Clark Gable

William Clark Gable was born on February 1, 1901, in Cadiz, Ohio, a small coal and farming town in the eastern part of the state. His father, William Henry Gable, worked as an oil driller and later farmed; his mother, Adeline Hershelman Gable, died before her son's first birthday. The boy was raised largely by his stepmother, Jennie Dunlap, whom his father married in 1903 and who encouraged his early interests in music and reading ^[1].

The family moved to Hopedale, Ohio, where Gable spent most of his boyhood, and later to a farm near Ravenna. He left school in his mid teens and took factory work, including a stint at a tire company in Akron. Seeing a stage play there, by his own later account, turned his ambitions toward acting, an idea his practical minded father found baffling ^[2].

After a period working in the Oklahoma oil fields alongside his father, Gable struck out on his own. He drifted through the Pacific Northwest, selling ties, working in lumber camps, and joining a traveling theater troupe. In Portland, Oregon, he met Josephine Dillon, an acting coach fourteen years his senior who trained his voice, corrected his posture, and paid to have his teeth fixed. The two married in 1924 and moved to Los Angeles, where she continued to manage his early career ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Clark Gable in the mid 1920s would have found a struggling bit player. He picked up extra work in silent films and small roles on the stage, gradually building a reputation in touring companies and West Coast theater. A run on Broadway in the late 1920s, including the prison drama The Last Mile in its Los Angeles staging in 1930, brought him to the attention of film scouts ^[2].

Hollywood at first was skeptical. His ears were considered too large and his look too rough for leading man work, and early screen tests went nowhere. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer nonetheless signed him in 1930, and the studio quickly discovered that audiences responded to his blunt, physical screen presence. In 1931 alone he appeared in a dozen features, often cast as a gangster or a tough who manhandled refined leading ladies, notably opposite Norma Shearer in A Free Soul ^[3].

By 1932 he was a star in his own right. Red Dust, which paired him with Jean Harlow on a rubber plantation set in Indochina, confirmed his appeal, and MGM began building vehicles around him. His first marriage had ended; in 1931 he wed Maria Langham, known as Ria, a wealthy Texas socialite, a union that lasted on paper until 1939 ^[1].

Among the most cited Clark Gable achievements is his Academy Award for Best Actor, won for the 1934 comedy It Happened One Night. MGM had loaned him to Columbia Pictures, then a minor studio, reportedly as a form of discipline, but the Frank Capra film became a phenomenon. It swept the five major Oscar categories, a feat not repeated until 1975, and the picture's success helped establish the screwball comedy as a Hollywood staple ^[4].

The following year Gable earned a second Oscar nomination for Mutiny on the Bounty, playing Fletcher Christian opposite Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh; the film won Best Picture. In 1938 the columnist Ed Sullivan ran a newspaper poll that crowned Gable the King of Hollywood alongside Myrna Loy as Queen, and the title of King followed him for the rest of his life ^[2].

His defining role came in 1939. Producer David O. Selznick cast him as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, the adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's Civil War novel, after a public campaign in which readers overwhelmingly demanded Gable for the part. The film broke box office records, won eight competitive Academy Awards, and brought Gable his third Best Actor nomination. Adjusted for inflation, it is often ranked the highest grossing film ever released ^[5]. His closing line to Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara, ending with the words 'I don't give a damn,' became one of the most quoted lines in American cinema, later voted number one on the American Film Institute's list of top movie quotations ^[6].

Gable's third marriage was the one the public embraced. He and the actress Carole Lombard, his co-star in the 1932 film No Man of Her Own, became a couple in 1936 and married in Kingman, Arizona, in March 1939, during a break in the filming of Gone with the Wind. The pair settled on a ranch in Encino, California, raising horses and living with a deliberate informality that contrasted with studio era glamour ^[1].

The marriage ended in tragedy. On January 16, 1942, Lombard was returning from a war bond rally in her home state of Indiana when her flight, TWA Flight 3, crashed into Potosi Mountain near Las Vegas, Nevada, killing all twenty two people aboard, including her mother. Gable rushed to the crash site and, by the accounts of friends, never fully recovered from the loss ^[7].

He married twice more. A brief union with Sylvia Ashley, a British socialite and former wife of Douglas Fairbanks, lasted from 1949 to 1952. In 1955 he married Kay Williams Spreckels, a former model and actress, and the marriage endured until his death. Decades later it became public that Gable had fathered a daughter, Judy Lewis, born in 1935 to the actress Loretta Young after the two filmed The Call of the Wild together; the paternity was an open secret in Hollywood but was not acknowledged during his lifetime ^[2].

Devastated by Lombard's death, Gable enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in August 1942, at age 41, despite MGM's reluctance to lose its biggest asset. He completed officer candidate school in Miami Beach, earned aerial gunnery qualifications, and was assigned to the 351st Bombardment Group in England. There he flew combat missions aboard B-17 Flying Fortress bombers while producing a recruitment and training film about aerial gunners, released as Combat America. He was awarded the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross and left active duty in 1944 with the rank of major ^[8].

His return to the screen in Adventure (1945), marketed with the slogan 'Gable's back and Garson's got him,' drew crowds but poor reviews, and his postwar films at MGM were uneven. Solid entries such as The Hucksters (1947) and Command Decision (1948) alternated with routine assignments, and in 1954 he and the studio parted ways after more than two decades ^[3].

Freelancing revived him. Mogambo (1953), a remake of Red Dust directed by John Ford with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly, was a major hit while he was still at MGM, and as an independent he commanded large fees and a share of profits on films such as Soldier of Fortune and The Tall Men (both 1955). Teacher's Pet (1958), a comedy with Doris Day, showed he could still carry a picture in his late fifties ^[2].

In 1960 Gable took the role of Gay Langland, an aging Nevada cowboy, in The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston, opposite Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. The production in the Nevada desert was long and difficult, marked by extreme heat, delays, and Monroe's health problems. Gable, then 59, insisted on performing some of the strenuous scenes involving wild horses himself, and he called the part one of the best of his career ^[9].

Two days after filming wrapped, on November 6, 1960, Gable suffered a heart attack at his Encino home. He appeared to be recovering in the hospital, but a second attack killed him on November 16, 1960, in Los Angeles. He was 59 years old. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale beside Carole Lombard ^[7].

His only son, John Clark Gable, was born to Kay Gable in March 1961, four months after the actor's death. The Misfits reached theaters in early 1961, and reviewers singled out Gable's weathered, understated performance as evidence of a talent that had deepened with age ^[9].

Any Clark Gable biography returns to the same point: for roughly three decades he defined what an American leading man looked like. His mix of humor, physical confidence, and unforced masculinity influenced generations of actors, and contemporaries from Spencer Tracy to Robert Taylor measured themselves against him. The American Film Institute ranked him seventh among the greatest male screen legends of classic Hollywood in its 1999 survey ^[6].

The basic Clark Gable facts remain fixtures of film history: an Oscar for It Happened One Night, three Best Actor nominations, more than 60 feature films, and the most famous exit line in American movies. Gone with the Wind continues to be studied, debated, and re-evaluated, particularly for its treatment of slavery and the antebellum South, and Gable's Rhett Butler sits at the center of those conversations ^[5].

His birthplace in Cadiz, Ohio, maintains a museum and hosts annual events in his memory, and his handprints remain in the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Sixty years after his death, revival screenings, biographies, and documentaries keep the King of Hollywood in circulation for audiences who never saw his films in a theater ^[10].