Since my last post about the DVD of Sylvia with Gable in Hawaii and with Doug at the races, I’ve been looking at my photo collection and discovered several stills of Sylvia at the track. It seems she rather enjoyed horse racing.

There are two where she’s in a group. One is a copy given to me by Keri Leigh of the Fairbanks Museum with Silky, Doug and the Plunketts from the 1930s. And the other went up for auction on eBay but quickly shot out of my price range, due to the fact that Sylvia and Doug were in a group that included Mr. And Mrs. Jack Warner and Marlene Dietrich.

The two I own are both of Sylvia by herself—one younger and one older. In the older shot, she’s got a cigarette holder in one hand and some sort of furry creature on her lap. She looks hot and I remember Miami to be insanely humid. The Associated Press caption says it was taken in February of 1949 at Hialeah Park Race Track and calls her the former Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks. It ran again on December 21st, 1949 when she became the fourth wife of Clark Gable.

I got the younger shot of her at the races from my uncle, Gene. She’s smiling into the camera, the shadow of her hat shading her eyes. Her clothing places it somewhere in the 1930s. The look on her face leads me to believe she knew the photographer and that it was a snapshot taken by someone intimate, not a professional. It could have been Fairbanks or perhaps her lover, racecar driver Tim Birkin.

I found the negative in Gene’s belongings after he died in December 2001. I was creating a photo collage for his funeral and ran onto it in the bottom of a box of pictures and postcards. He used it in an ad that I found at the Academy Library for his restaurant, Stratton’s Grill in the 1980s. In it he told a short story about his travels with Sylvia in Paris and the South of France. It was the only trace of her I could find from their long friendship.