Clark Gable

A long road to stardom

William Clark Gable was born on February 1, 1901, in Cadiz, Ohio. His father, Will, drilled oil wells. His mother, Adeline, died when he was ten months old. In 1903 his father married Jennie Dunlap, and his stepmother shaped the boy: she kept him well dressed, gave him piano lessons and encouraged a love of music and books. His father pushed the other way, toward hunting, engines and hard physical work. Gable grew up with both.

At sixteen he left high school and went to work at the Firestone tire plant in Akron. There he saw a play, The Bird of Paradise, and decided he would be an actor. The road was long. He worked oil fields, sold ties, toured with stock companies and took unpaid theater work, and when his stepmother died in 1919 he joined his father in the Oklahoma oil fields for a time. In Portland, Oregon, working days for Pacific Telephone, he studied acting at night with Josephine Dillon. She paid to have his teeth fixed, helped him lower his naturally high voice and taught him to carry himself with confidence. They married in 1924 and moved to Hollywood.

The rest of the 1920s brought stage work in Houston and New York and small roles in silent films. His break came in 1930 as the villain of The Painted Desert. MGM signed him, paired him with stars like Joan Crawford and, after A Free Soul, The Hollywood Reporter predicted he would outdraw every other star. It was right. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for It Happened One Night (1934), and in 1939 he played Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.

In 1942 his wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash while he was filming. Grief-stricken and past draft age, he enlisted as a private in the Army Air Forces on August 12, 1942. He graduated from officer candidate school, trained as an aerial gunner and, on orders from General Hap Arnold, went to England in February 1943 to make a film about aerial gunners. Assigned to the 351st Bomb Group at Polebrook, he flew combat missions over Europe in B-17s that, as the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force notes, he was neither ordered nor expected to fly. He earned the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the footage became Combat America. He was released from active duty as a major in June 1944.

The star who chose to fly

Gable’s war record is the part of his life most worth remembering. He was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, with every reason to sell war bonds from a safe stage. Instead he went through officer candidate school and gunnery school and went up in bombers over occupied Europe. He did not need to prove anything to anyone, and he went anyway.

His early years matter too. Nothing about his rise was quick or certain. He spent years in odd jobs and small companies, learned his craft from a teacher who saw something in him, and was nearly thirty before audiences noticed. The polished King of Hollywood was the work of a long apprenticeship.

He was not a simple man, and his private life was not tidy. He had been married three times by 1939, and studio publicity shaped much of the image audiences loved. But the sources agree on the core of him: he showed up, did the work, and served when it counted. He returned to films after the war, became the highest-paid freelance actor of 1954 and gave what critics count among his finest performances in The Misfits. Two days after filming ended he suffered a heart attack, and he died on November 16, 1960, at fifty-nine.

Six weeks in Beverly Hills Lodge

Gable joined Freemasonry just as his fame was taking off. According to the Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, he received the first degree on September 19, 1933, the second on October 17, and was raised a Master Mason in Beverly Hills Lodge No. 528, California, on October 31, 1933. That is six weeks from beginning to end, in the year before his Oscar.

It is worth noticing when he chose to join. In 1933 Gable was already a valuable studio property and could have spent his evenings anywhere in Los Angeles. He chose to sit in a lodge room as a candidate, learning alongside men who had no part in the film business. Freemasonry asks the same of a movie star as of a mechanic.

The record says little more about his Masonic life, and we will not fill the gap with legend. But the shape of his life fits what the Craft values: a man who rose from humble work by steady effort and who, when his country went to war, chose service over comfort. His Brothers can claim him on those grounds alone.

Gable joined the Craft at the height of his fame and later volunteered for combat he could have avoided. What draws a man with every advantage to take on obligations he does not need?

Sources

• Scottish Rite, NMJ, The King of Hollywood: Brother William Clark Gable: https://scottishritenmj.org/blog/clark-gable-freemason
• National Museum of the United States Air Force, Maj. Clark Gable: https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196680/maj-clark-gable/
• Guernsey Freemasons, Brother Clark Gable: https://guernseyfreemasons.org.uk/2025/10/14/brother-clark-cable/