Loretta Young confirmed that her daughter Judy was fathered by Clark Gable

Most likely, Loretta Young gave birth shortly before filming began on The Crusades. The story of her daughter became one of the more mysterious biographies among the children of Hollywood celebrities, and came to light only shortly before Loretta's death in 2000 at the age of 87. In the 1930s, society circles whispered that the daughter whom Loretta had taken into her home as an orphan was in fact her own child. To her biographer and to several close friends in her last years Loretta confirmed that these rumours were true, as was the fact that Judy's father was Clark Gable. But the child was not the fruit of love or of some piquant romantic affair: Gable had raped Loretta, yet she feared publicity and even blamed herself, and for many years did not regard herself as a victim. Loretta spent the pregnancy in England and returned to provincial America to give birth. She gave up her daughter, after which her mother reunited the family, but the little girl came back in the status of an adopted child. Judy died in 2011 at the age of 76; in 1994 she had published a book in which she shed light on the secret of her origins