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Just after his 21st birthday Clark Gable joined a touring theatrical company called the Jewell Players, stayed with the group until it collapsed some months later in Butte, Mont. He had 26¢. Hopping a freight, he took a gelid ride to the Pacific Northwest, piled logs, sold neckties, became a telephone repairman. One of the last phones he fixed was at the theater of the Red Lantern Players, where Josephine Dillon, then in her late thirties,, was the resident stage director. She taught him diction, projection and carriage, and married him when he was 23.
For six years Gable floated among minor theatrical jobs, then caught the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. There was just one problem—those ears. Milton Berle would later describe them as "the best ears of our lives," but Warner Bros, had already decided that they made young Gable unfit for the screen. M-G-M simply pinned back the Gable flappers with adhesive tape, and cast him in The Painted Desert. As Gable rose toward his coronation as The King—a ceremony actually performed in 1937 by Spencer Tracy with a cardboard crown—he shed the tape.
Comfort & Courage. Divorced by Josephine Dillon in 1930, he married Maria (Rhea) Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham, a Houston socialite whose first marriage had occurred before Gable was born: despite his obvious virility, he apparently needed the comfort and security provided by older women. The first Mrs. Gable is now 76, lives alone in Hollywood with her chihuahua, and provided a startling contrast last week when, white-haired and frail, she was photographed looking at a picture of her young husband of years ago. Rhea, now 70, lives alone in Houston.
Gable liked his women to be both sacred and profane, and Carole Lombard, who in 1939 became his third wife, was close to perfection in both categories. During their courtship, when she heard that another actress had plans of her own for Gable, Carole Lombard stormed the set, told the director: "Get that whore out of this film or Gable goes.'' The rival vanished. Lombard gave her man a pure white Ford adorned with red valentines, learned to handle a shotgun so she could join him on his beloved hunting trips.
Gable's smile spread wider than a river in flood—until Carole Lombard was killed in an air crash during the early months of World War II. Soon afterward he en listed in the Army Air Forces, flew combat missions in B-17s out of Peterborough, England, functioning as both the head of an aerial film unit and as a turret gunner.
On His Own. After the war, the momentum of his great days in the '30s carried him through a series of mediocre films, but not through a mismatched 1949-52 marriage to Lady Sylvia Ashley, widow of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and ex-wife of a couple of British peers.