Clark Gable

Clark Gable: The King, and What It Cost

On the set of *Gone with the Wind*, the studio had put up signs designating separate lavatories by race. The film's star told the director Victor Fleming that the signage would come down or "you won't get your Rhett Butler." It came down. He then refused to attend the segregated Atlanta premiere from which Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen had been excluded, and went only after McDaniel personally asked him to. Clark Gable's public image was built on unreflective masculine ease; the record occasionally shows something more deliberate underneath it.

Cadiz, Ohio

He was born on 1 February 1901 in Cadiz, Ohio, to Will Gable, an oil-well driller, and Adeline Hershelman, who died before he was a year old. His father remarried in 1903. Gable's early working life was manual: the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, then the Oklahoma oil fields — work that left him with a physical bearing no drama school could have supplied and none of the equipment for a career in front of a camera.

Josephine Dillon

The person who made him castable was an acting coach named Josephine Dillon, whom he met in Portland, Oregon. She paid to have his teeth fixed and his hair restyled, and she taught him posture, body control and voice modulation — the entire apparatus, in other words, of what audiences would later take for Gable's natural manner. She brought him to Hollywood in 1924, became his manager, and married him; she was seventeen years his senior. They divorced in 1930, the year his career began in earnest.

He spent the intervening years as a silent-film extra, in *The Merry Widow* (1925) and *The Johnstown Flood* (1926), and worked in the theatre, where a notice for *Machinal* in 1928 described him as "young, vigorous, and brutally masculine." That phrase was, more or less, the business plan.

MGM

Irving Thalberg signed him to MGM in 1930 at $650 a week. *A Free Soul* (1931) generated the fan mail that settled the matter, and the studio publicity department went to work on what it called his "lumberjack-in-evening-clothes" quality. In 1934 he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in Frank Capra's *It Happened One Night* — a screwball comedy, notably, rather than anything heroic. Capra observed that the character closely resembled Gable's real personality, a compliment that contains a small trap.

He was nominated again for *Mutiny on the Bounty* (1935), in which he played Fletcher Christian in a picture that took eight Oscar nominations and grossed $4.5 million against a $2 million cost. Gable's own verdict on his work in it was "I stink in it."

Rhett Butler

He did not want *Gone with the Wind*. He had flopped in the period drama *Parnell* (1937), doubted any adaptation could survive the novel's expectations, and took the part under studio pressure and public demand. It brought him his third nomination, his most famous line — "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" — and permanent identification with a single character. His salary was $117,917. He appeared sixteen times on Quigley's annual poll of top ten money-making stars, and the trade press had settled on calling him the King of Hollywood.

Lombard, and the B-17

He married Carole Lombard on 29 March 1939, during a break in the *Gone with the Wind* schedule, at Kingman, Arizona. "You can trust that little screwball with your life or your hopes or your weaknesses," he said of her. They kept a ranch in Encino and called each other Ma and Pa. On 16 January 1942, returning from a war bond tour, Lombard was killed with all twenty-two aboard when her aircraft crashed near Las Vegas; she is counted as the first American woman to die in service connected to the war. Esther Williams said simply that Gable "had been devastated by Carole's death" and "was never the same."

He enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces on 12 August 1942, at forty-one and well over draft age, was commissioned that October and promoted to major by June 1944. Attached to the 351st Bomb Group at RAF Polebrook in England, he flew five combat missions as an observer-gunner in B-17 Flying Fortresses between May and September 1943. On one sortie over Germany his aircraft lost an engine to flak, a crewman was killed and two wounded, and shrapnel passed through his boot. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal, and produced the recruiting film *Combat America* in 1944.

The Long Decline, and The Misfits

He came back to a studio that marketed his return with the tagline "Gable's back, and Garson's got him." The films that followed were not the films that had made him. David Thomson judged that his post-*Gone with the Wind* work "hardly befitted a national idol," and Britannica's assessment is much the same: solid pictures, few classics, *The Hucksters* (1947) and *Mogambo* (1953) the likeliest exceptions.

Then, at the end, *The Misfits* (1961) — John Huston directing, Arthur Miller writing, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift alongside him, and a story about ageing men roping mustangs in Nevada. He insisted on doing his own dangerous stunt work. Many critics regard it as his best performance, and Gable, watching the rough cuts, agreed. He was admitted to hospital on 6 November 1960 after a heart attack and died there ten days later, aged fifty-nine, of a second attack; staff avoided resuscitation for fear of rupturing his heart, and no defibrillator was available. Spencer Tracy and James Stewart carried his coffin.

Why Clark Is Called a Genius

The claim for Gable is not an intellectual one and should not be dressed up as one. It rests on physical presence and on trained technique, and the interesting part is how much of the first was produced by the second. What audiences read as innate — the walk, the ease, the voice — was substantially the work of Josephine Dillon, who rebuilt his teeth, his posture, his breathing and his diction before anyone had heard of him. The skill consists of holding a frame without visible effort, playing insolence and tenderness in the same beat, and doing it consistently enough to carry sixty pictures across thirty-seven years. Joan Crawford, who worked opposite him eight times, said he "was the most masculine man that I have ever met in my life." Doris Day located the mechanism more precisely: "He was as masculine as any man I've ever known, and as much a little boy as a grown man could be — it was this combination that had such a devastating effect on women." Pauline Kael, colder about it, called his presence a "bold open challenge to women," his romantic scenes "violent and primal."

The counter-case is easy to make and Gable made much of it himself. Capra's remark that the Oscar-winning role closely resembled his own personality is double-edged: the range was narrow, and the man was frequently playing himself well rather than playing others at all. He dismissed his own Fletcher Christian outright — "I stink in it." Two decades of postwar pictures failed to add anything to the reputation. What he had was star quality of an unusually durable kind, plus, in *The Misfits*, one late demonstration that there had been an actor in there all along. Genius is a heavy word for that. Craft, engineered and then made invisible, is the accurate one.

Legacy

Gable received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in February 1960, months before he died, and was ranked seventh among the American Film Institute's greatest male screen legends in 1999. He is buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale beside Carole Lombard. His name reached places he never did: Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, was partly named after him. Arthur Miller, who wrote his last part for him, offered the epitaph that fits the studio's image of him least comfortably and the man probably best — Gable, he said, was "the man who did not know how to hate."

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Actor — 1935
• Worked as film actor, actor and military personnel