"I've laughed about my so-called 'death' before," he said last year, when his health seemed excellent and he smilingly scotched the sort of morbid rumor that forever comes up in the career of an aging giant. Of course he was not dead. The lines of his face had deepened and the skin had toughened. There was less gloss and more grey in his hair. But this was like seasonal change on a mountain. The basic topography was nearly permanent. He was, after all, Clark Gable.
In 30 starring years and about 65 films, he had dominated Hollywood. He was to the American motion picture what Ernest Hemingway is to American literature. He had the same masculine appeal, conveyed the same sense of escape from oppressive city culture, and suggested that what matters in life is the things a man can do with his body and his two hands. The gulf between Gable and a newer Hollywood generation was well summed up by a Clan member, who once said contemptuously: "He's a square. What would we find to say to him? He goes hunting."
Like a Gong. There was something exhilarating about his sheer brawn, whether he was swashing across the decks of the Bounty, or boxing with Spencer Tracy in San Francisco, or pouring the carafe of water over the Big Boss's head in The Hucksters. He often pioneered shock scenes. In Red Dust (1932) he discovered Jean Harlow bathing in a rain barrel, and in It Happened One Night (1934) he shared a tourist cabin with Claudette Colbert, their beds divided by a blanket stretched on a rope. In the same picture, when he took off his shirt and revealed nothing but a glossy chest, he touched off a crisis among undershirt manufacturers.
The main thing was that he took no nonsense from women. In Gone With the Wind, when he snarled at Scarlett O'Hara, played by Vivien Leigh, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," he taught the talkies how to swear. And when he slapped Norma Shearer's face in A Free Soul (1931), he slapped into obsolescence the smooth and courtly Valentino school of hand-kissing elegance. "Perhaps," said Norma Shearer last week, "that was where Noel Coward got the idea for his line: 'Every woman should be hit regularly—like a gong.' And for that sort of thing it was Gable who made villains popular. Instead of the audience's wanting the good man to get the girl, they wanted the bad man to get the girl."
Although he was a thorough professional, few critics bothered to consider him as an actor. He was, simply, a hero, and everything he touched turned to Gable. Sometimes he played The King as if he expected someone else to play The Ace, but he knew it and said so disarmingly. "I'm no actor and I never have been," he once explained. "What people see on the screen is me."
His Coronation. The man they saw was born William Clark Gable in Cadiz, Ohio, the 12-lb. son of a Pennsylvania Dutchman who had one foot in agriculture, the other in oil. Gable's mother died before he was a year old, and the shy, chubby, awkward, somewhat spoiled only child—who played a Teddy bear in a grade-school play—was raised on a mixture of hazard and earthy practicality. For three years he worked as a tool dresser in an Oklahoma oilfield, climbing 80-ft. derricks to grease the crown block and swinging 16-lb. sledge hammers.