Clark Gable & Loretta Young's Secret Daughter Dies At 76

Today’s stars constantly praise “Old Hollywood” glamour, but they conveniently forget about the nasty side that involved concealing your scandalous pregnancy and, in order to keep up appearances, pretending your “love child” was adopted. Judy Lewis was an actress in the ’60s and ’70s and later became a clinical psychologist, but she’s best known as the daughter of Clark Gable and Loretta Young — though she didn’t learn who her parents were until she was 31. This week she died of lymphoma at age 76.

After Young got pregnant during her affair with Gable on the set of The Call of the Wild, she shipped off to Europe until the girl was born — then left her with various caretakers. 19 months later she had her publicist announce that she’d adopted a daughter, and Young refused to acknowledge that she and Gable were her parents until Lewis confronted her as an adult. Young once told Lewis, “Wouldn’t you be [unhappy] if you were a movie star and the father of your child was a movie star and you couldn’t have an abortion because it was a mortal sin?” Her only public admittance that she and Gable had a child was in her posthumously published autobiography.