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54 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S to the ranch and stayed there in seclusion for ten months. "It was a perfect thing. I never expect to find it again," he mourned. "Sometimes I wonder how she'd take things the way they are today, and I always come up with the same answer . . . with a laugh. She'd get through it better than me." Clark had to find another way to live. "I don't want to sell war bonds; I don't want to make speeches; and I don't want to entertain. I want to be sent where the going is rough. I'm going to enlist in the Air Corps, but not until I get my head together and sort things out. I don't expect to come back, and I don't want to come back." At 41, past the draft age, he joined up. Clark was inducted as a private in the 8th Army Air Corps and shouldered his pain and emptiness in silence. He graduated from Officer's Candidate School and became an aerial gunner on a B-17 bomber over France and Germany. On his fourth mission his plane was attacked. One of the crewmen was killed and two others were badly wounded. Clark dodged some flak but survived unscathed. "Those boys can take it. Don't think they aren't dishing it out, too," he said. "I saw so much in the way of death and destruction that I realized that I hadn't been singled out for grief—that others were suffering and losing their loved ones just as I suffered when I lost Carole." His discharge papers were signed by an officer named Ronald Reagan. Shortly after he returned home, he christened the USS Carole Lombard, accompanied by their friend, actress Irene Dunn. "Well, we've won the war and there's peace now everywhere. Everywhere except here in Hollywood, where the fighting for good scripts, good billing, and good dressing rooms never ends!" he said. But acting no longer enthralled him. "Definitely there was no future for me in Hollywood. I was no Valentino or Gilbert; I was somewhat of a roughneck. My days of playing the dashing young lover are over. I'm no longer believable in those parts. There has been considerate talk about older guys wooing and winning leading ladies half their age. I don't think the public likes it, and I don't care for it myself. It's not realistic. The actresses I started out with have long since quit playing glamour girls and sweet young things. Now it's time I acted my age." G able gave up hunting and fishing, but in 1953 found some happiness with Kay Williams, who had two children by a previous marriage. He settled into family life for the first time, but it wasn't the same as it was with Carole, and it was clear it never could be. In 1960 Gable made The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe. It was a very physical picture. He lost 40 pounds too fast and suffered a heart attack. One night he had a dream that Kay was pregnant, and his dream proved real. But he suffered another heart attack and died before his son was born. Clark Gable was 59 years old. Frank Capra once said, "In our film profession, you may have Gable's looks, Tracy's art, Marlene's legs, or Liz's violet eyes, but they don't mean a thing without that swinging thing called courage." Clark Gable was a courageous man. S hortly before his death, Clark Gable— despite or perhaps because of what he had, and lost, during his life with Carole Lombard—said, "On my tombstone they should write, 'He was lucky and he knew it.'" My husband, Johnny, and I would have enjoyed duck hunting with Gable and Lombard. I think any man and woman who love one another, hunt and fish together, and love the great outdoors would feel the same. n Carole Lombard not only looked the sporting part, she could back it up. She's pictured here on the set of Made for each other, in which she starred opposite of James Stewart.