Two different Duesenbergs connected to Clark Gable made headlines during Monterey Car Week 2026, and it’s easy to see how the stories get tangled together. A 1935 Duesenberg SSJ Special Speedster that once belonged to Gable won Best of Show at the 75th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance on August 16, according to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance’s own release. Separately, a different Gable-owned Duesenberg — a 1935 Model JN Convertible Coupe — sold at auction days earlier for $9,080,000, per RM Sotheby’s own lot listing.

Key Points

• The Best of Show-winning SSJ Special Speedster is owned by Cincinnati collector Harry Yeaggy and was not offered for sale
• Only two SSJ Special Speedsters were ever built — one for Gable, one for actor Gary Cooper
• The $9.08 million sale was a separate car, the Model JN Convertible Coupe, sold as part of the Sam and Emily Mann Collection at RM Sotheby’s Monterey auction
• The Model JN was custom-bodied for Gable first by Rollston of New York, then restyled by Bohman & Schwartz of Pasadena to his personal specifications
• Duesenberg now holds eight total Best of Show wins at Pebble Beach, more than any other American marque
• Total collector-car auction sales during Monterey Car Week 2026 reached $747.9 million, up 73% year over year, according to a report citing auction data

Yeaggy’s winning SSJ carries a genuinely rare distinction on top of the Gable connection: it’s one of just two SSJ Special Speedsters Duesenberg ever built, both commissioned in 1935 for two of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the era. Gable got one, Cooper got the other. Pebble Beach’s own writeup noted an odd bit of symmetry to this year’s win — the car’s second owner had lived on the Pebble Beach grounds and kept the car for roughly 12 years, making the Best of Show win “a homecoming of sorts” for a car that hadn’t been back in decades.

The Model JN that actually crossed the auction block has its own dense paper trail. Built on one of the final JN-series chassis — one of only four Rollston-bodied convertible coupes on that platform — the car was used personally by Gable and his wife Carole Lombard and appeared in studio promotional photography and the 1938 film “Merrily We Live.” After Gable, it passed through nine identified owners, including the well-known Blackhawk Collection, before Sam and Emily Mann acquired it in 2005. It debuted restored at the 2007 Pebble Beach Concours, where it won the Gwenn Graham Trophy for Most Elegant Convertible, and went on to Best of Show wins at the Meadow Brook and Amelia Island concours before returning to Pebble Beach in 2018 for a class award.

Neither car needed the other’s story to be remarkable on its own — a 91-year-old speedster built for a movie star winning the top prize at America’s most prestigious concours, and a second Gable-owned Duesenberg with its own decorated show history selling for just over $9 million in the same week. The overlap is Gable, not the car.