Uncommon knowledge

About this book

Judy Lewis was in her thirties before she discovered what was common knowledge among the Hollywood elite - that she was the daughter of Clark Gable and Loretta Young. The two had fallen in love while on location filming Call of the Wild - but Gable was a married man and, according to Young's Catholic beliefs and Hollywood's strict moral code, he was off limits. On the brink of mega-stardom herself and terrified that her romance with Gable would ruin their careers, Young gave birth to Judy in secret - later "adopting" her from the orphanage to which she had been sent as an infant. While growing up, Judy, who met "Mr. Gable" once, was never told that he was her father. . Set against the backdrop of Hollywood in its heyday, Uncommon Knowledge depicts a world where home movies were filmed by studio cameramen, home was a thirty-eight-room house on a five-hundred-acre estate in the heart of Beverly Hills, friends were the children of Bing Crosby or Joan Bennett, and getting off a train could be delayed by a mob of fans clamoring to get your mother's autograph. But it is also the story of a lonely little girl who felt she didn't belong anywhere, and who comforted herself by sitting in a dressing room full of her mother's clothes. Hungry for her mother's attention, Judy felt even more excluded after Young's marriage to advertising executive Tom Lewis - a martinet who once said to her two half-brothers, "Judy's adopted. She's not part of our family." Loretta Young was a controlling woman who had little time for the daughter whom she later described as "a mortal sin" - a child w…

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