Clark Gable

• 1. Introduction

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  Clark Gable arrived in Hollywood as an extra in 1924, barely able to afford a meal, and left it more than three decades later as the man the American Film Institute ranked seventh among the greatest male screen legends of classical Hollywood cinema. He appeared in more than 60 motion pictures. He won an Academy Award, earned nominations for two others, and showed up on the annual box office poll of top money-making stars sixteen times. But the number that might surprise you is this: the man the world called the King of Hollywood was told by a Warner Bros. executive that his ears were too big and he looked like an ape.

  How did a shy, loud-voiced kid from Cadiz, Ohio, who worked oil fields and sold neckties, become the actor whose last line in a movie is still one of the most quoted in history? And what does it mean that when his final film was released, he had already been dead for months?

• 2. Ohio to Oregon

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  Cadiz, Ohio, in 1901 was oil country, and William Henry Gable drilled wells for a living. His son William Clark Gable was born on the 1st of February that year, and ten months later his mother died. His father refused to raise him in the Catholic faith his mother had practiced, which set off a lasting dispute with the maternal Hershelman family. The compromise was that young Clark would spend time with his uncle Charles Hershelman and his wife on their farm in Vernon Township, Pennsylvania.

  The stepmother who eventually raised him, Jennie Dunlap, whom his father married in April 1903, was a different influence entirely. She dressed the tall, shy boy carefully, gave him piano lessons at home, and instilled habits of grooming and presentation that would later serve him on screen. By 13 he was the youngest member of the Hopedale Men's town band. He loved Shakespeare and would recite the sonnets among people he trusted. He also loved repairing cars alongside his father, who insisted on hunting and physical labor as the correct masculine pursuits.

  The oil fields called the family again in 1917, when financial difficulties prompted a move to Palmyra Township near Akron, Ohio. Gable's father wanted him to work the farm; Gable left for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company instead. His break from the life his father had mapped for him had begun.

• 3. Learning the Craft

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  A play called The Bird of Paradise, seen when Gable was 17, planted the idea of becoming an actor. But ambition needed money behind it, and he had none. He spent years working with traveling tent shows, lumber mills, and odd jobs across the Midwest before landing in Portland, Oregon, selling neckties at the Meier and Frank department store.

  Also working at that store was a stage actor named Earle Larimore, the nephew of Laura Hope Crews, who would later play Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind alongside Gable. Larimore encouraged Gable to pursue acting, introduced him to a group member named Franz Dorfler, and the two began dating. Their audition for The Astoria Players made Gable's lack of training obvious, but the group accepted him after Larimore urged them to.

  The pivotal figure was Josephine Dillon, a theater manager in Portland who became his acting coach. She paid to have his teeth fixed and his hair styled. She coached him in building up a chronically undernourished body, improving his posture, and lowering his naturally high-pitched voice. His speech habits improved. His facial expressions became more natural. After a long period under her guidance, Dillon judged him ready for a film career. In 1924, they traveled to Hollywood together. She was 17 years his senior, and she became his wife as well as his manager.

  His $300 inheritance from a Hershelman family trust, received at 21 after his stepmother died in 1920, had made it all possible in the first place.

• 4. The MGM Years

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  Gable's early Hollywood years were hard. He played bit parts in silent films, including Erich von Stroheim's The Merry Widow in 1925 and a Clara Bow picture called The Plastic Age the same year. He was not offered major film roles and returned to the stage. A review of his work in Machinal in 1928 in New York described him as "young, vigorous, and brutally masculine," but that had not yet translated into a film contract.

  The turn came in 1930 with his Los Angeles stage performance as Killer Mears in The Last Mile. He was signed by MGM's Irving Thalberg for $650 per week. Darryl F. Zanuck at Warner Bros. had already dismissed him after a screen test, saying his ears were too big and he looked like an ape. Warner's loss became MGM's gain.

  Joan Crawford asked for him personally for Dance, Fools, Dance in 1931. Studio head Louis B. Mayer recognized the electricity between them and cast them in seven more films. It was Gable's role in A Free Soul that same year, in which he played a gangster who shoved the character played by Norma Shearer, that secured his star status permanently. He received such extraordinary fan mail that the studio took notice. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that audiences worked themselves into enthusiasm whenever Gable walked on screen in a way the paper had never seen before.

  MGM publicist Howard Strickling shaped his image around the phrase "lumberjack-in-evening-clothes," capturing something real about the man: rough in origin, polished on the surface, and threatening enough to be exciting. His unshaven scenes opposite Jean Harlow in Red Dust in 1932 established him as MGM's most important romantic leading man. He and Harlow made six films together in five years. Their final film, Saratoga in 1937, was their biggest hit, and Harlow died during its production. With ninety percent of the film completed, the remaining scenes were shot using doubles and long shots. Gable said he felt as if he were "in the arms of a ghost."

• 5. One Night and Gone with the Wind

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  When MGM head Louis B. Mayer decided Gable was becoming difficult and ungrateful, he loaned him to the lower-ranked Columbia studio as a form of punishment. The film was It Happened One Night in 1934, and it won Gable the Academy Award for Best Actor. Director Frank Capra said Gable's character in the film closely resembled his real personality. Critics praised the fast-paced farce as founding a new romantic genre: the screwball comedy. Gable returned to MGM a bigger star than when he left.

  Five years later came the role that defined his legend. Producer David O. Selznick's first choice for Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind was Gary Cooper. When Cooper turned the role down, he reportedly said the film would be the biggest flop in Hollywood history and he was glad it would be Gable falling flat on his nose. Gable himself was wary of the role, afraid of disappointing an audience that had already decided no one else could play it. He later said he felt like a fly caught in a spider's web. His total salary was $117,917 for the film.

  On set, Gable discovered the studio facilities were segregated and signage divided workers by race. According to extra Lennie Bluett, Gable phoned director Victor Fleming and said, "If you don't get those signs down, you won't get your Rhett Butler." The signs came down. He also tried to boycott the film's premiere in Atlanta because African American cast members Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen were not permitted to attend. He reportedly only attended after McDaniel pleaded with him to go, and the two remained lifelong friends.

  For the scene in which Rhett learns of a miscarriage, Gable refused to cry. Co-star Olivia de Havilland pulled the performance out of him by telling him she knew he could do it, and at the last moment, he wept. Butler's final line in the film, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," became one of the most famous lines in movie history.

• 6. War and Grief

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  On the 16th of January 1942, Carole Lombard boarded Transcontinental and Western Air Flight 3 with her mother and press agent Otto Winkler. She had just finished her 57th film and was returning from a war bond tour. The Douglas DC-3 crashed into Potosi Mountain near Las Vegas, killing all 22 people aboard, including 15 servicemen. Gable flew to the crash site to recover the bodies of his wife, his mother-in-law, and Winkler, who had been the best man at their wedding. President Roosevelt sent him a personal note of condolence. The Civil Aeronautics Board concluded the crash was caused by pilot error.

  Lombard was declared the first war-related American female casualty of World War II. Gable returned to work a month later, having lost 20 pounds. Co-star Lana Turner called him a consummate professional throughout filming, but actress Esther Williams said, "He was never the same. He had been devastated by Carole's death."

  On the 12th of August 1942, following completion of his next film, Gable enlisted in the United States Army under the Army Air Forces. Commanding General Henry H. Arnold offered him a special assignment: to make a recruiting film for aerial gunners. He and his MGM friend, cinematographer Andrew McIntyre, went through Officer Candidate School together, graduating from Class 42-E in Miami Beach on the 28th of October 1942, commissioned as second lieutenants. His class of roughly 2,600 students chose Gable as its graduation speaker.

  He spent most of 1943 at RAF Polebrook in England with the 351st Bomb Group, flying five combat missions including one over Germany as an observer-gunner in B-17 Flying Fortresses, earning the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross. During one mission, flak went through his boot and narrowly missed his head. Adolf Hitler reportedly offered a reward to anyone who could capture Gable alive and bring him unscathed. His discharge papers were signed on the 12th of June 1944 by Captain Ronald Reagan, later President of the United States.

• 7. The Final Performance

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  By the late 1950s, Gable was at Paramount, turning down television offers outright, and acknowledging at 57 that it was time he acted his age. His contracts began including a clause that his filming days ended at 5 p.m. While making It Started in Naples in 1960 with Sophia Loren, his weight had climbed to 230 pounds. He went on a crash diet, quit drinking and smoking briefly, and aimed for 195 pounds to pass the physical required for his next project.

  That project was The Misfits, with a screenplay by Arthur Miller and direction by John Huston. His co-stars were Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, Thelma Ritter, and Rex Bell. Many critics regard the performance as the finest of Gable's career, and after seeing the rough cuts, Gable agreed. He had insisted on performing the physically demanding mustang wrangling sequences himself. In his 2006 autobiography, Eli Wallach recalled Gable as a professional who went home each evening at 5 p.m. to his pregnant wife.

  On the 6th of November 1960, Gable suffered a heart attack and was taken to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles. Newspaper reports the next day said his condition was satisfactory. By the morning of the 16th he seemed to be improving, but he died that evening from a second heart attack caused by an infection. He was 59. Medical staff had not performed CPR, fearing the procedure would rupture his heart, and no defibrillator was available.

  Four months after his death, his fifth wife Kay gave birth to his only biological son, John Clark Gable. The Misfits was released in 1961 with its star already gone. Gable is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, next to Carole Lombard and her mother. Spencer Tracy and James Stewart served as pallbearers.