Big ears can be genetic, passed on to children. Ear shape inheritance is complex and may or may not be passed to children. Sometimes large ears may show up in children or wait until grandchildren.

Inheriting large ears can be stressful. A parent with a similar problem sometimes is sensitized by the problem and will seek early plastic surgery correction for their child. To learn more about Clark Gable's large ears please start here.

Big ears can be genetic and passed on to children as in Clark Gable's daughter.

Source: Good Housekeeping, April 1994 v218 n4 p106(6).
Title: Hollywood's hidden love child. (illegitimate daughter of Clark Gable and Loretta Young)
Author: Judy Lewis

By giving me her husband's name, my mother probably thought that people might forget all the rumors surrounding my birth. Hollywood children's birthday parties were grand productions in equally grand mansions. I hated them all. But one birthday party stands out sharply; I was seven. A movie was shown, Walt Disney's Dumbo. When the children started laughing at the baby elephant trying to walk and tripping over his long, flappy ears, something began to stir inside me. Echoes of "cover her ears" rang distantly in my memory. As I was leaving the party, two little girls stood nearby whispering. "Dumbo! Look, it's Dumbo."

They were looking directly at me. "There's Dumbo. Look at Judy's ears. Just like Dumbo's." I ran over to my governess and, grabbing the bonnet out of her hands, I shoved it on my head. When I got home I ran right into my mother's room and burst into tears. "Some girls called me Dumbo. I hate my big ears." She put her arms around me. "It'll be all right, Judy. We'll fix them." Shortly thereafter, I noticed a pile of children's books in her den. "They're all for you, Judy," she said. "You can read them while you're in the hospital."

The first thing I remember when I woke up after the operation was that my entire head was wrapped tightly in bandages. I reached up and tried to tear them off, and I felt a searing, red-hot pain. I screamed. Hands held mine tightly, and I felt a sharp stick. Then nothing. I awoke with the pain again, and my arm was again stuck with a needle. No matter how I cried, "No more sticks," the shots still came, followed by unconsciousness. Even when I came home the pain was not gone. "It hurts," I would cry, and my mother would put her arms around me. "I know it does, but you wanted your ears fixed." Inside, I cried out to her: You didn't tell me it would hurt like this. You just told me you'd fix it. I later learned that my surgeon had told my mother that an operation of this nature was extremely painful. He suggested perhaps it should wait until I was older. But she insisted that now was the right time. The surgery erased my connection with my father.

My ears were his trademark. I also had prominent buck teeth, just as my mother had had, and, instead of waiting until my second teeth came in, she took me to an orthodontist who put braces on my baby teeth. The procedure had to be repeated again when my second teeth came in. I bore both my parents' genetic "marks of Cain" and both had been "fixed."