From: <NOBR>Princess_Joy_1952</NOBR>

Sent: 3/29/2008 5:33 PM

March 29, 1939

Clark Gable & Carole Lombard marry

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard marry on this day in 1939 as Gable is filming Gone with the Wind. The marriage was considered one of Hollywood's happiest but ended in tragedy when Lombard was killed in a plane crash in 1942, en route from a War Bond drive. Gable joined the air force shortly after her death, rose to the rank of major, and won several medals.

Gable was born in Ohio in 1901, the son of a farmer who later became an oil driller. Gable went to work at a tire factory in Akron, Ohio, at age 14. He began attending theater and started working as a backstage runner in the evenings but moved to Oklahoma with his father in his late teens to drill for oil. At age 21, he joined a traveling theater troupe, then worked as a lumberjack and salesman in Oregon before joining another troupe. He married the head of the troupe, who was 14 years his senior, in 1924, and the couple moved to Hollywood. Gable occasionally worked as a film extra but had no luck landing bigger roles, so he returned to live theater. He was cast in several successful Broadway productions, played a lead role in the Los Angeles production of a hit play in 1930, and landed a screen test-which he failed. He and his wife divorced the same year.

Finally, in 1931, he was cast as a villain in a western called The Painted Desert, and MGM signed him immediately. He stole the show in A Free Soul, with Norma Shearer and Lesley Howard, and married his second wife, a rich Texas socialite some 17 years his senior, the same year. In 1934, against his wishes, MGM lent him to Columbia to star in It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert. Both won Oscars for the film.

Carole Lombard, born Jane Alice Peters in 1908, grew up in Los Angeles and made her first film appearance at age 12. She signed with Fox in 1925, but it was only after the studio terminated her contract and she signed with Mack Sennett in 1927 that her gift for comedy was discovered. She starred in several brilliant screwball comedie, including Twentieth Century (1934) and My Man Godfrey (1936). She married actor William Powell in 1931, but divorced him two years later.

Lombard and Gable began seeing each other in 1935, shortly after Gable separated from his second wife. His career flourished during this period, and he won his greatest role, as Rhett Butler, in Gone with the Wind in 1939. Three years later, Lombard starred in Ernst Lubitsch's brilliant comedy, To Be or Not To Be (1942). It was her last film.

After Lombard's tragic death and Gable's subsequent air force stint, he returned to Hollywood in Adventure (1945), but his career had cooled. He allegedly began drinking heavily, and MGM dropped his contract. His last film, The Misfits (1961), seemed to promise a comeback, but he died of a heart attack before its release-and before the birth of his only child, John Gable, who was born to Gable's fifth wife, Kay Spreckles, in 1960, shortly after Gable's death.