Loretta Young

Reader Alert: An Old Post That Lots Of People Are Suddenly Interested In Reading

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

-judy-lewis

All of a sudden, a post from 2011 is attracting more views in the last four days than it did in the previous four years. Odd are you missed it too, so so to avoid the anomaly of non-Ethics Alarms fans being more attuned to a post here than the loyal throng, I’m going to point the way to the link. The essay is titled “Clark Gable, Loretta Young, and the Betrayal of Judy Lewis,” and told the heart-breaking story of how Clark Gable denied his parenthood of his own daughter (that’s her to his left) to avoid a career-damaging scandal, while the child’s mother, Loretta Young, lied to her as well.  It was and is an interesting and disturbing chapter in Hollywood history, and my commentary  generated some furious defenses from fans of “The King,” who marshal every rationalization imaginable to try to justify a rich and famous father neglecting his only child, even after she became aware of who her father was. That phenomenon is as illuminating as the sad tale itself.  Here, for example, is “Seeker”—see how many rationalizations you can find. I see at least four: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Clark Gable, Loretta Young, and the Betrayal of Judy Lewis”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

-judy-lewis

Ethics Alarms has had an influx of new readers lately (Thanks, “O’Reilly Factor”!) and many have been visiting and commenting on older posts that I hadn’t thought about for a long time. “Evangeline” found one of the saddest and strangest, my post in December of 2011 about the death of Judy Lewis, who was the love child of Hollywood legends Loretta Young and Clark Gable. Gable, the “King of Hollywood,” never acknowledged her as his daughter, and Young, who like Gable was married and afraid of harming her reputation, pretended to adopt the girl, never revealing to her that she was her real mother, and the top leading man in movies was her father. (Judy was a dead ringer for him, too, as you can see in the photo above.) You should read the original post, here.

Evangeline apparently knows her Golden Age of Hollywood history, and makes a case that I was too hard on “Rhett Butler.” I’ll be back at the end for a rebuttal. Here is her Comment of the Day on the post, “Clark Gable, Loretta Young, and the Betrayal of Judy Lewis.” Continue reading →

Clark Gable, Loretta Young, and the Betrayal of Judy Lewis

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Clark Cable is the one on the right.

Judy Lewis died this week, at the age of 76. She survived and flourished despite being brought up in a community that conspired to hide the truth from her, and famous parents who refused to acknowledge her as their own. The community was Hollywood, and its treatment of Judy Lewis demonstrates the depth of its ethical failings. Her parents were Clark Gable and Loretta Young, and it is difficult to look at them the same way once you have learned what they did to their daughter.

Lewis was a love child, conceived during a movie set fling in 1935 when Gable, married at the time, and the single Young co-starred in “The Call of the Wild”. When Young became pregnant, she hid herself away, had her child, and entrusted her to a nunnery until the little girl was two. Then Young faked an adoption. Throughout her childhood, Lewis (the last name she took from Loretta Young’s first husband, who refused to adopt her) did not know the true identity of her famous parents, or why Gable, then known as “The King” of Hollywood, mysteriously showed up at her boarding school one day for an unannounced visit—the only time she ever saw him in person. Continue reading →