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We rarely offer our audience a glimpse behind the scenes into how we go about researching a rumor. It's usually a boring process most of our readers wouldn't find at all interesting, primarily because the most time-consuming part of investigating the origins and truth (or falsity) of rumors is often not the legwork of performing research and tracking down background material, but all the time required to collate the research results, organize the information, and write it up as a coherent narrative for others to read. But one item provided an example in which the research itself was every bit as much the story as the rumor, so for a change we thought we'd skimp a little on the organization and coherent narrative part and take the reader along on a trip through the process: When we're investigating a rumor about a person who is both well-known and long dead, the first place we usually turn is the most recently published biography about that person (on the assumption that the biographer had access to the most up-to-date, and therefore most accurate, information). In this case the most recent Clark Gable biography was 2002's Clark Gable by Warren G. Harris (also the author of the 1974 dual biography Gable and Lombard), and there we found that Mr. Harris had indeed addressed this rumor: According to this account, Gable was once involved in an automobile accident while drunk, but he hit a tree (not a pedestrian or another car), and he injured no one but himself. And while MGM did feed reporters a story about Gable's having been forced off the road by another driver in order to head off unflattering publicity about his drunkenness, there was no pedestrian whose death needed to be hushed by a pliant press. We wouldn't want to dismiss this rumor based on a single source, however, especially since in this case the referenced biography provided no footnotes or endnotes to indicate the source of the author's information. (Biographers often simply pick up and repeat anecdotes from earlier biographies and other printed sources without independently verifying their validity.) Remembering that we had come across this rumor in a recent book about strange myths and curious legends associated with Los Angeles, Paul Young's L.A. Exposed, we flipped through the volume to see what it had to say: Now we were confronted with a legend-within-a-legend: According to this version, the rumor of Gable's automotive mishap dated from 1933 (twelve years earlier than the previous account), and the real story involved no dead pedestrian or even an automobile accident — rather, the entire car crash tale was fabricated by Gable and a studio publicist as a cover story for a prolonged hospital stay during which Gable underwent cosmetic surgery on his ears and teeth! Right away, a few problems with this account jumped out at us: Improbable as his information might be, Mr. Young at least mentioned his source: biographer Lyn Tornabene. A check on the author's name revealed that Ms. Tornabene was the author of the 1976 Clark Gable biography Long Live the King, so we turned to that work to see if it could help us sort out the details of this rumor. Confusingly, what we found was that nothing in Long Live the King corroborated the story offered in Paul Young's L.A. Exposed, despite his identification of the former as his source. First off, Ms. Tornabene's take on the genesis of this rumor differed little in detail (and was probably the source of) the version we found in the first biography we consulted: Nowhere in Long Live the King did we find anything about Clark Gable's involvement in an automobile accident in 1933, or his striking and killing a pedestrian, or his plotting a mysterious week-long hospital stay, or his undergoing cosmetic surgery on his ears and teeth. The book merely mentioned that at some point in his career Gable had his teeth capped, and that there had since been dispute over when the work was performed and who paid for it. (Gable himself said that MGM head Louis B. Mayer paid for it, which contradicts the notion that the dental work was something Gable arranged for himself on the sly.) Likewise, on the subject of Gable's ears, Long Live the King simply quoted several people who worked with Gable, half of whom maintained that Gable had his ears fixed at some unspecified time, and half of whom emphatically denied that Gable ever had anything done to his ears. Working on the charitable assumption that the author of L.A. Exposed didn't just make up his own version of the Gable rumor but somehow misreferenced his source, we kept looking for additional information to resolve the discrepancies. Since an essential component of dead pedestrian rumor is that MGM chief Louis B. Mayer conspired with a Los Angeles district attorney to conceal the truth and send an uninvolved MGM employee to jail in Gable's place, a book about Mayer seemed a good place to start. Consulting Charles B. Higham's 1993 work, Merchant of Dreams: Louis B. Mayer, M.G.M. and the Secret Hollywood, we found yet another version of events, one that asserted as fact the claim that Gable did indeed kill a pedestrian while driving drunk and avoided jail only through the machinations of Mayer: Here the lack of detail concerning some key points aroused our suspicion. This account doesn't tell us anything about when all this activity supposedly occurred (the most the reader can infer from the context is that the events described supposedly took place sometime in 1933), it doesn't provide any information about the putative accident victim, it doesn't identify the proposed picture that Mayer allegedly canceled because of the incident, and it doesn't tell us anything about the MGM employee who purportedly took the rap for Gable (other than referring to him by a pseudonym). And the details that were checkable revealed a writer sloppy with the facts: The film Today We Live premiered in March 1933, so Joan Crawford could hardly have been threatening in October 1933 to stop working on a movie she had completed over seven months earlier! (Presumably the author was referring to her next project, the Gable-Crawford film Dancing Lady, which finished shooting in October 1933.) Since the only cited source for this account was an interview with a former studio employee conducted sixty years after the fact, we began to suspect that the author had been taken in by someone who'd simply recounted an age-old rumor to him as a real-life event. (At this point we also had to wonder: if MGM and Mayer, as claimed, wielded enormous clout that they could completely hide the fact that one of their stars killed another person and get the district attorney's to compliantly assist in the cover-up, couldn't they have come up with a better resolution than sending an innocent man to prison? Why not simply say that the pedestrian had been struck by a hit-and-run driver who couldn't be identified?) Clearly, we needed more information to be able to sort out the conflicting accounts. Since we had two versions of the rumor that set Gable's automobile accident in 1945 and two others that set it in 1933, the first order of business was to determine whether Gable was involved in two different accidents or just one -- or any at all -- and when they took place. The 1945 incident was easy enough to verify through newspaper archives: Gable's accident was front-page news in both the Los Angeles Examiner and Los Angeles Times, and it was also mentioned in the New York Times and Variety (a prominent entertainment industry trade publication). The Los Angeles Times' account, from Sunday, 26 March 1945, read as follows: These accounts conform to the version of events given in the two Gable biographies cited above: Gable ran his car into a tree during the early morning hours of 25 March 1945, he was taken to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital for treatment of some cuts and bruises, and MGM fed the press the story that Gable was run off the road by a wrong-way driver. (Contrary to the biographic accounts, none of the contemporaneous newspaper reports we found stated that the non-existent other driver was drunken: since the other driver was unidentified and reportedly did not stop, nobody could possibly have known whether he was drunk or not.) Gable's accident was so prominent, in fact, that it prompted a section-leading follow-up story in the Los Angeles Times the next day (March 27) about the Board of Public Works' ordering an engineering survey to ascertain what can be done to reduce the traffic hazard at Sunset Blvd. and Bristol Ave., Brentwood, scene of numerous accidents. The Los Angeles Times article from Monday, March 26, stated that Gable was expected to leave [Cedars] today, and a March 27 Variety piece noted that Gable checked out of the hospital Monday, so the duration of Gable's hospital stay was apparently one night only, not three days or one week as variously reported by his biographers. About an accident in 1933, we found ... absolutely nothing. The author of L.A. Exposed maintained that the only recorded episode in Gable's life that bears any resemblance occurred on June 20, 1933 when he drunkenly ran his Duesenberg into a tree and claims the accident was reported in the Los Angeles Examiner, but no mention of Clark Gable's being involved in an automobile appeared in the Los Angeles Examiner on June 20, June 21, or any other day in June 1933. None of the other newspapers we checked (the Los Angeles Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Variety) carried any story about Clark Gable and an automobile accident any time in 1933. In fact, it's quite clear that Gable couldn't possibly have been involved in an automobile accident in Los Angeles on June 20 that year, because, according to Variety, Gable (on advice from his physician) had left for Alaska with his wife three days earlier (June 17) and was still away on vacation as late as July 3 (when Variety reported that MGM was trying to get him to return from Vancouver and finish work on Dancing Lady). Outside of the unlikely event that Gable was involved in two separate alcohol-related automobile accidents on the same portion of the same street (the first of which was so completely covered up that not a word of it ever reached the press), we had to concede that something was wrong here. Even if Higham or his interviewee got the dates mixed up and was indeed referring the 1945 accident, the details were still obviously wrong: Buron Fitts, the district attorney whom Higham claims arranged the deal that prevented Gable from being charged with manslaughter and instead sent another MGM employee to jail in Gable's place, left the Los Angeles D.A.'s office in 1940 and served with the Army Air Force in Europe during World War II, so he couldn't have been involved in brokering a deal with Mayer in 1945. So, we were left trying to reconcile how Clark Gable could have run over a pedestrian in Los Angeles while he was actually in Alaska, or how his accident could have been covered up by an out-of-office district attorney who was halfway around the globe serving in the military. Perhaps, we thought, some answers might turn up if we looked into what was happening in Clark Gable's life in 1933. The sources we'd used so far all agreed that during the latter part of the year Gable experienced some significant medical problems, missed a couple of months' work, was docked a large chunk of salary, and landed in Louis B. Mayer's doghouse (as described by biographers Harris and Higham): The contemporaneous newspaper accounts we dug up confirmed Gable's hospital stays: Variety noted in its July 24 issue that Gable had been discharged from Cedars of Lebanon after a tonsil snatching, and a number of newspapers reported in early August that Gable had re-entered the hospital to have his appendix removed. (The news reports that Gable's surgeries were for tonsil or appendix removal, two very common types of operations, were undoubtedly less-alarming cover stories given out to the press by MGM to avoid the disclosure that one of their stars was seriously ill.) We also noted another item that, although it didn't involve Clark Gable, might have some bearing on this rumor. Higham repeated a story he picked up from Lawrence Grobel's The Hustons, about actor-writer (and later world famous director) John Huston: It's far more likely Huston escaped prosecution because there was no strong evidence that he was at fault in the accident rather than because Mayer invested $400,000 to suppress the matter, as $400,000 was an enormous sum of money in 1933 -- more than half the budget of an MGM feature film and easily the equivalent of several million dollars today. It beggars belief that Mayer would have spent such a huge sum to protect a nobody who was not nearly as important to MGM financially as Gable was, and simply having newspapers underplay the matter wouldn't have kept Huston out of criminal court. We mention the incident because it poses an extraordinary, or perhaps not so extraordinary, coincidence: another tale of a woman killed in an accident on Sunset Boulevard in 1933 by a Hollywood-connected driver who supposedly escaped prosecution through the behind-the-scenes manipulations of Louis B. Mayer. At this point we had enough information to reconstruct the true arc of events, and a likely scenario for the rumor. On Monday, 12 June 1933, Clark Gable was to begin production on the film Dancing Lady. The night before, however, he was struck down by an advanced infection that required several days of hospitalization, followed by the extraction of most of his teeth. Since it would take a couple of weeks for him to recover his strength and for his gums to heal sufficiently to allow the fitting of dentures, after his release from the hospital Gable and his wife left for a vacation in Alaska and Canada where he could recuperate away from studio pressures and the prying eyes of fans and the press. (He couldn't have been especially anxious for others to see him in his newly-toothless state.) MGM shot scenes around Gable until he returned to California and was fitted with false teeth, but after a single day's work on July 30 he was again felled by the same infection, now serious enough to require the immediate removal of his gall bladder. Gable was out for another month before finally returning to the studio in September; meanwhile, the producer considered replacing him, production on Dancing Lady was shut down, the film ran $150,000 over budget, and Mayer docked Gable over two months' pay. (Actors under studio contract were not paid per film; they were paid weekly salaries, whether they were currently working on films or not. Illness was considered a poor excuse for missing work when it delayed production and incurred additional expenses for the studio, so contract actors were often penalized for taking sick days.) After Dancing Lady finally wrapped in October, Gable (displaying a notable lack of enthusiasm) was sent over to Columbia Pictures for the film that would eventually become It Happened One Night, because Mayer had no other project lined up for him and could cover his salary (and more) by lending him to another studio. Nearly twelve years later, Gable ran his car into a tree on Sunset Boulevard after a night of heavy drinking. MGM was notified of the accident before the police or the press, and they floated the story that Gable's car was forced over the curb by a wrong-way driver. A banged-up but not seriously injured Gable was taken to the hospital, held overnight, and discharged the next day. Sometime after Gable's 1945 automobile accident, a rumor began to spread that Gable had hit a pedestrian rather than a tree. Gossipmongers whispered that the poor woman had been killed and the studio had arranged for someone else to take the rap to protect Gable. Perhaps Gable's 1945 non-fatal accident was conflated with Huston's 1933 fatal accident, producing the apocryphal tale that Gable was the one who had hit and killed a woman. Perhaps an MGM employee really did kill a pedestrian and serve time for vehicular manslaughter in the 1930s, thereby providing fuel for the later claim that he was an innocent party sent to prison in place of Clark Gable. Whatever the case, people who knew or worked around Gable, recalling events with the haziness of decades-old memories, found the rumor plausible: they remembered that Gable was a heavy drinker, that one year (1933) Gable had been in the hospital (due to the automobile accident), that he'd been suspended without pay (because Mayer was upset at having to deal with the fallout of his drunken driving), that production on a film (Dancing Lady) had been shut down and Gable had almost been replaced (because Mayer needed to get rid of him quickly), that Gable had left the country (to keep ahead of the law in case things went badly), and that Gable had then been shipped out to Columbia Pictures, the Siberia of the film industry (because Mayer was punishing him). From such hazy half-rememberings and unconscious conflation of separate events are long-lived rumors created, especially when such tales confirm what everyone knows -- that the studios of the 1930s and 1940s went to any lengths to protect their misbehaving stars. The rumor about a dead woman and a studio flak sent to jail sounds believable because it so perfectly fits what we already believe about how the studios guarded their properties and is therefore accepted as valid without question. If this lengthy exercise in sleuthing teaches anything, it's the danger inherent in accepting any one source's version of an event as gospel. Each of the resources we consulted mixed up bits of fact with rumor and included some mistakes (which could have been avoided with some minimal research), and some presumably authoritative accounts weren't just slipshod but were egregiously in error. Yet they all shared one thing in common: each account was presented as truth of the No need to question this variety. Had we merely cracked open one book — or even two or three — and accepted whatever we found there as veracious, we'd have been just as much in error.
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