Clark Gable's
Mercedes Benz
300Sc Cabriolet
A man who loved his automobiles, the late American film legend was the proud owner of two 1930's specially built Duesenberg Speedsters. He also owned a 300SL Gull-wing, and a sporty Jaguar XK120, a gift from MGM, but it was the tobacco-brown 300Sc Cabriolet with cognac leather interior that became his favorite.
The Cabriolet was elegant and manly in fashion, yet quite unpretentious for the era. Inordinately proud of the car, Gable never permitted anyone to drive it but himself. At the 1956 studio premiere of the Warner Brothers film Giant, Gable and his wife, Kay, decided to forgo the studio's customary Cadillac limousine and instead arrived in the new Mercedes 300Sc.
Gable purchased the Cabriolet from Auto Stiegler, the Beverly Hills Mercedes-Benz dealership. Virtually hand-built to order, the S and Sc were more expensive than any other Mercedes-Benz models. At $12,500, the Sc cost nearly twice as much as the 300SL and much more than any American luxury car. For example, in 1957 a Cadillac Eldorado cost $6,648.
Flying in the face of progress, as only Mercedes-Benz could, the luxurious 30S and Sc preserved the classic dignity of the late 1930s, blending it with refined body styling and the proud upright grill shell and silver star ornament that had been a Daimler-Benz tradition since 1926.
Among the rarest of Mercedes' early postwar cars, teh 300S and Sc Series' production came to a mere 760, built between 1952 and 1958. In a decade of mass production when cars were being turned out as quickly as assembly line workers could throw them together, it was almost beyond reason that Mercedes-Benz would build fewer than 50 examples of a single model. Of the scant number of 300Sc models produced from September 1955 to April 1978, a total 200, 98 were couples, 53 were roadsters, and only 49 were cabriolets such s the car purchased by Clark Gable. The 300S and Sc marked the passing, not only of a time but of an era. Never again would Mercedes-Benz produce automobiles like these.
When Gable died of a heart attack in 1960, after completing the film The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe, Kay parked the car in the garage of their San Fernando Valley home and kept it there for the better part of 20 years. She finally sold it to Bruce Meyer in 1982.