About Me
Gretchen Young was born on January 6, 1913 in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was the daughter of Gladys Royal Young and John Earl Young. When she was around 4 her family, minus her father, moved to California and into the home of Gladys' sister. Loretta's father moved to be with them. Later Gladys found him with the maid and told him to get out. His children never saw him alive again. The family moved to a boarding house that Gladys ran. Around that time also she and her cousin went to live with an actress the called Aunt Mazi and these girls who had lived a poor life lived the life of a movie star's daughters. After a year they both went back to their biological mothers. When Loretta was 10 her mother got married again to one of her boarders George Belzer and they had daughter Georgianna two years later. At the age of 14 Loretta answered the phone and the person at the other line who was looking for her sister Polly Ann hired her. Gretchen was under contract, had braces put on her teeth and had her name changed to Loretta. In 1930 Loretta got married to her costar Grant Withers. They eloped to Arizona where the legal age to get married was 16. Loretta was just 17. Less than a year later they got divorced. In 1935 she was considered to be a very successful actress when she made Call of the Wild with a King, Clark Gable. They had an affair, and Loretta became pregnant. Because of the strict morality clauses in their contracts and the fact that Clark was married they could not tell anybody, except her mother, Gladys Royal Belzer. Mother and daughter went to Europe during Loretta's pregnancy and she delivered a healthy baby girl on November 6, 1935, in a house that nobody knew about, but family. Her daughter was brought up thinking that Loretta had adopted her, and did not know Clark Gable was her father until after she had had a child herself. In 1940 Loretta got married again to businessman Thomas Lewis. Even though now her daughter is called Judy Lewis, Tom never adopted her. Four years after they got married Loretta had Christopher Paul Lewis. About a year later Loretta had Peter Charles. Loretta continued to make movies until the early 1950's when she decided to go into television. She was very popular for about eight years and then the show went off the air. In 1960 she tried a new show with a new concept, but that did not work. By that time Loretta was a grandmother. Judy had gotten married about three years before and had a baby girl in 1959. Loretta and Tom Lewis divorced in the early 1960's. Loretta enjoyed retirement. Sleeping late, visiting her son Chris and daughter-in-law Linda. She had traveled a lot. She and her friend Josie Wayne, John's first ex-wife, traveled to India and saw the Taj Mahal. In 1990 she became a great-grandmother when her granddaughter (Judy's daughter) had a boy. Loretta died in 2000 of ovarian cancer.
MyGen
Profile Generator
