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Biography
Early life
Cornell Capa's portrait of Clark Gable
Clark Gable was born in Cadiz, Ohio, on 1 February 1901 to William H. Gable, an oil-well driller and prospector, and Adeline Hershelman. Gable had German ancestry from both sides of his family tree; his maternal grandfather, John Hershelman, was German, as were Gable's paternal great-great-grandparents, Johan Frankenfield and Catharine Haupt. Contrary to popular belief, Gable never had a middle name but was registered simply as Clark Gable. He temporarily adopted his father's name as a teenager only to drop it again a few years later. (Spicer, Clark Gable, McFarland)
When he was six months old, his sickly mother had him baptized Roman Catholic. She died when he was ten months old, probably as the result of an aggressive brain tumor. Following her death, Gable's father's family refused to countenance any notion of raising the child a Catholic, provoking an enmity with his late mother's side of the family. The dispute was resolved when the Protestant side agreed to allow young William Clark Gable to spend more time with his mother's Catholic relatives.
In April, 1903, Will Gable married Jennie Dunlap whose family came from the small neighboring Ohio town of Hopedale. Will purchased land there and built a house and the new Gable family settled in. By 1917 Clark was in high school when his father's business had financial difficulties. Will decided to try his hand at farming and the family moved to Ravenna, just outside of Akron, but Clark had trouble settling down and soon left school to work in Akron's tire factories.
After seeing a play which impressed him, he formed an ambition to be an actor, but he was not able to make a real start until he turned 21 and could inherit money that had been left to him. By then, Jennie had died. Deciding not to follow his father, Clark found work with several second-class theater companies and worked his way across the midwest to Portland, Oregon, where he found work as a tie salesman in a department store. While there he met the grandson of the well-known actress, Laura Hope Crews, who encouraged him back onto the stage and into another theater company. His acting coach was Josephine Dillon, who had his teeth fixed and after some rigourous training eventually considered him ready to attempt a film career.
Hollywood
In 1924, with Josephine's financial aid, they went to Hollywood where she became his manager and his first wife. Although he found work as an extra and bit player in such silent films as The Plastic Age starring Clara Bow, Gable was not offered any major roles and so returned to the stage. It was only after his impressive appearance as the seething and desparate character Killer Mears in the play The Last Mile that he was offered a contract with MGM in 1930. Gable's first role in a sound picture was as the villain in a low-budget William Boyd western called The Painted Desert (1931). He received a great amount of fan mail as a result of his powerful voice and appearance, which forced the studio to take notice.
He worked mainly in supporting roles, often as the "heavy', building his fame and public visibility during 1931 in such important movies as A Free Soul (1931), in which he played a gangster who slapped Norma Shearer, Susan Lennox: Her Rise and Fall with Greta Garbo and Possessed in which he and Joan Crawford steamed up the screen with some of the passion they were sharing in real life. To bolster his rocketing popularity, MGM was now frequently pairing him with well-established female stars. In the following years, he acted in a succession of enormously popular pictures which levitated him to megastar status, earning him the undisputed title of "King of Hollywood". Throughout most of the 1930s and 1940s, he was arguably the world's biggest movie star.
When MGM head Louis B. Mayer decided that Gable was getting difficult and ungrateful, he got a brilliant idea: loan Gable out to the lower-rank Columbia studio; that would teach him a lesson. The result: Gable won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1934 performance in the film It Happened One Night. He returned to MGM a bigger star than ever.
In 1930, Clark and Josephine Dillon were granted a divorce, and a few days later he married Texas socialite Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham. After moving to California they had to be married again in 1931 possibly because of differences in state legal requirements.
Most Famous Roles
Despite his reluctance at the time to appear in the role, Gable is best known for his performance as Rhett Butler in the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. At the time, Gable was wary of potentially disappointing a public who had decided noone else could play the part.
A few years before, he had also earned an Academy Award nomination for his role as Fletcher Christian in 1935's Mutiny on the Bounty. In addition, Gable was one of the few actors to play the lead in three films that won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Decades later, Gable would say that whenever his career would start to fade, a re-release of Gone With the Wind would instantly revive everything, and he continued as a top leading man for the rest of his life.
Marriage to Carol Lombard and World War II
Gable's marriage in 1939 to his third wife, successful actress Carole Lombard, was reportedly the happiest period of his personal life. They purchased a ranch at Encino and once Clark had become accustomed to her often blunt verbal expression, they found they had much in common. Sadly, their relationship ended with Lombard's death in a plane crash in 1942 on her way home from a tour to her home state of Indiana promoting war-bonds.
Gable was devastated by her loss and, inconsolable, he soon joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. As Captain Clark Gable he trained with and accompanied the 351st Heavy Bomb Group as head of a 6-man motion picture unit making a gunnery training film. While at Polebrook, England, Gable flew five combat missions, including one to Germany, as an observer-gunner in B-17 Flying Fortresses between May 4 and September 23, 1943, earning the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his efforts. He left the Army Air Forces with the rank of Major.
After World War II
His first movie after returning from service in WWII was the 1945 production of Adventure. It was not really successful and, despite some subsequent popular successes such as Mogambo (a remake of "Red Dust" that he had made two decades earlier), Gable became increasingly unhappy with the mediocre roles offered him by MGM as a mature actor. He refused to renew his contract with them in 1953 and proceeded to work independently.
In 1949, Clark married Sylvia Ashley, a British divorcée who also was the widow of Douglas Fairbanks. Unfortunately, this relationship was profoundly unsuccessful and they divorced in 1952.
His fifth wife, married after an on-again, off-again affair spanning thirteen years, was Kay Spreckels (full name Kathleen Williams Capps de Alzaga Spreckels), a thrice-married former fashion model and stock actress. She was the mother of Gable's son, John Clark Gable, born on March 20, 1961, four months after Clark's death. She also had two children from her third marriage, Joan and Adolph Spreckels III (nicknamed "Bunker").
Gable also had a daughter, Judy Lewis, born in 1935, the result of an affair with actress Loretta Young, begun on the set of Call of the Wild. In an elaborate scheme, Young took an extended vacation and went to Europe to give birth. On her return, she claimed to have adopted Judy (a gambit that got stranger when the child grew to look eerily like her mother, only with ears sticking out like Gable's).
According to Lewis, Gable visited her home once, but he didn't tell her that he was her father. While neither Gable nor Young would ever publicly acknowledge their daughter's real parentage, this fact was so widely known that in Lewis's autobiography Uncommon Knowledge, she wrote that she was shocked to learn of it from other children at school. Loretta Young would never officially acknowledge the fact, which she said would be the same as admitting to a "venial sin". However, she finally gave her biographer permission to include it only on the condition the book not be published until after Young's death.
Gable's last film was The Misfits, which co-starred Marilyn Monroe (in their last completed screen performances) and Montgomery Clift. Written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston, many critics regard Gable's performance in his final film to be his finest. Gable died in Los Angeles, California in November 1960, the result of a heart attack. He was 59.
There was much speculation about Gable's physically demanding Misfits role having contributed to his sudden death soon afterward, yanking on and being dragged by horses. In a widely reported quote, Kathleen Gable blamed it on stress caused by "the endless waiting... waiting (for Monroe)". Monroe, on the other hand, claimed that she and Kathleen had become close during the filming and would refer to Clark as "Our Man". (Spicer, Clark Gable, McFarland, pp. 300-301). Others have blamed Gable's crash diet before filming began; for years, Gable's head would sometimes shake from the diet pills he would take to strip off pounds before making a film, a practice which may have contributed to his early death.
He was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California, beside his beloved Carole Lombard.
Filmography
Feature films
White Man (1924)
Forbidden Paradise (1924)
Declassee (1925)
The Merry Widow (1925)
The Plastic Age (1925)
North Star (1925)
The Johnstown Flood (1926)
One Minute to Play (1926)
The Painted Desert (1931)
The Easiest Way (1931)
Dance, Fools, Dance (1931)
The Finger Points (1931)
The Secret Six (1931)
Laughing Sinners (1931)
A Free Soul (1931)
Night Nurse (1931)
Sporting Blood (1931)
Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931)
Possessed (1931)
Hell Divers (1931)
Polly of the Circus (1932)
Red Dust (1932)
No Man of Her Own (1932)
Strange Interlude (1932)
The White Sister (1933)
Hold Your Man (1933)
Night Flight (1933)
Dancing Lady (1933)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Men in White (1934)
Manhattan Melodrama (1934)
Chained (1934)
Forsaking All Others (1934)
After Office Hours (1935)
China Seas (1935)
The Call of the Wild (1935)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Wife vs. Secretary (1936)
San Francisco (1936)
Cain and Mabel (1936)
Love on the Run (1936)
Parnell (1937)
Saratoga (1937)
Test Pilot (1938)
Too Hot to Handle (1938)
Idiot's Delight (1939)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Strange Cargo (1940)
Boom Town (1940)
Comrade X (1940)
They Met in Bombay (1941)
Honky Tonk (1941)
Somewhere I'll Find You (1942)
Adventure (1945)
The Hucksters (1947)
Homecoming (1948)
Command Decision (1948)
Any Number Can Play (1949)
Key to the City (1950)
To Please a Lady (1950)
Across the Wide Missouri (1951)
Callaway Went Thataway (1951) (cameo)
Lone Star (1952)
Never Let Me Go (1953)
Mogambo (1953)
Betrayed (1954)
Soldier of Fortune (1955)
The Tall Men (1955)
The King and Four Queens (1956)
Band of Angels (1957)
Run Silent, Run Deep (1958)
Teacher's Pet (1958)
But Not for Me (1959)
It Started in Naples (1960)
The Misfits (1961)
Documentaries and short subjects
The Pacemakers (1925) (short subject)
The Merry Kiddo (1925) (short subject)
What Price Gloria? (1925) (short subject)
The Christmas Party (1931) (short subject)
Jackie Cooper's Birthday Party (1931) (short subject)
Screen Snapshots (1932) (short subject)
Hollywood on Parade No. 9 (1933) (short subject)
Hollywood Hobbies (1935) (short subject)
Starlit Days at the Lido (1935) (short subject)
Hollywood Party (1937) (short subject)
The Candid Camera Story (Very Candid) of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures 1937 Convention (1937) (short subject)
Hollywood Goes to Town (1938) (short subject)
Screen Snapshots: Stars on Horseback (1939) (short subject)
Hollywood Hobbies (1939) (short subject)
Northward, Ho! (1940) (short subject)
You Can't Fool a Camera (1941) (short subject)
Combat America (1943) (documentary)
Show Business at War (1943) (short subject)
Wings Up (1943) (short subject)
Screen Snapshots: Hollywood in Uniform (1943) (short subject)
Screen Actors (1950) (short subject)
Trivia
The 6'1" Gable had dark brown hair and hazel eyes. He had a muscular build, and weighed about 190 pounds at the time of Gone With the Wind. He wore a 44-long suit. Later in life, his hair grayed, his face weathered, and he put on considerable weight (in his late 50s, he weighed 230 pounds). He chain smoked and liked whiskey. To get in shape for The Misfits, he went on a severe diet and dropped to 195 lbs.
Gable had a reputation as an outdoorsman. At first, it was an image conceived by the MGM publicity department, but Gable found that he liked the lifestyle, spent time in the outdoors whenever he could.
A song by the Postal Service bears his name, which includes the lyric "I kissed you in a style Clark Gable would have admired (I thought it classic.)" The song is the sixth track of their debut album, Give Up.
His name was part of the inspiration for the name of Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, the other half coming from Kent Taylor.
Clark disliked Greta Garbo and the feeling was mutual. She thought he was a wooden actor while he considered her to be a snob.
References
Spicer, Chrystopher J. Clark Gable: Biography McFarland, 2002
