Carole Lombard, the highest-paid actress in Hollywood and wife of Clark Gable, died in a plane crash on January 16, 1942, at age 33, after flying 4 degrees off course from her intended route; she was on her way home from a war bond rally in Indianapolis where she had sold over $2 million in defense bonds, and her death transformed her into the first American celebrity killed in service of the war effort, while her husband Clark Gable spent the next 18 years grieving, eventually serving in the Army Air Forces and being buried beside her at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
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CLARK GABLE NEVER OPENED HER CLOSET AGAIN — THE TRUTH ABOUT CAROLE LOMBARDHinzugefügt:
On the night of January 16th, 1942, a twin-engine airliner climbed out of a small airfield in the Nevada desert and turned toward California.
On board were 22 people. 15 of them were soldiers, three were the crew, and one of them, sitting near the front of the cabin in a simple wool coat, was the most beloved comedian in America.
She had a husband waiting for her at home. She had a telegram in her purse.
She had, as she would later be remembered, 3 days left of the most public marriage in Hollywood.
19 minutes after takeoff, the airplane was gone. It struck a sheer cliff on the side of a mountain called Potosi at an altitude of roughly 7,700 ft.
The investigators who climbed up to that wreckage 3 days later in deep snow would calculate that the pilot had been off course by about 4°.
4° over the distance involved was the difference between a routine flight home and a wall of stone in the dark.
The woman in the wool coat was 33 years old. Her name was Carole Lombard.
And the man waiting for her at the ranch in Encino, the man who had cooked dinner that night and laid the table for two, was Clark Gable, the highest-paid male movie star in the world.
He would outlive her by 18 years. He would marry twice more. He would fly bombing missions over Germany. He would never, by any honest account of those who knew him, get over her.
This is the story of how a girl from a small town in Indiana with a long scar on the left side of her face that the cameras were never quite allowed to see became the woman whose death was announced by a president of the United States.
It is a story of two husbands, one fiance who never quite got to be a fiance, a famous lost letter, a coin tossed in an Albuquerque hotel room, and a mountain that was exactly where the chart said it would be.
Stay with me.
Because before the airplane, before the king of Hollywood, before the white parties and the Indianapolis stage and the desert, there was a 6-year-old girl on a train looking out a window, watching the only home she had ever known disappear behind her.
Her name then wasn't Carole Lombard. Her name was Jane Alice Peters.
She had been born on the 6th of October, 1908 in Fort Wayne, Indiana into a comfortable family that owned a hardware business. Her father, Frederick Peters, had been injured in a workplace accident some years earlier, and the injury had given him chronic pain and according to family accounts, a difficult temperament.
Her mother, Bess, was a woman of strong intuitions and a strong will. And in 1914, when Jane Alice was six, Bess made a decision that would change her daughter's life.
She left her husband.
She took the three children with her and she boarded a train for California.
The journey from Indiana to Los Angeles in 1914 was something close to 4 days on the rails.
Most of what we know about that trip comes from later interviews Lombard herself gave in the 1930s and from a memoir written by her older brother, Stewart.
By those accounts, the little girl spent much of the journey at the window. She did not cry. She did not ask questions.
She watched.
Whatever she made of the situation, she kept to herself.
They arrived in Los Angeles in the spring of 1914 and Bess settled the family in a modest house in the Los Angeles area.
The marriage was not formally ended for many years, in part for religious reasons.
Bess, by every account, never spoke ill of the husband she had left behind.
The children grew up understanding that their father existed somewhere east of them, and that he was not part of the daily life of the household, and not much more than that.
Jane Alice grew quickly into the kind of child that older relatives describe as a handful. She climbed trees. She got into fights with the boys in the neighborhood. She had, by the age of 12, a reputation in her own family for using language that her mother had to correct on a regular basis. She loved sports.
She loved horses. And by some accident of geography, she had grown up in the one part of the United States where a pretty girl with a loud voice could conceivably turn that into a career. She was 12 years old when she was first noticed by a film director.
The director was a man named Allan Dwan, a respected figure in early Hollywood, who saw her playing baseball in the street outside her house in Los Angeles.
He cast her in a small part in a silent picture called A Perfect Crime, released in 1921.
The role was tiny.
The film is largely forgotten today, but it gave the 12-year-old her first taste of a film set, and her mother her first hint that the daughter who was always shouting in the backyard might have something more in store than a quiet life as somebody's wife.
For the next several years, nothing much happened. Jane Alice went to school. She played sports. She hated school, by every account, and loved sports, and signed up for a Hollywood area amateur theater group, where she got the kind of basic training in stage presence that no film school of the period could have provided.
Then, in 1925, when she was 16, the studios came back. Fox Film Corporation signed her to a contract.
Fox in that era was an aggressive young studio looking for fresh faces, and they put her into a string of small films through 1925 and 1926.
They also gave her a new name. Jane Peters became Carole Lombard.
The E at the end of Carole would come later.
The Lombard, by most accounts, came from a family friend whose name she liked.
She was not a star. She was a working actress in her late teens, riding horses in westerns and looking pretty in light comedies, and learning, in the way that actresses of that era learned, by doing.
And then, on the night of October 26th, 1926, when she was 17 years old, the entire story very nearly ended.
She was riding in a car driven by a young man named Harry Cooper, who was, by some accounts, the son of a banker she was casually dating.
The car was traveling on a Los Angeles street. The driver in front of them stopped suddenly. Cooper braked. The Lombard car struck the rear of the car ahead.
She was thrown forward into the windshield. The injury that resulted has been described in slightly different ways in different sources. The most reliable accounts agree that the windshield glass cut deeply into the left side of her face, from the cheekbone down to the jaw.
She was rushed to a hospital.
The wound was serious.
Plastic surgery in the modern sense barely existed in 1926.
The surgeon stitched the cut closed and warned her that any visible movement of facial muscles during the healing process could leave her permanently disfigured.
She would need to lie still with the wound bandaged for a considerable period. By her own later account, she chose to do something unusual. She insisted that part of the stitching be done with her conscious, without full anesthesia, so that her facial muscles would not relax in ways that could distort the eventual scar.
Whether the medical details are entirely as she later described them is impossible to verify a hundred years later. What is documented is that the surgery was carried out, that she healed, and that when the bandages came off, there was a long, fine scar running down the left side of her face that would be visible to anyone who saw her in person for the rest of her life. Fox Film Corporation took one look at her and dropped her contract. A girl with a scar in 1926 was not what the studios were buying.
She was 17 years old. She had been a working actress for over a year, and she had, by the standards of the industry, just been finished. What she did next is one of the most remarkable things in her early life, and it tells you almost everything you need to know about the woman she would become. She did not go home and cry. She did not retire.
She studied her own face in mirrors.
She figured out which lighting made the scar disappear and which lighting made it look worse. She figured out which side of her face was the camera side, and she taught herself, over months, to stand and turn and lift her chin in such a way that the scar simply was not there.
She practiced.
By 1927, she was working again, this time at the Mack Sennett studio, making short comedies, the kind of two-reel slapstick films that were the boot camp of American comedy in that decade.
Sennett's films were rough work. The actors took pratfalls, got hit with pies, fell into swimming pools, and learned to hit their marks under chaotic shooting conditions.
For Lombard, the Sennett years were exactly the training she needed. She came out of them at the end of the 1920s as a young actress with two unusual qualifications.
She could do physical comedy at a professional level.
And she had figured out how to look on camera like a woman with no scar at all.
By 1930, she had signed with Paramount Pictures. By 1931, she was a leading lady.
And it was at Paramount in the spring of that year that she met the first of the three men who would shape the rest of her short life.
His name was William Powell.
He was 16 years older than she was. He was, in 1931, one of the most respected actors at Paramount. A man with a velvet voice and a dry wit and a kind of grown-up elegance that the silent era had largely missed.
He was also, by every account, a quiet man, almost a shy one in private.
They were paired together in a film called Man of the World, released in March of 1931.
They began a relationship during shooting. They were married just 3 months later, on the 26th of June, 1931.
She was 22 years old. He was 38.
By every account from people who knew them both, the marriage was kind, affectionate, and almost immediately strained by a single problem.
He was a quiet man.
She was not a quiet woman.
She liked parties that went until 4:00 in the morning. She liked practical jokes that involved live animals.
She liked, most of all, to fill a room with noise.
He liked, most of all, a quiet evening with a book and a glass of something cold.
They tried, by every account, to make it work. They lasted just over 2 years.
They divorced amicably in August of 1933.
And here is the part that almost no one ever expects.
They remained close friends for the rest of her life.
He gave her professional advice. He attended her later wedding, the famous one.
He would carry, by every account of those who knew him in his last years, a particular tenderness about her until the day he died decades later in 1984.
Some marriages end in fire.
Theirs ended in a kind of soft mutual recognition that they had simply been wrong about each other in one specific way and exactly right about each other in every other way.
It is one of the gentlest divorces in Hollywood history.
But she was 24 years old and single again.
And she was about to fall into something far more complicated. Within months of her divorce from Powell, Carole Lombard met the singer.
His name was Russ Columbo.
He was a crooner, a baritone with a soft intimate vocal style, considered in his time the only serious rival to Bing Crosby.
He was 25 years old when he met her in late 1933.
He was Italian-American, the youngest of 12 children, raised in Philadelphia and California, devoted to his mother to a degree that was remarked upon by everyone who knew him.
He was handsome. He was talented. He was, by every account, deeply in love with her almost from the moment they met.
By the spring of 1934, they were a couple.
By the summer of that year, they were a couple in the way that Hollywood couples become couples, public, photographed, widely understood to be heading toward marriage.
He was building in the hills outside Los Angeles a house intended for the two of them.
He had spoken to friends openly about engagement. She had by all accounts told her mother that this was the man.
And then, on the 2nd of September, 1934, Russ Columbo went to visit a friend.
The friend was a photographer named Lansing Brown. They had known each other for years.
They were sitting in Brown's study in Brown's house in Los Angeles talking.
On the desk between them sat a pair of antique dueling pistols, decorative pieces that Brown collected.
Brown picked one of them up and was idly tapping it with a match while he talked, the way one might fidget with any object during conversation.
Both men believed the pistols were unloaded.
They had been on Brown's desk for years.
One of them was not unloaded.
The pistol discharged. The bullet struck a hard surface, the desk itself by most accounts, and ricocheted.
It struck Russ Columbo in the head.
He was rushed to the hospital. He died a few hours later.
He was 26 years old.
Carole Lombard, who had been somewhere else in Los Angeles that afternoon, was reached by telephone with the news. By the account of those who were with her, she went to the hospital, sat with the family, sat with the body, and then, after some hours, asked to be driven home.
She did not, in the days and weeks that followed, give a single public statement about what had happened. She attended the funeral. She wore black.
She walked back to her car, and then she went, by every account, into the deepest silence of her life.
The friends who saw her in the autumn of 1934 described almost identically a woman who was simply not entirely present in any room she was in.
She did not cry in public. She did not ever talk about him in interviews afterward.
She had loved him by every honest account, and she had lost him to an accident of fewer than 2 seconds, and she did not have, in the language of 1934, any framework for what had happened to her.
There is one further story attached to the death of Russ Columbo that has been retold in many books over the years, and that I want to handle carefully because the evidence behind it is much thinner than the legend suggests.
The story goes that Russ Columbo's mother, who was elderly and in poor health, was never told that her son had died.
The family, to protect her, allegedly maintained the fiction for years that Russ was simply away on a long European concert tour.
Letters were said to arrive in his handwriting. Money was said to be sent.
Some retellings have suggested that Carole Lombard herself was involved in maintaining this deception.
I want to be very clear about this.
The basic outline of the family fiction that Mrs. Columbo was shielded from the news for years is reasonably well attested in family accounts.
The specific claim that Lombard personally helped write or send letters in her dead lover's handwriting is not supported by any document or any direct testimony in any reliable source I have been able to find.
It is a story that has grown in the telling. We do not know whether she was involved. We know only that she carried for the rest of her life an attachment to that period that she would not discuss publicly.
By the spring of 1935, she was working again. By 1936, she was about to meet the third of the three men who would shape her life.
But before we get to the king of Hollywood, before we get to the screwball comedy that would change her career, before we get to the white parties on the hill in Bel Air that the entire industry tried to crash, there is one more thing you need to understand about who Carole Lombard had become by the middle of the 1930s.
She had decided, very quietly, somewhere in the long silence after Russ Columbo's funeral, that the years given to her were going to be lived loudly.
And she was about to walk into a New York-themed costume ball on the night of February 7th, 1936, in a long white gown with no straps, and she was about to spot, across a crowded ballroom, a tall man with a thin mustache and ears that the cameras spent considerable effort hiding.
And she was about to do something to him that no woman in Hollywood had ever quite tried before.
The ball was called the Mayfair, and in the Hollywood of 1936, it was the social event of the winter.
It was an invitation-only affair, hosted that year at the Victor Hugo restaurant in Beverly Hills, organized by a group of A-list stars who took turns running it.
The theme that February was white Mayfair.
Every woman attending was asked to wear white. Every man was to wear black tie.
The idea was a ballroom that looked, when the band started, like a snow field with men scattered through it like dark trees.
Carole Lombard, who had been given the responsibility of co-hosting that year, took the dress code seriously.
She arrived in a long white gown cut to the floor with a kind of elegant simplicity that everyone in the room noticed.
She had been in a low public period. She had been working steadily, but had not yet made the picture that would later that same year change everything for her.
She was 27 years old, divorced, widowed in everything but the legal sense, and she was, by every account of those who saw her enter that room, dazzling.
Then, around 10:00 in the evening, the door opened.
And a woman walked in wearing a deep red gown.
The woman was Norma Shearer.
She was, in 1936, one of the most powerful actresses at MGM, the widow of the late production chief Irving Thalberg's protege status. Actually, Thalberg was her husband, very much alive at that moment, and she carried at every Hollywood event she attended the unspoken authority of being married to the most respected producer in the business.
Norma Shearer had decided, for reasons she never fully explained, to ignore the white dress code.
The red gown was a small, pointed act of social defiance, of the kind that the very powerful occasionally permit themselves at parties they consider beneath them.
The room registered the dress.
Conversations paused.
By the account of several people who were there, Carole Lombard registered it, too, and her face did something brief and complicated that those who knew her could read.
She did not, however, say anything.
Not then.
Some minutes later, Clark Gable walked in. He was 35 years old. He had been a star for 5 years. He had won the Academy Award for Best Actor 2 years earlier for It Happened One Night.
He was, by 1936, beginning to be called, half jokingly and half seriously, the King of Hollywood.
He was also, at that moment, married.
His second wife was a woman named Maria Langham, known as Ria, a Texas socialite 17 years his senior, and the marriage was not in good shape.
He had attended the Mayfair Ball alone.
He and Lombard had met before. They had, in fact, made a film together back in 1932, a forgotten drama called No Man of Her Own, in which they had played romantic leads. They had not, by all accounts, gotten along particularly well on that picture. He had found her loud. She had found him stiff.
They had finished the film, gone home to their respective lives, and not spoken much in the years since.
Tonight, at the Mayfair, he asked her to dance.
What happened on that dance floor and in the hours that followed has been retold in many slightly different versions in many books.
And I want to be honest with you that the precise dialogue you sometimes see quoted in older Hollywood biographies cannot be verified word for word. What is consistent across the sources is the shape of what happened. They danced.
They talked. By midnight, they had left the ballroom together and had gone for a long drive through the hills of Los Angeles. Whatever was said in the car that night, neither of them ever publicly described in detail. By morning, by every reliable account, they had become something that they had not been before. And they were not going to be able to go backwards from it.
There was a problem.
He was married.
The Hollywood of 1936 did not, in any sense, permit open affairs between its biggest stars, particularly when one of them was legally bound to someone else.
Ria Gable was a respected member of Los Angeles society. The studios had built careful public images for both Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, and an open affair would damage both of them.
So, they did what Hollywood couples in that situation always did.
They were careful.
They met at out-of-the-way restaurants.
They were photographed together, when at all, in groups of friends. They worked.
She, in particular, worked. Two months after the Mayfair Ball, she began shooting the film that would define her for the rest of her career, and in many ways, for the rest of cinema history.
The picture was called My Man Godfrey.
It was directed by Gregory La Cava, a man known for his loose, improvisational shooting style.
Her co-star, in one of the great accidents of casting, was William Powell, her ex-husband, the man she had divorced three years earlier and remained close friends with.
Powell, in fact, had personally lobbied for her to get the part.
He had told the producers that there was no other actress in Hollywood who could play the role of Irene Bullock, the wealthy, scatterbrained socialite who falls in love with a homeless man she finds at the city dump and brings home to be the family butler.
He had told them that Lombard's particular combination of beauty and physical recklessness was the only thing that could make the character work without making her unbearable.
The producers listened.
The film was released in September of 1936.
It was, almost immediately, a phenomenon.
It was funny in a way that American film comedies had not quite been funny before.
The dialogue came at a pace that audiences had to lean forward to keep up with.
The chemistry between Lombard and Powell, the ex-husband and the ex-wife, playing two people falling in love for the first time, was, by all accounts of those who saw it, electric in a way that only the truth of their previous relationship could have produced.
Carole Lombard was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
She did not win.
The award that year went to Luise Rainer for The Great Ziegfeld. But the nomination, combined with the box office success of the film, transformed her almost overnight from a working leading lady into the highest-paid actress in Hollywood.
The numbers from that period are extraordinary. By 1937, Carole Lombard was earning, by reliable accounts of her contracts, somewhere around $465,000 a year.
Translated into modern terms, that is millions.
She was earning more than the president of the United States. She was earning more than nearly anyone in the film industry, male or female.
And she was doing something with that money that had also become part of her growing legend.
She was paying her taxes in full, without complaint.
This sounds to a modern audience like a strange thing to be famous for.
You have to understand the context.
Hollywood in the 1930s had a long tradition of tax avoidance. Stars routinely funneled income through complicated arrangements designed to reduce their tax bills.
When asked in an interview why she did not do the same, Lombard reportedly said that she was happy to pay because the country had been good to her and she wanted to pay it back.
The exact phrasing of that quote varies in different sources and you should take the specific wording with a grain of salt, but the underlying fact that she paid full federal income tax in years when many of her colleagues did not is well documented and was widely reported in the press of the period.
It was the kind of thing that made ordinary Americans in the deep years of the Great Depression regard her as one of the few movie stars who had not entirely lost touch with the country outside the studio gates.
By 1937, the affair with Clark Gable had become an open secret.
The fan magazines of the period had begun to drop hints. The studios had begun to grow concerned.
Ria Gable, who had behaved with considerable dignity through years of her husband's distant marriage, had finally agreed in principle to a divorce.
But the negotiations were complicated and slow.
They would drag on for nearly two more years.
In the meantime, Lombard and Gable did something that, for two of the most photographed people in America, took remarkable skill.
They built a private life.
He had grown up in rural Ohio. He liked guns, hunting, fishing, mechanical things, and the kind of quiet outdoor weekends that did not involve premieres.
She, despite her loud public reputation, turned out to share most of those tastes once you got her out of a ballroom.
They went hunting together. They went fishing together.
She gave him on his 36th birthday in February of 1937 one of the most famous gifts in the history of Hollywood courtship.
She gave him a Ford Model A.
Not a new one, an old one, a used Ford, the most ordinary car on American roads, restored and wrapped with a large bow and a card that, by his own later telling in interviews, made him laugh harder than any gift he had ever received.
The point, of course, was the joke.
The king of Hollywood, whose every public appearance was photographed, was being given the kind of car that anyone in any small town in America could afford.
She had taken the trouble to find the worn-out used model that would most thoroughly puncture the public image of the man she was falling in love with.
It is, in many ways, the perfect summary of who she was and what she was doing in his life.
She was not impressed by him.
She loved him.
Those were two different things, and she made sure he knew the difference.
A few weeks later, he gave her a gift in return.
He bought her, by reliable accounts, an old ambulance, a decommissioned hearse and ambulance combination that had been used by a hospital and was, by the time he found it, well past its working life.
He had it restored just enough to drive.
It was his way of returning the joke.
They drove around Los Angeles in that old ambulance for a while, the most famous couple in the country in the most absurd vehicle either of them had ever owned.
People who knew them in those years described the relationship as, more than anything, a long shared joke that the two of them never seemed to tire of.
In 1939, several things happened in quick succession that would set the rest of her life into motion.
In March of that year, Rhea Gable's divorce from Clark was at last finalized. He was, for the first time since his early 30s, a free man.
On the 29th of March, 1939, he and Carole Lombard drove together, quietly, with almost no announcement, to a small town called Kingman in Arizona, and were married in a brief civil ceremony at a local Methodist Church.
The press was not informed in advance.
The witnesses were a few close friends.
They drove back to Los Angeles the same day, gave a single brief press conference, and went home.
She was 30 years old. He was 38. By most accounts of those who knew them both, this was the first marriage in either of their lives that was, in the deepest sense, the right one.
They bought a ranch. The property was located in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, on 20 acres of land. It had been owned previously by the director Raoul Walsh. They paid, by reliable accounts, around $50,000 for it, which was a considerable sum even by Hollywood standards of 1939.
It was a working ranch. There were horses, there were chickens.
There were citrus trees.
The main house was a two-story white-painted structure with green shutters, comfortable but not ostentatious.
They moved in together in the spring of 1939.
That same year, Clark Gable was filming the picture that would seal his place in cinema history.
It was called Gone with the Wind.
He had been resistant to the casting at first. He had not wanted the part of Rhett Butler, but the studio had pushed him into it. And Carole, by every account, had encouraged him to accept.
The film premiered in Atlanta in December of 1939.
He attended the premiere. So did she.
She wore a long gown. She held his arm.
She let him have his night.
By the end of the year, he was the most famous male actor in the world. And she was sitting in a chair next to him at every event, looking, by every photographic record we have, like a woman who had finally arrived where she wanted to be.
They wanted children.
This is one of the quieter parts of the story and one of the saddest. And the documentary record of it is more delicate than most of what we have discussed so far.
By the consistent testimony of friends, family, and Lombard's own later very rare comments to people close to her, she wanted children.
Clark's children, more than almost anything else.
She had been told, after a serious illness in her late 20s, that conception would be difficult for her.
She had not given up.
By all accounts, throughout 1940 and into 1941, she pursued every medical option available to her at the time.
The accounts of that pursuit come to us mostly through her brother Stewart and through the close circle of friends who saw her on a regular basis.
She suffered in the period in question at least one pregnancy that did not progress to term.
The medical details are not fully documented in any reliable public source, and I do not think it is right to invent them.
What is well attested is that the child she wanted with Clark Gable did not arrive, and that this absence weighed on her in ways that those who loved her could see.
The ranch in Encino, in the meantime, had become the center of the life she did have. She rose early. She fed the chickens herself. She made breakfast.
She read the trade papers. She worked when she had a picture in production with her usual ferocious commitment.
And in the evenings, when he was home, the two of them sat at a kitchen table together at 6:00 and ate dinner like any other married couple in California.
The simplicity of it was for both of them the entire point.
She was at the height of her powers as an actress. She made True Confession in 1937.
She made Made for Each Other and In Name Only in 1939.
She made Vigil in the Night in 1940, a serious dramatic role for which she received some of the best reviews of her career.
By 1941, she was at work on a film that few people in America yet knew about, a comedy written and directed by Ernst Lubitsch, set in occupied Warsaw, in which she would play an actress in a Polish theatrical company outwitting the Nazi occupation.
The film was called To Be or Not to Be.
It would be the last film she ever made.
Then, on the 7th of December, 1941, the Japanese Navy attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.
The United States, which had spent 2 years watching the war in Europe and Asia from a careful distance was suddenly and completely at war.
The reaction in Hollywood was immediate.
Studios began converting production schedules toward war-related films.
Stars began volunteering.
Within days of the attack, the president's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, had telephoned a number of leading actresses to ask for their personal participation in a national effort to sell something called defense bonds, later renamed war bonds, to the American public.
The bonds were the chief mechanism by which the federal government was going to pay for the war. The plan was to send actors and singers and other public figures on personal appearance tours, state by state, to encourage ordinary Americans to buy them.
Carole Lombard, when she was contacted, said yes immediately. She volunteered for one of the very first tours.
The tour was scheduled for January of 1942.
The state assigned to her was the state of Indiana, the state where she had been born, her own home state.
She would travel by train. She would be accompanied by her mother, Bess Peters, and by an MGM publicity man named Otto Winkler, who had been assigned as her press handler for the trip.
Clark would stay in California. He had a film in production, a comedy called Somewhere I'll Find You with Lana Turner.
He could not get away.
In the days before her departure, by the accounts of friends who visited the ranch in early January of 1942, she was in unusually high spirits. She was going home.
She was going to stand on the steps of the Indiana Statehouse, the building she had walked past as a child before her mother had taken her west, and she was going to ask the people of her home state to give what they could to a country at war.
She had been, all her life a woman who needed to be doing something.
The bond drive was something to do.
She left Los Angeles by train in the second week of January 1942.
She did not know she could not have known that she was leaving the ranch, the kitchen table, the man at it, and the long, carefully built private life for the last time.
The train pulled into Indianapolis on the 15th of January 1942.
There was a crowd at the station. There was a band.
There was a governor.
There was, by the accounts of local newspapers covering the event, a turnout that surprised even the people who had organized it.
The defense bond rally, planned for that afternoon and evening, had been expected to draw a respectable audience of a few thousand people.
By the time Carole Lombard arrived at the steps of the Indiana Statehouse, the crowd was estimated at 12,000 or more.
They filled the lawn. They filled the streets around it.
They came in winter coats in the cold of an Indiana January, and they stood there for hours.
She stood at a microphone on the Statehouse steps. She wore a dark suit.
She did not, by every account of those who saw her speak, deliver a polished political address.
She spoke in her ordinary voice about why this mattered.
She talked about being from Fort Wayne.
She talked about her mother sitting somewhere behind her on the platform.
She asked people to buy bonds.
And then she did something that was, in retrospect, almost unbelievable.
She sold them herself.
In a single day, by the official tally that was reported in the press the following morning, Carole Lombard personally sold over $2 million dollars of defense bonds in the state of Indiana.
The figure has been verified in multiple sources and even adjusted for the size of the wartime bond program, it was a remarkable single day total for a single celebrity appearance.
The Treasury Department was, by all accounts, astonished. The crowd, by every newspaper account, did not want to leave even after she had finished speaking. That evening there was a flag raising ceremony. There was a rendition of the national anthem. There were photographs of her on the platform with the governor and a small group of soldiers.
In one of the photographs, she is laughing at something one of the soldiers has said.
It is one of the last photographs of her ever taken.
The plan, when she had left Los Angeles, had been a leisurely return.
The schedule called for her to come home by train in the company of her mother and Otto Winkler with several stops along the way.
It was a pleasant itinerary designed not to exhaust her.
But by the evening of the 15th, she had decided, for reasons that her companions would describe in slightly different ways afterward, that she did not want to wait.
She wanted to be home.
She wanted to be home tomorrow, not in 3 days.
She wanted, more than anything, to see Clark.
There was, in 1942, a relatively new alternative to a multi-day train journey.
There were commercial airliners.
The route from Indianapolis to Los Angeles, with a couple of refueling stops along the way, could be flown in a long single day.
The aircraft involved was a twin-engine machine called a Douglas DC-3, the workhorse of American commercial aviation in the period. The airline operating the relevant flight was Transcontinental and Western Air, known by its initials as TWA.
Carole Lombard wanted to be on the next available flight west. Her mother did not.
Bess Peters, who was 60 years old and had grown up in an era when the airplane was something other people did, was deeply uncomfortable with the idea.
By the consistent testimony of those involved, she said so plainly. She wanted to take the train, as planned.
Otto Winkler, the MGM publicity man, agreed with her.
He felt strongly that the schedule should be kept. There was, by all accounts, a real argument about it that evening at the hotel.
The way the argument was finally settled has been told in several books and confirmed in its essentials by Lombard's brother, Stuart, who heard the story directly from the people who were there.
They flipped a coin.
That is the exact mechanism by which the decision was made.
Three adults in a hotel room in Indianapolis, late on the night of the 15th of January 1942, agreed that they would resolve the disagreement by tossing a single coin.
By the accounts that have come down to us, Carole Lombard called heads. The coin came up heads. She had, on the spin of a piece of metal, won the right to fly home.
It is the kind of detail that, if you encountered it in a novel, you would think the writer had laid on a little thick. It is, however, what happened. In the early morning hours of January 16th, 1942, Carole Lombard, her mother Bess, and Otto Winkler boarded TWA Flight 3 at the airport in Indianapolis. The flight was scheduled to make several stops on its way west, including St. Louis, Kansas City, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas, before arriving in Los Angeles late that evening.
The aircraft, a DC-3, would be carrying not only the Lombard party, but also 15 United States Army Air Corps pilots and crewmen who were being ferried west on military business.
With the regular crew of three, the total number of people on board would be 22.
The flight proceeded normally through most of its day.
They flew through clear winter skies.
They stopped to refuel. They got back on.
By late afternoon, they had reached Albuquerque, New Mexico, the second-to-last scheduled stop before the final leg to Los Angeles.
It was at Albuquerque that the second remarkable decision of the journey was made.
When the aircraft landed at Albuquerque, military officers at the airport informed the airline that the 15 Army personnel on the flight had priority status and that any civilian passengers would need to be removed to make room for additional military passengers boarding at Albuquerque.
This was an ordinary wartime procedure.
There were, by any reasonable reading of the rules, three civilian passengers on the flight whose tickets could be bumped. Carole Lombard, her mother, and Otto Winkler.
Carole Lombard refused to be bumped.
The exact tone of the conversation at the Albuquerque airport varies in different retellings. And I want to be honest with you that the precise dialogue you sometimes see quoted is reconstruction.
The basic facts, however, are well documented in the post-accident investigation.
She argued that she had just sold over $2 million worth of defense bonds for the United States government. And that she did not believe she should be required to give up her seat home to her husband. The airline staff, faced with one of the most famous women in America insisting on her right to remain on the airplane, made phone calls.
The military officers, faced with the same situation, deferred.
The civilian passengers were allowed to keep their seats.
Three Army pilots in the end were the ones who did not board the flight.
Their names have been preserved in the accident records.
They were alive at the end of that day.
The DC-3 took off from Albuquerque in the late afternoon. By the standard schedule, it should have made one more refueling stop in Las Vegas, Nevada before continuing on to Los Angeles.
There has been some discussion among aviation historians about the exact reasons for the decisions made on the leg from Albuquerque to Las Vegas, but the basic chain of events is clear.
The aircraft was running slightly behind schedule. The pilot, a captain with substantial experience, would have wanted to make up time.
The aircraft was somewhat heavier than it might otherwise have been. The weather across the route was cold and mostly clear, but the winter night was coming on.
Las Vegas in 1942 was a small desert town. It had a population well under 10,000.
It was not yet anything that a modern visitor would recognize.
The airport sat on the edge of the desert with mountains rising in the dark a short distance to the southwest.
The closest of those mountains was called Potosi.
Its highest peak rose to roughly 8,500 ft above sea level.
The flight refueled in Las Vegas in the early evening of January 16th, 1942.
The crew completed their paperwork. The passengers stayed mostly aboard the aircraft.
At 7:07 in the evening, the DC-3 took off from the Las Vegas airport on the final leg of its journey bound for Burbank, California.
It climbed into a clear winter night.
What happened in the next 12 minutes is reconstructed from the wreckage, the post-accident investigation conducted by by Civil Aeronautics Board, and the testimony of witnesses on the ground.
The aircraft, after takeoff, turned onto a heading of 218 degrees, that is, roughly southwest.
The standard charted safe heading for the route from Las Vegas to Burbank was somewhat more westerly.
The difference was small.
It was a deviation of approximately 4° from the published course.
4° on the cockpit compass of a DC-3 was visually almost nothing.
It was the width of a needle's quiver.
In the dark, with mountainous terrain to the southwest of the airport, 4° was the difference between clear air and a wall of stone.
At 7:19 in the evening, 12 minutes after takeoff, Flight 3 struck the side of Potosi Mountain.
The point of impact was a sheer rock face, roughly 7,770 ft above sea level.
By the calculations of the investigators, the aircraft had been in level flight at the moment of impact.
It had not been losing altitude.
It had not been in difficulty.
The pilots, by every indication of the wreckage, had not seen the mountain.
They had been flying in the dark on a heading that was 4° off.
And they had flown directly into terrain they almost certainly believed was somewhere else.
The aircraft disintegrated on impact.
The fuel tanks ignited.
The fire was visible for miles.
By the testimony of witnesses in the desert below, a flash of light was seen on the side of the mountain, followed by a sustained glow that lasted for a considerable period.
There were no survivors.
All 22 people aboard the DC-3 died at the moment of impact or within seconds afterward.
In Los Angeles, at the ranch in Encino, Clark Gable had spent the day waiting for her. By the accounts of the staff at the ranch, and by his own later very limited comments, he had been in good spirits earlier in the day.
He had told the cook to prepare dinner for two. He had laid the table himself.
He had at some point in the early evening gone out to the airport in Burbank to wait for her flight. The aircraft was overdue.
He waited.
The TWA staff at the Burbank Airport, who were beginning to receive the first fragmentary reports from Las Vegas, did not initially know how to handle the situation. There was at first only a report that flight three had not arrived in Las Vegas as expected on its outbound leg toward Burbank.
There was confusion.
There was for some hours the possibility that the aircraft had simply made an unscheduled landing somewhere in the desert. By late that night, the reports from Nevada were no longer fragmentary.
The man who delivered the news to Clark Gable was Howard Strickling, the head of publicity at MGM, a man who had handled some of the most delicate moments in the personal lives of the studio's biggest stars for over two decades.
Strickling drove to the ranch in Encino.
He brought with him the head of the studio's executive operations, Eddie Mannix.
The two of them, by every account that has come down to us, went into the house and told Clark Gable that the flight carrying his wife and her mother had been confirmed as crashed with no survivors expected.
I am going to be careful here because the next several hours of his life have been described in many books, often with considerable dramatic detail, and the documentary basis for some of those descriptions is thin.
What we know from the consistent testimony of Strickling, Mannix, and others who were [music] there in the aftermath is that Gable's reaction was severe.
He was, by every reliable account, almost completely [music] unable to function for a period of hours. He insisted at one point on going to Nevada himself. [music] They tried to dissuade him. They could not.
By the early morning hours of January 17th, a small group including [music] Gable, his close friend Spencer Tracy, Strickland, Mannix, and Lombard's brother Stewart [music] Peters were on a chartered flight headed east toward Las Vegas.
He arrived in Las Vegas before dawn. He was taken to a small hotel on the edge of town where the search and [music] recovery operation was being coordinated.
The mountain was, at that point, inaccessible. [music] Heavy snow had fallen during the night.
The wreckage was at over 7,000 ft on [music] a sheer rock face in a section of the Spring Mountains that even experienced climbers could only reach with considerable difficulty in winter conditions.
>> [music] >> He wanted to go up.
The men with him, by every account, had to physically prevent him. He was, they later said, in a state where he believed [music] he could climb the mountain himself and bring her down.
They got him into a hotel room. They sat with him. They waited.
>> [music] >> The recovery teams, made up of professional mountaineers, military personnel, and [music] local volunteers, [singing] took 3 days to reach the wreckage.
The conditions on the side of Potosi were brutal. [music] The wreckage was scattered across hundreds of yards of nearly vertical terrain. [music] There was, when the recovery teams arrived, almost nothing left of the aircraft itself that was recognizable as such.
The remains of the 22 passengers [music] were brought down the mountain individually, by hand, on stretchers over the course of several days.
Carole Lombard's body was identified by her wedding ring and by a small handful of personal effects.
Some accounts have suggested that specific items of her clothing were used in the identification.
I have looked carefully at the better sourced accounts, and the truth is that the precise details of how she was identified are not as clearly documented as some retellings suggest.
What is clear is that her body was recovered, that it was brought to a funeral home in Las Vegas, that her mother's body was recovered separately, and that Clark Gable, despite the protests of everyone around him, insisted on seeing her one last time before the casket was sealed.
By the testimony of those who were present at the funeral home, he sat with her for a considerable period of time.
He did not speak.
When he finally rose to leave, he took her wedding ring from her hand.
He wore it on a chain around his neck for the rest of his life.
The funeral was held in Los Angeles on the 21st of January 1942.
It was, at her own previously expressed wish, a simple service.
She had once told a friend in passing that if anything ever happened to her, she did not want the kind of operatic Hollywood funeral that the studios were known for.
Gable honored that wish.
The service was small. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, in a section called the Sanctuary of Trust.
Her mother was buried beside her.
The grave was marked, at her husband's instruction, with a simple plaque.
The name on the plaque is not Carole Lombard, the name the world knew her by.
The name on the plaque is Carole Lombard Gable.
Two days later, on the 23rd of January, the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sent a telegram to Clark Gable.
The exact text of the telegram has been preserved in the archives, and it is worth giving its substance accurately.
The president, in plain language, expressed his condolences and described Carole Lombard as having given her life in the service of her country.
In subsequent public remarks made by administration officials in the days that followed, the phrase was repeated and slightly amplified. That she was the first American woman to be killed in the line of duty in the war that had begun 6 weeks before.
Whether that designation is technically precise depends on how one chooses to define the line of duty in January of 1942.
But the spirit of it was understood at the time and has been understood ever since.
She had been in the country 2 months at war, and she had given herself to it completely.
And the country buried her with the recognition that she had done so.
In Encino, the husband she had left behind was about to do something that no one who knew him in those first dark days would have predicted. And that the studio that employed him would spend the next 2 years trying, without success, to talk him out of.
In the weeks following the funeral, Clark Gable went back to work. He had to. He was in the middle of a film.
The picture was Somewhere I'll Find You, the comedy with Lana Turner that he had been shooting on the day of the crash.
Production had been suspended for the funeral and for the immediate aftermath.
By early February of 1942, MGM had begun, gently but persistently, to ask him when he would be willing to come back to the set.
He came back.
By every account of those who were on that production, he was not, in any meaningful sense, present.
He hit his marks. He said his lines.
He went home.
The film was finished. It was released that summer.
It made money because anything with Clark Gable in it in 1942 made money.
But the man on the screen was not the man audiences had seen the year before.
He was drinking.
The accounts of how heavily and how steadily he was drinking in the spring of 1942 come from a wide range of sources who were close to him at that time and they are consistent.
He drank in the morning. He drank at the ranch.
He drank, by the testimony of his friends, in a steady, controlled, joyless way that suggested a man who had decided he no longer particularly cared what happened next.
He had stopped sleeping in their bedroom.
He had moved into a small guest room on the property, by the account of the housekeeper at the ranch, and he had left her clothes in the closets of the master bedroom exactly where they had been on the day she had left for Indiana.
He left, by the same account, her dressing table untouched. The brushes, the bottles, the small things she had used in the morning.
He instructed the staff not to disturb any of it.
By the testimony of those who visited him in those months, walking past the master bedroom of that ranch in the spring of 1942 was an experience that more than one of his friends found nearly unbearable.
He was 41 years old. He was the most famous male actor in the world.
And he was, by the unanimous testimony of those who knew him in that period, a man who was no longer entirely sure why he should keep going.
In August of 1942, 7 months after her death, he made a decision that surprised everyone around him.
He enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces.
There has been considerable discussion over the eight decades since about exactly why he did it.
Some accounts have suggested that Carole Lombard, on the night before she left for Indianapolis, had urged him to enlist if the country went deeper into the war.
Other accounts have suggested that he was acting on his own grief, looking for something dangerous to do with himself.
The truth, by the most careful reading of his own brief comments on the subject and the testimony of those closest to him, is probably some combination of both.
He had been thinking about it. She had wanted him to.
She was gone. He went.
The decision was, from the perspective of the studio, a disaster.
Clark Gable was MGM's single most valuable asset. He was, in 1942, a 41-year-old man well past the age at which the military would have drafted him.
He could have spent the war making patriotic films and selling bonds, and no one in the country would have thought less of him for it.
The studio executives, by every account, tried hard to talk him out of it.
He went anyway.
He enlisted as a private.
He could have gone in as an officer. His fame and his age would have entitled him to a direct commission.
He chose to start at the bottom.
He went through basic training at an Army Air Forces base in Miami Beach, Florida, in the summer and early autumn of 1942, alongside men who were, in many cases, 20 years younger than he was.
He drilled with them. He marched with them. He slept in the same kind of barracks.
The other recruits, by the consistent accounts that have come down to us, treated him initially with something like awe, and then, fairly quickly, with the rough affection that soldiers in basic training tend to develop for one another, regardless of who they were before the war.
He did not, by any account, ask for special treatment. He did not, by any account, get any.
After basic training, he was sent to Officer Candidate School, also in Miami.
He completed the course.
He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in October of 1942.
He was then sent for additional training in aerial gunnery, the operating of the heavy machine guns mounted on bomber aircraft, at a school in Tyndall Field, Florida.
He turned out to be good at it.
This is one of the small surprises of his military career, and it is well documented in the records of the period.
He was 41 years old. He had no particular athletic background by the standards of professional military men.
He was a movie star who had decided to learn how to operate the waist guns of a B-17 Flying Fortress, and he learned how to do it to a standard that satisfied the instructors at one of the most demanding training programs in the wartime Army Air Forces.
He graduated at or near the top of his class.
In early 1943, he was assigned to a unit called the 351st Bombardment Group, which was preparing to deploy to England as part of the Eighth Air Force, the strategic bombing force that would conduct the daylight bombing campaign over Nazi-occupied Europe.
He arrived in England in the spring of 1943, stationed at an airfield called Polebrook in Northamptonshire.
His official assignment on paper was to make a documentary film about aerial gunners.
The Army Air Forces had decided that gunner recruitment was a problem. It was, by the standards of the period, one of the most dangerous jobs in the entire war, and young men were not lining up for it. And they wanted a film made by an experienced Hollywood team led by a famous face to encourage enlistment.
Gable led that project.
The film was eventually released in 1944 under the title Combat America and it survives today in archival form.
But the assignment was, in another sense, not entirely the point.
The point for Gable was that he wanted to fly combat missions and the documentary project gave him the official cover under which he could do so.
He flew, by reliable Army records, five combat missions over occupied Europe in 1943 as a gunner aboard B-17 bombers operating out of Polebrook.
The missions were not staged.
They were real bombing raids against real industrial targets with real German fighters intercepting the formations and real anti-aircraft fire coming up from the ground.
Men were lost on those missions.
Aircraft were shot down. Gable, aboard the aircraft he flew on, came back each time.
There is a story, frequently repeated, that Hermann Göring, the head of the German Luftwaffe, personally placed a substantial bounty on Gable's head. A reward for any German pilot who could shoot him down or capture him.
that it has acquired the weight of fact.
I want to be honest with you about this.
There is no document in the German archives that anyone has ever produced to confirm the existence of such a bounty.
There is no Luftwaffe order, no captured paperwork, no reliable contemporaneous testimony from any German source.
The story appears to have grown out of wartime American propaganda and the natural human appetite for a good narrative.
It may be true.
It is more likely a legend.
What is certain and well documented is that Clark Gable flew real combat missions in real bombers in 1943 and that he came back from them and that his fellow crewmen, who were not fooled by celebrity, regarded him by the end of his deployment as a serviceable, professional gunner who had done his job.
He was awarded the Air Medal for his combat missions with an oak leaf cluster denoting an additional award.
He was, by the end of his service, a captain.
He returned to the United States in late 1943.
He was stationed for some months at the First Motion Picture Unit, a special unit of the Army Air Forces based in Culver City, California, that produced training films and documentaries.
The unit was an unusual one. It was made up almost entirely of Hollywood professionals in uniform, directors, writers, cameramen, editors, and a handful of actors who applied their civilian skills to the production of military films.
Among the men serving in that unit during the period was a young captain named Ronald Reagan, who would later, in another life, become a different kind of public figure entirely. Reagan and Gable served at the same base during overlapping periods. They knew each other, at least in passing. Some popular accounts have suggested that Reagan personally signed the paperwork releasing Gable from active duty in 1944.
The actual signature on the discharge documents has not, to my knowledge, been clearly identified in any reliable source. The two men were in the same unit. The paperwork went through that unit. The specific claim about who signed what is one of those small historical embellishments that has grown up around the story over the decades.
The basic fact that Gable was discharged in 1944 with the rank of major and that the First Motion Picture Unit was where the paperwork was processed is documented and accurate.
He came home to the ranch in Encino in the summer of 1944.
The ranch had been throughout his absence maintained exactly as he had left it.
By the testimony of the staff and the friends who visited him in the months after his return, the master bedroom was still as it had been on the day Carole had left for Indianapolis.
Her clothes were still in the closets.
Her dressing table was still untouched.
He moved back into the small guest room.
He resumed his pre-war routine in many of its outward forms.
He fed the chickens in the morning. He rode out across the property on horseback.
He drank in the evenings.
He went back to work.
MGM, which had waited patiently for 2 years, put him into a film called Adventure in 1945, his first post-war picture.
The studio's marketing campaign for the release was built around the line, "Gable's back and Garson's got him."
It was, by every account including his own, the kind of slogan that made him profoundly uncomfortable.
The film was a modest success commercially and a disappointment artistically.
He was not, in 1945, the man he had been in 1941.
The audiences could see it. The studio could see it.
He could see it.
He continued in the years that followed to work steadily. He made The Hucksters in 1947.
He made Command Decision in 1948, a serious drama about the costs of strategic bombing in the war he had himself flown in.
He made Mogambo in 1953 opposite Ava Gardner and a young Grace Kelly, a film that earned him some of his best reviews in years.
He kept his place at the top of the industry. He aged. The mustache went gray.
The famous ears stayed exactly where they had always been.
Audiences who had grown up watching him in the 1930s came back year after year to see what he was doing now.
He married twice more.
The first of those marriages, his fourth, was to a woman named Lady Sylvia Ashley, a British socialite who had been previously married to, among others, Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
They were married in December of 1949.
The marriage was, by every account, a mistake almost from the beginning.
They were divorced in April of 1952.
The accounts that have come down to us from those who knew him in that period are consistent on one point. He had not, in any deep sense, recovered from Carole.
He had tried. He had married a woman who was, in some superficial ways, possessed of the kind of social glamour Carole had had.
It had not worked.
He had not expected it to.
The second of those marriages, his fifth and last, was different. He married a woman named Kay Williams in July of 1955.
Kay had been, in her younger years, a model and a minor actress. She had two children from a previous marriage.
She and Gable had known each other casually for years, and she had, by every account from those who knew them both, a calm, grounded quality that he had badly needed.
She did not try to be Carole. She did not try to make him forget.
By the testimony of friends who saw them together in the late 1950s, the marriage was a kind one, and he was, in his sixth decade, somewhat less haunted than he had been in his fifth.
He made one more great film.
In the autumn of 1960, at the age of 59, he traveled to the Nevada desert to shoot a film called The Misfits.
The screenplay had been written by Arthur Miller for his then wife, Marilyn Monroe.
The director was John Huston.
The cast included Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach.
It was a difficult production.
The desert heat was punishing. Monroe was unwell during much of the shoot.
Gable, who had insisted on doing his own physical stunts despite his age, spent long days being dragged behind horses in the high desert sun.
By the testimony of those on the set, he refused offers of a stunt double for sequences that the production crew believed should not have been performed by a man his age.
Production wrapped on the 4th of November, 1960.
Two days later, on the 6th of November, 1960, Clark Gable suffered a serious heart attack at his home.
He was admitted to the hospital.
He appeared over the following days to stabilize. Kay was with him. Friends visited. There was, by the accounts of those who saw him in that hospital room, a quietness about him that was not, in the way that one might have expected, fearful.
There was, at the time of the heart attack, one further fact that mattered enormously.
Kay was pregnant. She was carrying his first biological child. The child, a son, was due in the spring of 1961.
On the evening of November 16th, 1960, 10 days after the first heart attack, Clark Gable suffered a second, massive coronary in his hospital bed. He died within minutes.
He was 59 years old.
His son, John Clark Gable, was born 4 months later, on the 20th of March, 1961.
The child never met his father.
There is one detail of his burial that I want to give you accurately, because it has been told in slightly different ways in different places, and the truth of it is the part of the story that matters most.
Clark Gable had left, in his will, specific instructions about where he was to be buried. He was to be interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, in the Sanctuary of Trust.
The Sanctuary of Trust was the section of Forest Lawn where Carole Lombard had been buried in 1942.
He had specified by name the exact crypt. It was the crypt directly next to hers.
He had purchased that crypt in 1942 in the days after her funeral.
He had owned it for 18 years.
He had never spoken about it publicly.
He had simply made sure in 1942 that when his time came, he would be placed beside her.
Kay Williams, his last wife, when she herself died in 1983, was buried in the same section in another nearby crypt by her own arrangement.
She had understood, by every account of those who knew her, exactly what she had married into, and she had not tried to compete with it.
There is one more piece of this story to tell, because the larger meaning of what happened on the side of Potosi Mountain on the evening of January 16th, 1942, did not end with the funeral, and did not end with the war, and did not end with the husband she left behind.
It echoed in ways that are still echoing eight decades later in the country she had spent her last conscious days asking to give what it could give.
The bond drive in Indianapolis on the 15th of January, 1942, was not, in the larger picture, a one-time event. It was the first major celebrity driven war bond appearance of the United States entry into the Second World War.
The Treasury Department, watching the numbers come in from Indiana that day, drew specific conclusions about what was possible.
Within weeks, a much larger and more systematic celebrity bond program was being designed in Washington.
Over the next 3 and 1/2 years, that program would generate, by the official Treasury figures, something on the order of 180 billion dollars in war bond sales. A sum that, in the economy of the 1940s, paid for a substantial fraction of the entire American war effort.
I'm not going to claim, because the documentary record will not support it, that this entire program existed because of Carole Lombard.
The bond program would have happened without her.
What is reasonable to say, and what was said at the time by the people who designed the program, is that her single appearance in Indianapolis demonstrated to the Treasury Department exactly what a serious celebrity tour could accomplish, and that the model used in the celebrity bond drives that followed was directly influenced by what she had done in a single afternoon on the steps of a state house in her home state.
She was the first. She set the template.
The rest of the war was, in some real sense, paid for by a method that she had, at the cost of her life, helped to prove out.
In January of 1943, 1 year after the crash, the United States Maritime Commission launched a new Liberty ship from a shipyard in Wilmington, California.
The ship was a standard cargo vessel of a class that would, over the course of the war, be built by the thousands.
It was, at the moment of its launching, indistinguishable from any of the other ships of its class, except for one thing.
The name on its hull was the SS Carole Lombard.
The ceremony was attended by Irene Dunne, who broke the bottle of champagne against the bow.
The ship was crewed and put into service. Over the next several years, the SS Carole Lombard sailed the Pacific, carrying cargo and personnel for the war effort.
In 1944, she was involved in the rescue of survivors from another ship that had been struck by a Japanese torpedo, taking aboard a substantial number of men whose own vessel was sinking beneath them.
She survived the war.
She was eventually scrapped, like nearly all of her sisters, in the 1960s.
While she was in service, the men who crewed her, the men whose lives she helped save in 1944, sailed under a name that had been chosen because the woman to whom it had belonged had, on a frozen mountainside in Nevada, given everything she had to a country at war.
There is, on the side of Potosi Mountain today, the remains of the wreckage of TWA Flight 3.
The site is reachable, with considerable effort, by experienced hikers willing to make a difficult climb at altitude.
The aircraft itself was never removed.
The terrain was too vertical and too dangerous in 1942 to permit removal of the heavier pieces, and so much of the wreckage was simply left where it had fallen, on a sheer rock face 7,700 ft above the desert floor.
Over the eight decades since, weathering and erosion have spread fragments of the airframe across a wide area.
Visitors who make the climb today report finding pieces of aluminum, sections of engine cowling, fragments of the airframe still bearing traces of their original markings.
The site is, in an unofficial way, a memorial.
There is a small plaque that climbers have placed in recent decades, listing the names of the 22 people who died there.
Among those names are the names of the 15 Army Air Corps personnel who died alongside Carole Lombard, her mother, and Otto Winkler that night. Their names are less well-remembered than hers.
They were soldiers being ferried west on military business, men whose own stories were just beginning, and they died in the same impact.
Their names on the plaque on the mountain are listed alongside hers in the order of crew first and then passengers, the way the manifest had been written.
I want to come back before we end this to the personal questions that haunt this story because there are several of them, and they matter.
The first question is the question of the 4°.
Why did the pilot, an experienced captain on a route he had flown before, fly a heading that was 4° off the charted course?
The Civil Aeronautics Board investigation in 1942 reached a number of conclusions.
They found that the navigational lights at the Las Vegas airport had, in some accounts, been partially blacked out as a wartime precaution, which may have made it more difficult for the pilots to establish their initial heading after takeoff.
They found that there was no mechanical failure in the aircraft itself.
They found that the pilots had not been impaired.
They found, in the end, that the aircraft had simply been flown into terrain in conditions where the terrain should have been visible on the chart in the cockpit.
The phrase used in the official report was pilot error.
There's been continued debate among aviation historians about whether that finding was complete or whether other contributing factors should have been weighted more heavily.
The plain facts, however, are not in dispute.
12 minutes after takeoff, an aircraft hit a mountain that was exactly where the chart said it would be.
The pilot believed he was somewhere else.
The second question is the question of the coin.
If the coin in that hotel room in Indianapolis had come up tails, if the disagreement had been resolved in favor of Best Pictures and Otto Winkler, there would have been no flight.
Carole Lombard would have ridden the train home with her mother and her publicity man, taken her time across the western states, and arrived at the ranch in Encino 3 days later than she had planned.
She would have made To Be or Not to Be, the picture was already finished, set for release in February.
She would have likely made many more films.
She would have, in some plausible version of events, become the great American comic actress of the 1950s, the woman who would have anchored the kind of sophisticated romantic comedies that the next decade would produce, if she had been there to anchor them.
She would have been 41 years old at the end of the war.
She would have been 60 in 1968.
She might still have been alive in the 1980s, an old woman giving rare interviews about a Hollywood that no longer existed.
We do not know.
We will never know.
The coin came up heads, and a different version of her future ended in the dark on the side of a mountain.
The third question is the question of who she was in the end as a person.
She has been, since her death, somewhat flattened by legend.
She has been turned in many retellings into a kind of saint of pre-war Hollywood, beautiful, generous, witty, doomed.
She was beautiful. She was generous. She was witty.
The doom is the part of the story that took the longest to make sense of, because it was an accident, and accidents do not produce meaning the way that meaningful deaths in stories are supposed to.
She was, by every honest account from those who knew her well, a complicated person.
She had a famously profane vocabulary, the kind that startled visitors to her sets, and that the studios spent considerable effort keeping out of fan magazines.
She was capable of professional ruthlessness when she felt a project required it.
She had been, in her earliest years in Hollywood, ambitious in a way that some of her contemporaries had found sharp.
She had also been, in ways that mattered to the people who loved her, deeply loyal.
She had stayed close to William Powell after their divorce. She had carried Russ Columbo's death with her privately for the rest of her life.
She had built, with Clark Gable, a marriage of unusual privacy in an industry where privacy was almost impossible.
She had paid her taxes when she could have not paid them for reasons she felt were obvious, and that she was not particularly interested in being praised for.
She had, in the last weeks of her life, gone home to a state she had left as a child, and asked the people there to help save the country.
And they had loved her enough to give her over two million dollars in a single day.
The fourth question, and I think this is the one that the story turns on in the end, is the question of what Clark Gable did with the rest of his life after she was gone.
He lived for 18 years after her death.
He fought in a war. He made 25 more films.
He married two more women, one of whom he loved in his late quieter years, and the other of whom he didn't really.
He had, at last, a child of his own, born four months after his death.
He drank steadily for the rest of his life.
He kept her wedding ring on a chain around his neck.
He kept the master bedroom of the Encino ranch, by the consistent testimony of the staff and the friends who visited, exactly as she had left it on the day she had gone to Indianapolis. And he never moved her clothes from the closets, and he never disturbed the brushes on her dressing table, and he bought, in the days after her funeral, the crypt next to hers at Forest Lawn.
And he waited.
When he died in 1960, his last instruction was that he was to be placed there.
He had been waiting 18 years.
They placed him beside her on the 7th of November, 1960.
You can visit them today.
The Sanctuary of Trust at Forest Lawn is on most days a quiet place.
Visitors who go there looking for them sometimes have to ask.
The crypts are not heavily marked.
The plaque on hers reads Carole Lombard Gable.
The plaque on his reads Clark Gable.
They are next to each other, the way he had arranged.
Bess Peters, the mother who had taken her west on a train in 1914, and who had died on a mountain beside her in 1942, is in the same section.
I've been telling this story for a while now, and I want, before we close, to come back to the moment we started with, because the meaning of that moment looks slightly different now than it did when we began.
A twin-engine airliner climbed out of the desert at 7:07 on the evening of January 16th, 1942, and turned onto a heading that was 4° too far to the south.
There were 22 people aboard. One of them was a woman in a wool coat who had spent her last conscious afternoon selling defense bonds on the steps of a state house in the state where she had been born.
She had won a coin toss the night before.
She had refused to give up her seat in Albuquerque a few hours earlier.
She was, at the moment the aircraft turned south, somewhere between 33 and 33 years and 3 months old, depending on how you count it.
She had two husbands behind her, one fiance who had never quite been a fiance, a famously private current marriage, an unborn child who had not arrived, a Liberty ship that had not yet been named, a president who had not yet sent the telegram, and a husband at home who had set the table for two and was waiting for her.
She had no idea any of this was about to happen.
She was, in the most ordinary sense possible, simply going home.
That is in the end what makes this story worth telling.
She was not on her way to a heroic death.
She was on her way to dinner.
She had cut 3 days off her schedule because she missed her husband.
She had argued at an airport because she did not want to be bumped from a flight that would get her there sooner.
She had been, in those last hours, exactly the person she had always been.
Practical, impatient, in love, and in a hurry.
A pilot in the dark, 4 degrees off course, turned a 33-year-old woman in a wool coat into one of the first American casualties of the Second World War.
And turned the man waiting for her at the table into a man who would spend the next 18 years living in the half of his life that had been left to him.
With her wedding ring on a chain around his neck, and her clothes in a closet he never opened, and a crypt at Forest Lawn that he had bought in 1942 and waited 18 years to use.
Some stories are remembered because of what they tell us about the people in them.
Some stories are remembered because of what they tell us about ourselves.
This one, I think, is remembered because it tells us something neither of those things, exactly.
It tells us that the largest events in a life, the ones that the public will know us for, the ones that will be carved on plaques and put on the hulls of ships, sometimes turn entirely on the smallest decisions.
A coin in a hotel room, an argument at an airport gate, 4° on a compass needle.
She was 33 years old. She had been the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. She had been, by the end, in the only marriage of her life that worked.
She had 3 days left of it when the airplane left the ground.
She is buried in Glendale, California, next to her mother, and next to the man who waited 18 years to be placed beside her.
Her name is on the wall.
The date of her death is the 16th of January, 1942.
The aircraft is still on the side of Potosi Mountain.
Pieces of it are still being found by people who climb up to look, more than 80 years after the night she did not come home.
If you ever find yourself in Forest Lawn, walking through the Sanctuary of Trust, and you stop in front of the plaque that reads, "Carole Lombard Gable," you can stand there for a while.
Most people do.
There is no special arrangement to be made. There is no formal moment of remembrance prescribed.
You simply stand in front of it.
And you think about a girl on a train in 1914, and a windshield in 1926, and a coin in 1942, and a man who set a table for two and waited 18 years.
And then you walk back out into the California sunlight, the way she would have wanted you to.
Because she had been all her life a woman who did not believe in standing still in dark rooms.
She believed in movement and in laughter and in going home.
She was on her way home when it happened.
That is, in the end, the simplest and the truest thing about this story.
She was on her way home.
The light was on. The table was set.
The man at the table was waiting.
She just never quite got there.
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