Actor Clark Gable was a real man among men: tough, rough-and-tumble, and known for his cocksure young characters from Peter Warne in It Happened One Night to Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. Director George Cukor was one of the most famous gay men in Hollywood and was known as a “woman’s director,” coaxing the best performances out of the beautiful starlets he directed.
Cukor was the original director on the set of Gone with the Wind, and stayed with the film through its pre-production stages and screen tests. But before filming could start, he was ungraciously fired from the set, only to be replaced by Victor Fleming at the behest of lead actor Clark Gable. Gable’s reasons for having Cukor canned are the basis for one of the juiciest rumors in Hollywood.
One simple theory is that Gable resented the attention that Cukor lavished on the film’s female leads, Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland, and wanted more of a “man’s” director who could help him deliver his best performance. Then again, there may have been a deeper reason: Cukor knew a secret about Gable that the actor was eager to bury. So eager that he had the director kicked off the set.
Gable’s secret, if it were true, is one that would make the conservative actor understandably uncomfortable. According to gossip at the time, Gable was forced to work as a “rent boy” at the beginning of his career and had sexually serviced silent movie actor William Haines around 1925. Cukor and Haines were close enough that the director would know all about the affair, and Gable was paranoid that Cukor would spill his secret. Whatever the case, Cukor left the film, and the rumors around Clark Gable remain a closely guarded secret.
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