10 Golden Age Scandals Hollywood Wants You To Forget

4. Loretta Young & Clark Gable’s Love Child

You may remember a subplot from the Coen Brothers latest caper Hail Caesar! in which real-life Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix arranged for Scarlett Johansson’s character DeeAnna Moran to adopt her own illegitimate child to avoid an image-tainting scandal. Well, it turns out this story wasn’t actually too far from the truth. In fact, Mannix had orchestrated a similar fix for actress Loretta Young when she too found herself in a spot of trouble back in the mid-1930s.

Devout Catholic Young met the dashingly handsome and married Clark Gable when they co-starred in the 1935 film The Call of the Wild. One thing led to another and after a brief fling Young found herself ‘with child’, as it were. To avoid the inevitable sh*tstorm, Young fled to Europe to hide the pregnancy before returning to California and stealthily birthing her child, Judy. Judy then spent the first year or so of her life raised in a nun-run orphanage before Young ‘adopted’ her 19 months after her birth.

There was just one problem with that little white lie. As Judy grew up she started looking more and more like Gable, including inheriting his unmistakably large ears. Despite Young’s efforts to disguise the kid’s lugs – including dressing her in bonnets and making her undergo painful ear pinning surgery – Hollywood was not convinced. It wasn’t until Judy was in her early thirties, however, that Young finally confirmed that Gable was indeed her bio dad.