Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  A few feet away Carole Lombard stopped pacing and stared out at the plane, watching Ed Fuqua continue to work. She fumbled for a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag. She huddled up and began pacing again, arms folded tightly about her. She pulled a bit of tobacco off the tip of her tongue with her fingers, and then continued to smoke and pace. Duffy thought her a tight little firecracker about ready to go off. He had to admit that the turnaround was longer than he would have liked, this quick service job that should have been 10 minutes at most and was now more than 20. No cargo or mail was being added to or removed from the plane, which should have made turnaround a snap. Floyd Munson, the young cargo assistant, simply had to work with the TWA hostess still aboard the plane to remove the remnants from a dinner served to passengers in the air between Albuquerque and Las Vegas, and that should have been done by now.

  Outside, Fuqua worked as fast as he might. Western Air employed him and he preferred the smaller Western fuel truck. But the Las Vegas terminal served both Western Air Express and TWA, and by agreement he serviced the TWA ships too, and on those occasions he was forced to use the unwieldy TWA truck with too many levers and gauges. He was up on the wings adding gas to the mains, and then down, up again, and then down. The second time he almost bumped into a soldier who had strayed near the wing, obviously the guard assigned to watch the plane while it remained on the ground. They were just 40 days past Pearl Harbor after all. McCarran Field was an Army facility, and they had the place buttoned up tight, with guards at every entrance and by every plane.

  Finally, Fuqua was done adding gas and oil. Munson confirmed that he had removed the meal service. Fuqua brought the maintenance sheet inside and handed it to Chuck Duffy. Chuck then prepared Flight 3’s final clearance and gave it to Capt. Williams. Pilot and co-pilot returned to the plane. Duffy was conscious of the delay and hurried over to the door to the station, calling for passengers to line up by seat assignment. He led them outside and stood by the portable aluminum stairway as the large group of Army personnel and the few civilians began to file past and climb aboard. By the order of boarding, Miss Lombard was sitting in the center of the plane. He held out his hand and she took it as she climbed the steps, her high heels clomping on aluminum. She thanked him for his help and seemed a bit less high voltage getting onto the plane than she had been stepping off. Then Duffy helped the elderly lady make the climb and set foot inside the plane.

  When all were aboard, he swiveled the door around and into the hands of that pretty uniformed stewardess, who gave him a smile and a thank you. “Happy landings,” he said, and she smiled again and pulled the door closed. He heard the lock catch inside the plane. He pulled his steps away and returned to the station, his work for the day now finished. Flight 3 hadn’t been scheduled to land at McCarran and was on its way to Boulder City to the south, but the flight was well behind schedule and had run out of daylight, and Boulder airfield didn’t have runway lights. Flight 3 then made the call to McCarran and the airfield had accommodated. Now Chuck Duffy was bushed and anxious to get home to dinner.

  Up in the control tower, Pfc. Parnell was once again engaged. Word hadn’t reached him about Carole Lombard, and so all he cared about was getting Flight 3 airborne without incident.

  He watched the pilot turn over one propeller, and then the other, and the twin-engined bird started to run up those big Wright Cyclone engines to take-off speed.

  The pilot radioed for permission to taxi to the northern edge of the north-south runway, and Parnell gave him the OK. The engines were practically screaming by now. Parnell was used to the throaty growl of the Western DC-3s, but this TWA airship had two engines that seemed to be working hard. A DC-3 was a DC-3, so why would the engines sound so different? He couldn’t understand it, but then he was new and shrugged to himself that he didn’t know what he didn’t know.

  Flight 3 began to move north to south along the runway. It continued to gain speed without getting off the ground, past the intersection with the diagonal runway. A streak of blue flame trailed each engine, which Parnell found a spectacular sight, like Independence Day fireworks. The ship didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave the ground, he thought, as she kept rolling along the runway, down and down. As quickly as he grew concerned, there she went, easing into the air and gaining altitude. The flame of the engines illuminated the plane enough for him to see the wheels start to retract.

  Parnell glanced at his watch and grabbed his clipboard to write down the departure time. From downstairs he heard the maintenance man’s voice—Parnell didn’t know his name—as he called up suddenly, “What was that just took off, an AT-6? What’s a trainer doing taking off at night?”

  The engine of the AT-6 trainer made a terrific high and distinctive roar, a sound heard all day every day around McCarran since Pearl Harbor. That’s what the engines of Flight 3 had sounded like; they were working hard to get off the ground because of a heavy load.

  “Nope,” Parnell shouted down the stairs. “It was a DC-3.”

  There was a pause. “Huh,” said the operations man, as if a little embarrassed to have guessed wrong.

  At about two miles downrange to the south or southwest, the TWA ship radioed back, “TWA Flight 3 take-off time, seven zero seven,” and Parnell acknowledged.

  On the radio he heard Air Traffic Control talking to TWA Control: “Traffic for TWA 3 is northeast-bound Western 10, estimated Daggett 7:59, climbing to 9,000.”

  “K.F.,” had come the response from ATC.

  In Las Vegas tower life had grown quiet again, and Parnell thought about his buddy at the movies and envied him that little bit of Hollywood excitement. As it was, the private settled back and waited for Western Flight 10 on what was in all respects a perfectly routine Friday night in January.

  2. Perpetual Motion Machine

  Aboard TWA Flight 3 on takeoff from McCarran Field, the soft-hearted, hard-charging, caffeine-fueled, self-promoting, profanity-laced, nicotine-addicted, business-oriented, and usually optimistic sexpot and perpetual motion machine known to the world as Carole Lombard could finally see the end of the road. A Hoosier from Fort Wayne, Indiana, she was born Jane Alice Peters, the third child of Frederic and Elizabeth Knight Peters. Fred had money, and Bess came from money. Money would practically grow on every tree in the vicinity of Carole Lombard her whole life. But having money didn’t mean that the kid had it easy.

  “I always had the feeling that I couldn’t keep up,” she said of a youth spent in the shadow of two older brothers, which is odd considering that Carole Lombard gave the appearance all her Hollywood life of being comfortable in her own skin. Whether posing in a negligée or bathing suit (and nobody in the 1930s struck more cheesecake poses than Lombard), dancing onscreen, shooting skeet, attending the Academy Awards dinner, camping in long johns, or launching Gone With the Wind with 150,000 people looking on, Lombard always seemed on the verge of saying, “You bet your ass I belong here.”

  But did she belong in her own family? Before Fred and Bess had married, he had nearly been killed in an industrial accident at the manufacturing plant owned by his father. Fred had been mashed up pretty bad and nearly lost a leg. But it was the head injury that would plague him the rest of his life, perhaps a lesion on his brain, perhaps a clot or tumor, and after his marriage to Bess and the birth of their three children, headaches crippled him, and then came seizures so frightening that Bess feared she would have to take the children away. The episodes didn’t seem to be spells of epilepsy, the “falling sickness,” but more on the order of blind rages for which there was then no cure, no warning, and absolutely no defense.

  It was the dark cloud in an otherwise bucolic turn-of-the-century life in Fort Wayne. Jane grew up idolizing her two big brothers, Freddy, nicknamed Fritz, and Stuart, known as Tootie after Jane’s early attempts at Stuart. Endless tagging along with Fritz and Tootie hardened Jane into a tomboy the likes of Scout in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Before her sixth birthday, Jane was p
acked up with brothers and mother for a vacation west to California, the farthest point in the United States from Fred and his problem. As funded by Bess’s well-heeled family, and later by Fred Peters himself, the group of four found an apartment in Los Angeles, and the vacation turned into a lifestyle.

  Jane was a quiet child, fair haired, blue eyed, with no hint of the raucous and profane personality of her adult life. She was a thoughtful girl and a follower, easy to laugh, quick with a joke, and possessing a love of the silent pictures that drew her in and spawned ambition.

  Mother Bess moved the family to a big house on South Harvard in the affluent Wilshire Boulevard district of Los Angeles, just around the corner from the Ambassador Hotel. Future director Delmer Daves was a childhood friend of Fred and Stuart Peters. “We were front-door friends,” said Daves. “We sat on the steps and talked about whatever boys talked about. And Carole was the kid sister and really beneath our attention. She teased me about it later.” Daves’ expression grew sour and he added, “Carole at that time was not an attractive girl. She was scrawny.”

  In this neighborhood that Daves described as “rather elegant,” the entire Peters family fell in with the Hollywood crowd. For Jane Peters, it was a magical place to grow up. “I can remember myself as a little girl,” said Carole Lombard later, “standing at the corner of Hollywood and Vine watching my idol Gloria Swanson.” Jane decided then, “I, too, was going to have a screen career, and I’ve never deviated from my purpose.”

  In 1921 at age 12, Jane landed a role in a motion picture production called A Perfect Crime by rising director Allan Dwan, then just three pictures away from directing action-adventure hero Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood. A Perfect Crime starred Monte Blue, an actor so successful in the movie business that by 1921 he had already appeared in nearly 50 pictures, including bit parts in three of the most important epics of the early cinema: Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and The Squaw Man. A Perfect Crime became a one-off with no print in existence today, and Jane continued to have ambition about life in the picture business, if no direct way to get there. But it didn’t hurt to know Dwan, Blue, and A Perfect Crime’s leading lady, Jacqueline Logan.

  It also didn’t hurt that Jane lived right in the middle of burgeoning Hollywood action. At Virgil Junior High she met other future film stars, girls like Sally Eilers, and became best friends with Dixie Pantages of the Pantages theater chain. At Fairfax High School Jane met a very tall, very wide, very funny girl named Madalynne Fields, who would become a friend later, but for now Jane Peters joined the jazz age and turned flapper. She dated many boys, including the son of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and the son of film director Thomas Ince. She had a near miss in casting with the great Charlie Chaplin, and another near miss with demure superstar Mary Pickford. Vitagraph Studios wanted Jane, and then didn’t. Fox Films finally signed her to a modest contract and ordered a name change; thus was born, at age 16, Carole Lombard—with the e, which would come and go for the next six years until it finally stuck. At each step it was the girl’s face that triumphed, or rather the combination of face, ash-blonde hair, blue eyes, and a natural comfortable something alluding to the fact that, wherever she was, this girl belonged.

  Another near miss involved rising director John Ford, but as a Fox Films contract player at $65 a week, teenaged Carole got work in feature pictures. Not big parts, but it was features work and she loved it. Then John Barrymore, the famous Broadway star who had made a successful transition to Hollywood in pictures like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Beau Brummel, called Miss Lombard and wanted to meet her. If Barrymore didn’t actually invent the casting couch, he was one of its earliest practitioners, which forced the sharp-beyond-her-years Lombard to engineer her way through the meeting with virtue intact. Barrymore called her in for a screen test, acted with her, and then hired her to star opposite him in his newest production, The Tempest.

  Soon, everything went right. Director Howard Hawks was about to make a big picture called The Road to Glory at Fox starring popular leading lady May McEvoy, and Lombard landed a nice supporting part. She didn’t understand the irony of the story line of the Hawks picture just yet: A woman suffers terrible injuries in an auto accident and relies on prayer to live through the experience.

  That October Carole Lombard may have been the happiest birthday girl in southern California, all of 17 and shooting scenes for Howard Hawks on the Fox soundstages while about to be the great John Barrymore’s leading lady.

  On a chilly autumn night, the young ingénue went on a date with one of her wealthy boyfriends, this time Harry Cooper. Just another boyfriend; just another date. All these beaus were nice, good-looking, all-American boys with money. All were well suited to the ash blonde with the striking face and topaz blue eyes. But on this night, the boyfriend’s roadster was struck by another car.

  The life story of Hollywood’s queen of screwball can be broken down into four freak accidents. The first, before she was born, had crippled her father, physically and emotionally, and caused Bess and their children to migrate to California. This October 1925 auto crash became the second. The windscreen on Harry’s roadster shattered “like a fireworks explosion,” as Lombard described it, on a steep Hollywood hill when the brakes failed on the car ahead of them and that car rolled backward. Plate glass shot straight into her face and lodged in her cheek, sliced through her left eyebrow to the bone, and nearly severed her upper lip. Hot blood blinded her eye, pulsed down her neck and dribbled off the end of her nose. Shock should have been instantaneous, but she didn’t lose consciousness—or her cool. Instead, she sat there, mouth agape. Harry turned, saw her bleeding in the dark, and heard the blood dripping into her lap, the shard of glass embedded in her cheek. He tried to stem the river of blood as best he could, and then put his car into gear and dashed her to the hospital.

  So deep and vicious had been the wounds that she might have bled out without emergency treatment. Bess arrived at the hospital, took one look at her daughter’s face, and knew there would be no Howard Hawks picture, no Barrymore picture, no more Fox pictures all. In fact, no more anything in the picture business unless there was about to be a female-lead remake of Phantom of the Opera. Carole Lombard’s name had barely hit the papers before her career was finished.

  3. The Radiating Halo

  The Blue Diamond Mine sat atop a high bluff guarding the entrance to Red Rock Canyon, southwest of the growing city of Las Vegas, Nevada. Almost 9,000 people now inhabited Las Vegas, and things were looking up further with the opening of a sprawling motor hotel and lodge called El Rancho Vegas, located on Highway 91 just south of town.

  The strip mining operation at the Blue Diamond produced gypsum for wallboard and had been in operation for 60 years. The mine’s workers and their families lived in a collection of company structures generously called the “town” of Blue Diamond, which sat low in the valley below the strip mine in Red Rock Canyon.

  Darkness had recently cloaked the diggings on the bluff. It had been a cold day and promised to be a colder night, a Friday night, with the sky clear and full of stars. Fifty-year-old watchman Danlo Yanich was on his rounds, which didn’t amount to much in a location this remote. There was a war on now, and facilities across the nation had been ordered on high alert due to the dangers of sabotage, but that figured to be on the coasts where shipping proved to be vulnerable in the ports of Los Angeles and New York. Dan didn’t have any reason to figure that saboteurs would come stumbling up to the Blue Diamond Mine. If anything, they might be tempted to try for the Hoover Dam 15 miles to the southeast. It was with some security that Dan Yanich guarded the Blue Diamond mining operation, where intruders usually took the shape of wild burros or rattlesnakes rather than Japs or Nazis. Yanich had emigrated from Yugoslavia, and with no formal education he counted himself lucky to find a job at the mine in 1916, half his life ago. Food poisoning had laid him low earlier in the year, and for the past five months he had worked guard duty. Now he was getting better, slow
ly but surely.

  Going on 7:20, Dan saw a plane flying over a bit to the south and west, not too far off and not too high considering that the mine sat way up on the bluff. Dan couldn’t hear the engines of the plane for the incessant drone of the machinery behind his ears, but he remarked to himself that this big baby was flying lower than he was used to, even considering the bombers and fighters that zipped past on their way to the classified area off to the southwest where Army maneuvers took place almost daily.

  Far below the bluff and away from the machinery, Calvin Harper, the head loader in the loading department, was able to hear the plane fly over. Harper was down by the cook house at the gypsum plant below the mine and just moments from punching out for the night when he heard the mystery plane, lower and louder than other planes. He gave the airship a glance over his shoulder and saw a streak of flaming exhaust from the right engine—the plane was so low in the sky that the fuselage blocked his view of the left engine—but the peculiar thing to Calvin was the sound of the engines. One growled steadily while the other seemed to come and go. He would hear it, then it would sputter to silence, then he would hear it again. Harper had ridden planes a lot back when he lived in Los Angeles, and he was a motor man who loved to fool around with his car engine and keep it humming. He noticed motors and didn’t like the sound of that sputtering engine.

  By now the plane had flown over; Harper’s shift was about done, and his attention returned to getting out of there and warming up on this cold night. He vaguely heard the piston engines of the plane growling away into the darkness, working hard, their frenetic drone bouncing off the nearby cliffs and echoing through Red Rock Canyon behind him.