When the company folded in snowbound Montana, Billy and their pianist stowed away on a freight train to Bend, Oregon, where his fellow traveller’s relatives lived.įor a while Billy found work as a lumberjack but handling logs damaged his hands. His first job was with a chautauqua (travelling tent show) but not as a performer: instead he was erecting and taking down marquees.

From Meadville, Billy headed for Kansas City – for no other reason, he later said, than ‘it happened to be there for the drifter he had become’. When he left Meadville in 1922, he temporarily left his ‘effeminate’ name behind and for the next few years he would call himself Billy Gable. William Gable’s slurs on Clark’s masculinity were to rankle. His many highly successful books incllde: Edth Piaf, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Errol Flynn and the soon to be published Mario Lanza (all from JR Books) Read moreĬhapter One GAY FOR PAY: ASCENDING THE LAVENDER LADDER Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, Bret pulls no punches in this star-studded story of Gable’s life, told with candour and panache.ĭavid Bret is one of Britain’s leading showbusiness biographers, and an authority on the chanson. Mayer to promote and protect Gable’s image.Īfter ending an affair with Ben Maddox in 1942, Gable seems to have ‘gone straight’, from which point Bret moves into more familiar territory, focusing on Gable’s great movies including Gone With the Wind and on his affairs with Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner and other famous stars. Like an earlier paternity suit, it was an exercise dreamed up by studio chief, Louis B. Gable was adopted by the ‘Sewing Circle’ – the group that included Jean Harlow and, ironically, Carole Lombard, the great love of his life.īret also reveals how Gable’s wartime ‘heroics’, which saw him promoted through the ranks from Private to Major in less than a year, were no more than an elaborate publicity stunt. However, as David Bret reveals in this powerful biography, in the early days of his career, with his squinty teeth and fondness for men as well as woman, he was anything but the wholesome figure he appeared. Clark Gable was perceived as the archetypal Hollywood superman, the kind of man that women lusted after and their husbands envied.

Rock Hudson by David Bret