The King of Hollywood

twelve days after shooting finished. Monroe was stunned and heartbroken when she learned of Gable's death. She told one reporter quote, nobody was more of a man's man than he was, but he appreciated women. It's clear Monroe was talking about someone who was much more than a co star to her.

Lark Gable was like a father to Monroe. When she was being shuffled between orphanages and foster homes as a child, she slept with the movie stars picture under her pillow, which is why on the final day of shooting for The Misfits, Monroe reportedly walked over to her famous costar and made a confession, She told Gable, do you know something? You're my hero and I never had a hero before.

Clark Gable's rise to the top of Hollywood during the nineteen thirties was much different than Monroe's two decades later. Both actors came from humble origins and we're products of a studio system that transformed them into larger than life figures. Monroe, however, as we learned in episode three, thought of Hollywood as quote a merry go round with beds for horses, and she resented the fact that her career advancement depended upon

pleasing the predatory male executive she called the wolves. Monroe's hero, Clark Gable did not have to confront the wolves the way that women did in early Hollywood, but unlike Monroe, he was willing to do whatever it took to become a star. In this episode, we chart Clark Gable's journey to screen legend, including how Hollywood's archetypal man reportedly used and abused women along the way. Suit the star away from how's it going, I know you got a clue?

What you do? You complain brand new to all the other chicks out here that I know what you are what you are, baby, look at you. I'm Sean Braswell. Welcome back to the Thread. This season is about the chain of historical events behind the rise of feminist leader Gloria Steinham. The chain we follow takes us back to the Hollywood of the nineteen thirties and Clark Gable. He's the man who uttered perhaps the most famous line in film history as Rhett Butler and Gone with the Wind. Frankly,

my here, I don't give a damn. Here's a quick recap to follow our thread so far, but please listen to the previous episodes if you haven't already. Las Vegas, Nevada, was a desolate, struggling town in the late nineteen thirties that changed dramatically after Clark Gable's wife, Real Langham, went there to get a quickie divorce while Gable filmed Gone

with the Wind, and pretty soon people were running. You might say, to Las Vegas to get a divorce, because everyone wanted to get a divorce where the Gables had gotten theirs. Seven years later, a nineteen year old Marilyn Monroe obtained her own divorce there. Maryland clearly felt that it would be easier for her to pursue her modeling

and acting career if she were single. Fast forward another seven years, A magazine publisher named Hugh Hefner uses a nude photo of Monroe taken when she was a struggling model, to sell the first issue of Playboy magazine. She was the the launching key to the beginning of Playboy. Fast forward another seven years, and Hefner founds the first Playboy club,

whose bunny clad employees revolutionized the nightclub scene. A young reporter named Gloria Steinham then writes an expose of life as a bunny, one which helps spark her resolve to spend a lifetime on women's rights. It was subject to constant what we would now term sexual harassment, but there wasn't even a word for it. Then. In this episode, we turn our attention to the movie star whose landmark divorce helped launch Las Vegas, the man they called the

King of Hollywood, Clark Gable. Clark Gable plays a Nevada cowboy in The Misfits, one who finds love and companionship with a recently divorced younger woman played by Monroe. In the final scene of the movie, Monroe turns to Gable as they drive down desert road at night. How do you find your way back in the dark? Just head for that big star, straight on the high. Raise Catt'll take us right home. Those would be the last lines Clark Gable would utter on screen. Two weeks later, he

died from a heart attack. The New York Times headline read the King is Dead. Gable's widow and fifth wife, Kay blamed one person for her husband's sudden death. Marilyn Monroe, the actress, had a reputation for causing delays and problems on set, and The Misfits was no different. Monroe was always late, She forgot her lines. She fought constantly on set with her husband, Arthur Miller, the playwright who had written The Misfits for her. She also popped amphetamines and tranquilizers.

The filming was very, very difficult. This is Monroe. Biographer Sarah church Well, her relationship with Arthur Miller was breaking down, um and um. There were many many problems on the set, uh, some of which had to do with Maryland's own problems with addiction, but also with her unhappiness in her marriage. To make matters worse, the Nevada summer heat was oppressive. The delays, the waiting, and the heat were hard on

the aging Gable. He also insisted on doing many of his own stunts, including being dragged by a truck for over four hundred feet across the desert. The physical strain on Gable during the Misfits may have contributed to the star's death, but Gable was also a chronic smoker and a heavy drinker, and he spent his reign as the King of Hollywood living large and trying to live up to his larger than life image. Gable starred in some of Hollywood's best films, including It Happened One Night, Mutiny

on the Bounty, and of course, Gone with the Wind. MGM, the studio that owned Clark Gable services for decades, structs Aintematic Gold when they discovered him. This is E. J. Flemett, author of several books on early Hollywood and stars like Gable. Clark Gable's success really was based upon the fact that the product that M. Jim put on the screen, the movie Clark Gable was an every man. But Gable was

so much more than an every man. There had been other super masculine men in Hollywood and Helen Peterson is the author of Scandals of Classic Hollywood and a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed. But no one had that sort of like swarthy, unshaven masculinity that Clark Gable popularized over the course of the nineteen thirties. Gables frequent co star and even more frequent lover. Actress Joan Crawford perhaps summed

up Gable best. She said, he represented man at his most primeval viril, rough and ready, with the instincts of a wild beast. Gable had more balls than any man I've ever known. So one of the things that made women go wild old was that in a lot of his performances he had stubble, like he was a slightly unshaven, and that at the time, you know, it was a

signifier of this sort of unmitigated masculinity. Gable cemented this impression and one of the scenes from the nineteen four classic It happened one night he took off his shirt and he wasn't wearing an undershirt, which was just scandalous at the time. Gable won the Oscar for Best Actor

for his performance in that film. He was also given another honor, Hollywood Colnation Gable and Maniva Crown, King and Queen of the Street to Gable and behalf of the twenty minutes fans, I present to you this kingly crown. Thank you. Ed. You know I play gamblers, newspaper men, pondike miners and now a test pilot. But this is the first time I've ever played the role of a game. Gable scoffed at his honorific title. In private, he said, this king stuff is pure. I'm just a lucky slab

from Ohio. I happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I had a lot of smart guys helping me. That's all. It's true. Gable had a lot of guys to help him, and even more women. He slept with virtually every woman acrossed paths with Marna Lloyd later said that he was the least selective man in the hemisphere. Had screw anything. It didn't even have to be pretty or clean. Gable was legendary around MGM

for his womanizing. One day, Gable was in a studio executive's office and his desk was covered with hundreds of studio stills of the contract actresses at MGM and Gabel looked at them and said, I've had every single one of them. It didn't stop with the contract actresses. He had affairs with virtually every famous MGM star, John Crawford, Marilena Dietrich, Marian Davies. It's hard to actually find one that he did not have a fair but at least

one of those alleged conquests had broader consequences. It was Gable's relationship with a twenty two year old rising film star named Loretta Young. Loretta Young was kind of like the Jennifer Anison of the nineteen thirties, just you know, a very very steady and lovable star that wasn't necessarily an incredible actress, but was widely beloved. Loretta Young signed on to make a film with Clark Gable, Call of

the Wild, about gold prospectors in the Klondike. And she goes with Clark Gable to shoot Call of the Wild, which is based on the Jack London novel. And they're in the wilderness in you know, the forest outside of Seattle and on location, which was somewhat rare at the time. Despite the frigid weather, Sparks flew between Young and the

married Gable and not just on screen. So you have this long shoot in the winter, in the middle of nowhere, and you have a beautiful star and Laretta Young, and then another very handsome and flirtation a star in Clark Gable, and you know there's home movies of them being flirtatious with one another, and people on the set said that they were flirting. Young, Gable and the rest of the casting crew boarded an overnight train back to Hollywood when

filming came to an end. The stars were given individual compartments for the journey. Loretta Young was in her compartment in the overnight train and Clark Gable knocked on the compartment door, and, as she told her biographer and also her son and daughter in law, he knocked on the door and she didn't know how to say no. Young later said that she thought Gable just wanted to visit her compartment, but according to Young, he had other ideas

in mind. She said quote, he wasn't rough, but I kept saying no, and he wouldn't take no for an answer. Clark Gable returned home to his wife, Real Langham after shooting finished on Call of the Wild. His first words were, I want my freedom. He didn't get it, at least not then. Not long after, Gable received some news Loretta Young was pregnant. He ignored it. Young was devastated. She

was freaked out. I mean, the thing to be an unwed mother at that time in Hollywood, you know, it would be the end of her career and she would be a fallen woman. I mean, when that happened with Hollywood starlet's usually the course of action and was to get an abortion, but Loretta refused. Instead, she orchestrated one of the greatest cover ups in Hollywood history. Young told the studio she needed a vacation and left for Europe with her mother. She remained there for months, explaining that

she was ill. Young then secretly returned to her mom's house in California for her final trimester. She would go out at night only and walk around the neighborhood to get a little bit of exercise because she was still crazy. But there were rumors that she was pregnant. Young invited one prominent gossip columnists to her mom's house to dispel the rumors. She greeted the calumnists from her bed and they piled pillows all over her and they said, she's

just sick. She can't get out of bed, and they essentially convinced the world that she was not pregnant by putting pillows on top of her bed. One evening, about nine months after Call of the Wild ceased filming on location, Clark Gable attended the New York premiere of his next film. Afterwards, Gable received an unsigned telegram in his hotel room. It read, beautiful, blue eyed, blonde baby girl for an eight fifteen. This morning, Gabel walked into the bathroom, tore up the telegram, and

flushed it down the toilet. It took decades for Young to come to terms with what she claimed happened to her that night in the train compartment, says Anne Helen Peterson. In the nineties, Loretta Young was watching a program that described day rape or you know, acquaintance rape, and the dynamics of how that worked. That's someone that you know that you know it's not a violent thing, but that

it is unwanted sex. And she saw that program and heard that definition, and she said, that's what happened between me and Clerk Gable. Loretta Young devised even more elaborate plans after giving birth. She placed her baby in an orphanage for the time being, and went back to work on her next movie. Over a year later, she told the press she decided to adopt two babies. What eventually happened is those two children turned into one child, and that one child that she adopted turned out to be

her own child. Thanks to Young's efforts, the story would remain just a Hollywood r She was so smart, she was so savvy. She pulled it off with no help. She didn't have like a publicist who was coaching her on us. Was like her her mom and her sisters, who figured out how to game the entire publicity apparatus so that she could keep her daughter like that's amazing. Loretta Young did not get a lot of help from the studio and navigating the rocky shoals of Hollywood morality

and scandal. She was unmarried, female, pregnant, and unwilling to get an abortion. But her male co star, Clark Gable, had plenty of help with his career threatening scandals up next the men they called the Hollywood Fixers, an elite special forces unit for scandal management. Clark Gable may never have become Marilyn Monroe's hero or the King of Hollywood without the help of some powerful allies within the studio system.

The fixers at MGM saved gable skin more than once, and they were also responsible for his ill fated marriage to relaying them. Historians call the nineteen thirties the golden Age of Hollywood, and more than anything, that golden age was defined by stars. The studios realized right away that the fans reacted to the stars as much as they did to the movie This is e. J. Fleming again.

And the studios also realized that the individual stars translated to money, so it was imperative that they had an organized system in place to take care of any problems that came up. There was one studio in particular that stood out as a star making machine, Anne Helen Peterson MGM was the King, so they had one of their slogans was more stars in the heavens. They were like

the HBO of nineteen thirties Hollywood. MGM stable of stars included Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, Gene Harlow, and Judy Garland. MGM and other studios took the personal behavior of their stars very seriously. Any hint of scandal could sink a star, and more importantly, the studio's large investment

in them. So MGM, like all of the other major studios at the time, had what we're called fixers, and those are people who collaborated with the publicity department to make sure that no negative stories or stories that didn't match the public image of the star would be released. Clark Gable encountered MGMs fixers early on in his career at the studio. In fact, that's how he came to

be married to Real Langham in the first place. Gable's first major films were coming out in nine At the time, he was living with Langham, a wealthy woman seventeen years his senior. One day, Langham came to see MGM boss Louis B. Mayer. Mayor had an experienced secretary who was used to handling disgruntled wives and girlfriends. Her name was Ida Koverman. Remember that name. We will get back to

Ida in the next episode. Ida Cooverman quickly redirected the distraught Real Langham to a studio executive named Howard Strickling. Howard Strickling was the publicity director and m JAM. He was the guy that had to develop the stories, designed the spin and sell then narratives. Langham broke down in Strickling's office. She told him how she was living with Gable for years with the understanding they would marry. She threatened to raise a stink in the press if he

didn't propose. Studio executive summoned Gable and waived his contract in front of him. The entire contract could be avoided if the actor engaged in sexual or criminal misconduct. To save his career, Clark Gable agreed to marry Real Langham. MGM did much more than force its young stars to marry live in lovers. They made sure no rough edges

came into public views, says Anne Helen Peterson. So anything that they did, whether it was drunken mischief, punching a waiter at a bar, um, abusing a wife or a partner, those things were covered up in collaboration with the press and the police department. MGM controlled every police force within fifty miles. It had an army of doctors, psychiatrists, pharmacists, lawyers and reporters that it could enlist at any time to fix a problem. And MGM's chief fixer was a

man named Eddie Mannix. Mannix was a former amusement park bouncer from New Jersey. One of the jobs Mannix was tasked with was to keep an eye on Clark Gable. Both men were inveterate gamblers, drinkers, and womanizers. They quickly became close friends, and whenever Gable had a problem, Mannix, along with Howard Strickling, was there to solve it. Yes, Gable felt the blade of the studio's almighty sword when

he was forced to marry Realangum. But as Gable star rose, he saw that same sword go to work for him. He was driving drunk in Hollywood and he hit a woman in a crosswalk and drove away. Clark Gable had a lot of car accidents in his life, according to E. J. Fleming, This one in three was the worst. He immediately called Strickling and said he thought he hit somebody with his car. Strickling called the Hollywood police and they confirmed that yes, there was a dead woman on a crosswalk and people

identified gables car. MGMs fixers went to work, says Fleming. MGM reportedly paid off the victim's family and paid another employee to take the rap for the accident. Twelve years later, Gable was driving home drunk again when he lost control of his car on Sunset Boulevard and plowed into a tree. Gable was taken to a nearby hospital. News of the accident leaked to the press. MGM's publicity team, never cowed by irony, told reporters that Gable was sideswiped by a

drunk driver. Like so many other royals in history, Clark Gable got away with just about everything. But even before he became a star, Gable was an unflinching opportunist, one who would do almost anything and sleep with anyone that might advance his career. Real langenm was just one of several women who served his rungs in the ladder that Gable used to climb to the top of Hollywood. Clark Gable's route to Hollywood was an orthodox, to say the least.

He was from Cadiz, Ohio, a small river town in the middle of nowhere. The young man, then known as Billy Gable, quit school and went to work in Akron doing odd jobs and Helen Peterson. Again. Like many classic Hollywood stars, he had a pretty poor and rough and tumble childhood, His parents were in and out of pictures. His mom died when he was young um, and he made his way to start um kind of by fits and starts. Eventually Gable found his way to Portland, Oregon.

There he met the first of a series of older women that would change his life. E. J. Fleming explains Gable used women his entire life. He was with a traveling stage crew in Oregon early in his career, and he hooked up with the lead actress, a woman named Franz door Fler. She actually got him his first job acting, and he promised to marry her, uh so she would keep giving him jobs. Gable broke that promise. He left door Floer a year later when he met Josephine Dillon.

Josephine was a kind of a homely acting coach. He was twenty years older than than Gable, but she took a liking to him all women did. She renamed him Clark. Dylan soon became the first Mrs Clark Gable. The newly weds moved into a Hollywood bungalow. Gable worked as a garage mechanic and struggled as a studio extra. He was tall and handsome, but he had enormous ears and unattractive teeth.

So one of the things that Josephine Dillon for how did for him was basically instruct him on how he could make it as a Hollywood star and not just as a you know, sort of handsome guy from Ohio. And what she did was paid for him to get new teeth. His teeth were crooked and bad. She also taught him how to speak in a way that it was less high pitched and feminine. Gable rewarded Dylan's efforts on his behalf by abandoning her. He took up with

yet another older woman, actress Pauline Frederick. She had this huge mansion on since at Bovard. He moved in with her. He never told Dylan he was even in town, and he was basically a kept man. He didn't do any acting. She just kept giving him sports cars and jewelry. Gable was indeed it kept man, even if no single woman kept him for all that long. Finally he met a wealthy forty four year old divorce and socialite from Texas named Real Langham, and it was kind of a full marriage.

They pretended they were married. They introduced themselves as Mr and Miss as Gable. With Langham bank rolling him, Gable pursued a career on Broadway and then back in Hollywood. The Ohio Ruffian blossomed into a suave or be night. He wore Brooks Brothers suits. Sometimes he carried a cane. I think that you could safely call Clark Gable a gold digger. He saw opportunity in a way to rise through their ranks in Hollywood, and that was given to him by the rank and money and success of his

respective wives. You'll recall that Marilyn Monroe had no desire to be a kept woman, despite no shortage of opportunities. As a result, she often lent paycheck to paycheck. Gable took a very different tack. One of the interesting things about Gable is that during his early career as a stage actor was that he never had to worry about the types of things that most struggling actors had to worry about. He never had to worry about money, He never had to worry about a place to stay, he

never had to worry about food. He didn't have to worry about anything because door flour Dylan Paulian, Frederick real laying him had him on the payroll. Gable was more than a boy toy. He was a Pygmalion like project. His female keepers could play Henry Higgins to his Eliza Doolittle. After Gable signed with MGM, the starmakers at the studio continued the transformation. Gable was a complete studio creation. The Clark Gable that everybody remembers and saw in all the

movies was the antithesis of the real Clark Gable. He was almost laughably hypochondriac. He had to be taught the basic manners because he was basically kind of an uncouth Ohio bumpkin. MGM sent Gable for new dentures. They restyled his hair, plucked his eyebrows, and sent him to the gym. They even tried pinning his ears back with tape. It didn't work, so studio cameramen were instructed to film him

from the side as much as possible. The end result, MGM cast him in a series of increasingly big roles. In ninety one, the same year the studio forced him to marry Real Agum. Movie goers had never seen anyone like him. One magazine dubbed him the Great God Gable. Here he is with Carol Lombard in the nineteen thirty two film No Man of her Own. Sure go so FATCHO? I wouldn't be and I was sure of you. Men all over America started to imitate his brash, macho style.

It was not uncommon to overhear a woman responding to those men by saying, who do you think you are? Clark Gable. Clark Gable was in the right place at the right time in Hollywood. MGM was loaded with female stars but short of romantic leading men. By the end of the decade, and after his stint as Rhett Butler,

Clark Gable was the biggest star on the planet. Gable's massive fame also helped fire up the divorce courts of Las Vegas, and aren't a chain of events that shaped the lives of Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner, and Gloria Steinem Next week, in our final episode of the season, we

find out what launched Clark Gable. Even with all the help from his various wives and female patrons, the young Gable might not have succeeded in Hollywood without a little good fortune, including a single test audience that was stacked in his favor. We also retrace our steps and learn more about the casting couches of early Hollywood and how they connect to Gloria Steinham and the women's movement today. Womanizing Daddio, he had got the swagger of a champion.

So bad for you. You just can't find the right company, And I guess when you have one makes it hard. It could be easy who you are. That's just who you are. Baby. The Threat is produced by Libby Coleman and me Sean Braswell. Chris Hoff engineered our show special thanks to Cindy Carpian, Tracy Moran, and James Watkins. This episode features a cover of the song Womanizer by Britney Spears that was recorded at the New Foundry Studios by

Sophie Goldby. To learn more about the Thread, visit ausi dot com, slash the thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to the Threat on Apple Podcasts. Check us out at ausi dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. If you love surprising, engaging stories from history, look no further than the flashback section of ausy dot com. That's o z y dot com. Or you don't trying to run no, just just what you up by. You don't trying to fright. No, just just do what you are,

Sam crazy. I've got your crazy, nothing but the woman. No, you're a woman now