Clark Gable was known worldwide as “The King of Hollywood,” a legendary figure whose charisma captivated millions on the silver screen. But even a man as famous as Gable faced defining moments that transcended his celebrity. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, a nation plunged into war, and Gable felt a profound call to serve. He sent a telegram to President Roosevelt, not asking for a special role, but for a chance to fight. Despite being told to stay put, Gable didn’t hesitate, choosing action and sacrifice over comfort.
From his humble beginnings to becoming the biggest star of his era, Clark Gable’s journey was already an incredible American story. Yet, it was his unwavering determination to join the war effort, defying expectations and stepping out of the spotlight, that truly revealed the man behind the legend. Join us as we explore the surprising and deeply moving path of a cinematic icon who became an unexpected hero, forever cementing his place not just in Hollywood history, but in the heart of Our American Stories.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Clark Gable was known as the King of Hollywood. He appeared in more than sixty movies over a span of thirty-seven years. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in It Happened One Night, the big hit of 1934. He was nominated for Best Actor two more times. He made the famous Top Ten Money Making Stars List sixteen times from 1932 through 1955. From 1934 through 1939, he ranked number two four times. In 1939, he starred as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, the greatest film of the era. During the depths of the Great Depression, MGM paid him seventy-five hundred dollars a week, equivalent to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a week today, whether or not he was making a movie. His leading ladies were a who’s who,
of female stars.
Before World War II, they included Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, Myrna Loy, Loretta Young, Jeanette MacDonald, Vivien Leigh, Rosalind Russell,
and Lana Turner.
After the war, they included Barbara Stanwyck, Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner, Gene Tierney, Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe. Born William Clark Gable at home in February 1901 in Cadiz, Ohio, Gable is German on his father’s side and German and Irish on his mother’s. His parents come from farm families, but the father becomes a wildcat oil driller. The mother dotes on her infant son, but she dies when he’s only ten months old. Gable is taken to be raised by a maternal uncle and his wife on their farm. They have no children of their own and love the little Gable boy so much they want to adopt him. Gable’s father refuses to allow it, thinking he will soon remarry. Two years later, the father does remarry and takes his now three-year-old son back.
The new wife.
Can’t have children of her own and devotes herself to the large-for-his-age boy. Young Gable is rambunctious and loves the outdoors, especially when his father takes him hunting and fishing. Gable also spends each summer back on the uncle’s farm until he’s twelve years old. From then on, he has full-time jobs during the summer, usually driving wagons and delivering goods. By the time Clark Gable is sixteen years old, he reaches his full height of six-foot-one and is one hundred and eighty pounds of muscle, bone, and sinew. He is his high school baseball team’s home run hitter. His towering drives land in cow pastures will be.
On the outfield.
Gable doesn’t return to school for a senior year. Though the United States enters the Great War in Europe, and manpower…
shortages begin to appear.
Gable gets a job on the production line at the Firestone Tire plant in Akron. Akron tire plants are running around the clock, and the town’s population grows more than two hundred thousand.
Gable is in the big.
City, and life is at a pace he has never experienced. It’s in Akron. Gable is bitten by the acting bug. He attends a play at the Akron Music Hall and is captivated by the theme and the performances. “I clapped my hands until my palms were sore.” Gable later said, “I’d never seen anything as wonderful in my life, which I guess had been here. Do you drab up until then?” Whenever he can, Gable is at the music hall. He volunteers to be a callboy, which entails notifying actors in their dressing rooms when it is their time to go on stage. He watches and makes careful mental notes of everything. His enthusiasm is evident to everyone. When an actor playing a household servant suddenly takes sick, Gable is given the opportunity to replace him. Said Gable, “I had one line: ‘Your cab is here, madam.’ I thought I’d die while I was waiting to go on. When I didn’t fall on my face, I thought I was an actor.”
“It was all over then.”
“As far as my future was concerned, I never wanted to be anything else.” With the end of the war, in the sharp cutback on production, Akron falls on hard times. Many lose their jobs, including Gable. He struggles on with odd jobs for another before leaving and joining his father, who was wildcat drilling in Oklahoma. His father finds him a job as an apprentice tool dresser, swinging a sixteen-pound sledgehammer to sharpen the cutting edges of drilling bits. After six months of daily twelve-hour shifts, his muscles are bulging and he weighs two hundred…
and five pounds.
Even among the rugged oilfield workers, Gable stands out. Tired of swinging a sledgehammer, Gable gets a job in an oil refinery, but the work is just as rugged,” said Gable,
“I was part of an eight-man gang that cleaned…”
out the sludge, which was almost like asphalt from stills and storage tanks as soon as…
they were emptied.”
“The interior temperature and oil fumes were so terrific that only one man would go in at a time with a rope around his waist, and case he passed out, work with a pick and shovel. You could only tolerate it for about two minutes, so you are in and out every sixteen minutes throughout the twelve-hour shift. I saw lots of men get a little hysterical. They started to laugh, and I had to be hauled…”
out and sent home.”
And you’re listening to Roger McGrath to pick the early life of actor Clark Gable and what a life! When we come back, more of the story of Clark Gable,
here on Our American.
Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories.
Every day on this show, we’re…
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com
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And we continue with Our American Stories. And you’re listening to Roger McGrath, who also happens to be the author of Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier. And McGrath has done countless hours on the West with us. And you can just Google his name on our search bar on our website, and you’ll hear so many beautiful and good and compelling stories by McGrath. And by the way, Greg Hangler, who’s also the producer on this piece, studied with McGrath when he was in college, and McGrath is one of the great history teachers at UCLA. Now let’s return to McGrath and the story of Clark Gable.
When Gable turns twenty-one, he comes in a small inheritance from his mother’s side of the family. It’s enough money to quit the oilfields and pursue acting. Father explodes when Gable tells him he’s leaving. They almost come to blows and vow never to see each other again. For two years, Gable’s on the road with a traveling tent show, playing minor roles. The show gets stranded in Butte, Montana, in a terrible blizzard, which forces the cancellation of the rest of its tour. And then a member of the show tells Gable he has relatives in Oregon who might have work for them. The two hop a freight train and arrive in Oregon half-frozen, hungry, and broke. Gable finds a job at a lumber mill unloading logs from delivery trucks. He eventually earns enough money to make his way to Portland. In Oregon’s big city, he strings wire for a telephone company, is briefly engaged to actress Francis Doorfler, and appears on stage with the Astoria Players. Gable’s life changes dramatically when he meets Josephine Dylan, a former Broadway actress who is opening an acting studio in Portland. Within weeks,
Gable is not only Dylan’s…
star student, but also living with her. He is twenty-three and she is thirty-nine. However, the relationship is not sexual. Dylan is fascinated by the prospect of turning Clark Gable, who she sees as a diamond in the rough, into not just a good actor, but a star. After a year of working with Gable, often to the neglect of her other students, Dylan decides to relocate to Los Angeles and establishes an acting studio in Hollywood. Gable arrives in Hollywood no longer an awkward novice, but a fairly competent actor. He also has acquired a degree of refinement and sophistication to go along with his natural personal charm. To avoid scandal concerning the relationship, Gable and Dylan agreed to a marriage of convenience. For the next several years, Gable appears in minor roles in movies, but in ever greater roles in the theater. He goes on the road with several different productions, and it’s here he hones his acting chops until critics…
begin to take notice of him.
He plays a great variety of characters, from a big-city newspaper reporter to an innocent, naive sailor, to a ruthless gangster; he even sings and dances in a musical comedy. After his performance as the male lead in Eugene O’Neill’s Pueller’s, a prize-winning play, Anna Christie, a critic says of Gable, “He took the spotlight early in the play, and through the character’s ready wit and wisdom, kept the audience in an uproar from the opening scene to the final curtain.” Rave reviews confirm Gable’s progress as an actor, but something else is happening that portends his future stardom.
Dozens of women are…
at the stage door waiting for him to leave the theater at each of his appearances. Clark Gable’s first significant movie role comes in The Painted Desert, released in 1931. By the end of 1931, he appears in ten more films and moves from supporting roles to leading man. 1932 sees Gable as the male lead in four major motion pictures. His leading ladies are the greatest female stars of the day. He’s making two thousand a week, something like forty thousand a week today, and the nation is in the depths of the Great Depression. His star continues to rise through 1933 and 1934, and his salary is doubled.
It will double again.
His movies are box-office and critical successes, especially It Happened One Night, which wins five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Gable wins the Oscar for Best Actor. Secretaries find it difficult to keep up with his fan mail, and his…
hit movies continue.
China Seas, Call of the Wild, Mutiny on the Bounty, San Francisco, Test Pilot, Too Hot to Handle, Gone with the Wind. “Where I go?”
“Watch my do?”
“Frankly might heir. I don’t give a…”
damn. Women, money, cars, homes are his. Clark Gable is the King of Hollywood. I can.
That must be somewhere to bring him back.
In 1939, Gable marries the love of his life, Carole Lombard. He continues to star in movies, and so too does Lombard, until the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor throws the United States…
into World War II.
A patriot, Lombard raises money for the war by going on a bond tour. On a return to Los Angeles, though, the plane she is on crashes into a mountain in Nevada, with the loss of all on board. Devastated, Gable spends weeks swilling and whiskey, but sobers up and completes a movie for MGM against the strong objections of the studio bosses. The forty-one-year-old King of Hollywood now enlists as a private in the Army Air Corps. “I don’t want to sell bonds to Clarence Gable. I don’t want to make speeches, and I don’t want to entertain. I just want to be sent where the going is tough.” Because of his age, commanding presence, and experience, Gable is accepted for Officer Candidate School and is ordered to report to a camp at Miami, Florida, for a thirteen-week officer’s course. He travels by train, and wherever the train stops, women by the hundreds are there waiting. When Gable asks to change trains in New Orleans, a crowd of five thousand female fans makes it impossible for him to catch his connecting train. He arrives in Miami a day late. For all his heavy smoking and drinking, Gable, in excellent condition, his build and prowess impress the other candidates, but most of them keep their distance, thinking Gable must have an awfully high opinion of himself. Sensing the tension, Gable removes his false teeth and waves them at the other men.
“Look at the…”
King of Hollywood,” he says. “Sure looks like the jack now, doesn’t he?” Everyone laughs, and Gable is suddenly just one of the guys. Physically, Gable sails through OCS, outperforming men half his age. Academically, a high school dropout, he struggles until he decides to treat classroom material like a movie script. While other candidates are sleeping at night, he sits in a lighted latrine and memorizes page after page of subject matter until he can recite the material. He finishes OCS in the top one-quarter of his class, and at the request of the other candidates, delivers the graduation address. After commissioning, Gable spends several more months training at gunnery schools. Having spent years hunting and shooting skeet, he excels as a gunner and is promoted to first lieutenant by the end of January 1943. There’s no question that Gable will be a top aerial gunner, but the War Department and the Army also want him to make training films with footage from actual combat.
And you’re listening to a heck of a story about the biggest star in the world at the time, and at the age of forty-one, after suffering perhaps the greatest loss of his life, the love of his life, enlists. “I don’t want to raise no money for bonds. I want to go where the going is tough.” When we come back, more of this remarkable story, a story of sacrifice, a story of love of country. And at forty-one, the story of Clark Gable continues here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Clark Gable and his military service in World War II. We’ve heard about the man, his life, and my goodness, all of the tough work he did prepared him for—well, the physical nature of war. The psychological nature of war—well, that’s another thing. Let’s pick up where we last left off. Here’s Roger McGrath.
After more training, Gable is deployed with the 351st Bomb Group to Polebrook, England, some eighty miles north of London. His arrival in April 1943 is first announced by German radio broadcasts, which say he will be welcomed in Germany when his plane is shot down. Hitler has a large collection of American films and has stated more than once his favorite Hollywood actor is Clark Gable. German Air Minister Hermann Göring announces that any pilot who shoots down Gable’s plane will receive the equivalent of five thousand dollars—something like one hundred thousand today. If Gable survives a shoot-down and is captured, the German pilot will also be promoted and given a paid vacation. Exactly how many combat missions Clark Gable flies is not known, because he is not a regular crew member for any particular bomber, but simply climbs aboard whenever he can to shoot aerial footage or serve as a replacement for a wounded or ill gunner. The logbooks record Gable on five missions, but he probably flies…
more than twenty.
His commanding officer, Colonel William Hatcher, says, “The damn fool insists on being a rear gunner on every mission.” Gable’s first officially recorded combat mission comes in May 1943. He’s aboard a B-17 on a bombing raid targeting factories in German-occupied Belgium. Besides filming, he also serves as a gunner. Not wanting to diminish his dexterity for camera work, he wears light leather gloves and suffers frostbite. Two B-17s are shot down and the others sustain damage. His second mission takes him to a German airfield in France, but clouds are obscuring the target, and the B-17s cannot drop their bombs.
German fighters, though, come…
up through the clouds to attack the American bombers. Several sustained damage, but none are lost. Gable’s third mission targets chemical plants in German-occupied Norway. It’s the longest flight for the Eighth Air Force, yet two B-17s suffer damage from flak. His fourth mission, almost his last. The target is a synthetic oil plant in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. In a massive air raid by several bomb groups, three hundred planes participate, twenty-five American bombers are shot down, and double that number badly damaged. Many men are killed or wounded. In the midst of…
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