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Y ou know Clark Gable. Everyone in the world knows his name. He was cool even before the word was invented. The model of heroism who never broke a sweat. A man who women would go crazy over. A man who men wanted to be just like. That was Gable. Gable was inseparable from his public image. In the movies, he was the sex- charged lover who scorned propriety, an unrepentant sinner who defied authority, and a headstrong adventurer who couldn't resist a challenge. But in real life he was a regular guy who loved to hunt and fish. The so-called "King of Hollywood" was born February 2, 1901, just one week after Queen Victoria of England died. "This 'King' stuff," he'd say, "is pure bullshit. I eat and sleep and go to the bathroom just like everyone else. There's no special light that shines inside me and makes me a star. I'm just a lucky slob from Ohio." His mother died when Gable was only 10 months old. Happily for young Clark, his father married a childless woman who doted on Clark as though she'd given birth to him Sporting Life by Laurie bogart WiLeS A COUPLE OF GOOD SPORTS: CLARK GABLE AnD CAROLE LOMBARD herself. She was the one who urged him to follow his dream to become an actor. He came to Hollywood and made his first film when he was 21, but didn't land a feature role until 1931, at age 30, in The Painted Desert. Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg was impressed with the six- foot-one Midwesterner whose masculine physique had been developed plowing fields and working on oil rigs. He signed Gable to a $650 a week contract—a fortune at the time—and that first year Gable appeared in a dozen movies. Soon he was making movies with Hollywood's top leading ladies, including Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Garbo; six films with Jean Harlow and eight with Joan Crawford, his on-again, off-again lover for over 30 years. By 1934 he'd made 30 movies. B etween films and whenever he could, Gable would head for the duck blind with his 12-gauge Remington autoloader or his 12-gauge Parker. He went with Jimmy Robinson to the Sports Afield Duck Club in St. Ambroise on the delta marshes of Manitoba, which Jimmy, the magazine's shotgun editor, had built in 1935. The local Métis, one of Canada's first aboriginal peoples, guided them in boats. They knew everything about the lake and its ducks. Gable, with his insatiable enthusiasm for waterfowling, soaked up all he could. Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper were among Gable's hunting buddies. So was Robert Stack, a champion skeet shooter. But most of Gable's pals were just regular guys and first-rate sportsmen. They'd fish the Rogue River in Oregon for salmon and steelhead, shoot pheasants in Dakota, and head down to Mexico for white-wings. When it came to firearms, Gable's favorites for hunting were a Browning over- and-under, and a Parker double-barreled, both in 20 gauge. "I have little occasion to use a rifle or pistol," he said, "but when I do, prefer a .30-06 sporting model rifle." Gable was always the first one up in hunting camp. He'd chop wood for the campfire and cook up a big stack of flapjacks—his specialty—in a cast-iron frying pan. He'd man the oars when the boats set out, fillet the fish, and bone and cook the birds from the day's bag for the camp's dinner. 48 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S Carole Lombard and Clark Gable pheasant hunting in South Dakota, circa. 1941.