Tag Archives: hollywood

The Oatman Honeymoon That Never Was

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The Oatman Hotel.
The Oatman Hotel.

One of the most enduring stories on Route 66 is that film stars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their honeymoon at the Oatman Hotel in Oatman, Arizona. Mention Oatman and this so-called fact will be trotted out. There’s just one problem.

It never happened.

Despite the hotel still having the ‘Gable and Lombard honeymoon suite’ on display, despite town even having produced commemorative postcards in the past, despite hundreds of tourists insisting the story is true, it isn’t. It seems that it was a novel piece of flummery on the part of a past hotelier to bring in more business to his establishment and his town, although it’s uncertain when the story was concocted.

On March 28, 1939, Clark Gable was filming scenes for ‘Gone With The Wind’ when he discovered he wouldn’t be needed on set the next day. Rather than a relaxing day at the ranch he and Carole Lombard had bought in Encino, California, he telephoned Carole and suggested they elope. The pair had been seeing each other for three years, but the relationship had only been made public in 1938 when Gable’s divorce to his previous wife, Houston socialite Maria Langham, was finalised.

They drove through the night with Otto Winkler, an MGM publicist, whose main contribution to the trip was that he had a new car without license plates, allowing the trio to travel without being spotted by press and fans.

St John’s Methodist Church in Kingman, now the Public Defender’s Office.

The afternoon of March 29, 1939, was a typically uneventful afternoon for Kingman court clerk Viola Olsen – until two of the most famous stars in the world appeared in her office. “I’d like to get a marriage license,” Viola reported Gable as saying. Then he asked who could marry them. A breathless Viola recommended the Reverend Kenneth Engle, the pastor of Saint John’s Methodist Episcopal Church on North 5th Street. The pastor recruited his wife and his neighbour, Howard Cate, the high school principal, as witnesses and half an hour later Gable and Lombard were man and wife. Clark wore a blue suit with a white shirt and a patterned tie, while Lombard was dressed in a dove-grey flannel suit made by the designer Irene, along with a polka dot blouse.

Sources vary as to what time the pair were married. Newspapers reported that it was ‘dusk’ when the pair walked into Viola Olsen’s office, others that it was ‘just after 4pm’, while Gable himself later said it was 3.30pm (although bear in mind that the clocks would only just have changed in California) and Lombard’s mother said that newly-weds telephoned her from Reverend Engle’s study at 6.15pm. Regardless of these various times, it’s clear that Lombard and Gable were married in the late afternoon in Kingman.

So, was it straight off to Oatman for their honeymoon? No. Howard Cate would say that the couple were heading for Boulder City, Nevada, but it seems that this was a ploy to throw off any press on their trail. The pair and Otto Winkler set off for Carole’s home on St Cloud Road in Bel Air and arrived there at 3am. That trip today would take you at least five hours but this was 1939; the I-40 interstate was years in the future and it would be the often rough and slow Route 66 all the way. It seems that the Gables set off almost immediately after the wedding and stopped only for gas at Daggett along the way (and possibly food in Needles).

The happy newly-weds.

The next morning they woke at 9am to find reporters and photographers camped outside the house and a press conference was held on the lawn of Carole’s house at around midday. However much you would like the story of the Oatman honeymoon to be true, it would simply be impossible. The pair left Kingman and were home in Los Angeles, some 315 miles of rough road away, ten hours later. No stop in Oatman, no honeymoon.

But that hasn’t stopped the legend rumbling on – and despite that both the Oatman Hotel and an ‘anniversary’ postcard of 1989 cite the date of the marriage as March 18, 1939, some eleven days before it actually took place.

The ‘honeymoon suite’ in the hotel is just hokum. On one chair is, supposedly, Lombard’s wedding gown, a flouncy white affair rather than the tailored grey suit she wore. On the other chair is ‘Lombar’s night gown’. Except it’s pink and, according to Lombard expert Carole Sampeck of the Carole Lombard Archive, ‘Carole never wore pink around Clark (much less a nightgown!) – he loathed that color’.

A board which hangs in the Oatman Motel – note the incorrect date of the marriage.
The pink nightgown that Lombard would never have worn.

The dream marriage was all too short. Travelling back from a war bond rally in Indiana, Lombard decided to fly (rumour has it she felt Gable had a wandering eye when she was away). She, her mother and Otto Winkler took TWA Flight 3. Just after 7am the airplane crashed into Double Up Peak southwest of Las Vegas. Everyone aboard was killed.

The so-called honeymoon suite.

But the myth of the Oatman honeymoon still continues, romance triumphing over truth.

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard in Los Angeles, just hours after their marriage.

THE ENDURING MYTH OF HOTEL EL RANCHO

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Hotel El Rancho as it looked when it opened in 1936.

Hotel El Rancho in Gallup, New Mexico, is as much a draw for tourists as it was when it opened in 1937 and one of the first things anyone is told about the hotel is that it was owned by the brother of the most famous film director of the early 20th century, David Wark ‘DW’ Griffith. Given its history as home to the stars, commemorated today by named rooms and copious photographs through the hotel, it’s easy to see why the idea that RE Griffith was related to such a movie legend has been repeated over and over again, by everyone from the National Parks Service to Wikipedia.

There’s one problem; it isn’t true.

There has always been something that has troubled me about the Griffith connection; I have a degree in film and have researched DW Griffith and I knew that, of his siblings, not one had a name beginning with R. So down the rabbit hole I went.

Rupert Earl Griffith, movie theatre mogul but no relation to DW.

Rupert Earl Griffith was born in 1893 in Hallettville, Texas, the second son of Henry and Minnie Griffith. He had two brothers neither of which were David Wark and his only relationship with DW was that they shared a surname.  In 1920, putting a spell as a grocery salesman and one marriage behind him, RE Griffith – as he would be known for most of his life – found a job working as a commercial salesman in the motion picture industry selling film. He then opened his own theatre before moving to Oklahoma in 1931. From there he began the Griffith Amusement Company with his brothers Louis Clyde and Henry Jefferson, known in the family tradition as ‘LC’ and ‘HJ’.

David Wark Griffith, legendary movie director, but no relation to RE…

Despite the Great Depression, the movie industry – and the Griffith brothers – prospered. By the early 1940s they were the operators of the largest independent chain of theatres in America, owning some 290 picture houses. In 1936 RE had come to Gallup to build the Chief and Navaho theatres; New Mexico was, at that time, very popular with Hollywood filmmakers and Griffith, who adored all things Old West, decided what Gallup needed was a top-notch hotel.

He was right. Hotel El Rancho opened in 1936 and, over the next two or three decades would play host to countless stars. Did DW Griffith ever stay there? It’s quite likely he didn’t, for he had made his last film, the unsuccessful ‘The Struggle’, in 1932, five years before the hotel opened.

RE Griffith also went on to open The Last Frontier hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada (it would be renamed the New Frontier in 1955 and was where Elvis Presley made his Las Vegas debut the following year) which was designed by his nephew William J Moore who owned the El Cortez and Showboat hotels in Vegas. Incidentally, The Last Frontier had originally been planned to be built in Deming, New Mexico, but on a buying trip for the new venture, Griffith and Moore stopped in Las Vegas and realised the potential of the growing city.

The interior of Hotel El Rancho in the 1940s, still instantly recognisable today.

The Last Frontier, Vegas’ first themed hotel, opened its doors in 1942, but RE Griffith would have only months to enjoy its success. On November 24, he died of a second heart attack, days after he had suffered the first at the Beverly Hills Hotel while on a business trip to California. It was just five miles from where DW Griffith would also die of a coronary at the Knickerbocker Hotel in 1948. And the myth continues to persist that they were brothers.