The cracks in the marriage were getting deeper. Tom had a terrible time with Judy. He questioned her, challenged her, and demanded perfection in her grades and deportment. Loretta didn’t know how a father should behave with a daughter, since her own father had left when she was young, so she went along with Tom’s approach to discipline. She didn’t like it, but she acquiesced to keep Tom happy.
Loretta hadn’t brought Judy to the Academy Awards that night because she thought she would lose. When her name was announced, Tom Lewis had to pull her out of her seat and push her toward the stage.
In what Loretta would call an underwater moment, sound went away and the world went blurry when her name was called as Best Actress for The Farmer’s Daughter. Loretta looked back in the theater and saw her sister Georgie jumping up and down in slow motion. Her sisters and their husbands were all there, in the audience. They stood and cheered.
Judy sat by the radio and listened as her mother’s name was announced. She jumped on the bed, the sofa, the chair, and the table, elated. The audience laughed when Loretta said she was glad she’d overdressed. Judy beamed with pride.
Later, when Judy went off to sleep, she dreamed of her mother, but she wasn’t an Academy Award winner. She was a fairy, sprinkled in glitter, flying through a silent movie in black and white.
Loretta stood on the set of The Key to the City. Luca hollered at her from the grid above.
“Loretta! I just put the final touches on San Francisco!”
She looked up at a series of flats hanging from the ceiling.
“It’s like the old days,” she hollered.
“I like old days,” Gable said from behind her.
“Me too.” Loretta gave her costar a warm hug.
“You think we still got it?”
“We got something. I don’t know if it’s an ‘it,’ but it’s something.”
Gable laughed. “You mind if Sylvia hangs around? She wants to paint us in action.”
Lady Sylvia Ashley, the ex-wife of Douglas Fairbanks and prior to him some nobleman in England, had married Gable hastily, in a way that worried his friends. She had already transformed the Encino home from an early American ranch to a chintz palace with a faux view of the Thames, a lot like one of Luca Chetta’s backdrops.
Loretta got the feeling Gable was scared of Sylvia. She smiled at his wife. “Paint whatever you like, Sylvia.”
Sylvia nodded. Gable smiled and waved to her before she went outside.
“Yes, my current wife is a painter and a ballbuster.”
“Is she better at one than the other?”
“Hard to say.” Gable laughed. “Same old Gretchen.”
“Old. Hmm. I’m still younger than you.”
“You always will be. It’s funny, isn’t it?”
“The script, I hope.”
He laughed. “No, our lives. How they’ve worked out. Are you happy?”
“We have a job in a good picture. I’m happy.”
“With Tom.”
“Marriage is hard.”
“You’re telling me. Would it have been hard for us?”
“Absolutely.” Loretta smiled.
“I don’t think so.”
“I’ve grown up, you know.”
“I can see that. How’s your girl?”
“Our girl is fine. She’s fifteen.”
“Where did the time go?”
“Up in smoke.”
“What’s she like?”
“Very sweet. Has a temper. She’s pretty.”
“Like her mother.”
“Like her father.” Loretta blushed. “Would you like to see your daughter?”
“I remember holding her in that fleabag your mother owned in Venice.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“It was not fitting for our child.”
Loretta blushed, remembering the moment she handed Judy to Clark the first time. “She had a humble start.”
“The best people do.” Gable shrugged.
“I guess.”
“Do you ever wonder about us?”
“Are you unhappy with Lady Ashley?”
“She’s stealth.”
“What do you mean?”
“Changes things, one teacup at a time. I turn my back, and where there was wool, there’s now a ruffle.”
“One of those.”
“Oh, brother, one of those.”
“Do you think it will last?”
“Until she finds a pack of matches with a phone number, or lipstick on my collar.”
“How long will that take?”
“That depends,” he said, flirting.
“Oh, no. No. No. No.”
“Not even a little?”
“The problem is, there’s no ‘little’ with us. It’s all out or all in, for better or worse. It’s just the way it went.”
“It’s never over, Gretchen.”
Luca watched Loretta and Gable from the catwalk. The two stars stood together, having a deep conversation in the middle of the production circus as the crew rushed around, carpenters built the set, and costume racks careened through. Luca remembered how Loretta and Clark had stood in the middle of a blizzard on Mount Baker and had a similar conversation, as though they were the only two people on the mountain. Luca couldn’t wait to get home and tell Alda what he had witnessed. It was exactly as Luca remembered, two lovers with so much to say that there wasn’t enough time, so they took their portion, knowing it too wouldn’t be enough. Nothing had changed. It was all there, everything but the snow.
Gable knocked on Loretta’s dressing room door. When she hollered for him to enter, she was sitting cross-legged on her sofa, reading her script. He opened the door and found her in corduroy overalls and a turtleneck.
“You look like a kid.”
“I’m not.” She patted the seat next to her on the sofa. “Mother of three.”
Gable sat, and she offered him a cigarette. He took it. She handed him her cigarette, and he lit his own.
The years had given Gable gray hair at his temples. He was thicker through the middle, and his hands, once so genteel, were rough and spotted with age. Loretta liked Gable older, though when she looked at him, it was so easy to recall him in detail in his prime. He had grown into himself. The tiny flutter of lines around his eyes had deepened, as had his dimples. In his countenance he bore the scars of the losses in his life, and it pained her to think that she was one of them.
“Looking at this scene for tomorrow,” she said.
“The new one?”
“Yep. It’s all right, don’t you think?”
“It’s fine. Fine.”
“Any way to beg Anita Loos to come and give it a rewrite?”
“She’s long gone, Gretchen. She went to New York. She’s in Paris with her books. I don’t think we could lure her back with a sack of gold.”
“Good for her. See how obsessed I get over the script?”
“It’s why you have a great career.”
“I’m in there slugging.”
“Would you like to go to dinner?”
“Where’s Sylvia?”
“I thought I’d bring her. You bring Tom.”
“Let me call and see if he’s free.”
Loretta reached for the phone, and stopped herself.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Sure.”
“I want you to get to know Judy.”
“Has she been asking questions?”
“All the time. I’m evasive.”
“Is Tom a good father to her?”
“They don’t get along.”
“Why not?”
“At first, when she was little, he was very sweet with her. But she’s willful, and he doesn’t appreciate that. But I raised a willful child on purpose. I want her to be able to take care of herself.”
“Like her mother.”
“Like my mother.” Loretta put out her cigarette and turned to him. “Judy is
a responsible older sister. She’s good with the boys. You would be so proud of her.”
“I’m sure you raised a great girl.”
“Maybe when you’ve become friends, we can gently tell her the truth.”
“Is she happy?”
“Seems to be.”
“Why would we ruin it? You know, you’ve done a great job with her, she has friends, she has a stepfather, she’s well adjusted. Why would we tell her now?”
“Because I’ve worried about this every day since she was born. I have wrestled with it, prayed about it, wondered how her life would go if she never knew, told myself over and over again that she would be fine if she never knew the truth. But what is there besides the truth? What could possibly be more important to Judy?”
“You did the best you could, Gretchen. All by yourself. I was useless.”
“I didn’t bring this up to make you feel bad, I really didn’t.”
“I have my own way of dealing with my mistakes. I don’t know if it would be good for her to learn about me now. She has a good life. If we tell her, she may react badly, run away—you don’t know.”
“No, we don’t.”
“I wanted a relationship with her, but it was such a mess back then, I didn’t know what to do. You had so much pressure on you at the time.”
“I was afraid I’d lose my job. That you would lose yours.”
“I think we did what we could do, Gretchen.”
“If we had been in any other profession, I wonder if we couldn’t have done better. Look at us. We’re still acting.”
“It’s so much easier to act out the feelings than to have them.” Gable put his arm around Loretta. “Maybe that’s why we’re still at it.”
“We haven’t cracked it.”
“We haven’t figured anything out.”
“How sad is that?” Loretta wondered.
“Look, Judy has you, your mother, your sisters, the cousins, her brothers. You’ve given her everything important.”
Loretta smiled. “Everything but you.”
“I wanted to be a father, you know. Had big dreams and plans. Wanted a houseful. And here we are. Sylvia’s a little long in the tooth to engage me on that subject. I’m not going to have children. We had Judy, but it didn’t work out—I couldn’t be her father. I think there’s something phony about trying now.”
“I understand.” Loretta summoned everything within her not to cry in front of Clark. She had cried so many nights over him, over Judy, over the loss of the family that could have been. She could not let him know the depth of her pain because there was nothing to be done about it now.
“I hope you do.” Gable went to the door.
“Clark?”
“Yes, Gretchen?”
“You know I love you.”
Gable stood for a moment, his hand on the door. “I’ve known it all along. But I wasn’t worthy of it.”
“That’s not what you’re supposed to say when a woman tells you that she loves you.”
“Give me the line.” He turned to face her and grinned. It might as well have been 1935 on Mount Baker.
“You’re supposed to tell the girl that you love her too.”
“That’s too easy,” Gable said. “Come here.” Gable extended his hands to Loretta and lifted her up to face him. She stood before him as she had fifteen years earlier, when she challenged him on Mount Baker. This time she looked deep into his eyes and saw more than the years; she saw what those years had meant to him too. Loretta had spent so many nights wondering, when she needn’t have.
“I’m going to do something that I’ve never done before with any woman. And that includes Carole. And the reason I grieved so deeply for her, and always will, is because I never told her how I felt about her. We were too busy laughing to get down to the business of true love.”
“Carole knows you loved her.”
“We said the words, but we didn’t have the years, the history over time, that defines love—do you understand what I mean?
“We have that. You and me. We met when we were young—well, you were very young—and that counts for something. Time invested counts for something. I know I made you cry and I brought you pain, and for that, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me, even at this late date. I’m a louse sometimes, and I can’t help myself. I react in the moment—whatever is front of me is what I eat, drink, smoke, or hunt. What I pursue. I don’t examine my conscience, or the past, and I don’t even make plans too far into the future. You get me as I am, or you don’t get me at all.
“I want to tell you what you mean to me because I never have, and not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t want to hurt you anymore. After we came home from Bellingham and Ria was on the warpath, you were pregnant with Judy and pushed me away. And rightly so. After that, after the baby was born, when I saw you out on the town, you looked like you had moved on. But I was happy for you—when you were happy, I was too.
“But I never moved on from you. I’ve spent the last fifteen years running from my feelings for you, and sometimes I thought I outran them. You made it easy for me to let you go, and that was an act of kindness on your part. You loved me, and you didn’t make any demands on me. Now I’m almost fifty years old, and I have learned very little on this hayride, but you taught me what love really is. It’s letting the person you love be who they are, faults and all, failures and all. It’s letting go when you would really rather hold on. So you see, I love you, Gretchen. But I never said those three words to you because they weren’t enough. And they still aren’t.”
Loretta put her arms around Clark. She had been reminded of him every day of Judy’s life. She had resisted calling him when their daughter did or said something extraordinary or needed his counsel when she fell short. Loretta felt she had half-parented Judy—cheated her in a sense, though that would have meant she deliberately rejected Gable, when it seemed to Loretta he had been the one to move on.
Loretta buried her face in Gable’s neck; the scent of bitter orange and pine reminded her of when they were young. It hadn’t been a dream. It hadn’t been a scene in a movie, shot on location and forgotten. They had loved each other, always would. It was a bit of a miracle to Loretta, but then again, it always had been.
Judy threw her schoolbooks down on the stairs and was on her way to the kitchen when she noticed a man standing in the living room. He turned to face her and smiled.
“Mr. Gable?”
“You must be Judy.”
“I am. Are you looking for Mom?”
“She’s taking a call.”
“Are you having fun making a movie together?”
“Your mother is a lot of fun.”
“She can be. And she can be a drag, but don’t tell her.”
“I won’t.” Gable tried not to laugh. He invited Judy to sit with him. “Tell me about yourself.”
“I’m learning to sew.”
“That’s a good talent to have.”
“It’s practical, I guess.”
“Any idea what you want to be when you grow up?”
“Maybe an actress, like Mom.”
“Have you been in any plays?”
“At school.”
“You know, I’ve been friends with your mom for years.”
“I know. Since The Call of the Wild.”
“You know about that movie?”
“I’ve seen it. Mom’s seen it about a million times. It’s her favorite movie.”
“It is?” Gable was pleased.
“We watch it a lot on movie night.”
“A lot?”
“Are you kidding? She’d watch it every time if she could. But sometimes I just feel like Jerry Lewis, you know?”
“I know.”
“Sometimes she cries when she watches it. I think she’s sad for those guys that go down in the creek.”
“That must be it.”
“What’s your favorite movie? Let me guess. Gone with the Wind.”
r /> “I’m afraid everybody likes that picture but me.”
“You were good in it. It’s long, though.”
“You ever see Night Nurse?”
“Nah. Mom doesn’t have it.”
“I think she burned the print.”
“She’s like that. If she hates something, look out.”
“I’m kind of like that too.”
“Mom says it means you’re made of something. You know, when you have an opinion.”
“I agree with that.”
“I guess.”
“Well, Judy, it was good to meet you.”
“You want to wait for my mom?”
“I’d be waiting forever.” Gable smiled.
“No kidding. She takes hours no matter where she’s going, even if it’s just to Delaney’s.”
Judy walked Gable to the door.
“You be a good kid, okay?” He extended his hand, and she shook it.
She looked up into his eyes. Like all old people’s, his eyes were watering. She wondered if he used drops. “Well, see ya, Mr. Gable.”
“Good-bye, Judy.” Gable kissed her on the forehead. Judy did not think much of it, but it was all Gable could do not to embrace her. He saw grace notes of Gretchen in Judy, but he also saw aspects of his mother in their daughter—the wide-set eyes, the fine bone structure, and the sweet smile.
Gable walked down the sidewalk. He turned back to look at Judy, who stood on the portico, waving. He waved back. He got into his car and turned the key. He put his hands on the steering wheel and realized they were shaking. He clasped his hands together to stop the tremors.
Gable wondered if he would ever have the chance to tell Judy the truth: that he was her father, and even though he hadn’t been there for her, she would always be his. He wouldn’t have found the words to explain his absence, the Hays Code, the way the world was in the 1930s, and he doubted that she’d understand even if he could. He drove out of the driveway and onto the street.
Despite the deep well of regret that anchored the soul of Clark Gable, there was joy for him that day. He was able to connect himself to his past and to understand that all he was would go forward in Judy. Perhaps he was simplifying it, but that’s how it went in Hollywood. A story was told in scenes, and usually there was one moment that turned the key, that sent the characters in the direction that would lead to their happiness or their demise.