Loretta Young and Clark Gable were involved in one of the biggest cover-ups in Hollywood history. Their affair, which began during the filming of The Call of the Wild in 1935, resulted in a pregnancy that Young worked desperately to hide from the public, the press, and even her own co-star. When she gave birth to a daughter she named Judy, she would spend decades maintaining the pretense that the child was adopted, while the father, Clark Gable, never acknowledged the girl as his own. At first, Young managed to keep up appearances, finishing two additional films and continuing to show up at public events.
On April 21, she attended the wedding of Hollywood director Tay Garnett, and in early May, she hosted a tea for the press in her backyard. But as her pregnancy advanced, fatigue began to catch up with her. By June, a piece in Movie Classic referred to her as Hollywood’s most exhausted personality, noting months of grueling work of up to eighteen hours a day. Young was careful not to draw a straight line between her exhaustion and possible pregnancy, yet the rumor mill was already stirring.
Columnist Ed Sullivan wrote about a lively weekend in Manhattan, while Young and her mother Gladys departed on a European trip on June 29. The papers carried news of their travels and of Young’s vibrant social schedule abroad, hosted by prominent expatriates and countesses. When they returned on August 21, Gladys told the press that Young had not been feeling well and had recently lost a great deal of weight, the exact opposite of the truth. Dr.
Howaler advised Young to take at least two months off from films, though the details of her illness were never shared. In that era, such matters were kept quiet, especially when they were sensitive. Back in Los Angeles, Young essentially disappeared into a small cottage in a newer part of Venice, far from the Hollywood spotlight. Josie Wayne, wife of actor John Wayne, came to visit and hugged Young warmly but said nothing about her protruding belly.
Even Spencer Tracy stopped by, found Young relaxed, and exchanged affection with her, without ever mentioning her pregnancy. Growing bored, Young began going on late-night drives with her family through quiet neighborhoods, sometimes stopping at drive-in theaters, all in an effort to keep her out of public view. But gossip would not die, so roughly a month before the due date, a meeting was arranged with Dorothy Manners, a well-known gossip columnist. Young received her while propped against a careful arrangement of pillows in her bed, giving Manners only twenty minutes.
It was hard to say whether Manners believed Young’s performance or simply played her part in preserving appearances, but the first paragraph of her column aimed to deny every rumor on the circuit. Loretta Young was not suffering from a terminal illness that would keep her off the screen for a year or more, her beauty had not been ruined in some secret accident, and she was not broke and living off charitable handouts from powerful friends. From her bed, Young pretended she was convalescing, saying she was slender and looked thin but was not. She expressed disappointment at missing her sister’s wedding, then added that she still had her books, her thoughts, and her cigarettes.
As the date approached, the family’s greatest fear was the milkman, worried that he might hear Young’s cries during labor. Her mother and sisters worked together to soundproof the cottage, draping blankets over the windows. On November 6, 1935, when the cries began, Dr. Howaleran administered chloroform.
A backup doctor and nurse, who did not know the woman’s identity, sat in a car down the street while Young delivered her baby on her sister Sally’s massage table. Young gave birth to a healthy girl and named her Judy, after Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes. That same day, according to Young’s account, someone sent a telegram to Clark Gable in New York for the premiere of Mutiny on the Bounty. It read simply that a beautiful blonde girl with blue eyes had been born at eight fifteen that morning.
Gable tore the telegram into pieces. In the weeks that followed, Young remained in the Venice home with Judy and a nurse named Frenchy, who cared for the infant. On November 13, a birth certificate was filed for Judy, naming her mother as Margaret Young, a film extra of a decade’s experience. The father’s line was left blank.
Young clearly wanted Gable out of the picture. Only four days later, Gable, who had been rumored to be involved with socialite Mary Taylor and actress Elizabeth Allen, categorically denied any romantic involvement with either of them, saying all the rumors were completely wrong, though he was flattered by the notion. While Gable was busy denying the rumors, Young was preparing a comeback. The Sun ran an article supposedly written by her on how to preserve beauty, and Screenland featured a full-page photo with a caption reading Loretta Recovers.
On New Year’s Eve, she made a stir at producer Samuel Goldwyn’s grand party. By January, she was back at work, nursing her baby while enduring sore breasts, and she was loaned to MGM for a new role. That meant working in the very studio where Gable was under contract. He and Spencer Tracy decided to surprise her on the set, but when they did, Young could not bring herself to look Tracy in the eyes.
For a time, Judy stayed at the Venice house with Frenchy, and Young visited whenever she could. But when Frenchy attempted something suspicious, the housekeeper reported the details to the family, who sprang into action. Within days, they moved Judy to a Catholic orphanage, waiting for the right moment for Young to adopt her without provoking a scandal. On June 10, 1937, Young shared the details in Louella Parsons’ gossip column, announcing that she had adopted two little girls.
Parsons, who delighted in hinting at news, eagerly printed it all. She wrote that Young had confessed that day to becoming a mother through adoption, taking an older girl of four years and a younger one of twenty-three and a half months. Young told Parsons that there was one thing she could not say, where she had gotten the children, because she wanted to forget as quickly as possible that they were not her own. About a month later, Young revealed that a relative of the older girl had appeared, demanding her return.
That left Young with just one adopted child, Judy, whose birth certificate was now slightly altered. If there were private whispers of a hidden pregnancy, the press never dug deep. Loretta’s popularity continued to climb, and the rumor mill shifted its focus to her love life, keeping the same tone as before Judy entered the picture. Her name was linked to director Joe Manowitz, actor David Nunn, and her frequent co-star Tyrone Power.
Still, as one columnist put it, such stories should not be taken seriously, because Loretta was always said to have a soft spot for her leading man, and it was all just a joke to her. As she aged, Young adopted something of a preaching tone, the same tone people would later use to judge her for hiding her pregnancy. Once, when a young woman remarked that men would not leave her alone, Young asked whether she was inviting them. When the young woman then asked about Young’s time with Tracy, wondering if she had dared to be alone with him in a room, Young answered that she had been alone with him in a room, and that she knew what she was doing at all times.
She added that every woman knew that if she gave a man even half a chance or less, he would try to get close to her. No man had ever insulted her, she said, unless she had given him some sort of opportunity. The words sounded preachy, but in hindsight they were also a way of publicly rebuking herself. In her own mind, she bore full responsibility for the pregnancy.
She asked Gable to visit the baby, and as she remembered it, he came only once. She opened a bank account for him to contribute to, but he never kept that promise. She kept Judy out of sight, covering her with hats to hide the prominent ears that reminded everyone of Clark Gable. When Judy turned seven, they arranged surgery to adjust her ears.
It was a complicated story, but for Young, it was one she felt she had to tell. In 1940, Young met Tom Lewis, a handsome advertising executive, and they married quickly. By 1945, they had two sons, Chris and Peter. In 1948, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, mastering a passable Swedish accent for The Farmer’s Daughter.
The secret continued. According to Chris, his father never pressed for details about Judy’s parentage or questioned it outright. On the night before the wedding, Young asked Lewis if there was anything he wanted to ask her, anything he wanted to know. He said no, he was fine.
They simply agreed not to discuss it. It was easier that way. He did love Judy. Gable remarried in 1949, to Sylvia Ashley, after his third marriage to Carole Lombard had ended tragically in a plane crash.
That same year, by coincidence, Young and Gable were cast as the leads in Key to the City. MGM was desperate for a postwar hit as the studio system declined, and bringing back a former star seemed the safest bet, especially if paired with a familiar romantic partner. When studio head Scheuer, an old friend of Young’s, proposed the role, she accepted. Perhaps it was out of duty to him, or more likely it was another shrewd publicity move.
No one would have expected the alleged mother of Gable’s child to play his on-screen sweetheart. Production went smoothly until Young collapsed on the set during a scene that required smoke effects. Gable carried her to her dressing room, and the press framed it as complications from an as-yet-unannounced pregnancy. Fifteen days later, Young suffered a miscarriage.
She continued working and finished the film, even hosting a premiere party at her home that Gable attended. There, he was briefly introduced to Young’s children, including Judy. Young performed all the required promotional stunts for the picture. An article circulated under her name, fondly reminiscing about the old days on the Call of the Wild set and emphasizing how rarely Gable had appeared in her life since, underscoring how seldom their paths had crossed in the years that followed.
She acknowledged it would sound strange to people in other parts of the country, but the distances in Southern California were vast, and their only exchanges over the years had been shouts of greeting across a crowded room at a big party. Loretta’s life moved on. Home movies showed her enjoying luxury vacations at Sun Valley and family trips to Hawaii, with the boys always dressed in matching outfits. With Tom Lewis’s advertising expertise, she easily developed a television show bearing her name, which became a major event in 1950s television.
She became more publicly visible and more openly moralizing, speaking proudly of her Catholic faith and her support for various Catholic charities. Orphanages and women’s aid groups such as St. Anne’s were her favorite causes. Judy did not learn the truth about Gable until 1958, when she was twenty-three and dropped a bombshell on her fiancé Joe Tinney, saying she could not go through with the marriage because she knew nothing about herself while he knew everything about himself.
Tinney’s answer came from years of conversations he had overheard and hints he had picked up. He told her she was wrong, that he knew everything about her, and that her father was Clark Gable. Judy revealed the details in her 1994 memoir, Uncommon Knowledge, published years after a strained relationship with her mother. According to Chris, Judy’s brother, things fell apart during a confrontation on Mother’s Day.
Judy insisted her mother reveal the truth, which drove Young to retreat to her room and become physically ill. Uncommon Knowledge was sympathetic to Gable but did not absolve Young of responsibility. In the opening pages, Judy wrote that her life had been filled with hypocrisy and deceit from the moment she was born. With Judy, Loretta was trapped.
She had this lie and no way to shape it, and she bore full responsibility for hiding it her whole life. To be stuck, exposed in such a public way, with no way to escape, there was little she could do about it. As they worked on repairing their relationship, Young did not want to dwell on the past. Later, she said simply that dwelling on it would not help Judy.
Over the next few years, it became clear that the long-awaited biography by Ed Fink would never be completed. Young eventually collaborated with Joan Wester Anderson on a memoir that was arranged for publication after her death. In it, she openly acknowledged for the first time that Judy was indeed her daughter and Gable’s. Young died on August 12, 2000, at age eighty-seven.
A year before her death, she appeared in a photo in Vanity Fair, still looking remarkable, with a caption noting that she had chosen not to speak about whether her daughter was Clark Gable’s child, from the film Call of the Wild in 1935, for the sake of that honor. She had never aimed her appeal at intellectuals or high-strung types, nor at shop girls and secretaries; that was Joan Crawford’s market. There were too many women like her, she believed, who were willing to follow the rules, who did not have casual affairs, and who were deeply ambitious. Loretta Young’s film had a happy ending.
A nice husband, a nice sweetheart, no abuse. That was what heroes and heroines were like in those days. But the cost of that ending was a secret kept for a lifetime, with a daughter left to learn the truth about her own father from the man who had decided to marry her.