It was a pitch-black, moonless night, and in places the drive was illuminated only by the headlights of his car. It was 25 miles to Goodsprings and seemed to take forever, with all the men silent in contemplation of a hard experience ahead. They finally pulled up at the sheriff’s office in Goodsprings and there learned of a local man named Lyle Van Gordon who had reported the crash and fire to the sheriff and who claimed to know the exact spot where rescuers should go.
“Are you talking about Bull Van Gordon?” asked the deputy.
The sheriff said yes, one and the same. Moore asked the sheriff to get Bull on the phone, and then when the connection was made asked Van Gordon if he was certain where the crash had happened.
Lyle said that he had watched the fire, marked the spot, and knew exactly where it was. Moore asked where Van Gordon lived—he could pick him up in a few minutes and—
The sheriff interrupted the conversation. There was no point starting off for that mountain in the dead of night; no good could come of it. They could wait in the office and pick Van Gordon up before dawn. So that’s what they did, looked over maps, drank coffee, made plans, and waited until 5 A.M., still well before dawn, at which point they drove to Lyle Van Gordon’s shack, one of many that dotted Goodsprings.
Moore knocked on the front door and Van Gordon fairly burst out, filling the doorway as he passed through. He was a powerfully built man and seemed like he could make the climb up any mountain and then some. Van Gordon hopped in his truck and pulled out in front of Moore’s car and up to the rock-strewn dirt road leading to the old mines of Clark County. It was a long, slow, 11-mile crawl over rutted paths, dodging washouts and boulders, all the while hoping against hope that they might yet find Miss Carole Lombard and the brave Army men on that TWA flight still alive.
16. Certified Bombs
Carole Lombard enjoyed everything about being Clark Gable’s paramour. Well, everything except maybe the sex because, after all, Gable had his limitations. He was a heavily engineered piece of machinery, built for show by Josephine Dillon and then by the MGM publicity department. He hadn’t been road-tested for performance. Among his problems were dentures from the extraction of most of his teeth a few years earlier. This apparatus became problematic during the rigors of lovemaking. Plus Gable was in the habit of being Clark Gable, which meant that anything he contributed to the lovemaking ritual should be good enough. He seemed to share with fellow Hollywood lover Errol Flynn, or so rumor said, the problem of racking up numbers and not necessarily assuring satisfaction at the end of the evening.
Yeah, well, Carole Lombard had different ideas. Lombard had proven herself to be an athlete, sexual and otherwise, so Gable’s reputation could take him only so far. But her ballsiness was something that Gable actually liked. He liked being told when his performance didn’t pass muster. He liked and relied upon strong women; the kind of women he had married twice already. “I knew every wife he had,” said Delmer Daves. “I think probably the psychological thing behind all this was, he needed a mama.”
Jean Garceau, who would become a Gable employee in 1938 and remain one for 20 years, said, “He liked a woman with a lot of guts, vim and vigor, humor particularly.”
Carole played by a man’s rules and he respected her for it. She wasn’t like other dames; she wasn’t like any dame he had met. This girl played the game of life for high stakes, and she gave the impression that at any time she could scrape back her chair and walk away from the table. She even talked tough, her language as salty as advertised, but at all times slangy, informal, real. “Yah, yah, I get you,” she’d say as she listened, intently listened, to whatever he said. When something was satisfactory, she’d say, “It’s OK by me!” and mean it.
Yes, to Gable Carole Lombard seemed to believe that she belonged at the high-stakes table. For once Gable’s admiring grin wasn’t for show. He truly did admire this dish.
He especially enjoyed Lombard’s practical jokes at his expense. He knew it was all about building the reputation of the screwball girl, and he also found something funny in the tearing down of the revered Gable persona. Of all her stunts, the attempted bombing of MGM with leaflets tickled him. He had just made his biggest dud of a picture at Metro, Parnell, the screen biography of Charles Stewart Parnell, Irish nationalist hero of the nineteenth century. Gable broke out of his successful formula of wise-cracking tough guys to attempt something in the realm of Warner Bros.’ Paul Muni, and Gable had been skewered for it. Nowhere had the ribbing been less merciful than on his own lot, among his actor colleagues. Spencer Tracy, one of the studio’s most talented actors, had been especially snide.
Gable’s own girlfriend got into the act when she learned that Parnell had become a success in, of all places, China. She huddled up with publicity wiz Russell Birdwell, “Birdie,” and developed a leaflet announcing, PARNELL: 50 MILLION CHINAMEN CAN’T BE WRONG. It was a beautiful gag in theory, so good that Gable actually laughed when he heard, but it proved a dud in execution. No pilot would fly low over the studio and lose his license, so she hired boys to stand in front of the MGM gates and distribute the leaflets one at a time. But a Culver City ordinance rendered the distribution of handbills illegal as well, so the boys were paid and sent home and the leaflets never did circulate.
It was a power-mad move by the publicity-mad team of Lombard and Birdwell, but it typified the early portion of the Lombard-Gable association, with Lombard having found a real man, not a gentleman like Powell or a tender child like Columbo or an egghead like Riskin. She had caught the big game, biggest of all, and he had revealed himself to be, well, fun! But then clouds formed on the horizon as all that talk of filming Gone With the Wind turned Hollywood on its ear. From the beginning the word was that Gable must portray the self-serving hero, Rhett Butler, which he never wanted to do, and from the beginning Carole Lombard very much wanted to portray spoiled Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara, a part that in no way suited her. No, she would never play Scarlett, but he was cursed to portray Rhett, and the result was the most famous motion picture of the twentieth century.
“I read Gone With the Wind,” reported a deadpan Gable. “My reaction was enthusiastic and immediate. ‘What a part for Ronald Colman,’ I said. I was sincere.”
Even before shooting of Gone With the Wind had commenced, Gable was voted the King of Hollywood by legions of fans, with Myrna Loy his Queen in name only and Lombard his consort of the flesh. In terms of her own career, Carole had taken her eye off the ball as she focused so hard on Gable, and paid a price. There had been the Technicolor hit for David Selznick, Nothing Sacred, which had made box-office cash registers jingle. Then Carole laid an egg at Paramount with another screwball comedy called True Confession in which she portrayed a hard-to-care-about habitual liar. Lombard believed that she could pull off the disagreeable premise of True Confession with sight gags and mugging, but things went south fast and stayed there for the winter.
Matters weren’t helped by Carole’s latest cause, John Barrymore. The actor who had co-starred with Lombard in Twentieth Century just three years earlier was now drowning in liquor and in need of a break. She found a small part for “Jack” in True Confession and asked the writer to pump up a bit part into a feature role. Barrymore tried but failed to make the part work because True Confession had been ill-conceived from the start.
Lombard had made a strategic blunder, and trumped it with her next move. Now a free agent, she agreed to make a picture at Warner Bros., an unfunny studio known for social dramas and gangsters and now attempting a new direction in screwball comedy. For Carole, the direction turned out to be—down. She found herself overacting miserably to try to infuse energy into a lifeless cast, crew, and script that attempted to rework the Godfrey formula: Impoverished European nobleman becomes the butler of a movie star. Carole could measure the disaster by the length of the shoot, which dragged on for months as opposed to the usual six or eight weeks of a successful shoot. The most successful productions came and went all too fas
t, with an energy about them, a symmetry, but this thing, Fools for Scandal, never seemed to end. She had been the fool for signing for a picture with Warner Bros. in the first place, a studio led by the highly unusual Jack L. Warner. He was a charismatic, under-educated man, notorious for telling bad jokes, most of them off-color, which, if she thought about it, explained why he ran a studio that couldn’t produce a comedy. Sometimes Carole had to wonder at her own judgment. Decisions came easy, but some were mistakes. Big mistakes. Huge mistakes. But, oh, how they had treated her like a queen, hiring her cameraman of choice, Ted Tetzlaff, and her wardrobe expert of choice, Travis Banton.
“Anything you want, Miss Lombard.”
“We’ll take care of it right away, Miss Lombard.”
“Whatever you say, Miss Lombard.”
Box office for Fools for Scandal said otherwise—she may have been a queen to Warner Bros., and she remained Gable’s queen in waiting, but she wasn’t box-office royalty to the critics. The Photoplay reviewer said this was the straw that would “break the back of that slapstick camel Carole Lombard’s been riding so long,” while Variety said, “this falls short of distinction and is in many respects pretty dull stuff.” The Time reviewer cut to the chase by calling Fools for Scandal “unearthly.”
Not that Lombard had stood idly by and watched her career sink to the depths. She possessed that intuitive streak and had surrounded herself with smart people. Myron maximized each free-agent deal, and Lombard was the highest-earning woman in Hollywood; Fieldsie offered shrewd counsel; and Selznick International PR man Birdwell had intervened at a critical moment in 1937 and found a way to earn Lombard headlines that had propelled her through 1938. Carole happened to mention during production of Nothing Sacred that she had filed her tax return for 1936, earning nearly half a million bucks and paying all but 20 grand in taxes. But she shrugged and said something to the effect that, oh well, it’s worth it to live in the good-old U. S. of A.
Birdwell’s eyes lit up and in a week Lombard was earning headlines in papers across the country: Highest Paid Actress Shrugs Off Huge Tax Bill. The press release quoted Lombard as saying, “We still don’t starve in the picture business after we’ve divided with the government. Taxes go to build schools, to maintain the public utilities we all use, so why not?” Coming at a critical moment in the Depression, Lombard’s altruism as exploited by Birdwell earned praise nationwide, beginning with President Franklin Roosevelt.
Sometimes the Lombardian antics proved so wild that even Russell Birdwell couldn’t dream them up. When a South American explorer gave Carole a gift of two shrunken heads, her psychic consultants said they were bad luck, so Carole and Clark drove to Benedict Canyon and threw the heads away. When advised that this was the worst possible solution, the tipsy, giggling pair went back to the canyon and searched for the heads on hands and knees. Ultimately, they buried the heads in her backyard in Bel Air and said a prayer. Imagine the surprise for the house’s next tenant, Alfred Hitchcock, when Carole Lombard said, “Oh, by the way…”
The Screwball Girl rolled on with such career momentum that even certified bomb Fools for Scandal couldn’t stop her. The week of October 17, 1938, Birdwell landed her the cover of the nation’s most popular magazine, Life. In going for a memorable cover shot, photographer Peter Stackpole captured an uncharacteristically pensive Lombard, and it was this moody face that stared out at patrons of every newsstand in America, and readers now got the inside scoop on her unorthodox personality. Writer Noel Busch described her method of conversation in terms of “screeches, laughs, growls, gesticulations, and the expletives of a sailor’s parrot.”
Yes, Gable was the king of Hollywood, nobody could argue that, but she was his lady and now a Life magazine cover girl. It was one thing to land covers of Photoplay, Motion Picture, and the rest—she had been doing that for the past seven years—and another to make the front of Life. No, Lombard couldn’t presume to match Gable, but as she accepted the mantle of consort, she was holding her own. She had always loved powerful men and how she gloried in his status as the king. She loved it, which meant that to Lombard, nothing, absolutely nothing was too good for her sovereign.
It was a time of change in Carole Lombard’s life. Best pal and secretary Fieldsie married director Walter Lang, and the inseparables stopped spending their days together. Carole hired Jean Garceau from the Myron Selznick Talent Agency as a replacement.
Said Carole Sampeck, “To function in Myron Selznick’s office you had to be tough as nails, but you had to do it diplomatically or people would just go around you. You had to be discreet but take no prisoners, stand your ground, and make it look like you were planting flowers on that ground all the while.”
So Garceau was a sharp cookie; not quite the head-on force of nature that Fieldsie had been, but sharp, competent, and loyal. Gable approved of her, which meant everything.
In career terms, Lombard knew she was down two strikes with screwball bombs in True Confession and Fools for Scandal. One more and she was out, so the stakes were high on what scripts she looked at. She decided to change it up and switch to drama. David O. Selznick produced her first picture of 1939. Made for Each Other paired Carole with Jimmy Stewart in a maudlin tale of newlyweds that featured a race against time to save their sick baby. Next, she teamed with popular RKO leading man Cary Grant to make In Name Only, a hard-edged drama about a love triangle. Made for Each Other lost some money, but the sassy soap opera In Name Only, featuring pal Kay Francis, scored nicely in the black, putting Myron Selznick in a favorable position as he set up future picture deals for Miss Carole Lombard.
But a crisis loomed for Lombard and Gable at the end of 1938 when Photoplay magazine ran an article written by Carole’s supposed pal, reporter Kirtley Baskette. Entitled “Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands and Wives,” the piece detailed the couples in Hollywood shacking up without benefit of a marriage license. Among them were Carole and Clark, who now felt the indignation of a morally conservative America—and it no longer mattered how much Carole Lombard had paid in taxes. MGM came down hard on Gable for making the studio look bad.
In January 1939 Clark started work on Gone With the Wind, the most pressure-packed motion picture production in the history of Hollywood, while behind the scenes, MGM worked to settle what was known in the front office as “this Gable mess.” Ria possessed what one Gable biographer called “an impregnable dignity” and had been humiliated by the carrying on of these two overaged teenagers. Photoplay’s article on Hollywood’s unmarrieds was both a blessing and a curse to Ria. Yes it exposed Clark and Carole to a disapproving nation, but it humiliated Ria that her husband was flaunting convention with another woman.
In response to the article, a shaken Gable stated that he would seek a divorce from his estranged wife. An infuriated Ria then demanded an apology from the King—if anybody was going to divorce anybody, she was going to save face and divorce him.
Like always with its star, MGM did the apologizing for Clark, issuing a public apology in Gable’s name in the nation’s newspapers that read, “I regret bitterly that a short time ago a story was printed to the effect that I would seek a divorce from Mrs. Gable.” The logjam broke. Ria’s attorneys negotiated with MGM’s attorneys and a divorce settlement came together. It would cost Gable $286,000, fronted by MGM and paid out over three years, to secede from an unhappy union.
In the meantime, Gable and Lombard began shopping for a house in the San Fernando Valley, away from the press and the public. They had always had a love-hate relationship with the press, and now they were through with prying eyes and lurking cameras.
It didn’t take long to find their dream home: director Raoul Walsh’s horse ranch with 20 acres in the sparsely developed Valley community of Encino. Gable talked Walsh into selling but was cash-strapped to make the purchase due to that ungodly divorce settlement. Lombard put up the $65,000 purchase price and at long last, things were looking up for America’s dream couple.
17. The Plain,
Black Night
Back around midnight, when it seemed nothing could be done amidst the clot of responders and a great deal of commotion and wasted effort at the Blue Diamond Mine, Maj. Herbert Anderson, his quartermaster, Maj. Taylor, and Taylor’s aide set out to find the crash site on their own. They drove toward Red Rock Canyon and turned down Wilson Ranch Road, past the ranch and outbuildings into desert, heading toward Potosi. They drove along an old trail around the base of the mountain and finally ran out of navigable surface, as evidenced by the number of vehicles parked there, those of rescuers who had followed the same reasoning and the same path. The beam of their headlights showed men standing and talking in a group.
Taylor parked and shut off the engine. It was cold out there, dry, biting cold. On foot, the soldiers approached the huddle of men and discovered one man at the center holding a map. It was Mayor Hal Garrison with a number of civilians standing around him, including some of the local cowboys who yet roamed the range on horseback and wore 10-gallon hats, just like in the movies. A few of these men had seen the plane fly over and told how they had watched it head straight toward the mountain and strike it with no explosion that they could hear. One man said it had “burst into a large tongue of flame which kicked up frequently and burned for a total of about three hours.”
Now the fire on the mountain was long out and when the darkness had swallowed it, confusion began about where the crash was located and how it could be reached. Anderson would call this moonless night “one of the darkest I have ever seen, and I’m pretty well qualified on dark nights. It was so dark that those sharp ridges couldn’t be seen, and they were only evidenced by the light of the stars. There was starlight but no light on the ground from the stars. It was a plain, black night.”
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