Clark Gable’s death recasts his work on The Misfits as both a final professional ordeal and a loss that Marilyn Monroe struggles to separate from the public story told about the production. The novel places the widow’s accusation that Monroe’s delays and unpredictable behavior contributed to Gable’s fatal heart attack beside evidence of his pre-existing heart problems, his tolerance of the difficult shoot, and Monroe’s later grief. His death is not only an ending: it exposes the distance between a star’s public image of invulnerability and the vulnerable life the film’s production had already revealed.

Illness and the Production

Gable’s mortality is made explicit before his death is discussed as fact. The narrative challenges the idea that he might somehow be exempt from death, describing a heart attack as something that could take him within weeks. The warning acquires force from the account of his repeated heart attacks, which had left him feeling fragile. His health was already a serious concern; the production did not create that vulnerability from nothing.

Even so, Gable did not protest the delays or the strain caused by Monroe’s unpredictable conduct. He accepted work under punishing sun and in action scenes that were demanding for a man of his age. In one mishap, he became caught in a rope and was pulled along behind a van traveling at seventy kilometers per hour. The incident makes the physical hazards of the shoot concrete, while the account of his patience complicates any simple version of events in which Monroe alone explains the production’s stress. Gable recognized that he was mortal, yet he also had a young wife who was pregnant. The prospect of seeing his child grow up gave his hope for a longer life a personal stake.

Death and the Film’s Afterlife

By the time The Misfits was released, Gable had been dead for several months and Monroe had been divorced for several months. The film’s reception offered little consolation: it failed at the box office and was unwelcome to the Studio that had produced it, despite positive reviews and praise for the performances of Gable, Monroe, and Montgomery Clift.

The novel describes the film as having a rough integrity and presents its famous performers as figures who seem to have come undone. Their faces remain recognizable, but their screen characters make that recognition feel uncertain: Gay Langland prompts the thought that he might once have been Gable, Roslyn Tabor that she might once have been Monroe, and the ruined rodeo champion Perce Howland that he might once have been Clift. Gable’s death therefore shadows not only the film’s production but also its effect. The work’s worn-down figures and the knowledge of the actor’s death make the distance between screen identity and mortal person especially stark.

Blame and Public Grief

After Gable’s death, his widow accused Monroe of being directly responsible for the heart attack, citing the delays and complications she had caused during The Misfits and the resulting stress. At a public appearance, Monroe was asked about Gable, including how close their friendship had been and what she thought of the accusation. She managed more or less coherent answers to those questions, but fell silent when asked about her former husband, the Playwright. The contrast registers both the public pressure surrounding Gable’s death and the boundary of what Monroe could discuss in that setting.

The appearance also took place against the news of Monroe’s divorce from the Playwright after four years of marriage. Reports described her as fragile and thinner by between five and six kilograms, and attributed states of anxiety to the divorce and to the tragic loss of her friend and fellow actor Gable. The account does not establish that production stress caused his death. Instead, it shows how the accusation attached itself to Monroe at a moment when she was already being questioned about private pain, while her connection to Gable was reduced to a public dispute over responsibility.

Monroe’s Recollection and the Meaning of the Loss

In a later recollection, Monroe connects the public treatment of her past to a paid calendar photo shoot she had done at nineteen. She had received fifty dollars for the pictures; the resulting calendar became the best-selling of all time and, in her view, nearly ruined her career. She describes herself as disappointed rather than embittered or angry. That distinction matters: her account does not deny the damage associated with the photographs, but refuses to let anger define her response.

Her thoughts then turn to the child she might have had and to Gable’s death. She remembers that some people blamed Marilyn, while insisting that she loved Gable as a friend and that he had suffered from heart trouble before filming began. Her explanation counters the widow’s allegation with a specific point about chronology, not a claim that the production was easy or that Gable was well. She calls him by the familiar honorific Mr. Gable, and says that she misses him terribly—more, she reflects, than she misses her marriage or marriages. The comparison gives the loss an intimate measure: even amid the collapse of her marriages and the scrutiny of her career, Gable’s absence remains distinct and profound. His death thus persists in the novel not as a settled verdict on blame, but as a collision between an actor’s known illness, the pressures of a troubled production, and Monroe’s enduring affection for a friend.