It’s unclear what news story, exactly, made Loretta Young — one of the most beautiful and celebrated actresses of Classic Hollywood — first wonder if she had been date-raped by one of the biggest stars of all time.
It was 1998 and the 85-year-old Young was living a life of comfort and splendor in Palm Springs. At 80, she’d married French fashion designer Jean Louis; until his death in 1997, they had reveled in their collective fabulousness, drawing attention wherever they went, like an irresistible vortex of glamour.
At that point, Young was best remembered for The Loretta Young Show, a pioneering and massively successful program that had put her in American living rooms for the bulk of the ’50s. But that had been Young’s second act. She’d first appeared onscreen in 1917, at the age of 3; by age 40, she’d appeared in over a hundred films. Even years out of the spotlight, her distinctive doe eyes and name would have been recognizable to anyone born before 1950.
Young was also known for her part in one of the biggest Hollywood cover-ups of all time: In 1935, at the age of 23, she became pregnant with Clark Gable’s child — while Gable was married to another woman. Over the course of the next two years, Young managed to hide the pregnancy, birth, and young infant for more than a year, eventually manufacturing an adoption narrative to bring her daughter home.
The story was successfully concealed from the public, even as it circulated around Hollywood, at a muted level, for years — Young herself didn’t confirm it until after her death, via her posthumously released memoirs, in 2000. The child wouldn’t learn of her parentage until just before her wedding, and Gable never acknowledged her as his own. Meanwhile, Young attempted to reconcile her image as devout and often openly moralizing Catholic, known for implementing a “swear jar” on set, with the persistent rumors of an extramarital affair. Over the course of her decades-long career, she was called a duplicitous liar, a fraud, a hypocrite.
Young loved to watch Larry King Live, which is most likely what prompted her to first ask her friend, frequent houseguest, and would-be biographer, Edward Funk, and then her daughter-in-law, Linda Lewis, to explain the term “date rape.” As Lewis recalled from her Jensen Beach, Florida, home this April, sitting next to her husband, Chris — Young’s second born — and flanked by Young’s Oscar and Golden Globe, it took a tact to explain, in language that an 85-year-old could understand, what “date rape” meant. “I did the best I could to make her understand,” Lewis said. “You have to remember, this was a very proper lady.”
When Lewis was finished describing the act, Young’s response was a revelation: “That’s what happened between me and Clark.”
After my extensive interviews with Young’s son, daughter-in-law, and longtime biographer, it seems clear to me that by keeping the secret of her daughter’s conception, Young was doing what millions of women have done before and since: using what little power she had to take back control of her life after it had been wrested from her.
But to understand this story — and why Young kept quiet for so long — one has to understand not only how women were made to understand their role in unwanted sexual advances, but also the expectations that governed Hollywood in the 1930s, and the well-honed studio system that ensured, at all costs, that stars hewed to them. But you also have to understand who Gable and Young were — what their larger-than-life images stood for, and all they stood to lose if the truth were revealed.
This is a story about the past, of course, but one with chilling echoes in the present: in the ever-accumulating allegations against Bill Cosby, or this week’s revelations about the rape of a 16-year-old member of The Runaways in 1976. It’s easy to look at Young’s elaborate cover-up and label it ridiculous. It’s harder to see what happened to her as indicative of larger structures of power — patriarchy, of course, but also Hollywood — that continue to make it so difficult for these stories to be told.
Young’s narrative was classic Classic Hollywood: She came to the pictures poor, from a working-class family, with no formal training. She first appeared onscreen at the age of 3, when she was still known by her birth name of Gretchen. She was cute and took instruction well, but the same was true of her other two sisters, who, like so many young kids in Hollywood during the silent era, made extra dimes by appearing as extras after school. Loretta didn’t distinguish herself until age 14, when, according to lore, a director telephoned to request her sister Polly, to which Gretchen replied, “Polly isn’t in, but why don’t you use me? I’m better looking and a better actress.” Silent star Colleen Moore became her mentor, giving her the name “Loretta”; in 1928, Young starred opposite Lon Chaney in Laugh, Clown, Laugh in what would become her breakout role — in part because, even at the age of 15, she was ethereally beautiful.
With two equally beautiful sisters, Young’s home became the go-to hangout for “some of the younger boys around Hollywood,” as one fan magazine reported. “One of the sisters was almost always to be at home when anyone called.” But this was no house of ill-repute: Young’s mother, Gladys, had converted to Catholicism, and was filled with the sort of religious vigor that entailed a convent education for each of the girls, weekly suppers with friendly priests, and a rigid code of conduct.
Which is why Loretta’s elopement, at the age of 17, with 28-year-old actor Grant Withers, fractured the family. It wasn’t that Loretta had absconded without her mother’s knowledge — at least not entirely. The sin was far more grave: Withers wasn’t Catholic. To punish Loretta, her mother refused to speak to her, and forced her sisters to do the same, even when one was serving as Loretta’s body double. Young quickly became disenchanted with her marriage and returned home — at which point a visiting priest, Father Ward, told her something that would guide Young’s decisions from that point forward. “I’ve already spoken with two 16-year-old girls, who each wanted to elope. They said, ‘If Loretta Young can do it, why can’t I?’”
Loretta Young and first husband Grant Withers Fred Archer / Getty Images
Her priest’s warnings and parental shunning affected Young deeply, but she was still a sucker for romance. She separated from Withers after less than a year and embarked on the beginning of her time as “The Gayest Divorcee,” as one headline put it. She was consistently framed as a woman of great beauty and greater emotion: “Currently she is out of love and hard to date,” Screenland reported in 1932. “She has moody weeks like these, occasionally, when she fancies herself the lonesome Garbo type. … Then she’s falling in love again despite protestations that she never wanted to. She just can’t help it!” She fell for another actor; he married someone else. She fell for a businessman; he died during an operation. And then she fell for Spencer Tracy — a Catholic, but a Catholic married to another woman.
Tracy and Young met on the set of A Man’s Castle in 1933, when he was newly separated from his wife of 10 years. Both Tracy and his wife acknowledged the separation to the press, and Tracy appeared frequently with Young. It was a public courtship, but one that couldn’t come to a happy end, as Tracy, a Catholic, refused to divorce. He hung out at the Young family home — a point captured in home-movie footage taken with a camera that Tracy himself had given Young.
But for all their flirtation, Young remained chaste. You can see it in her goodbye letter to Tracy, which Tracy kept until his death; today, Linda and Chris keep a facsimile in their guesthouse, which doubles as a loosely organized Young archive, where her massive hat and glove collection seeps into endless stacks of glamour shots, posters, and family photos.
In the letter, Young’s words are coded but her intentions are clear. “When I’m with you, or listening to your voice, I seem to have little or no logic or common sense and certainly no resistance,” she wrote. But “unless I’m able at this time to see you and still live up to the promise I made five years ago” — “to never again under any circumstance … Forget Him, to the extent of committing a sin” — it will be “impossible for us to see each other again unless we can truthfully and honestly be a good boy and a good girl.”
“It’s enough for me just to be able to look at you and talk with you,” Young continued, “and although this might sound stupid to say at this time I know I could do it if I even had a tiny bit of help from you, Spencer.”
Tracy, however, couldn’t keep up his end of the forever-chaste bargain. He and Young parted just as she was about to begin location shooting for Call of the Wild — a high-budget 20th Century film based on Jack London’s juvenile adventure of the same name. It was a loose adaptation, picking up on only one of the text’s plotlines, in which a prospector heads to Alaska looking for a gold mine, finds a woman in distress, rescues said woman, and allows a dog to steal the show.
It was a perfect role for Clark Gable, whose studio, MGM, was in the midst of renovating his image as a romantic “lover” into that of a hardened he-man. When Gable, the 22-year-old Young, and the rest of the crew left for Mount Baker, Washington, in January of 1935, Gable was a month from winning Best Actor for his turn in It Happened One Night. He was also a known womanizer, constantly at war with his second wife, who rebelled against his constant philandering, most notably with fellow MGM star Joan Crawford. Those relations, along with a purported drunk driving accident in 1934 that killed a pedestrian, were kept quiet by MGM’s legendary team of “fixers,” who helped shape the raw, and often scandalous, star material into sanitized images ready for public consumption.
Every studio had a set of fixers, including Young’s home studio of 20th Century. Yet apart from well-placed fan magazine articles around her divorce from Withers, she hadn’t needed their services: She was a flirt, but not a reckless one. Still, it was common practice for unmarried starlets to have chaperones — usually a friend or family member — when shooting on location. When the train left for Washington state, Young was accompanied by Frances “Fanny” Earle, a friend of one of her sisters. The plan was to shoot in the Mount Baker wilderness, about three hours’ drive from Seattle, for several weeks, but after the entire crew travelled 65 miles to the base camp, eight days of blizzard socked them in. With temperatures of 11 degrees below zero, even the film in the camera froze. When Young was doused in water for a scene, her teeth started chattering so hard that she began to cry uncontrollably. Co-star Jack Oakie sent the studio a tongue-in-cheek letter: “Am lost in deep snowdrifts. Send St. Bernard dog with keg of brandy. Will return dog.”
In the end, director William Wellman eked out a total of six days of shooting during the nearly nine weeks they spent on location. When Young and Gable weren’t sequestered in their quarters, they clowned around and flirted like mad — a flirtation Young herself caught on camera.
Clark Gable on the set of Call of the Wild, filmed by Loretta Young. Courtesy Chris and Linda Lewis
In location and isolated by snow, it made sense that feeling between the two co-stars amplified. Gable would call out, “Where’s my girl?” whenever he was looking for Young; Young openly loved attention and the exploitation thereof and believed, as she told Ed Funk years later, that so long as no boundaries were crossed, she wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Rumors traveled to Hollywood that Gable had made a conquest of yet another co-star, but Young was still heartbroken over Tracy. As she recalled in a 1950 article in Hollywood Magazine, “I was only a careless youngster at the time — spending most of the time at the window waiting for the messenger boy, on snowshoes, to bring the mail in which I thought there might be a letter from a lad in Los Angeles in whom I was deeply interested.” Later in life, she remained firm that for all her flirtation with Gable, nothing sexual took place between them — and the “paper thin walls that afforded only visual privacy” of their lodgings would certainly have made it difficult, if not impossible.
When 20th Century finally called the production home in February, Young thought their flirtation would come to a natural end. For the overnight train back to Hollywood, the stars were given individual sleeping compartments, while the crew, including Young’s companion, were seated and sleeping elsewhere on the train. At some point in the night, Gable entered Young’s compartment. Young never spoke of the specifics of what occurred to anyone — not to her sisters, mother, husbands, or children — until decades later.
In some ways, Young’s situation was impossibly unique. Yet it also recalls the millions of unwanted sexual encounters that entire generations of women did not talk about, in part because they couldn’t: They literally did not have the language to do so. The word “rape” was too extreme — something that happened to women in back alleys. The introduction of “date rape” into the vernacular gave a name for an experience that, to that point, had defied description, and thus reportage.
But back in 1935, Young had to deal with a train arriving at the station early in the morning — and her mother there to greet it. Once they arrived, Young did the only polite thing, and invited Gable to breakfast with her mother. Going about life as usual had and would continue to be Young’s primary coping mechanism. “She was so humiliated,” Linda told me, “and what she would do when she was humiliated was just ‘on with the show.’ Because she had been trained since the age of 3, you put a good face on it, and you go forward. She knew she’d have to continue working with him.”
Which is precisely what she did. Young and Gable filmed the remaining scenes for Call of the Wild on the 20th Century backlot, sustaining the rumors of Gable and Young’s involvement. A month after shooting wrapped, Gable’s wife, Ria, called Young with a plan: She was hosting a party, and if Young showed up, they’d shut down press speculation. But Young declined — not because she wanted the rumors to continue, but because she’d very recently deduced that she was pregnant.
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