Though the reality was kept from the public for years, Hollywood quickly began whispering after Loretta Young disappeared from the spotlight in 1935 only to resurface with an "adopted" baby girl. Known as one of the most beautiful actresses of all time, Young had just finished Call of the Wild with Clark Gable, and rumors held the child was an illegitimate daughter born of an on-set affair. In Young's memoir, published after her death in 2000, the world learned the truth: Gable was indeed her daughter Judy's father. But Young's daughter-in-law, Linda Lewis, now tells BuzzFeed there's even more to the story. While watching Larry King Live in 1998, Young heard the term "date rape" and asked for clarification. Lewis indulged her, describing "when you're with someone that you trust ... and you're not compliant, or you're saying no, and they're not listening." Young's reply, Lewis says: "That's what happened between me and Clark."
Lewis says Young at 23 was a flirt who was often "falling a little bit in love" with her co-stars, but she was also a devout Catholic who feared hell. Young says she would have remained chaste. Yet on an overnight train from Seattle to Los Angeles after much of the film's shooting had wrapped, Lewis says Gable entered Young's compartment. Months later, she gave birth. After speaking to her mother-in-law about date rape, "there was this whole dawning," Lewis says. "Like, suddenly there's a category that this thing that happened to her fits. ... We talked about it, and it didn't make her angry at him, it just gave her a new frame that I think lifted a lot of her guilt." Why come forward now? Judy—who died in 2011—"is not here to be hurt by this. And that's what Loretta really wanted to avoid," Lewis says. "I realized that it's almost every day, all these rapes, and the men just keep getting away with it." Click for more from BuzzFeed. (More Clark Gable stories.)
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