'Clark Gable --Tormented Star' after-reading

Last week I borrowed two books from library, one of them called ‘Clark Gable --Tormented Star’, by David Bret.

I know Clark Gable from ‘Gone With the Wind’ (GWTW). He played Rhett Butler—the reckless but charming character who shunned society’s expectations. Gable said he didn’t want to do GWTW, because people form opinions about characters, they already had a preconceived idea about what they were going to see. Gable was afraid and hesitated, but everyone believes he was the only one for Rhett Butler and I used to think Clark Gable was Rhett Butler.

However, co-star Myrna Loy recalled “He really wasn’t anything like what people thought.” “He was a deeply introverted person. He was actually quite bashful and tried to project a confidence that I don’t think he really had.” Joan Crawford recalled “He worked very hard to be the person people wanted him to be. I think he cared too much about what people thought.” I think it might be because of Gable’s pathetic childhood. Gable’s mother died when he was a baby. He worked on a farm at young age. It is miserable that his father despised everything about him, he even conned young Clark. He completely destroyed Clark's self-confidence. I suppose Clark Gable spent his whole life carrying that around with him.

GWTW took Clark Gable from superstar to icon, his salary was immensely high and he was immensely famous, he seemed to be blessed by god. For all the fame, Gable was humble “I'm just a lucky slob from Ohio who happened to be in the right place at the right time.” But happiness ended very soon, his wife died in a plane crash. Gable was grief-stricken. He deeply depressed and drank heavily. He enlisted in the Air Corps, he said "I don't expect to come back and I don't want to come back."

Increasingly he drank heavily and periodically ballooned in size and weight only to loose it on killer crash diets just before he would begin filming. Co-star Virginia Grey said "He's lonely”.

Gable’s wife used to say "Clark isn't the happy-go-lucky, carefree man the public sees. He's not had a very happy life and is inclined to be depressed and worried. I want to make it up to him if I can." Gable sacrificed his happiness for a success; after all he had chosen the simplest life. In his ranch, he sprayed horses for flies, he cleaned the stalls and the barn, and he cut weeds and mowed the citrus. “A man spends his whole life getting somewhere and where does he end up? Nowhere, just where he started." (Test Pilot 1938)

 

When I read the book I was thinking about my life and each individual’s life. We tried very hard to achieve, in the end what we lost and what we get. I am trying to understand myself through another person’s life. All in all, this was the King of Hollywood and this is the book. It is worth reading. Besides, you are going to read the stories behind the scenes. Frankly, some of them made me burst out laughing but some were beyond my understanding of Hollywood.