Clark Gable was the King of Hollywood for three decades, and yet he never raised a child of his own. He had two. His daughter grew up in Los Angeles believing she was adopted. His son was born four months after Gable’s funeral. People recently looked back at both of them, and their story has a twist the fan magazines never printed: the two half-siblings did meet as adults, and what came of it says a great deal about the father neither one really knew.
The daughter was Judy Lewis, born November 6, 1935. The son is John Clark Gable, who turned 65 this spring, and both were shaped by a man who was there for only a moment, or not at all.
How Did Loretta Young Hide Clark Gable’s Daughter?
The secret began in the winter of 1935, when Gable and a 22-year-old Loretta Young were filming The Call of the Wild on location in Washington state. Gable was married at the time. According to Forever Young, the authorized biography by Joan Wester Anderson that was published after Young’s death in 2000, the two had a brief encounter on the train ride home. Young found she was pregnant and quietly vanished from view, because in an era of studio morality clauses a baby could have ended both careers.
So Judy spent her first 19 months hidden away in orphanages, as ABC News and the Associated Press both reported at the time of her death. Young then brought the toddler home and announced that she had adopted a little girl. No adoption papers were ever filed. When Young married radio producer Tom Lewis, Judy took his last name, but the resemblance to her real father was hard to hide. She had Gable’s ears, and when she was 7 her mother had them surgically pinned back. “It was very difficult for me as a little girl not to be accepted or acknowledged by my mother,” Lewis said years later, in words ABC News and Fox News both carried in her obituaries.
Then one afternoon when she was a teenager, the most famous man in Hollywood turned up in her living room.
The Afternoon Clark Gable Came to the House
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It was 1950, and Gable and Young had just made Key to the City together. Judy was 15 and came home from school to find him there. She described the moment to Larry King on CNN in 2001. “I said, ‘You’re Clark Gable,'” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Yes, and you’re Judy.'” He asked her about her life before he left. She had no idea who he was to her, and it was the only real conversation they would ever have. Gable never publicly acknowledged that she was his daughter, and he died in 1960 without saying a word.
The truth reached her secondhand. In 1958, two weeks before her wedding to Joseph Tinney, Judy confessed to her fiancé that she didn’t know who she really was. He told her it was common knowledge all over Hollywood that she was Clark Gable’s daughter. Years later, in 1966, she finally flew to Los Angeles and asked her mother directly, “Is Clark Gable my father?” Young said yes.
Judy built a life of her own in the meantime. She acted on Broadway and in soaps like The Secret Storm and General Hospital. In her forties she went back to school, and in 1992 she became a licensed family therapist who specialized in foster care. Two years later she published her memoir, Uncommon Knowledge, and told the world. “I don’t think anyone knows what it’s like not to be acknowledged by your own parents,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. Young answered through People, calling the idea “a very romantic thought that many wish to believe,” and she did not speak to her daughter for three years. Only the biography published after her death in 2000 admitted what Judy had known since 1966.
The Son Born Four Months Too Late
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Gable’s other child arrived under very different circumstances. In the fall of 1960 Gable finished The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe while his fifth wife, Kay Williams, was expecting. Days after filming wrapped he suffered a heart attack, and he died on November 16, 1960, at 59. John Clark Gable was born the following March.
He grew up on the family ranch in Encino, California, and he went looking for his father in the one place that felt familiar, behind a wheel. He was riding motocross at 5 and had a Yamaha sponsorship by 11. As a young man he raced off-road trucks and finished second in the 1992 Baja 1000, according to The Seattle Times, and he won his first open-wheel race on Father’s Day in 1993. “My dad rode his Triumph in the dirt back in the days when there wasn’t even such a thing as a dirt bike,” he told the paper in 2000. “Even though I never knew my dad, speed and racing are things we will always have in common.”
He tried acting, too, appearing with James Brolin in the 1990 Western Bad Jim. With his first wife, Tracy Yarro, he had a daughter, Kayley, and a son, Clark James Gable, who hosted the reality show Cheaters. Clark James died in Dallas on February 22, 2019, at just 30, and the medical examiner ruled it an accidental overdose. John married Debra Hartsell in 2020, and Parade marked his 65th birthday this past March.
Which leaves the question at the heart of this family. Did Gable’s two children ever find each other?
What Happened When Gable’s Two Children Met?
They did, twice. Judy told Larry King that the first time was at a screening of Gone With the Wind, of all films, where she knew exactly who he was and he did not know who she was. The second time they had dinner, and she handed him a copy of her book. “And that was it,” she said. “I have never heard from him since.”
King then read a statement John Clark Gable had given the show. “My father said he had no other children,” it said, “and my father’s word is good enough for me.” Judy’s reply was three words long. “Good for him.”
Judy Lewis died of cancer on November 25, 2011, in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, at 76. The Associated Press listed John among the half-brothers who survived her, so in print, at least, the two of them finally stood side by side as family. She never got the acknowledgment she wanted from either parent while they lived. What she had was one afternoon in 1950, and decades later she could still describe exactly how it ended. “Before he left he bent down and kissed me on the forehead,” she remembered, “and walked out of my life.”
