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Professionally, matters improved with films like Command Decision and Mogambo, privately with his 1955 marriage to Kay Spreckels, who in 1952 had divorced Adolph Spreckels Jr., heir to a sugar fortune. By last summer, Clark Gable had at last settled again into a life that fully agreed with him. In The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston, he had found a film he considered his best since Mutiny on the Bounty. He was playing, in Miller's words, a Westerner whose idea of living was: "You start by going to sleep. You get up when you feel like it. You scratch yourself, fry yourself some eggs, throw stones at a can. Whistle . . ." In short, he was again playing Clark Gable.
On The Misfits location in Reno, he learned that his wife Kay was pregnant with his first child (due next March). He was so literally the king of his profession that when he came into a room, people stood and clapped. Nevadans stared in admiration while Gable fixed a flat on his own car: they were watching a man who did almost everything on his own and did it well. He made his own friends, who included studio executives but also hotelkeepers, contractors, mechanics; and with some of them he would motorcycle through San Fernando Valley at 100 m.p.h.
Reason or No Reason. Standing 6 ft. i in., he was still as strong as two men back to back. During the filming of 1938's Test Pilot, he was supposed to be "killed" by an avalanche of 60-lb. sandbags, flung them around like jelly beans until the bags were refilled at 200 Ibs. to make the scene believable. He had, too, a man's modest ration of swagger. He was proud of his wide, wide shoulders, and with one extra drink in him he would turn in the broad est doorway and go through sideways.
When word came of Clark Gable's death at 59 last week, resulting from his second heart attack this month, it was no rumor, as it had been last year. Tritely but accurately, his small, quiet military funeral —before burial beside Carole Lombard at Hollywood's Forest Lawn Cemetery—was called the end of an epoch. His star had gone higher and stayed there longer than any other in the history of films. A bit of dialogue from The Misfits will long be remembered as his exit line. "Honey," the script had him say at one point to Marilyn Monroe, "we all gotta go some time, reason or no reason. Dyin's as natural as livin'. Man who's too afraid to die is too afraid to live, far as I've ever seen. So there's nothin' to do but forget it, that's all. Seems to me."