Clark Gable was always known as something of a he-man in the movies. Women wanted to date him while men wanted to be just like him; able to throw a punch, beat the baddies and claim the woman all in one fell swoop. But while his tough guy attitude was mainly for the sake of his film roles, towards the end of the 1930s he was able to show the world just how hard he actually was when faced with an intruder right in the middle of his real-life home.
At the end of July 1939, Clark Gable and his new wife, actress Carole Lombard, were at their beloved ranch at 4545 Petit Street, Encino. They had been dating and secretly living together for some time but had not married earlier because of the reluctance of Gable’s wife Ria to divorce her estranged husband. But now everything was above board and the two actors were happily living together, doing up the house and making a home for themselves. However, it very nearly became a murder scene on the morning of 31 July, when Gable waved goodbye to his wife on her way to the studio, before heading out of the house in order to dig ditches in the orchard.
What seemed like a normal, run-of-the-mill day was actually not quite what it seemed, as some time during the previous night, a young man by the name of Willard Broski had come to the ranch and begun peering into the couple’s windows. Without anyone noticing what he was up to, Broski eyed up the impressive set of rifles and guns that Gable kept in his private gun room, and admired various other possessions as he gawped through the windows.
Seeing an opportunity to make some money, the eighteen-year-old man decided he was going to help himself to Gable’s firearms, but there was too much going on at the property to enable him to get in and out without being seen. Incredibly, it was at that point that instead of just going home, the young man actually decided to stay on site until morning and made his way to the garage where he encountered the Gables’ guard dog asleep inside the car. Thankfully what could have been a bloody situation actually ended peacefully, as somehow Broski was able to make friends with the dog and actually fell asleep in the car with the hound curled up beside him. This almost unbelievable turn of events led Carole Lombard and Clark Gable to later sarcastically rename the boxer, “Old Dependable”.
The next morning, while Clark Gable was out in the orchard, Broski exited the garage and watched the kitchen windows. Eventually, the cook, Fanny Jacobson, came to the door in order to let out the cat, and while her back was turned for just a moment, Broski took the chance to enter the home. When Fanny turned back into the kitchen and saw the intruder, the shocked woman immediately asked what he was doing there. He told her that he was a friend of Gable and had come to visit, which was something she took to be an out-and-out lie.
Fanny tried not to let the man know she was nervous and instead asked him to leave the house which he did. She then went to find her boss but while she was gone, the butler, William Mildner, went out of the back door and not knowing that there was an intruder on the ranch, he left it ajar. Unbelievably, Broski still had not taken the hint that he wasn’t welcome and seeing the door open, decided to enter after the butler had gone. He then snooped around the ground floor for a few moments, had a good look around Gable’s gun room and then tiptoed upstairs to see what he could find up there.
Meanwhile, out in the orchard, a ring that Gable was wearing proved to be something of a nuisance while he was digging, so he retired from the garden to go back into the house and rid himself of it. At this point Fanny Jacobson was still looking for the actor and had not yet caught up with him by the time he had left the orchard. This meant that while walking upstairs Gable had no idea that there was an intruder in the house or that there was anything wrong at all. Feeling somewhat hot after digging the orchard all morning, he decided to take an impromptu shower and began taking off his jewellery in the mirrored dressing room. It was at that point that the actor was shocked to see a figure disappearing behind a closet door.
“I yelled for the intruder to come out,” Gable later testified, and at that point, the door slowly opened and Broski entered the room. The actor was shocked to discover the intruder and even more so when he noticed one of his own guns sticking out of his jacket. Without a second thought – and living up to his he-man reputation – Gable wasted no time in showing his displeasure. “I let him have it behind the ear,” he later told reporter Peter Martin of the Saturday Evening Post. According to court records he testified that in order to protect himself, Gable grabbed Broski, threw him to the floor and took the gun away from him. “That’s about all there was to it,” he added, very matter-of-factly.
Gable demanded the young man leave the bedroom and accompany him downstairs, to which the intruder apparently took great exception. Instead of coming quietly, he amazingly refused point blank to leave the bedroom, a decision which both confused and infuriated the already stressed Gable. When the man continued to resist, the actor finally lost his patience, grabbed the undeterred Broski by the collar and proceeded to drag him downstairs and into the kitchen. “It was a bouncy drag,” Gable later exclaimed.
Once in the kitchen, the actor let go of Broski and noticed that the young man was little more than a kid, “He didn’t look more than twenty-one,” Gable told Peter Martin.
“Why are you here?” Gable demanded, to which Broski replied that he was in need of some money.
“Well, you have a peculiar way of asking for it,” Gable told him. “There are better ways.”
Seeing how young the intruder was, Gable decided to go easy on him and began lecturing Broski on why it was wrong to enter a person’s house and snoop around. Telling him that there was no way he should be doing things like this to other people, the actor asked Broski, “Aren’t you sorry?”
“No!” snapped the burglar and made a break for the door. He wasn’t quick enough, however, and Gable tackled him to the ground and called the police. “If he had shown any remorse I wouldn’t have called the cops,” he later said.
The young man was carted off to the local station, where he was photographed by reporters behind bars and dressed smartly in a suit, shirt and tie. Later Gable was called to testify against Broski in a Van Nuys courtroom, where he was appearing on a burglary charge. Accompanying the actor was Carole Lombard, their cook Fanny and butler William, who all sat in the spectators’ gallery and watched as Gable calmly told everyone in the court what had happened.
Eventually, the judge bound Broski over on a burglary charge and told him to come back to court on 19 August to be arraigned. Gable never heard from the young man again, but did surprisingly sympathize with him. “I am sorry it happened,” he told reporters outside the courtroom. “He’s only a boy who got off on the wrong foot. I hope he gets off without too much trouble.”