Clark Gable: Tormented Star [Hardcover]

David Bret (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 14, 2007

Clark Gable was the archetypal Hollywood gentleman, the kind of man red-blooded women lusted after, and who their envious husbands yearned to be. Yet as David Bret reveals, Gable was also bisexual, a facet of his complex persona that was airbrushed out in an age when such men were invariably mocked as effete and lily-livered. Bret recounts Gable's two failed marriages to women who turned a blind eye towards his affairs with men, such as the actors Earl Larimore, Johnny Mack Brown, William Haines, and Rod LaRocque — men whom Gable outed to the press to prevent himself from being outed. Bret also reveals exclusively that Gable's wartime "heroics," which saw him promoted through the ranks from private to major in less than a year, were no more than an elaborate publicity stunt, which subsequently embarrassed the U.S. government. Bret draws on a wealth of unpublished material to examine every aspect of Clark Gable's career and personal life, telling his story as it has never been told before — wholly uncensored, with accuracy and passion.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Bret's work is the epitome of tabloid titillation...Bret's expose is fascinating."--"Roanoke Times," 5/11/08

About the Author

David Bret's first biography, The Piaf Legend, was published in 1988 to great critical acclaim. Biographies of the French star Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier followed, and Marlene Dietrich, one of his closest friends, was the subject of his fourth book, fully authorized by Marlene and published shortly after her death. Since then he has written successful biographies of Morrissey, Gracie Fields, Freddie Mercury, Tallulah Bankhead, and Maria Callas.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (December 14, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078672093X
• ISBN-13: 978-0786720934
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,219,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"Amazon USA is Janus, pure and simple. You get 5-stars reviews and tremendous praise...or you get 1-star reviews which are so poisonous (the July 2011 one for "Valentino", by Markus King being a prime example)that they defy belief. If someone leaves a 5-star review, you can guarantee that a poison review will pop up the next day. The homophobic Valentino female fans are the worst--easy to discern here, they cannot accept that he was gay, loathe anyone who suggests that he might have been, and have set up a hotbed of loathing against this author. There is of course a maxim to all of this: if Bret's books were SO bad, how come that he has been publishing for a quarter-century, and outselling ALL of his rivals?

Diary For 2011:
"Elizabeth Taylor: The Lady, The Lover, The Legend", April, to be followed by special foreign language mass-printings (Poland, Russia, Sweden, China, Japan), September-December.

"Freddie Mercury: Too Young, Too Soon", September.

Born in Paris in November 1954, Bret published his first biography, "The Piaf Legend", in 1988. His other bestsellers include biographies of Maria Callas, Mario Lanza, Gracie Fields, Elizabeth Taylor, Rudolph Valentino, George Formby, Rock Hudson, and around twenty more. His two biographies of Morrissey have sold in excess of 150,000 copies in the UK alone.

Bret loathes fan forums, another reason for the one-star reviews:
"They place their idols on pedestals, but they see the idols only as THEY want to see them, not as they really were. Really, I am SO flattered that they can devote so much time to attacking me, and it is such fun attacking them back--though of course they do not like having a taste of their own medicine!"

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A One Star Rating Is One Star Too Much, December 15, 2007

By 

Gail K. Powers "Abra" (Harbor Country, Mi,N. Naples, FL, Chicago area) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Clark Gable: Tormented Star (Hardcover)

The first reviewer accurately described this book as trash. I couldn't agree more for exactly the same reasons. If the people who were discussed in this book were alive today, the author David Brett and his publisher would be put out of business after all the lawsuits were settled against them. Nothing in this book is factual AND new. What is new is so highly inflamatory and questionable that it amazes me that it ever appeared in print as non-fiction.
Having read Brett's last two books on Joan Crawford and Valentino, I honestly expected exactly what I got. Fortunately, for the price of a cup of coffee I read this at my local bookstore and didn't waste my money. Brett is incapable of throwing a book together without relying heavily on movie magazine articles and other people's research and/or previously published pieces. That is where his 'facts' begin and end. Then he conjures up some good stories which involve people who have long been dead and cannot sue him for slander. Unfortunately, Brett can't even get his dates right and has a serious problem with places, too. He refers to Gable attending an event at the 'Bilton'. Guess he meant to say the 'Biltmore'. As for Gable's ranch in Encino, it becomes 'Encinal'. Brett also points out that Franchot Tone and Joan Crawford were originally going to be included in an article about Hollywood's Unmarried Couples except he failed to realize that they had already been married for quite some time. Brett also states that Clark Gable rests between Carole Lombard and Kay Gable at Forest Lawn Memorial Park's Great Mausoleum. Totally false as Kay Gable was interred a few tiers away from Clark.
The lowest blow comes in the last chapter when Brett questions Gable's son's paternity and the morals of Kay Gable.
Please don't buy this book. I'd hate to see anyone make money off of this trash.

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Unworthy, December 30, 2007

By 

Vince Arroyo - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clark Gable: Tormented Star (Hardcover)

David Bret's biography of Clark Gable was unworthy of its subject. What could have been a juicy, but interesting biography is instead a complete waste of time. Gable, one of Hollywood's most enduring stars, is missing from this book. After reading the book I seem to have learned absolutely nothing about Gable. Bret offers little if any insight into what Gable was like as a person. He instead spends countless pages describing his movies and when he does get around to any insights they are brief and rushed descriptions.
The worst aspect of this book is the writing. Often I found myself having to reread entire sections because of the illogical sequencing---within a paragraph! Bret would often reference someone or something that he forgot to clarify beforehand. It was maddening.
The book also seems to have not been edited; there were many basic spelling and grammar errors that an elementary student would have caught.

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars INSANITY, January 11, 2008

By 

Arno O'Thames (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clark Gable: Tormented Star (Hardcover)

A well-known definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over, yet all the while expecting a different result. Well, David Bret, British chronicler of such celebrity lives as Valentino, Morrissey, Elvis, Errol Flynn, Joan Crawford, and Edith Piaf, has done it again. As in Camus' famous essay on the myth of Sisyphus, he's pushed the rock all the way to the summit of the mountain, only to have it stop, teeter, and then roll back down to the bottom, crushing him along the way. Once again, despite all his attempts to win some sort of respectability, he has provided the world with yet another model of how not to go about writing a biography. He seems to think that by continually assailing the book stalls with questionable attempts at recreating past lives, he may yet acquire, by sheer attrition, a favourable reputation.

He is sadly deluded. His whole enterprise banks on the fact that when dealing with the dead, there are no laws of criminal libel. The dead have no rights or recourse of redress to their reputations. However, there should, and must be, a law against criminal ineptitude. Libeling the dead aside, Bret's books characteristically exhibit the equally serious offences of terrible writing, frequent misprints, misspellings,
misstatements of fact, bad taste, and - worst of all - an almost supernatural lack of acquaintance with correct research methods. All of which means that if you are a serious-minded person who wants to discover something about a major film star of the past, buy CLARK GABLE: TORMENTED STARS at your own peril. You will learn almost nothing about William Clark Gable, figure of Hollywood history, but everything about David Bret, frustrated celebrity hanger-on and would-be literary mover and
shaker. In this case there will be some moving and shaking, but it will be the moving and shaking of the reader's head in disgust, followed by its removal to the nearest toilet for vomiting.

Despite the claims of his misguided publisher, this is not a biography. Like his other books, it is a diary of his own homoerotic imaginings projected onto a dead celebrity. The dust jacket of the book claims: "Bret draws on a wealth of unpublished material to examine every aspect of Clark Gable's career and personal life, telling story as it has never been told before . . . ." Okay, at least the second part is true. Nobody has yet - for good reason - had the audacity to claim that Hollywood man's man Clark Gable, at the beginning of his film career, was a male prostitute, and that he had numerous prolonged affairs with men. The first part, however, is patently misleading. CLARK GABLE: TORMENTED STARS is a tired rehash of material from other books and fan magazines, mangled by Mr. Bret's personal proclivities, and peppered with his trademark salacious tidbits of sexual shock-talk. And if the book draws upon any material that's "unpublished," it's only unpublished because Mr. Bret has just recently thought it up.

Why a publishing house that cared a fig about its reputation would touch anything with David Bret's name on it continues to be one of the unsolved mysteries of our day. With a little digging perhaps the mystery might be solved, but then the question becomes: Who cares? Why bother?

My sympathies go out to John Clark Gable and to any others who might be hurt by this vile, bungling, utterly contemptible piece of trash.