Pair Dubbed ‘A Match Made in Heaven’

The years that movie stars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent in the San Fernando Valley were some of their happiest--and for Gable, their most challenging.

The pair got married shortly after Gable’s epic turn as Rhett Butler in “Gone With the Wind” in 1939, during Lombard’s run of uproarious screwball comedies typified by Howard Hawks’ “Twentieth Century” in 1934. They lived on a 20-acre ranch in Encino and often vacationed at the Malibou Lakeside Lodge, a now-vacant 1920s retreat in Malibou Lake.

Gable and Lombard, both native Midwesterners, savored the Valley’s then-pastoral feel, riding horses and tending livestock on the ranch.

They also recognized the rare successful combination of their Hollywood personalities and were dubbed “a match made in heaven” by columnist Louella Parsons, also a Valley resident.

Among his standout roles, Gable appeared in Frank Capra’s Oscar-sweeping “It Happened One Night” in 1934. Lombard starred in Gregory La Cava’s “My Man Godfrey” and William Wellman’s “Nothing Sacred.”

The scene darkened when Lombard died in a plane crash in January 1942. Although he kept working, Gable never truly recovered from the loss. He started drinking heavily, gained weight and did not have a major postwar hit until his final film, John Huston’s “The Misfits,” released in 1961.

Gable, who subsequently remarried twice, suffered a fatal heart attack in November 1960. He had remained an Encino resident until his death.