Clark Gable.

Baptized as a Catholic, but raised as a Protestant, Gable did not practice any religion as an adult. His private funeral service at the Church of the Recessional in Forest Lawn Park was attended by some 200 mourners, including Spencer Tracy, Robert Taylor, James Stewart, Norma Shearer, Ann Sothern, Marion Davies, Frank Capra, Robert Stack, Jack Oakie, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Van Johnson and Howard Strickling. There was no eulogy. The closed casket was adorned with yellow roses shaped like a crown, befitting the one-time King of Hollywood.

In 1939, part of his and Carole Lombard’s honeymoon was spent at the Willows Inn in Palm Springs, CA. Today the Inn continues to operate and anyone can stay in the same room, which is largely unaltered since then.

Prior to making The Misfits 1961, he crash-dieted from a bloated 230 lb. to 195 lb. Twice in the previous decade he had suffered seizures that might have been heart attacks; once, ten years earlier, while driving along a freeway he had chest pains so severe that he had to pull off the road and lie down on the ground until he felt well enough to continue on.

He disliked Greta Garbo, a feeling that was mutual. She thought his acting was wooden while he considered her a snob.

Gable and Loretta Young had a romance during the filming of Call of the Wild 1935. Young became pregnant. To hide that she and Gable had produced an out-of-wedlock child, fearing it would ruin both of their careers due to strict morality clauses, Loretta Young secretly gave birth to Judy Lewis while ostensibly vacationing in Europe. When she returned to Hollywood, she claimed Judy was adopted. Gable met Judy only once when she was a teenager.

Had a fear of flying, and made all long journeys across America by train.

His father always opposed his decision to become an actor, and even after he became a major star he still denounced acting as a sissy occupation. Gable became a Freemason in 1933 just to please his father. However, he showed no grief when his father died at age 78 from a heart attack on 4 August 1948, having outlived his three wives.

Served as a pallbearer and usher at Jean Harlow’s funeral in 1937.

He and then future wife Carole Lombard first met in late 1924 while working as extras on the set of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ 1925. They would make three films together as extras and star together in No Man of Her Own 1932, but not become romantically involved until 1936.

A few months after his death, Gable’s widow, Kay 1917-1983, gave birth to John Clark Gable, a race-car driver and sometime actor.

On November 6, 1960, Gable was devastated to learn of the unexpected death of his close friend Ward Bond from a heart attack. Shortly afterward, he also suffered a massive heart attack while reading a magazine. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a close friend, sent him a message of support wishing him a speedy recovery. Gable died in the hospital ten days after his infarction. Although it is often claimed that he died as a result of Marilyn Monroe’s behavior and performing his own stunts in The Misfits 1961, he was already in terrible health when filming began from years of excessive drinking and smoking more than three packs of cigarettes a day. He was interred at Forest Lawn, Glendale, California in the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Trust, on the left hand side, next to Carole Lombard.

Was Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s inspiration for half of Superman’s alter ego name Clark Kent Kent came from Kent Taylor.

Despite his dyslexia, he became an avid reader. He would never allow himself to be photographed reading on film sets, fearing it would undermine his macho screen image.

His first two wives–Josephine Dillon and Maria Franklin Gable aka Ria Langham–were 14 and 17 years older than he was, respectively.

He became increasingly unhappy with the mediocre roles offered him by MGM as a mature actor. He refused to renew his contract with them in 1953 and proceeded to work independently.

Originally the image of him as an outdoorsman was an invention of the studios, designed to bolster his masculine screen image during the early 1930s. However, he soon discovered that he enjoyed hunting, shooting and fishing, so the image swiftly became the reality.

On November 5, 1960, Gable suffered his first heart attack when he was changing a tire on his jeep. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a close friend of his, sent him a message of support wishing him a speedy recovery.

Interred at Forest Lawn, Glendale, CA, in the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Trust, on the left hand side, next to Carole Lombard.

Wanted his headstone to read Back to silents, but his widow didn’t use it.

Once named Mutiny on the Bounty 1935 as the favorite of his movies, despite the fact that he did not like co-star Charles Laughton. He was also initially disappointed by the casting of Franchot Tone as Midshipman Byam, since the two actors had been bitter rivals for the affections of Joan Crawford. However, during filming they became close friends.

He liked westerns, and once expressed his regret that he didn’t make more of them.

So durable that he could play the same role in both an original Red Dust 1932 with Jean Harlow and Mary Astor, and its remake Mogambo 1953 with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly.

It was at his 36th birthday that Judy Garland sang Dear Mr. Gable: You Made Me Love You.

He was voted the 21st Greatest Movie Star of all time by Premiere Magazine.

At the time of his death his gun collection was valued at $500,000. He had a special gun room in his house filled with gold-inlaid revolvers, shotguns and rifles.

In 1949 he served as a pallbearer at the funeral of director Victor Fleming, whom he considered something of a father figure.

When he was born he was mistakenly listed as a female on his birth certificate.

He was a conservative Republican, although his third wife Carole Lombard, a liberal Democrat, encouraged him to support President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms. In February 1952 Gable addressed a televised rally at Madison Square Gardens in New York in support of Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a few days before his death he voted by post for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.

He disliked his most famous film Gone with the Wind 1939, which he regarded as a woman’s picture.

His first screen test was made by director Mervyn LeRoy for Warner Bros. When studio head Jack L. Warner and production chief Darryl F. Zanuck saw the test they were furious at LeRoy for wasting their money on that big ape with those huge floppy taxi-cab ears. Years later when Gable made it big, LeRoy used to tease Warner and say, How would you like to have him and those huge floppy ears now?

In the mid-1950s he started to receive television offers but rejected them outright, even though some of his peers, like his old flame Loretta Young, were flourishing in the new medium.

In the 1970s his Encino, CA, estate was subdivided and turned into a very upscale tract development called Clark Gable Estates.

During his time on Broadway, Gable worked as a stage gigolo, performing stud services for such actresses as Pauline Frederick and Laura Hope Crews, who were considerably older than he. Crews would later play Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind 1939. His much older first wife served as his first acting coach and paid for his false teeth. Later he married a woman 17 years his senior, Texan heiress Maria Franklin Gable, who had underwritten his successful assault on Hollywood.

In 1938, a poll of entertainment readers, he was overwhelmingly selected King of Hollywood and was officially crowned by columnist Ed Sullivan.

He worked as a lumberman in the Willamette Valley of Oregon in the early 1920s. After a couple of months of doing that he quit, saying that the work was too hard and he would rather act instead. He then left to go to Hollywood, where he began his acting career.

His father was of German, some Swiss-German, and distant Irish, ancestry. His mother was of half German and half Irish descent.

Discouraged by his failure to progress in films, he tried the stage and became an employable actor, first in stock and eventually on Broadway, without acquiring real fame. When he returned to Hollywood in 1930 for another try at movie acting, his rugged good looks, powerful voice and charisma made him an overnight sensation as the villainous Rance Brett in his first sound picture, The Painted Desert 1931. He exploded onto the screen in a dozen 1931 releases, in small parts at first, but he was an established star by the end of the year.

Military records on celebrities released by the Pentagon in 2005 reveal that Gable, upon enlistment, was described as a motion picture specialist and his weekly wage was listed as $7,500. A movie cameraman, Andrew J. McIntyre, enlisted along with Gable and trained with him, the documents showed. In order to have something definite to describe and some tangible evidence of his experiences, it is proposed that there be enlisted his cameraman to be trained as an aerial gunner also who may make pictures of Gable in various theaters of operations, one Army memo said.