In 1932 Joan Crawfordwas interviewed for a movie


 magazine where she was quoted as saying, “I am supposed to be madly in love with a certain other actor in Hollywood. Before the camera, we were in love. Now that the picture is over, we are merely good friends!” Just over 30 years later she was quoted as saying about the same actor, “We had an affair — a glorious affair — and it lasted longer than anybody knows.” The actor was Clark Gable.

When in 1931 they made their first movie together, Dance, Fools, Dance, Clark had a reputation for bedding his female co-stars and, according to Joan’s enemy Bette Davis, Joan had, ‘’Slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie.”


The first meeting between Clark and Joan was memorable “It was like an electric current went through my body. … My knees buckled. If he hadn’t held me by the shoulders, I’d have dropped,” recalled Joan. The fact that both were married to other people was not an impediment. Joan’s spouse, Douglas Fairbanks said when he discovered that both were making out in her trailer, “It had been my wedding gift to her, which made the betrayal worse. And I wasn’t quite finished paying for it yet either!”



Marriages, for both, came and went and Joan was in no doubt that their relationship would not end up with wedding bells. “I didn’t think Clark would make a good husband —a great lover, a fine friend, but I imagined him an unfaithful husband. And then came Carole Lombard”


Clark then kept Joan at arm’s length and when they came to make ‘Strange Cargo’ in 1940 there was tension and ‘cruelty’ on the set. So much so that Joan’s hairdresser was so upset by the atmosphere she walked off the picture.


Nevertheless, when Carole died shortly after, Joan was among the first to whom Clark turned to for solace and they spent many hours together while they drank and she talked him through his grief. She always maintained that the notion that Carole was returning to him by plane because she was suspicious of his womanising was a cruel gossip and that he was entirely faithful to her.


Before she died in 1977 she said, “Clark Gable was the only man I ever loved. Our relationship was private, just between us.”



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