Person:Judith Young (4)

Biography for Judy Lewis [1]

Judy Lewis was born and brought up in Los Angeles. She's the daughter of actors Loretta Young and Clark Gable. She graduated from Marymount High School in 1953. She then moved to New-York and started her acting career when she landed a small part on Kraft Television Theatre. She appeared on Broadway in Jean Kerr's "Mary, Mary" and became a featured performer on a number of daytime series such as "The Secret Storm" and "General Hospital". Judy has had a successful career behind the camera as well. She produced the daytime soap "Texas" and also won a Writer's Guild award for her work on "Search for Tomorrow". In the 1980's, Judy went on to earn a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She then took a few years off to write. Her first book "Uncommon Knowledge" was published and she became an acclaimed author. She proceeded to start working in the field she always was fascinated with: Psychology. She received her Marriage and Family, Child Counseling license (M.F.C.C) in the early 90's. She is now finally able to use her talent, her love of introspection, and her awareness in spirituality to help others. She has one daughter, Maria, and two grandsons, Michael and Gregory.

Judy Lewis, daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable, dies at 76

By Elaine Woo, Published: December 1, 2011

Judy Lewis, a psychotherapist and former actress who wrote a book about her complicated heritage as the illegitimate daughter of Hollywood stars Loretta Young and Clark Gable, died of cancer Nov. 25 in Gladwyne, Pa. She was 76.

The death was confirmed by her daughter, Maria Tinney Dagit.

Brought up in Bel-Air as Young’s adopted daughter, Mrs. Lewis was an adult when she learned that the glamorous leading lady and Gable, the dashing star of “Gone With the Wind,” had conceived her during a brief affair in the mid-1930s.

Fearful of scandal, Young hid the pregnancy and later fabricated the adoption. Gable never acknowledged that Mrs. Lewis was his daughter, although he visited her once when she was 15, an experience that Mrs. Lewis recounted in her 1994 memoir, “Uncommon Knowledge.”

Young was single and 22 and Gable married and 34 when they co-starred in “The Call of the Wild” (1935), based on the Jack London novel.

The rest of their story unfolds like a B movie. Young, the unmarried, devout Catholic known for playing wholesome roles, discovers she is pregnant as she is set to star in director Cecil B. DeMille’s religious-themed film “The Crusades.” She goes abroad to avoid gossip and returns to Los Angeles to give birth in secrecy. Then she turns the infant over to a home run by nuns, retrieves her daughter before she turns 2, fakes the adoption and raises the child under a cloud of lies.

“I had to write this book,” Mrs. Lewis told the Los Angeles Times in 1994 when her memoir was released. “I don’t think anyone knows what it’s like not to be acknowledged by your own parents.”

She was born Nov. 6, 1935, in a little house in Venice, Calif., where Young hid during the last weeks of the pregnancy. Mrs. Lewis spent the first months of her life there. According to her memoir, Gable visited her there and was so appalled to find her sleeping in a drawer that he took $400 out of his pocket and told Young to “buy her a decent bed.”

Judy was 5 when her mother married radio producer Tom Lewis. Although she had his last name, he never adopted her and treated her poorly. Young apparently never told Tom Lewis that Gable was Judy’s father, but it was an open secret in Hollywood - one that, amazingly, never reached young Judy’s ears, because her friends had been instructed not to tell her.

The physical hints, however, were difficult to ignore. Mrs. Lewis had Gable’s broad smile and his famously prominent ears. She hid her ears under bonnets until she was 7, when she had surgery to pin them back.

One day in 1950, Mrs. Lewis came home from Marymount Girls Catholic School to find the screen idol standing in her front hallway.

Over the next hour, Gable sat beside her on the sofa and engaged her in conversation about herself. Before he left, he thanked her for a lovely visit. Then, she recalled, he “bent down and, cupping my face in his two big hands, kissed me lightly on the forehead.”

She never saw him again.

Not until several years later did she begin to grasp the meaning of the mysterious visit. Two weeks before her wedding, she panicked and told her fiance, Joe Tinney, that she could not marry him because “I don’t know who I am.” She said he told her, “Judy, don’t worry about it. I know everything about you. You’re Clark Gable’s daughter.” She was astounded.

It took her eight years, when she was 31 and appearing on the soap opera “The Secret Storm,” to confront her mother. Young, after throwing up in the bathroom, told her that Gable indeed was her father. Then she made Mrs. Lewis promise to tell no one.

In the 1980s, after a two-decade acting career that included appearances on Broadway and dozens of TV shows, Mrs. Lewis became a marriage and family therapist, working with foster children and pregnant teens.

Her marriage to Tinney ended in divorce in 1972. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two grandsons and three half-brothers, including John Clark Gable, who was born after his father died of a heart attack while filming “The Misfits” in 1960.

When Mrs. Lewis’s book came out, her mother publicly denied Gable’s paternity. Estranged for years, the two women reconciled shortly before Young died in 2000. Young’s silence about the affair with Gable was not broken until a few months after her death in “Forever Young,” an authorized biography by Joan Wester Anderson.

Mrs. Lewis never had a chance to ask Gable the questions that swirled in her head for years: Did he want a child? What was he thinking that day they met? Would he have wanted to help raise her if her mother hadn’t pushed him away? She said that whenever she watched Gable’s loving scenes with his on-screen daughter in “Gone With the Wind,” she cried.

“It’s very sad to me,” she told the London Daily Telegraph in 2002, “because he’s so dear with her. I pretend it’s me.”

- Los Angeles Times

1. ↑ ^1.0 1.1 Lewis, Judy. "Uncommon Knowledge", Pocket Books, New York, 1994, pages 59, 61.
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3} Judy Lewis, in Find A Grave: Mount Vernon Cemetery, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania
   Memorial# 81231120, Nov 29, 2011.

   Birth: Nov. 6, 1935, Venice, Los Angeles County, California, USA
   Death: Nov. 25, 2011, Gladwyne, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, USA
   Burial: Mount Vernon Cemetery, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, USA

   Actress. The daughter of legendary actor Clark Gable and actress Loretta Young, she would not know of her parentage until later in life. She was raised by Young as her adopted daughter because her parents feared their careers would be destroyed by scandal (Gable was married and Young, a devout Catholic, could not acknowledge the affair); she took the last name Lewis when her mother remarried. She met Gable only once, at the age of fifteen, during a visit with Young at their home. It would be her fiance who told her Gable was her father and at first she refused to believe it. Eventually she revealed the truth in her bestselling memoir "Uncommon Knowledge" (1994). In spite of her mother's objections, Lewis's own career in entertainment began in television during the late 1950s, with roles in the programs "Kitty Foyle", "Perry Mason" and "77 Sunset Strip", and a featured part in the short-lived series "Outlaws" (1961 to 1962). In 1964 she inherited the role of Tiffany Richards in the successful Broadway production of "Mary, Mary", and during that period began playing her most accomplished part of Susan Ames Dunbar Carver in the soap opera "The Secret Storm" (1964 to 1971). Another prominent role would be Barbara Vining in "General Hospital" (1975 to 1976, 1978). After departing from the entertainment arena, she attained her bachelors and masters degrees in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University. She later practiced psychotherapy in the Los Angeles-area. She died from cancer. (bio by: C.S.)

3. ↑ Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, California (online archive)
   Obituary of Judy Lewis.
4. ↑ Lewis, Judy. "Uncommon Knowledge", Pocket Books, New York, 1994, page 168.