Clark Gable

Franz Dörfler – Gable and Dörfler lived together and got engaged when Gable was roughly 21 years old. They parted ways when Gable went on to have a relationship with Josephine Dillon, but remained on good terms. Dörfler would later help Gable in a court case. 

Josephine Dillon – Josephine Dillon was Gable’s first wife and they married when Gable was only 23 years old and Dillon 17 years his senior. She would promote and manage him in his early Hollywood years. Gable would ask her for divorce many times, but she never believed that he meant it until 1930 after six years of marriage. 

Maria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham, nicknamed „Ria” – Only two days after the divorce from Dillon, Gable married Texas socialite Maria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham Gable  who was nicknamed „Ria“. This marriage dissolved after nine years without children.

Carole Lombard – Only thirteen days after the divorce from Ria was finalized Gable married wife #3, Carole Lombard during a production break from Gone with Wind in March 1939. Carole Lombard probably can be called Gable’s true love. They had met seven years earlier during the filming of „No Man of Her Own“, when Lombard was still married to Hollywood star William Powell. They met again in 1936, when the affair probably started. Gable was still married to Ria because of the expensive divorce which he was able to finalize when filming Gone With the Wind and receiving the salary. They would buy a ranch from director Raoul Walsh in Encino, California, have a host of animals, raising chickens and horses and calling each other „Ma“ and „Pa“. It was a very enchanting life – until WWII started. Gable would enlist in the airfare and Lombard would help the war effort with war bond drives. Flying back from one of those, she and 21 other passengers perished when the plane crashed due to pilot error. Apparently, he was never the same although going on to make almost thirty more movies and marrying twice more as movie star Esther Williams is quoted: „He had been devastated by Carole’s death.”

Silvia Ashley – Seven years after Lombard’s passing, Gable married model, actress and socialite Sylvia Ashley who had been previously married to Douglas Fairbanks Sr. The marriage was unhappy and divorced three years later. 

Kay Spreckels – Kay Spreckels was an actress of minor successes who had already been married three times: First to Charles Capps, then to Argentinian cattle tycoon Martin the Alzaga and last to Adolph Bernard Spreckels II, heir to the Spreckels sugar empire. With the latter she had two kids, including Bunker Spreckels, who would lead a debouch celebrity surfer life style in the 1960s and 1970s, which also lead to his early death by morphine overdose at the age of 27. They were married for five years when Gable died in 1960 and only four months after his death, Kay would give birth to his only son, John Clark Gable. 

Additionally he had notable affairs with actresses Virgina Grey, Paulette Goddard, and maybe Marion Davies, his co-star in 1932’s „Polly of the Circus“. He was quite enamored and wooed her. 

Joan Crawford – Adele Rogers St Johns would later say about the Gable and Crawford relationship that it was “the affair that nearly burned Hollywood down“. Crawford was married to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Louis B. Mayer himself ordered them to stay apart. 

Loretta Young – Apparently, in 1935, when Gable was 34 and Loretta Young 22, he date-raped Young. She became pregnant, hid the pregnancy and managed to claim to have adopted her nineteen months after birth. Gable only once visited his daughter Judy Lewis, when she was around fifteen years old. Lewis would only find out about her real biological father five years after Gable’s death, when she was almost 30 years old.