On 12 August 1942 Clark Gable was sworn in as a forty-two-year-old private in the U.S. Army. Gable claimed that he had "no interest in acting as long as the war is going on." His wife, Carole Lombard, had been killed in a plane crash earlier in the year. She was flying back from a war-bond rally, Hollywood's first "casualty" of war. Gable joined the ranks of many of Hollywood's elites who had enlisted voluntarily in the first months of the war. Hollywood stars were a kind of royalty providing the role-model behavior and the occasional scandal worthy of the princes and princesses of Europe. Gable withstood the rigors of Officers Candidate school and contributed to an army air force film, Wings Up (1943), about the training program. Within weeks of the bombing of Pearl Harbor," stars-such as James Stewart and Douglas Fairbanks,' Jr., had...