Clark Gable’s Secret Daughter Dies

Via Jeanie, Belle Grove

photo by Everett Collection

Judy Lewis, the secret daughter of screen stars Clark Gable and Loretta Young, has died at 76. But her fascinating story lives on.

Lewis was conceived while Young was unwed and Gable was married to his second wife, Maria Langham. The two were filming "The Call of the Wild." Their affair resulted in a super secret pregnancy and a hush-hush birth. The actress left her love child at an orphanage for 19 months, returning only then to adopt her. Clearly, this was long before the Internet, DNA testing, or baby daddies.

To add to the mystery, Young kept her daughter in the dark about her family history. Born on November 6, 1935, Judy was eventually raised by her mother and Young's husband, Tom Lewis, whose last name she took. Lewis never did have a relationship with her biological father, although when she was 15, Gable visited her without telling her why. It took 31 years for her to learn the truth, which her mother told her privately but would not admit to publicly.

As Lewis told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1994, when she finally wrote a memoir of her parents' romance and subsequent cover-up: "It was very difficult for me as a little girl not to be accepted ... by my mother, who to this day will not publicly acknowledge that I am her biological child."

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