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Whether or not Joan had fallen in love with Clark Gable, her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was probably doomed from the start. In many ways Doug was a spoiled, isolated child of privilege who had married a comparatively sophisticated older woman who had pulled herself up by her bootstraps. For all his charm and levity, Fairbanks was, emotionally speaking, a boy who'd had everything handed to him at birth-by contrast , Joan had had to struggle for the same things. "Looking back," Joan remembered, "it would probably be unfair of me to say Doug was superficial and I was so world-weary, but frankly that's the way that it seemed sometimes. Doug didn't know anything about struggle, he'd never wanted for anything, he knew so little of the world outside his tiny sphere, and didn't seem all that interested. No wonder he was content. But I wanted it all. Sitting home waiting for the phone to ring and his vapid friends to come over was not for me." Although Joan wrote in her memoirs that it was Doug who wanted to go out all the time and she who wanted quiet evenings at home, Joan increasingly found married life at "El Jodo" a tiresome strain. The puppyish antics of callow Doug made him seem like an adolescent, especially when compared with the manly charms and unprivileged directness of Clark Gable, who had come from a background very similar to Joan's. Gable was the grown man; Doug, the emotional teenager. After a while, Joan grew tired of Doug, the way a child does of a pet that requires more care and attention than the child had bargained for. Another bone of contention was that, despite the career inroads made by Doug Jr. resulting from the publicity lavished on his relationship with Joan, he was not as big a star as his wife. Doug was oldfashioned , suggesting that Joan give up her career and let him be the sole bread-winner-a sure sign that he never really understood his wife at all. Then there was the lack of children. "I didn't need another child," Joan said, "I already had one in Doug." In her autobiography, Joan mentioned several miscarriages; privately she admitted that on at least one occasion she had had an abortion. She hid this fact from Doug, just as she hid her affair with Gable. By the time Doug learned of her involvement with her frequent costar, he was indulging in extracurricular activities of his own. It has been suggested that Louis B. Mayer forced Joan to stop seeing Gable, insisting that she make her marriage to Doug Jr. workor else-but this is unlikely. The press of that era was not as rapacious as the supermarket scandal sheets of today. To be sure, there were blind items about Joan and Gable in some of the columns, but Mayer rightly figured that without solid evidence these stories would only serve to titillate most of their fans, not alienate them. In other words, publicity was publicity. Even when the columnists reported, in 1933, that Joan and Doug were divorcing, it meant still more publicity-plus sympathy for Joan, the working class heroine whose Cinderella marriage had failed. Indeed, the fans may have reasoned that Doug Jr. was, like his father, a little too "swashbuckling." Those pesky Gable rumors? Who could blame Joan if she turned to the manly arms of Gable for consolation and comfort ? Too bad the handsome lug was married. Her fans wondered, would little Joan ever find happiness? Joan's father-in-law, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who had always been pathologically jealous of his son (despite the show of closeness he had with him in later years), had actually counseled Joan to divorce Doug Jr., if she was that unhappy. Doug Sr. figured that if he couldn't keep his son from having a successful career, at least he could ensure that he didn't hold on to the hot number he himself wasn't man enough to handle. As Doug Sr.'s own marriage to Mary Pickford was falling apart, Joan assumed that he was simply identifying with her situation and speaking from the heart, without ulterior motives, but in later years she began to wonder. It didn't matter. Even without her father-in-law's approval, she would undoubtedly have divorced Doug Jr. in time. Doug Jr. still spoke well of Joan months before his death...

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