Clark Gable

Clark Gable occupies two registers in the novel: he is the remembered Prince Mysterious of childhood cinema and the sixty-year-old actor whose work with Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits turns that fairy-tale image into a brief, fragile human encounter. His significance lies in the contrast between the enduring screen myth and the aging man, whose death soon after filming makes the film’s tenderness seem inseparable from loss.

The Prince Mysterious

The novel first places Gable within a child's imaginative landscape. At the Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the young Norma Jeane watched blond actresses and the Prince Mysterious with an adoring gaze. The name belongs to a romantic screen mythology rather than to a documented personal acquaintance: Gable’s image represents the kind of handsome, rescuing prince cinema offered a lonely child. That early fascination gives his later appearance in the story an emotional weight beyond his role in a film.

In The Misfits, the old screen ideal is neither simply discarded nor left intact. Gable, now sixty, appears as Gay Langland, a cowboy who walks through the desert at sunset with Roslyn Tabor. The novel imagines audiences falling in love with the on-screen lovers and with the fairy tale they seem to inhabit. Gable’s face, however, carries the marks of time, described as lines like ripples in stone. He seems newly solid, almost rocklike, but the story immediately tests the fantasy that such solidity could make him immune to death.

A performance recognized

During the production, Monroe was superstitious about watching the daily footage, but one evening she went with Gable to see a scene they had filmed. Its effect on the people in the screening room was astonishment: the scene appeared so complete that the usual distance between acting and life seemed to fall away. Director H took Monroe aside, clasped her hands, and thanked her for the work. He praised the scene as something more penetrating than sexual display, in which Monroe and Gable seemed like a real woman and a real man rather than ordinary cinematic figures.

H’s praise also marked a reversal in their working relationship. In the preceding weeks, he had spoken disparagingly about Monroe and had entertained the crew with violent fantasies about her. After seeing the footage, he was remorseful about both his insults and the pleasure he had taken in them. He told her he would accept being kicked if he ever doubted her again. The moment does not erase their earlier conflict; it records a change in what H could recognize in her performance. Gable is central to that recognition because the scene’s force depends on the presence and responsiveness of both actors.

Another scene makes their on-screen intimacy into repeated labor. The kiss between Roslyn and Gay is done again at Monroe’s request. The repetition is at once a practical act of performance and part of the scene’s romantic spell: the film can return to the lovers’ gesture, even as the actors and their story remain subject to time. The novel thus presents Gable not only as a partner in Monroe’s most affecting work, but also as a figure through whom the border between a performed love story and the audience’s desire to believe in it becomes visible.

The fairy tale and its limits

The novel describes the film’s romance as a shared enchantment. Monroe and Gable appear as the Good Princess and the Prince Mysterious, walking together through a desert sunset, whispering and laughing. Monroe is imagined as a child seeking affection in Gable’s embrace. His familiar masculine face, now lined by age, seems to offer the steadiness of a rock. This is not presented as proof of a private romance between the actors; it is the emotional meaning the film’s images acquire for the narrator and audience.

That tenderness is shadowed by the collapse of the fantasy. The narration challenges the notion that Gable could be magical or exempt from ordinary mortality: he would die of a heart attack within weeks. The suddenness matters. His on-screen solidity and his role as the Prince Mysterious may suggest protection, but neither can protect the actor from death. The fairy tale remains powerful precisely because the novel places its promise of safety beside the knowledge that it cannot last.

Release and legacy

When The Misfits was released, there was no grand premiere for Monroe: no limousine procession along Hollywood Boulevard, no cheering crowd, no reception at the Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. Gable had been dead for several months, and Monroe had been divorced for several months. The film failed at the box office and was disliked by the Studio that had produced it, although reviews were positive and critics praised the performances of Gable, Monroe, and Montgomery Clift.

The novel contrasts that commercial failure with the film’s rough integrity. Its celebrated performers appear transformed into people who seem at once familiar and difficult to recognize; the audience is invited to see the roles as ordinary Americans rather than as untouchable stars. Gable’s Gay Langland can resemble a solitary uncle, while the film’s romance carries the melancholy of a lost provincial world. His posthumous presence sharpens that effect: the screen preserves the actor in the role, but it cannot restore the living man. The Prince Mysterious survives as an image, while The Misfits makes visible the distance between that image and mortality.