Clark Gable: “Let’s Say She’s Just A Friend Of Mine” (and then they eloped)

It happened on The Tall Men location a few months ago. It was down in Durango, Mexico. Clark Gable and a reporter were sitting on the patio of the Hotel Posada Duran, nursing a couple of beers.

“When are you and Kay Spreckels getting married?” the reporter asked.

Gable put down his beer and ran the index finger of his right hand across his moustache. His man had just trimmed it that morning.

“Why don’t you cut it out?” the actor demanded. “Always trying to get me married.” He half-smiled. “Why should I want to get married?”

“Because you’re a creature of habit,” the reporter answered. “Your whole life you’ve been a sucker for marriage.”

Gable took another swig of beer and rolled a cigarette for himself.

“Maybe so,” he agreed. “But a man learns. From here on in I’m staying single.”

“Stop kidding.”

“On the level,” Clark insisted. “Kay’s a great gal. But we’re both at least three-time losers in this marriage routine. Better we stay friends.”

“Is that why,” the reporter asked, “you’ve been calling her in the States every day?”

Gable finished his beer and got to his feet. “Have to get over to Raoul Walsh’s place,” he announced. (Walsh directed The Tall Men.) “Have to talk about tomorrow’s scenes.” And with that the fifty-four-year-old king of the leading men picked up his little tobacco bag and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “And I’m not getting married.” He bobbed his handsome head up and down as if to emphasize the point. The reporter was impressed but not convinced.

“Your father’s moustache,” he said.

A week later the same reporter was sitting in a Hollywood night club called the Mocambo when Kay Williams Spreckels walked in.

Kay is one of the most cheerful, best-natured women in Hollywood. Always smiling, always pleasant, always ready with a quip. She reminds everyone of Gable’s third wife, the late Carole Lombard.

“When the King gets back from Mexico,” the newsman suggested, casual-like, “you two kids tying the knot?”

“You a professional match-maker or something?” Kay demanded.

“Level with me, Kay.”

“I’m leveling with you,” the blonde beauty said flatly. “I really am. Look at my arm.” She held up a well-formed limb. “Full of holes. I’ve been taking shots, all kinds of shots for typhoid, cholera, yellow fever. I’m going on that junket to Istanbul. You know, the opening of the new Hilton hotel.”

“Gable going with you? Maybe on a honeymoon?”

Kay Williams shook her head. “You must be sick, boy.”

That was the official line the lovers took. They were “just friends, old, old friends.” By the time Clark got back from Mexico, Kay would be off in Turkey. And probably it would have happened that way. Only when Gable flew up from Durango he had marriage on his mind.

He had spent a lot of time with Kay in Palm Springs before taking off for The Tall Men location. They had played golf together, visited old friends.

In Durango, Gable missed his “old, old friend” acutely. He refused to date any of the dozen Mexican beauties who made a play for him night after night.

Instead he spent his spare time and a small fortune gabbing with Kay on the long-distance phone. When the location work was over, the King flew up to Los Angeles where Kay, dutiful and pleasant as ever, was waiting at the airport.

That same night, out at Gable’s Encino estate, he proposed.

“After this picture is over,” he recalls saying, “why don’t we get married?”

Kay smiled from ear to ear. “That might not be a bad idea,” she agreed.

They kissed in the garden. And that’s how Clark Gable proposed. Short, sweet and simple.

“Actually,” he now admits, “I had it on my mind for about a year. I knew for a year that I’d marry her. But I was just stalling, just waiting for the right time.”

Once Gable popped the question, Kay stopped taking shots for the Istanbul junket. The plane-load of stars and celebrities and correspondents took off for Turkey without the thirty-seven-year-old Kay aboard. That was the tipoff.

But Clark is an old hand at marriage, and he wanted this one pulled off in complete privacy. So he phoned his best friend, Al Menasco, up in Northern California.

Gable told Menasco to scout around western Nevada “for some quiet place where we can get married.”

A few days later Al was back with the vital information. Minden, Nevada, he reported, forty-five miles south of Reno, was a likely spot. There was a courthouse in Minden where Gable could get a marriage license very quickly, then scoot over to a nearby justice of the peace.

Gable talked it over with his bride-to-be. She said that she’d like to have her sister along as a witness, Mrs. Elizabeth Messer of Beverly Hills.

Clark agreed happily. He just didn’t want to make a three-ring circus out of the ceremony with reporters, photographers and newsreel cameramen following them all over two states. Gable has always been a man for quiet elopements.

“We finally decided,” he says, “that we would drive up to Gardinerville—Kay, myself and her sister—and rendezvous with Mr. and Mrs. Menasco under a large grove of cottonwood trees. Then we planned to drive down to Minden for the wedding. Everything came off according to plan. We got the license, popped in on this justice of the peace and went through the ceremony.”

It was a two-ring ceremony. As a result Gable now wears a gold band on the little finger of his left hand. He hurt the knuckle of his ring finger in an accident and just as soon as it gets better “I plan to move the ring over.” Following the wedding the newlyweds chartered a private plane piloted by Caesar Bertagna and flew to Menasco’s ranch, named Top Of The Mountain, in St. Helena, California.

“This pilot Bertagna,” Gable affirms, “is a peach of a fellow. He was the only outside man who knew where we were honeymooning. If he wanted he could’ve spilled the beans. He didn’t. If you ever want to elope, ever need a plane, don’t forget his name, Caesar Bertagna.”

The honeymoon lasted ten days. Then the Gables came home to their twenty-acre Encino estate and Kay’s two children, Adolph, six, and Joan, four. There were dozens of congratulatory telegrams awaiting them. But what thrilled Kay the most was “the welcome feeling, the feeling of acceptance I got from all his friends.”

Hollywood ordinarily regards marriage with a jaded and sophisticated eye, but in this case the film colony is convinced that Kay is right for Clark.

They have known each other for at least a dozen years. They met at MGM when Gable signed up for the Air Force during World War II, and they have been constant friends since Clark’s divorce from Lady Sylvia Ashley.

Intimates of Clark’s once said that Gable would “lay off marriage because he is afraid of being taken to the cleaners.” But Kay is wealthy in her own right as a result of her various divorce settlements.

She has been married three times, to Charles Capps, Martin Unzue (known as Macoco) and Adolph Spreckels, the sugar heir. Unzue, the Argentine cattle king, has long been known as one of the most lavish spenders in the international set. How much he lavished on the blue-eyed, shapely blonde in their eleven months of marriage, no one knows. But it was a considerable fortune. At one time Macoco sued Kay for the return of his extravagant gifts while they were married. Subsequently the suit was called off, and Kay got her divorce.

Two years later in September, 1945, she became the fifth wife of Adolph Spreckels, who fathered her two children, and showered her with stocks, bonds and jewelry. Subsequently, however, he beat her mercilessly, and was jailed for it.

The only thing Kay wants, so she says, is to make Gable a good wife. And there is no one who doubts her word. She landed Clark by insisting that all she wanted from him was friendship on whatever terms he cared to give it.

Because she wanted nothing from him and proved it, Gable fell for Kay. In her presence he felt relaxed, at ease, always amused. She has the knack of handling him cheerfully, without his noticing that he was being handled at all.

For example, after they came back to the ranch, she suggested a possible press conference to Clark. Now, Gable hates to answer personal questions. They always embarrass him. As a rule he shies away, from all but a few reporters. Finally he agreed to talk to three or four reporters from the wire services. Soon the television network asked if they might cover it, too.

Gable has never appeared on any TV show, and he’s wary of the medium. Came the day of the press conference, however and the tv cameramen were parked outside his estate. They sent a message. Couldn’t they come in?

Kay looked at Clark. “You’re not going to keep those guys out there in that hot sun,” she said good-naturedly. “Not you.”

Gable grinned. “Of course not. Let ’em all in.”

Clark beamed with pride as Kay wisecracked with the newsmen. “Every time pick up a newspaper,” she began, “I read that I’m good for Clark because I’m such an outdoor girl. Maybe we should pitch a tent and move outside with bed rolls. That’s a great way of beginning a marriage.”

“Tell me,” a girl reporter asked, “how did you manage to win your husband?”

“In a crap game,” Kay muttered beneath her breath.

“I beg your pardon?”

Gable interrupted politely. “I popped the question a few months ago.”

“We understand your wife is a very good cook.”

“Sure,” Gable nodded. “She makes very good soup, also very good cole slaw, the kind the Pennsylvania Dutch make.”

“That’s true,” the new Mrs. Gable chimed in. “But I always put in too much vermouth. That’s when I’m making a martini,” she quickly added. “I sure make lousy martinis.”

Kay Williams Gable bubbles over with an irrepressible sense of humor. She’s witty and trigger-sharp but she never presses, never pretends.

Hedda Hopper, a few weeks after the marriage, rang her up one afternoon. “Well, dearie,” she began. “Tell me, how did you propose to Clark?”

Kay answered forthrightly. “You’ve go that twisted, Hedda. He proposed to me I’ve never proposed to a man in my life.”

About her children and their stepfather Kay is equally frank. She realizes that for the first time in his life Clark will be living with two children.

“It will call for adjustments on all sides,” she explains. “But basically what counts is that the children adore him, and Clark feels the same way about them. We plan to add on a couple of rooms for them. We also want to find a school out here. We want them close. Clark has been nuts about kids, and I know that I’m going to have a job in keeping him from spoiling ours. He’s a man who loves to ride and hunt and fish. And you can imagine wha that means to a pair of youngsters.”

When I asked Gable how he felt getting a ready-made family via marriage he smiled and his blue eyes shone brightly.

“You just write,” he said, “that Clark Gable is one lucky son-of-a-gun.”

With children to enrich it, Clark Gable’s fifth marriage will undoubtedly be his last. The Gable ranch house, empty so long, is now alive with the voices of the young. Where once he owned a house Gable now has a home.

THE END

—BY STEVE CRONIN

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE OCTOBER 1955