring theatre company, was stranded in Butte, Montana, on a sub-zero night, hopped a freight to Portland, Oregon, and found work as a telephone lineman. It was when he arrived to repair a wire in a little theatre that he met the stage director, Josephine Dillon.<\/p>\n

They married in Los Angeles and the gawky, jug-eared six-footer, determined on a theatrical career, tried pictures but made no progress. He turned to local stock companies, even tackled Broadway with no success. Undiscouraged, Gable returned to Hollywood, was seen in a play by Lionel Barrymore who found him some movie bit parts. A director recommended Gable to Darryl Zanuck, then chief of Warner Brothers. <\/p>\n

Today Zanuck ruefully remembers: \u201cI took one look at him, liked his engaging but self-conscious smile and told him: \u2018Buddy, your ears are too big. You\u2019ll never make it as a leading man.\u2019\u201d The depression ended the reign of the pomade pretty-boy movie lovers and crowned flop-eared, brawny Clark Gable king of the he-man era. <\/p>\n

For Gable it all started with a slap in the face. Norma Shearer\u2019s face, that is. The script of \u201cA Free Soul\u201d, filmed in 1930, called for Gable, as a gangster, in a bit part, to slap the heroine and shove her into a chair. Louis B. Mayer, Metro head, fearing women would be repulsed by the scene, decided to cut it after the preview. Other executives talked him into keeping it.<\/p>\n

Nationally, the reaction was astounding. Thousands of women sent letters to the studio. All of them wanted to be slapped by Clark Gable. After that he played an auto racer, cowboy, test pilot, globe trotter, big game hunter, soldier, sailor, air force colonel, cavalry scout, pirate, gun smuggler, oil well wildcatter, war correspondent, secret service agent, gambler, financier, international adventurer\u2014well, you name it, Gable played it. Though many of his films have been forgotten, an impressive number of them are enshrined in the Hollywood history books\u2014film classics like \u201cHell Divers\u201d, \u201cMutiny on the Bounty\u201d, \u201cCall of the Wind\u201d, \u201cRed Dust\u201d, \u201cMen in White\u201d, \u201cHonky Tonk\u201d, \u201cTest Pilot\u201d, \u201cSan Francisco\u201d, \u201cIt Happened One Night\u201d and \u201cGone with the Wind\u201d, the all-time favorite which has grosses over $50,000,000.<\/p>\n

When Margaret Mitchell wrote \u201cGone with the Wind\u201d she had Clark Gable in mind in her creation of Rhett Butler. Everyone knew it but Gable. \u201cI never could see myself in that part,\u201d he once said. \u201cIt shot for eight months, but I don\u2019t think I worked more than eight weeks. I even got married (to Carole Lombard) and had a honeymoon during the picture. There were whole stretches I wasn\u2019t in. But when Rhett did make an appearance, I guess you can say, he made it count.\u201d Clark\u2019s portrayal of Rhett Butler was one of the most memorable in screen history even though it was not his favorite role. <\/p>\n

The part he liked best was the wisecracking newspaperman in \u201cIt Happened One Night\u201d. It won him an Oscar in 1934. Always a big-boy bashful, almost humble, when you brought up his career as an actor, Gable explained once, \u201cMetro had me in a rut playing mostly heavies or brutes. I was having a beef with the studio in those days. I was sick\u2014even went to a hospital with exhaustion\u2014but they threatened me with a suspension. To get even, they exiled me via a loanout to Columbia. In those days Columbia was a little independent on Poverty Row\u2014Siberia for me, so my bosses at MGM thought. But I knew they had guessed wrong as soon as I read the script. The picture was a big turning point in my career\u2026gave me a chance to play comedy, and from then on I was never type cast.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m no actor and I never have been. What people see on the screen is the real me,\u201d he continued disarmingly. \u201cI\u2019ve been asked about switching from star to director. Hell, I haven\u2019t even learned how to act yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the last of the true superstars, the dashing celluloid figure of Clark Gable brings down the curtain on an era. He was to the American motion picture what Ernest Hemingway is to American literature. An exponent of the straight-from-the-shoulder school of acting, he was believable as the rugged, handsome hero who downed the \u201cheavy\u201d in a good brawl yet could be tender and convincing in a love scene. Although he was a thorough professional to the end, few critics have bothered to consider Gable an actor. He was simply, \u201ca hero.\u201d The new batch of \u201cMethod\u201d actors who portray mixed-up, emotionally unstable weaklings, frequently belittled Gable\u2019s acting ability and called him a \u201cpersonality performer in unsophisticated Gable-tailored scripts.\u201d But the ladies in the audience who sighed for and the men who admired his uncomplicated masculinity do not agree. They will long mourn The King. <\/p>\n

His last film, \u201cThe Misfits\u201d, may well stand as a worthy memorial to Clark Gable. Critics believe he gave his best performance in a strenuous picture in which he put up with outrageous delays by Marilyn Monroe, temperamental outbursts from Montgomery Clift and miserable working conditions in blistering heat and dust storms. At a projection room screening of the unfinished picture, Gable turned to Arthur Miller (who did the script) and said, \u201cI haven\u2019t seen myself in anything this good in 20 years.\u201d At Gable\u2019s funeral, Miller summed it all up: \u201cOf all the actors I\u2019ve known, he was the only real man I ever met\u2014the finest and truest gentleman.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Fabulous Life and Loves of Clark Gable by Maxine Block Screenland magazine, March 1961 \u201cWe can say the King is dead but we can\u2019t cry \u2018Long Live The King\u2019 because there is no one to take his place. And the belief is that no one ever will.\u201d Charlton Heston for all of us spoke these words. For three decades of movie-goers Clark Gable was not only the undisputed King of Hollywood but he also remained that rare combination\u2014a man\u2019s man and a lady\u2019s man, both on and off the screen. He portrayed the hard-muscled, lusty, wise-cracking, masterful man of action. On screen and off, he was uncomfortable in a drawing room, more at ease as the kind of man with whom men could cast a fly in a mountain stream, draw a bead on a flying duck, empty a jug, play poker and use four-letter words. At the same time, to women, the pitcher-eared, six-footer with the natty mustache, quizzical expression and lopsided grin epitomized both brutal and tender masculinity. Even when wrinkles aged his face and crow\u2019s feet etched his eyes, when his hair grayed at the temples, Gable had only to cock his eye at an actress, say \u201cOkay, baby,\u201d in that hoarse, organ-deep voice, and immediately every woman in the audience trembled with delicious anticipation. For 30 years, come the depression, world war, cold war and television, Clark Gable remained the biggest movie box-office attraction of all time. An estimated two billion people saw his movies in every nation of the world where there are theatres. To the discrimination, some of his 65 pictures have been little short of terrible, but nothing could shake his popularity. He\u2019d become an institution and a legend in his own time. As often happens with those who spend their days in the white heat of fame, the real Gable was lost in the glare. The myth of the tough, self-assured guy who could thrash the villain, resolve every situation with a flick of the hand and bring the heroine to his feet, took over. But it wasn\u2019t Gable. In reality, he was a self-conscious, basically insecure man who had few intimate friends and who was nervous in crowds. He stayed with one studio a record-breaking 24 years, afraid to strike out on his own, lived for the last 23 years in one house, married two women many years his senior, wooed a woman for many years who was five times a grandmother, only once fell in love with and married a young girl. The ruggedly handsome actor was a quiet, hard-working, publicity-shy guy who came on the set prepared\u2014a business man who in an industry of wildly temperamental creatures, insisted on 9 to 5 hours, did his job and went home. Once at a party, this reporter overheard a be-ruffled, middle-aged magazine writer coo, \u201cClark, how does it feel to be the screen\u2019s Great Lover\u2014the most desired man in Hollywood?\u201d The screen\u2019s Great Lover and most desired man squinted down at her to see if she was kidding. Then he flashed his famous grin, tinged with sheepishness, and observed laconically, \u201cWell, it\u2019s been a living.\u201d Though his personal romances were formidable in number, and he was five times married, Gable was uncomfortable in his public image as a mythical \u201che-man\u201d cutting a swath through feminine hearts, swaggering through boudoirs like Don Juan. On screen he made females swoon in the days before anyone ever heard of bobby-soxers. Clark once said he had received some 5,000 marriage proposals by mail. \u201cThey almost always enclose a picture with their letters,\u201d he explained, grinning self-consciously. \u201cAnd let me tell you, the toughest job a man ever had is saying \u2018no\u2019\u2014politely\u2014to 5,000 women!\u201d The man who was a masculine symbol of supercharged virility to several generations of women reached beyond the grave to prevent the curious from turning his funeral into a circus such as occurred at Tyrone Power\u2019s rites. \u201cClark told me many times of his fear that his funeral might become another macabre Hollywood spectacle and his body a freak for morbid strangers,\u201d sobbed his widow Kay. \u201cHe wanted simple and dignified rites with the casket closed during the services and I followed his wishes.\u201d To Clark Gable\u2019s shocked and grieving fans all over the world there was some consolation that their idol did not suffer during the only serious illness of his life\u2014the heart attack which came in his 59th year. The unbearable sadness of his sudden death on November 16, 1960, is that he was facing the greatest happiness of his life in the baby Mrs. Gable is expecting next March, four months after Clark\u2019s death. A half-year after Clark married Kay in 1955, she suffered a miscarriage. At that time he told a reporter: \u201cYou know what I regret most? I\u2019ve been married five times and I have no family of my own. That\u2019s sad. And now it looks like I never will.\u201d To have a child of his own was the one thing denied the romantic star who had the world at his feet. As a final ironic twist, Clark will not be here to welcome his child just as dashing Ty Power was denied seeing his first son when death came to him also from a heart attack. Clark was jubilant when he announced the expected child. In Reno, working on \u201cThe Misfits\u201d with Marilyn Monroe, Clark told reporters: \u201cWhen I wind up this picture I\u2019m taking off until the baby is born. Isn\u2019t that something\u2014and me 59 years old! But then I always was a late starter. This is a dividend that has come to me late in life. I want to be free to enjoy my son.\u201d (It never occurred to Gable that his firstborn would be anything but a boy.) When Clark took for his fifth wife, the 37-year-old beautiful blonde actress, Kay William Spreckels, via the highly secret \u201cstandard Gable elopement\u201d, he found at last the contentment and home life he has sought so long. She\u2019d been married briefly to a college student, Parker Capps, and again briefly to an Argentine cattle heir, Martin de Alzaga, then to Adolph Spreckels, heir to a sugar fortune and by whom she had two children. The youngsters\u2014Adolph (Bunker), 11, and Joan, 9\u2014gave Gable a ready-made family. \u201cIt\u2019s fun raising youngsters at this stage of life,\u201d Gable once declared. \u201cI\u2019ve taught Bunker to ride and fish and I\u2019m very fond of Joan who has her mother\u2019s blonde beauty. I\u2019ve always had a weakness for blondes.\u201d Clark had met Kay, a ravishingly lovely model, 14 years ago when he was recovering from the tragic death of his great love, Carole Lombard. Physically and in personality Kay bore a striking resemblance to Carole. She was sophisticated, witty, fun-loving and sports-loving. After they\u2019d dated for a year, suddenly, without explanation, Gable terminated their friendship. It was whispered that Kay\u2019s interest in marriage was too obvious to Gable. Hurt and humiliated, she put him out of her heart and mind and later married Spreckels. After Gable\u2019s marriage and divorce from Lady Sylvia Ashley, he again sought out the fun-loving Kay who was estranged from her millionaire husband. At one point Kay and Gable\u2019s friendship became a Hollywood sensation when Spreckels charged in a stormy temporary alimony suit that Gable had intimacies with Miss Williams. The actress denied the allegation and later she and Clark eloped. \u201cI am a very happy man,\u201d Gable declared of his marriage. He considered Kay the wittiest woman he knew, laughed explosively at her humor and appreciated her social graces and intellect. When she developed heart trouble he cared for her tenderly and they were apart only when he joined his cronies for hunting in his Stockton, California, lodge. The women in a man\u2019s life help reveal what kind of a person he is. In Gable\u2019s case they provide the real means of understanding this fabulous star\u2014a man with a passion for privacy, one who turned the conversation away from his personal affairs. The big guy could have made a fortune from his autobiography but he never discussed the women in his life and remained to the end a gentleman who refused to kiss and tell. In love, he was strange and unpredictable. His tremendous success gradually transformed him from the rough oil field hand to a polished \u201csocial\u201d lion, fair game for husband-hunting actresses and socialites. But he shied off like a frightened rabbit when he was pursued too boldly. Strangely enough, Gable\u2019s matrimonial record of five wives, like his many really bad pictures, was seldom criticized because of his friendly, honest manner and his healthy he-manliness. He never gained the reputation of such flamboyant contemporaries as Errol Flynn and Ty Power. Yet he had his share of quarrels with each wife expect Kay because of his roving eye and he traveled openly in Europe with assorted ladies between his marriages. Clark Gable\u2019s first marriage in 1924 to Josephine Dillon, now a frail 76-year-old drama coach who lives in a converted barn and ekes out a living on her old age pension and by teaching a few aspiring actors, was as strange a marriage as that of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. Why did a 23-year-old handsome and virile ex-old field roustabout marry a woman 18 years older than he, and later, when he was 30, marry a Texas socialite 11 years his elder? Though he was a man of legendary sex appeal and animal magnetism, the answer seems to lie in Gable\u2019s early life. He never knew his mother, who died when he was a year old, and later, lost his stepmother in his early teens. It\u2019s possible that he sought in these older women a security and comfort he had never known, a mother image and the stability of the permanent home he\u2019d lacked in his formative years. In addition to this security, Josephine taught Clark the rudiments of acting, and his second wife, Rhea Langham, taught the former Ohio farm boy many of the social graces lacking in his poverty-stricken childhood. For many years Clark was fascinated by older women of assured social position. He adored an undemanding, mature companion who had the gift of camaraderie, who was amusing, who liked to drink with him and stay up late and enjoy a bawdy story. But he could not abide the neurotic or possessive or demanding type. While Clark was still married to, but separated from, the motherly Rhea, he fell madly in love with youthful Carole Lombard. By then he was evidently secure enough to forsake his fatal preoccupation for women over 40 but later he returned to them. That was in 1935, though Carole and Clark didn\u2019t marry until 1939 because of legal difficulties with Rhea. Lusty, fun-loving and beautiful Carole Lombard seemed a perfect match for the quiet, introspective Gable. They\u2019d first met at a party and quarreled; next day, she sent him a cage of doves. That became their way of settling arguments\u2014many based on Carole\u2019s jealousy. An extroverted glamour girl who liked parties and people, Carole drew him out of the shell of his self-conscious semi-seclusion during their brief marriage. Clark\u2019s great love for his third wife overcame his own distaste at participating in the social life of the movie colony. Soon their raucous life together became a legend. To everyone in Hollywood Clark Gable was \u201cThe King\u201d and the name clung. Following Carole\u2019s tragic death in an airplane crash in 1942, the film idol lived almost entirely in seclusion. He never quite got over the loss of Miss Lombard. They\u2019d been pals as well as lovers\u2014had gone hunting in Mexico and shot pheasant in South Dakota. Many fans have expressed distaste over the fact that Gable was entombed next to Carole Lombard in Forest Lawn mausoleum and that his widow gave consent. But it was the movie idol\u2019s desire and Kay merely followed his wishes. He\u2019d bought the crypt adjoining Carole\u2019s when he made her funeral arrangements. 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