Clark Gable’s Former House

Clark Gable's House (2 of 6)

Speaking of Clark Gable . . . another location that I stalked recently was the Encino-area ranch where the “King of Hollywood” lived for over two decades.  I first read about this locale, as I did yesterday’s (the Playa del Rey house where Judy Lewis, Gable and Loretta Young’s secret love child, was born), in fellow stalker E.J.’s book Hollywood Death and Scandal Sites.  So, while doing some solo San Fernando Valley stalking a few days before my and the Grim Cheaper’s big move to the desert, I figured I might as well stop by the residence to check it out.

[ad]

Clark Gable’s ranch was originally built in 1933 for director and founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Raoul Walsh.  Gable and his then girlfriend, soon-to-be wife, Carole Lombard visited Walsh at his 20-acre property, which featured a nine-bedroom main house, a detached garage, citrus groves, alfalfa fields, a barn, a pigsty, a henhouse, and horse stables, and absolutely fell in love with it.  When they heard that he was planning on selling the site, they jumped at the chance to purchase it, which they did in 1939, shortly after their nuptials, for a cool $50,000.  According to E.J., at the time, the home’s entrance was located on Petit Drive (as you can see in this 1940 census, the original address was 4525 Petit Drive; it is now 4543 Tara Drive) and the property was surrounded by acres upon acres of orchards and fields.  Tabloids quickly labeled the two-story clapboard residence “The House of Two Gables”.

ScreenShot7212

Lombard tragically passed away in a plane crash just two years later, on January 16th, 1942, and it is said that Gable never recovered from his grief.  Shortly after her death, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps and was sent to Europe to fight in World War II.  Upon his return to America in 1944, he thought about selling the ranch, but ultimately decided to keep it and wound up living there with his fourth and fifth wives, Lady Sylvia Ashley and Kay Williams Spreckles, respectively.

Clark Gable's House (5 of 6)

Sadly, on November 5th, 1960, while changing a tractor tire in the ranch’s driveway, Gable suffered a heart attack.  The following morning, he was taken to Hollywood Presbyterian hospital, where he passed away ten days later, on November 16th, 1960.  Despite being married to Kay at the time, the actor was interred next to Carole Lombard at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.  Spreckles and John Clark Gable (Kay and Clark’s son and Clark’s only legitimate child, who was born four months after the actor’s death) continued to live at the ranch until 1973, at which point it was sold to developers.  Financier Michael Milken later bought the place in October 1977 for $587,500 and it appears that he still owns it to this day.  According to Zillow, the dwelling currently boasts seven bedrooms, nine baths, 7,093 square feet of living space, and a 1.17-acre lot.

Clark Gable's House (1 of 6)

As you can see below, the home’s wooden exterior archway . . .

ScreenShot7210

Clark Gable's House (6 of 6)

. . . and crookedly-placed white picket fence still look exactly the same today as they did when Gable lived there.  Sadly though, little else of the place is visible from the street.  And while the house still stands in much the same form as it did during Gable’s time, the twenty acres that once surrounded it were subdivided during the 1980s and transformed into a housing tract named the Clark Gable Estates.  The streets in the neighborhood, Tara Drive and Ashley Oaks, were named in honor of Gable’s most famous movie, Gone with the Wind, which I think is so incredibly cool. I wonder if someday a community will be named after my man Matt Lanter.  One of the streets could even be dubbed “Liam Court”!  Winking smile

ScreenShot7215

Clark Gable's House (3 of 6)

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER.  And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Big THANK YOU to E.J., from The Movieland Directory website, for finding this location!  Smile

Clark Gable's House (4 of 6)

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Clark Gable’s former house is located at 4543 Tara Drive in Encino.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Former Home

Alfred Hitchcock's house (5 of 8)

I tend to get a bit overexuberant when it comes to stalking Haunted Hollywood sites each year and typically wind up with more locations in my stockpile (or should I say stalkpile? Winking smile) than there are days in October to blog about them.  In fact, it would be safe to say that I have enough spooky locales left over from years past to cover all of this October’s posts, not that that will prevent me from stalking new ones, of course.  Anyway, one location that I have had waiting in the wings for quite some time now is the first house that Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense himself, lived in upon moving to Los Angeles in 1939.  I learned of the locale thanks to the 2009 book Dial H for Hitchcock, the fifth in Susan Kandel’s fabulous Cece Caruso mystery series.  I absolutely love Kandel’s novels because, not only are they fun and suspenseful, but they always feature numerous real and historic locations – one of which, Thelma Todd’s Roadside Café, I blogged about during my Haunted Hollywood postings back in 2008.  In Dial H for Hitchcock, biographer/part-time detective/heroine Cece Caruso, who has been commissioned by her publisher to pen a book on the Master of Suspense, heads out to several of his former residences in order to “commune with Hitch’s spirit”.  Kandel provided the addresses of the homes in the novel, so I, of course, immediately added them to my To-Stalk list and ran right out to stalk them shortly thereafter.

[ad]

According to Kandel, in 1939 producer David O. Selznick convinced Alfred, who was by that time already a successful director, to migrate with his wife, Alma, and daughter, Pat, from their native England to Southern California.  Selznick first rented the family a three-bedroom apartment in the Wilshire Palms building (which was once located at 10331 Wilshire Boulevard, but has since, I believe, been torn down).  Shortly thereafter, the Hitchcocks learned that their good friend Carole Lombard was moving out of a French Country-style manse she was renting in Bel Air, so Hitch decided to take over her lease and relocated his family there that October.

 Alfred Hitchcock's house (1 of 8)

Alfred Hitchcock's house (3 of 8)

Carole Lombard had first moved into the abode in 1936, after realizing that her home at 7953 Hollywood Boulevard was not conducive to the affair she had just begun with a married Clark Gable.  So she leased a much more secluded residence at 609 St. Cloud Road in Bel Air.  You can check out a photograph of Lombard and Gable that was supposedly taken inside of the home here.  After finally marrying Gable on March 29th, 1939, the two purchased a ranch in Encino, began renovating it and finally moved in that October, at which point Hitch took over the lease.  The Hitchcocks remained in the home until the Spring of 1942, when they purchased a larger Colonial-style manse located two miles away.  (And don’t worry, I also stalked that abode and will be blogging about it tomorrow.  SmileAccording to this website, Shelley Long also lived in the St. Cloud Road residence at one point in time, although I have been unable to verify that.

Alfred Hitchcock's house (4 of 8)

Alfred Hitchcock's house (8 of 8)

The property, which was originally built in 1926 and boasts 5 bedrooms, 6 baths, 4,357 square feet, a 0.76-acre plot of land, a swimming pool, a fish pond, parking for over 20 cars, a chef’s kitchen, and a private guest house, last sold in December 2007 for a cool $7.85 million.  It appears to have been remodeled at some point thereafter and, from the description of the place in Dial H for Hitchcock, was quite possibly in a state of disrepair for a brief period of time, as well.  The book reads, “Considering the neighborhood, 609 was a dump.  I wasn’t sure anybody was even living there anymore.  The driveway was strewn with leaves and yellowed newspapers.  The gate stretching across it was covered with brown canvas so you couldn’t see in.  However somebody had cut a little hole at the bottom.  Someone with an avid interest in the former residents, perhaps.”  (A stalker, maybe?  Winking smile)  And while that description may have been conjured up for story purposes and not the actual state of the house at the time of the writing, Google aerial views do show that the yard was torn up at some recent date.  I am very happy to report that the home was in nice shape when I stalked it earlier this year, although, sadly, not much of it is visible from the road.

Alfred Hitchcock's house (7 of 8)

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER.  And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Alfred Hitchcock's house (2 of 8)

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Alfred Hitchcock’s former home is located at 609 St. Cloud Road in Bel Air.  After finishing his second presidential term in January 1989, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, moved into a house located just up the street at 668 St. Cloud Road.