Goodbye, Carole

Carole Lombard Gable died 70 years ago today. Amazing to think that it has been that long, as Carole left in her wake films and tales that seem so modern. I’ve often thought you could drop Carole down in this day and age and she wouldn’t miss a beat.

There is no denying that her death infintely shaped Clark Gable’s life from that day on. He was different…and he was never quite the same.

From “The Story Gable Wouldn’t Tell”, Modern Screen magazine, November 1942:

Dorothy Canfield Fisher once wrote a story about a girl whose parents’ love and dependence on each other grew with every passing year. Then her mother died. In the shadow of her father’s desolation, she cried out: “People shouldn’t be happily married. It’s too terrible when one of them goes.”

Of course she was wrong, though in first anguish many might be inclined to agree with her. Cut those three years with Carole out of Clark’s life, take his memories from him, and you’d leave him an infinitely poorer man.

They’d been everything to each other, their devotion more complete than even their closest friends could have foreseen, than they themselves could have foreseen perhaps. They’d both been around. It wasn’t first love for either, but that rarer thing–a perfect blend of love, companionship, undoubtedly treasured the more because they hadn’t found it earlier. Carole went into marriage with the single thought of making Clark happy. His way of life–animals, farming, hunting–hadn’t been hers. She made it hers, knowing he’d be miserable any other way, not caring what way she went so long as it was with him. So they lived on a twenty-two acre ranch, and she hobnobbed with beef and poultry on the hoof and carried pitchers of milk like any farmwife to her lord and master sweating atop his tractor.

Before their marriage Clark had had plenty of friends. Carole had always been the hub of a crowd. Now they were sufficient unto themselves. Not that they turned into solitaries; both were to warm and genial for that. But as one friend put it: “They found something in each other that took care of everything.” they’d spend weeks on the farm, content to see nobody. You couldn’t even get them on the phone.

Clark never wrote letters. The only exception was the letter he wrote once a year on their anniversary to the girl who was living right there in the house with him. Carole wouldn’t work when he was off. he might take it into his head any old time to say, “Let’s go huntin’, Ma.” She wanted to be free to sling their stuff into the station wagon and go. First, second and third she was his wife. Being a movie star could take its chances.

Then came the Friday when he left the studio at five to pick her up at the airport. He raised the top on the car, since she didn’t like it down. With him was a friend whom we’ll call Ed because that’s not his name, and he shrinks from any publicity resulting from Clark’s tragedy.

Ed went in to check while Clark waited in the car. The plane, they told him, would be an hour late, so they drive to a hamburger joint for sandwiches and coffee. Clark was in high spirits, because Ma was coming home. When they got back forty-five minutes later, Ed was informed that the plane had come down at Las Vegas with motor trouble. Clark shook his head. “There must be something wrong.” They returned to the office together.

“It’s all right, Mr. Gable,” the clerk said. “Just a little engine trouble. They’re putting the passengers up at Las Vegas overnight.”

“What hotel?”

“That information hasn’t come through yet.”

“Look, Clark,” said Ed, “why don’t you go home? Maybe Carole’s trying to get you there. I’ll call Las Vegas and find out what hotel they’re stopping at.”

“Come over to the house and do it.”

“No, I’ll do it here.” Why he wanted to do it there he couldn’t have said–call it premonition or natural uneasiness caused by the delay.

He was in the telephone booth, coins in hand, when three men entered the place. He looked at their faces, and knew the worst had happened. Heavily he hung up the receiver and walked out. “How bad is it?”

“Very bad–” They added the few essential details.

He went up to the sky room where and MGM executive was dining. They phoned the studio. Eddie Mannix got the job of driving out to Clark’s house. There had been an accident, he said, that was all they knew. He got back to the airport with Clark as Jill Winkler, wife of the publicity man who’d accompanied Carole, came stumbling out of her car. The radio had blared the news at her as she drive to meet her husband. Clark stiffened. His face went a shade whiter. But his mind refused to accept what his ears heard. His brain was blocked at one point. There had been an accident, that was all they knew, that was all they knew–

The last trip…

The people around him were shadows. All his will was concentrated on getting to wherever Carole was. There were planes on the field, he moved toward them. Someone led him back. Someone said they’d have to charter a plane. It wasn’t easy. Planes were needed for soldiers. At last they managed to get an old crate. Its capacity was limited. There wasn’t room for Ed. He stood on the field, watching it disappear into the sky out of which–short hours or an eternity earlier–they’d been waiting to welcome Carole.

On Sunday Ed went to Las Vegas to bring Jill Winkler home. Otto’s body hadn’t been brought down yet. The regulations were–army first, then women, then male passengers, then the crew. Carole and her mother had been found. Clark refused to leave till they could take Otto back with them. But Jill was prevailed upon to go.

One of the friends who’d accompanied Clark met Ed.
“He hasn’t eaten since we got here. Go see if you can get him to eat.”

“If you can’t, I can’t–”

“Maybe a new face–”

He went in. “Hello, Clark.”

Gable lifted his ravaged face. “Hello.”
His eyes returned to the window. But the sight of Ed seemed to have dragged him back to the incredibly beautiful time when there had been a Carole in the world–back and then forward. He looked up again. ‘We didn’t meet the plane, did we, Ed?”

Ed’s heart turned to water. “No, Clark,” He said quietly, “we didn’t meet the plane.”

Then, a little later, “Want something to eat?”

“No.”
“Mind if I eat something?”
“No.”

He ordered a hamburger sent to him there. Maybe it was a lousy idea, but what could he lose? It worked. “Think you could get me some stewed fruit?” asked Clark. Ed was out of there like a bat out of hell. He wasn’t leaving this to the telephone. With the fruit, he brought back a bottle of milk. Clark finished the bottle, by which time Ed had stealthily introduced another. Clark finished that, too. No general ever got more satisfaction from a well-planned maneuver than strategist Ed.

A crumbled world…

Clark kept himself going till everything was done that had to be done. Otto was buried the day after Carole and her mother. He insisted on going. He went with Jill. Then he relapsed into what seemed a kind of stupor. They couldn’t get him to love; they could hardly get him to speak. He just sat.

Gable’s been rated a tough guy, who could take what blows fate handed out and come back for more. Those who wondered over his collapse are those who confused toughness with lack of deep feeling. Sure, Gable’s tough, none of which precludes the softer emotions. Tenderness is none the less tender when wrapped in a gag. One day there had been Carole, warm, alive, the dear companion of today and all the years to come. Next day there was Carole, a searing pain. She’d woven herself into every fiber of his being. Torn out, he was left bleeding. She’d been the heart of his world. When it stopped beating, the world crumbled. He was in no stupor. He’d crawled into the hole of himself, because every outside contact flayed his raw grief.

The few friends he did see where those who had loved Carole, who kept their hands off his grief. Instinctively, as a child does, he grew closer to his father. It was to his father that he first spoke of Carole, and the older man silently thanked the Lord. It was like the shadow of a crack in the ice. Presently he seemed to find his only relief in talking about her–this was what Carole had said, this is what she’d done. He seemed to be walking with her in the past. Between him and the future rose a night of horror. He wouldn’t approach it.

Gossip Friday: 2:00am Evidence

From August 1937:

Of course, I’m not one to gossip, but they do say that the Lombard girl waited at the MGM studio till two o’clock the other morning for Clark Gable, who was having a long session in front of the cameras. That, in Hollywood, is love….

The burning question of the moment is, “Will Carole marry Clark?” The Lombard-Gable affair has been a headline romance for some time now. their friendship began back in 1933, when they appeared together in No Man of Her Own. Carole at the time did have a man of her own (she was married to William Powell), and no whisper of romance came from the set. Apart from the fact that Hollywood thought he took it like a good sport when his co-star publicly presented him, in his hour of triumph a the Chinese Theatre premiere, with a large ham, with his picture pasted firmly on the wrapper, the association arroused no comment at all. They parted at the evend of the picture just two artistes who had done a job of work together and Gable’s name was in no way involved when shortly afterwards she got a divorce from Powell.

Neither, it must be clearly understood, was Carole’s when Clark and rhea Gable separated.

Their romance really began at a “gag” party thrown by Jock Whitney in 1936. Carole contributed to the gaiety of the proceedings by arriving in an ambulance and being carried into the house on a stretcher. Gable was there. They got together and had so much fun, that they made another date. A week later he was driving round Hollywood in a battered white Ford car with a large red heart painted on it and the whole town was talking. Carole had sent it to him on St. Valentine;s Day. Tied around the body was a huge red ribbon with a card reading: “To my Valentine, from Carole Lombard.” Since then they have been inseparable. But will it end in marriage with roses round the door and, perhaps, the patter of little footsteps in the hall, or will it just be another of those things? Hollywood can only guess. Both stars have steadfastly refused to discuss the romance. Gable, moreover, though living apart from his wife, is still married. There are complicated legal formalities to be faced (mostly in connection with the property settlement, a difficult business where film contracts are concerned) before he will be free.

Moreover Carole is a play girl; she likes the gay social life. Gable does not, though he has, at her side, thrown himself cheerfully into the party whirl in the past months.

Some of the gossips declare that he won’t keep up the Lombard pace for long.

And, it is pointed out,  this is not exactly the first rosy picture of love’s young dream for either of them. Clark has been married twice. Carole has loved both William Powell and Russ Colombo, to whom she was engaged at the time of his death.

On the other hand, the affair has already lasted a long time as Hollywood affairs go and there;s the evidence of that two a.m. wait…

'30s Star Carole Lombard Feted In Film Retrospective

Carole Lombard, subject of a seven-film retrospective beginning Tuesday at the Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago, was the most effervescent of the '30s movie sex goddesses. She was a sleek, lissome blond with a wicked smile and flashing eyes, and though usually dressed and coifed to the nines, she was never above giving her male lover-combatants a scathing wisecrack, a rough shove or even a swift kick.

Without the Depression, the former Jane Alice Peters of Ft. Wayne, Ind., might not have made it to the top. But the '30s brought a newer, more adult movie queen to the fore, and Lombard, like Claudette Colbert and Greta Garbo, was a beneficiary.

Lombard's forte was screwball comedy (the title of the Film Center's series is "Siren of Screwball"). These romantic comedys were set among the very rich, where, the characters acted wild, screwy and rambunctious. Lombard-whose specialty was headstrong, reckless rich vamps or lower-class climbers-empitomized them all.

"No Man of Her Own," the 1932 comedy that starts the series (6 p.m. Tuesday), isn't really much of a movie. It's a silly romance in which a Manhattan cardsharp falls for a librarian and sees the light. The script is negligible, the characters are cutesy, the direction-by Wesley Ruggles-is only serviceable.

But it's an essential Lombard film, because it's her one screen pairing with her eventual husband Clark Gable (gambler to her librarian). To call their scenes electric is putting it mildly. For the first 10 minutes of their screen courtship here-when Gable spies her at a magazine stand, pursues her into the library and then waylays her at one bookshelf after another-the stars literally seem besotted with each other (and probably were). This is screen chemistry with a vengeance.

"Twentieth Century" (6 p.m. Jan. 6) is one of six 1934 Lombard films. But it's the key one, the movie that set her image and made her career.

Playing Lily Garland (nee Mildred Plotka), Broadway ingenue turned Hollywood glamor queen, Lombard seized the screwball crown, holding her own against the '30s most formidable ham, John Barrymore. Barrymore, in his wild prime, plays egomaniacal producer Oscar Jaffe, determined at all costs to wrest his erstwhile star back from Movieland while on a coast-to-coast race on the famous luxury train, the Twentieth Century Limited.

Wordmasters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur adapted their own play, and the roaring, pell-mell, brilliantly sustained pace comes from ace director Howard Hawks-who also deserves full credit for helping Lombard's new image. When one argument scene with Barrymore dragged in rehearsal, Hawks asked Lombard what she'd do in the same situation. "I'd kick him!" she snarled. "Well, go ahead and kick him," Hawks told her, and a screwball legend was born.

- Cinematographers don't always get their due, but they do in "Visions of Light" Saturday and Sunday at the Music Box, 3733 N.

This warmly knowledgeable and glitteringly illustrated history of the craft was directed by Arnold Glassman, Stuart Samuels and Todd McCarthy, and written by McCarthy, then Variety's lead film critic.

McCarthy interviewed dozens of luminaries for the film, ranging from Golden Age masters (film noir legend John Alton) to the generations after them ("Prince of Darkness" Gordon Willis, Conrad Hall, William Fraker). Present-day cinematographers include Allen Daviau ("E.T.") and Spike Lee's right-hand man, Ernest Dickerson, who opens the film with his boyhood recollections of watching the David Lean-Freddie Young "Oliver Twist."

The film glows with lustrous pictures. More important, it takes us inside and backstage, to explain how those images were crafted-and to celebrate the artists who lit them, and who, at their best, deserve the appellation "painters of light."

Movie stars at war

Bob Hope led the pack of popular performers who entertained the troops during World War II. John Wayne and other actors fought the war in feature films, and other Hollywood favorites tirelessly toured the country on war bond drives. In fact, beloved actress Carole Lombard died in early 1942 in a plane crash returning from a war bond drive.

But there were numerous established stars, directors, producers and workers in other branches of the film industry who put their careers on hold to serve the country during WWII.

In honor of Memorial Day, here's a look at some of the superstars who put themselves in harm's way during the war.

James Stewart

Prewar: With his lanky, boy-next-door charm, Stewart was one of MGM's top young leading men. Besides winning an Oscar for 1940's "The Philadelphia Story," he also starred in the 1938 best picture winner, "You Can't Take It With You," and earned an Oscar nomination for 1939's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

Joining up: Stewart, then 32, was one of the men whose number was called in early 1941 in the first peacetime draft. However, he was turned down for service because he was 5 pounds underweight. But Stewart wanted to serve his country, so he fattened up, enlisted in the Army Air Corps and passed the physical, becoming the first Hollywood star to join the military before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

War record: After being assigned as a flight instructor for nearly two years stateside, Stewart was stationed in England, where he piloted bombing missions including raids on Germany. His numerous honors included the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal and the World War II Victory Medal. A colonel by war's end, Stewart remained with the U.S. Air Force Reserves and was promoted to brigadier general in 1959. He retired from the Air Force in 1968.

Clark Gable

Prewar: One of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Gable had won the lead actor Oscar for 1934's "It Happened One Night," a nomination for 1935's "Mutiny on the Bounty" and another nomination for his most famous role as Rhett Butler in 1939's "Gone With the Wind."

Joining up: Married to Lombard at the time of her death, the 41-year-old Gable joined the Army Air Forces in August 1942, as a private.

War record: Trained as a photographer and aerial gunner, he was assigned to England to make a movie to recruit air gunners. He saw combat during bombing missions and nearly lost his life when enemy flak just missed hitting him the head. He received an Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross.

Gable, who returned to the U.S. in late 1943, became a major in May 1944. By then, he was too old for combat duty, so he requested and received a discharge the following month. Capt. Ronald Reagan signed his discharge papers. (A side note: Adolf Hitler considered Gable his favorite actor and offered a substantial reward for his safe capture.)

Tyrone Power

Prewar: 20th Century Fox's top matinee idol starred in such films as 1936's "Lloyds of London" 1939's and "Jesse James."

Joining up: After completing the war film "Crash Dive," the 28-year-old Power enlisted in the Marine Corps as a private in August 1942 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant the following summer and a first lieutenant in 1944.

War record: As a transport pilot, he participated in the air supply into and evacuation of the wounded from Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He received the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with two bronze stars and the World War II Victory Medal.

Clark Gable & Carole Lombard

He Was a Man's Man and She Was a Man's Woman, and Together They Soared Beyond Stereotype. Then Fate Stepped in to Pull Hollywood's Golden Couple Apart

Like many showbiz pairs, they looked too good together to be true. Tall, blonde and fiery-eyed, Carole Lombard epitomized 1930s glamor; Clark Gable, with his broad shoulders, and devil's grin, seemed every inch his nickname—the King. But the queen of comedies, who swore freely and loved practical jokes, and her rough-and-ready leading man were more than just Golden Age window dressing. The love they shared for six years was that Hollywood rarity: the real thing. 

"They had an ineffable quality in romance, the ability to have fun together," says actress Esther Williams, an MGM contract player like Gable. "They were soulmates who thought life was delicious, and they made everyone's life delicious around them." 

By any measure, they had plenty to savor—even before they found each other. When the 28-year-old Lombard caught Gable's eye at a Hollywood party in 1936, she was one of the highest-paid actresses in America, pulling in $465,000 one year for three movies and three radio shows. Gable, the star of It Happened One Night and San Francisco, was a 35-year-old heartthrob so revered that "Who do you think you are—Clark Gable?" had become a standard put-down. Yet since Lombard's marriage to actor William Powell ended in 1933, serious romance had eluded her. And Gable was tiring of his second wife, a society belle named Ria Langham who had no interest in duck shooting or fishing, his chief passions. 

Lombard, a party girl who favored low-cut silk dresses, "bent herself around sideways to conform to him," says actor Robert Stack, who was a good friend of the actress's. "She went duck hunting and dressed like a ragamuffin. She'd stand around in the rain for the guy." Her friend Margaret Tallichet, wife of director William Wyler, watched her reel Gable in. "Carole was madly in love with him," she said. "When she would zero in on something, that was it, and she wanted this relationship." 

She was also smart enough to know how to keep it going. After one quarrel, Lombard sent Gable a pair of live doves as a peace offering, a heart-melting gesture she would repeat over the years. Yet this King wouldn't have loved an obsequious subject, and Carole was no pushover. At one point during their courtship, disturbed by rumors that Gable's current costar had designs on him, she stormed onto the film set and screamed at the director, "Get this bitch out of your picture or I'll take Gable out of it!" The offending ingenue disappeared, and Gable, long known for his womanizing, bragged afterward about his beloved's pluck. "He absolutely adored her," says Stack. 

By 1937, the duo were inseparable enough to be cited as one of "Hollywood's Unmarried Husbands and Wives" in an article in the movie magazine Photoplay. The exposure hastened Gable's divorce from the reluctant Ria, who walked off with a sizable settlement. Free at last, Clark and Carole wed in a tiny ceremony on March 29, 1939—the first day Gable had off from his job playing Rhett in Gone with the Wind. Their careers had never been in higher gear, but Gable hated the Hollywood partying that went with fame, so the couple made their home in an elaborately restored farmhouse in then-rural Encino, Calif. There, among horses, dogs, chickens and Gable's expanding gun collection, the newly-weds—who called each other Ma and Pa—lived simply, giving occasional small dinner parties for friends and even attempting to sell eggs (until their chickens proved unreliable). It was by all accounts an idyllic life, even without the babies their best efforts never managed to bring forth. 

On Jan. 16, 1942, the idyll ended. Lombard, who had just wrapped her 57th film, To Be or Not to Be, was on a tour to sell war bonds when the twin-engine DC-3 she was traveling in crashed into a mountain near Las Vegas. Upon hearing the news, Gable flew to the scene and had to be forcibly restrained from climbing the snowcapped mountain himself in an effort to rescue her. After Carole's body, along with the bodies of her mother and 19 others, was discovered, he reportedly sobbed, "Oh, God! I don't want to go back to an empty house...." 

Lombard's death, the first war-related female casualty the U.S. suffered during World War II, was the worst loss her husband ever endured. Gable lived out his life at the couple's Encino home, made 27 more movies and even remarried twice. "But he was never the same," says Esther Williams. "His heart sank a bit." 

When Gable died of a heart attack in 1961, his fifth wife, Kay, graciously buried him where he belonged: in L.A.'s Forest Lawn Cemetery, right next to Carole Lombard

What the Loss of Carole Lombard Means to Clark Gable

What the Loss of Carole Lombard Means to Clark Gable

By Ruth Waterbury
Photoplay magazine, April 1942

Gable was working on that fateful afternoon of January 16, 1942. He felt wonderful about it. He’d had five months lay-off since the production of “Honky Tonk,” the longest vacation he’d experienced since his first real click in 1931. It was swell to be back and he liked the new picture. It was called “Somewhere I’ll Find You.”

Gable had also, that afternoon, finished up his sixth day of separation from Carole Lombard, the longest time they two had parted since that flashing night in 1936 when they’d met at the white Mayfair call and had fallen hilariously in love. Now it was keen to be getting Carole back again. He had not known, until they went through that Monday-to-Friday stretch, how intensely he could miss her.

He was mighty proud of that vivid wife of his. She had been over in her hometown of Indianapolis, selling defense bonds for what she, typically, called “the best damned land there is.” And had she sold them! She’d hit the town in a blaze of glamour and nicked it for some $2,017,513 worth of patriotism.

Ever since the war began, he and Carole had been restless. Carole was really the family thinker. He was the natural doer and he’d had some lousy moments since the studio had told him that he simply could not enlist. He couldn’t talk about it generally. It looked like publicity stuff to let it be known how wild he was to get into service, so he had told the studio to shut up about it. They had had to do a lot of talking to dissuade him from joining up. Even when they had wished Lowell Mellett, out from Washington, on him and Mellett had said that Gable’s real job was to provide entertainment, to keep up morale by his comedy and his dame appeal, plus paying his gigantic taxes, he’d been only half-persuaded. Now Carole had scooped him on the bond-selling, but she’d also shown him the way he, too, could work for the government.

A publicity man stuck his head in at the Gable dressing room door.

“Ready to go to the airport?” he asked.

“And how!” Gable said. “Drive over with me, will you?”

The publicity man’s name was Larry Barbier and like everyone else at MGM, straight from the lowliest grip to Louis B. Mayer, there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t delight in doing for Gable. So, of course, he went to the airport and, on arriving there, he suggested the star stay in his car until he, Barbier, found out just when the plane was to arrive.

Thus it was that Larry was the first person at MGM to sense the tragedy that had happened against the wild sides of Table Mountain in Nevada.

Not that the airport officials told the truth. They themselves didn’t know it then, but they were evasive about where the plane was, when it was due to come in. Larry knew something was wrong, so, stalling for time, he went outside again to Gable in the car.

“Plane had to make an unexpected stop in Las Vegas,” he said. “Looks like they’ll be at least an hour and half late. Why don’t you go out to the ranch and the moment I get any definite news about its arrival I’ll call you and you can hop right over.”

“Fine,” said Gable. “I’ll go home and work up a few more gags.”

That was already an old family custom with Clark and Carole. Whenever they were separated for even a day, they gave each other presents, strictly goofy ones, strictly for laughs, like the ham she had originally sent him when he was courting her, or the cast-iron, life-sized statue of himself he had sent her. Now he had every nook of the ranch house loaded with such nonsense gifts and he could fairly hear the hoots of robust laughter that she would yip forth at sight of them.

It was an hour later that Larry phoned him and told him to come over to the airport quick. Larry didn’t add that meantime he’d engaged a transport plane to fly to Nevada and that he’d rounded up Eddie Mannix, the vice-president of Metro, and Don McIlwaine, a Metro publicity man who just happened to be dining at the airport and that Howard Strickling, the MGM publicity head and one of Gable’s closest friends, was speeding toward the airport, too.

The most popular man in the movie world got gaily into his car and turned on his radio to a record station to listen to some nice sloppy, sentimental tunes, right in key with his mood. Carole, who didn’t go in for that sentimental slush, who in contrast to his fans and other women he had known didn’t visibly adore him but who called him “Pappy” or “Mr. G”, Carole would kid the pants off him about that. But he didn’t care. He drove up to the airport in a welter of sweet swing. As he drew in smartly to the curb the voice of an announcer cut sharply in. “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you an important news announcement,” the voice said. “The transport plane bearing Carole Lombard and twenty-one others has been found. They are all believed dead.”

It was then that Gable paid one of the prices of fame, the inability to get even the most horrible news quietly and privately. He walked into the crowded airport that was sinisterly quiet. Hundreds of eyes hung on his haggard face, watched his every move. But he was unaware of them. He aged in that instant, aged incredibly, but all he said was, “Where’s the plane? When do we take off?”

Out on the runway, an agitated official was bustling about. Wartime regulations made a thousand new details necessary. “Gable must sign for the plane. Gable must sign for it,” the official kept insisting. Typically, he had never heard of Mannix, the million-dollar executive. Mannix tore the sheet from his hands and scrawled a signature. “This will be good for the price of the ship,” he said. He pushed Gable into the cabin of the plane and got in after him.

The plane taxied down the field, rose swiftly, while on the ground flags began fluttering frantically. Those were for Strickling who had just rushed through the gate, so the ship came down again and picked him up and then soared off again, that planeload of men and one woman, Mrs. Jilda Winkler, the wife of Otto Winkler, who was not only Gable’s press agent but a very dear friend.

It was not until the moment when the men sought to comfort the sobbing Jilda that they realized Gable’s double loss. Otto had been Clark’s pal. He had always been with him in everything. It was Otto who had been with Carole and Clark when they eloped in Kingman, Arizona, in March, 1939. Otto was Clark’s “front man”, his “other brain,” the one person who could most have helped him now.

But Otto was gone, too. He had been with Carole because Clark had sent him along on the Indianapolis trip to take care of her and protect her. Now Clark moved over to Jill and sat close to her, letting her sob her grief out against him. But he said nothing. The MGM crew in the background stayed silent. They knew that characteristic in him. Whenever anything bothers him, he becomes completely mute, and this was the most fearful thing he had ever had to face.

Two hours later they were in Las Vegas. Gable spoke then. “How do we get up to that mountain?”

They tried to dissuade him. They told him how the cactus-studded slopes of Table Mountain, strewn with boulders, sheer ridges and snowdrifts, was an almost impossible climb even for experienced Indian guides and hardened trackers. They told him how one tracker had already come back, the shoes torn from his feet by the rough wilderness. For an hour or so, while they told him there was still some hope, they persuaded him to wait in the Rancho Vegas for news.

Rancho Vegas is one of the gayest hotels on earth, a glittering, gambling casino sprawled in defiant luxury against the sterile desert. It’s like the setting of many a Gable film, of “Honky Tonk” particularly, but now it was chosen because of its nearness to the scene of the tragedy. They managed to hold Gable down there for nearly an hour, but then he revolted. “If those Indians can go on horseback and on foot, I can go on horseback and on foot,” he said and he went out and joined them.

It wasn’t until then that the MGM crowd, who all worshipped him, realized the triple loss Clark has suffered, the loss of the only mother he had ever known, his mother-in-law, Mrs. Elizabeth Peters, who had also been with Carole.

They did not abandon hope even when Friday night was gone and the cold, clear dawn of Saturday fell bright upon the desert. They toiled on through that impossible wilderness and the hours waxed and it was noon and still they climbed up and up and their hope flamed above their heartsick certainty. They went on until they began to see pitiful bits of wreckage of the plane scattered about them and then a merciful official stopped them. Just a little farther on, he said, were the bodies of fifteen brave young pilots who were en route West for war duty, and Otto Winkler, and Mrs. Elizabeth Peters and the ship’s pilots, and the stewardess and the gay young wife of an Army officer who had been speeding to his side, and Carole. You see, being wartime, you either had to be in the service or have an awful lot of drag to get on that plane. Somewhere, ahead, they were all lying, mingled in death, mingled in heroism, but the dearly beloved features that each of them had possessed were lost now to all save memory.

It was only then that Gable could be made to turn back. And then it was that his devoted friends knew the absolute devastation of his loss. For of course, being as devoted to him as they are, they all knew the story that up until now could not be told.

This was that, behind all their laughter, all their glorious love and warm compatibility, behind all their fame and wealth and the trips they had together and the sports they shared, Clark and Carole had one tragedy and one fear. They wanted children and they were denied them and they both worried about Carole’s increasingly frail health.

People told them to adopt a child, but they shook off that suggestion impatiently. They wanted their own. They couldn’t help knowing what a beautiful, amazing pair they were and they wanted their own youngsters to carry on those super-luxurious, super-sharp, super-glamorous characteristics. For this reason Carole went to doctor after doctor, tagged along when Clark had to go to Johns Hopkins for an operation for his shoulder and herself went under observation.

The sadness that many a queen of old experienced hung over the bright spirit of this golden queen of a modern world. With her whole passionate soul, Carole hoped for the maternity she could not know. Perhaps that was why Carole always laughed so much, laughed to hide this deep sorrow of hers. Perhaps it was why, in the last few years, she had sought for deeper meanings in her films, even essayed tragedy in “Vigil in the Night” and “They Knew What They Wanted.” The last couple of years she had taken the most faithful care of her health, but it had not improved. Always precarious, it was made more delicate by the continual recurrence of one of those persistent fevers travelers frequently pick up in Mexico and which Carole had contracted when down there on a hunting trip with Clark.

Motherhood was the only thing she had ever wanted in her thrill-packed thirty-two years that was denied her. She got her way about everything else. She even got about returning to Hollywood by plane.

Otto Winkler tried to talk her out of it, begging her to go by train. She finally tossed a coin with him and Otto lost. Her mother tried to talk her out of it. Otto had offered good sound reasons against flying in winter; her mother had admitted she was merely superstitious. She had good reason to be, for on Monday, the day they had left Hollywood, she and Carole had decided to call upon a fortuneteller they often consulted, just for the fun of it.

The psychic read Mrs. Peters’ hand, then read Carole’s. She shook her head. “Keep out of planes in 1942,” she ordered. “There is danger in them for you.”

On January 15 in Indianapolis, eager to get home, Carole never thought of that remark.

The memory of it, however, haunts Gable. When, finally, Saturday and Sunday he had to accept his heart’s devastation, he shut himself up alone in his hotel bungalow. Spencer Tracy drove out the three hundred miles from Hollywood to try to comfort him. A doctor stood by wanting to prescribe sleeping tablets. The entire MGM group stayed close, wanting desperately to do anything from working miracles merely to getting meals for him. But Gable stayed alone, appearing only once in a long while, on the bungalow porch, striding grimly back and forth. To all the solicitous attentions, he had only one answer. “I don’t want to go back to an empty house in Encino. If I had gone with Carole on this trip all this might have been avoided.”

Even when the broken bodies were finally brought down from the mountain, he could hardly be persuaded to leave. It was not until the following Wednesday at the burial service for his wife and his mother-by-marriage and his dear friend that he finally seemed able to gain some strength and courage to go on with life from the very heroism of Carole’s death.

It was only then that he comprehended the shrine in the world’s memory that she will forever occupy, this laughing tomboy, this Sennett bathing beauty who rose to make the highest salary any girl star ever earned, who married and divorced Bill Powell and then married the most sought-after man on earth, this girl who, through death, became the first heroine of the Second World War. She was all flame and passion and generosity, this Lombard girl, and she died as she had lived, gallantly, heroically, doing her duty by her country.

Meanwhile the Encino house is up for sale. Jessie, the cook whom Carole had had for years, Miss Garceau, the secretary, are devastated. The little gag presents have all been destroyed and even the very horses in their stalls and the hand-groomed cows and the cackling chickens seem to sense that desolation has enveloped them.

Shooting on “Somewhere I’ll Find You” has been suspended indefinitely.

At MGM and in Hollywood you will find those who say there will be no tying Clark down to acting now, that he will insist upon going into direct war service. In Hollywood they are talking about “The Carole Lombard Memorial Bond Drive” and some argue that Gable will go on tour, selling bonds in her name.

But the other half of Hollywood, those who know Clark best, argue that he will do both, war work and his own work, and I, personally, side with them.

Clark has long been very aware of his duty to his public and in this loss he will be doubly conscious of the loss in millions of homes today. He will be conscious that that one plane, which destroyed his heart’s security and rent asunder twenty-one other families, is only one small incident in days that are darkened with the memory of Pearl Harbor, and Manila, and the siege of Singapore and the blood on the snows of Russia.

Clark Gable has in him the power to make people forget these things for a little while. That is his responsibility—and his cure.

He will, I am convinced, go on with it after a little while, go on with his handsome head held high and with Carole’s beautiful, heroic image locked within his heart. And may God bless him and keep him while he walks this lonely road.

Editor’s Note:

When Carole Lombard met ghastly and sudden death on a mountaintop in Nevada, millions of us thought “Another brave American solider has died.”

Everyone knew that Carole Lombard had taken the trip to sell two million dollars’ worth of defense bonds to us.

Psychologists say that the way to give value to our emotions is to turn them into action. All of us who felt sincerely sorrowful about Carole Lombard should now turn that emotion into an action for which she died: the purchase of United States Defense Bonds. We can write a worthy epitaph if millions more of us go immediately to our post offices and banks to buy as many stamps or bonds as we can afford—in memory of Carole Lombard

Carole Lombard Biography

Carole Lombard starred in comedic films during the 1930s. She married actor Clark Gable in 1939, but died in a tragic plane accident a few years later.

Synopsis

Carole Lombard was born on October 6, 1908, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She appeared in her first movie, A Perfect Crime, at the age of 13. She appeared in more than 20 silent films. Her big break was in the 1934 film Twentieth Century. She appeared in numerous comedies and dramas over the next few years. In 1939, she married Clark Gable. She died in an airplane crash in 1942 at the height of her fame.