Although she considered comedy to be safe, as a concept, To Be or Not to Be involved risk. The plot concerned a company of Shakespearean actors in Poland as the Germans invade. The actors become freedom fighters against the Nazis and use their talents to stop a traitor before fleeing to England. Would audiences laugh at an aggressor nation that had already laid waste to Europe?
To Be or Not to Be was conceived by maestro producer-director Ernst Lubitsch, Carole’s old champion from the Paramount days, and Lubitsch had seen Lombard as the perfect Maria Tura, a great stage actress who must rise above her own self-centered lifestyle to fight the Nazis.
Gable had long been suspicious of Lubitsch, whom he called “the horny Hun.” And Clark reeled when Carole brought another one of her strays into the project, young Robert Stack, to portray her lover in the film. Carole considered Stack among her closer friends from way back in Tahoe, and now he was all grown up and handsome as the devil. By no coincidence, his presence on the picture would serve as a constant reminder to Clark about how it felt to watch your spouse in close quarters with a younger and very attractive co-star for days on end.
But Stack’s relative inexperience in Hollywood had drawbacks. “I was so nervous in close-ups,” said the future Academy Award winner of making To Be or Not to Be. “I often moved out of range of my key light, the last thing an actor wants to do. She’d gently maneuver me right back into focus. This was a courtesy never repeated in my long and spotted career.”
Lombard knew that Bob Stack was infatuated; she always knew the effect she had on men. She was a flame without apology to many moths during her entire Hollywood run and wielded her charms the way studio moguls wielded a cigar and a Montblanc pen. She didn’t need to put out; she merely made that devastating blue-eyed contact and flashed the Lombard smile and touched an occasional forearm, and sweat broke out on men’s foreheads and knees turned to butter.
Gentle Jack Benny, king of comedic timing and radio star, made an unlikely co-star for Lombard in To Be or Not to Be, portraying her husband, the “great actor” Josef Tura. Benny fell for Lombard, from her impeccable timing to what he saw as a glorious soul. Benny’s transition from radio to silver screen had been shaky, and his pictures had failed to capture the magic of the airwaves. He doubted himself as a motion picture actor and relied on the experience of Lubitsch and Lombard to see him through.
To Be or Not to Be became the highlight of Jack Benny’s screen career. As a comedy it worked, and Lombard took pride in calling attention to the dangers of Axis oppression at a time when America sought to remain isolationist and not participate in a second world war. People needed to see why they must fight, and Lombard and Benny would serve them a spoonful of sugar with the medicine.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 occurred with Gable on hiatus from pictures and Lombard hard at work on To Be or Not to Be. War had been coming for years; it was simply a matter of where and when. The attack stunned the nation, and Hollywood’s stars knew that their carefree lives were about to change. They would now have to pay up for all that adoration and all that income. They would become role models in a shooting war, which represented a different manner of hero—altruistic times were ahead. Some stars merely played along, while others, Lombard among them, sought an active role in the war effort.
The same Carole Lombard who had won hearts and minds with her 1937 proclamation about paying taxes now stood primed to take a leadership role in Hollywood’s war effort. She found the prospect no different from planning the White Mayfair Ball or bringing the Encino ranch up to speed. She would just jump in and do it.
America changed overnight after Pearl Harbor. Boys aged 18, 19, and 20 suddenly became men and mothers held them tight. Manufacturing shifted to the machinery of war, and raw materials became precious. Hollywood changed its working hours from the traditional 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. to 8 to 5 so that production would be wrapped for the day before mandatory blackouts commenced at dusk. The idea that an attack on the American mainland could be guided by the lights of homes and businesses was something new for the population, and the national mood turned somber.
Many American movie actors moved fast to enlist. Jimmy Stewart went first, and there was talk of others going or about to go, Robert Taylor, Robert Montgomery, Ty Power, Ronnie Reagan, Henry Fonda, and John Payne among them. Lombard wanted Gable to enlist, but at 41 man's man Clark Gable saw only his own limitations—and his Encino farm fields. Lombard whipped up a telegram to President Franklin Roosevelt offering the services of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard in any capacity and made Pa sign on to the notion, but Gable let out a relieved sigh when FDR responded that the Gables should stay in Hollywood and make pictures and serve by entertaining the populace rather than worrying about manning any guns.
Patriotism in the wake of Pearl Harbor sprung up in every corner of the land. Hollywood formed a Victory Committee and, when looking for someone to lead it, settled on the ever-capable Rhett Butler himself, the biggest star in the stable of the biggest studio, Clark Gable at MGM. Never was a man less ready, willing, and able to lead, and Lombard jumped in to coach him through.
A continent away, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morganthau approached MGM’s New York head of advertising and publicity, Howard Dietz, asking for ideas that would help to sell war bonds and stamps to the American people, and Dietz said that getting Hollywood stars out on the road would sell the sizzle and the steak.
Dietz communicated the idea to Victory Committee Chairman Clark Gable, who passed it on to the movie stars on the committee. Bond tours could be easily accomplished with a star on hiatus between pictures. Home cities and home states would welcome the returning stars, and funds would be raised for the war effort. Hollywood’s elite would become barnstormers. The idea caught fire in a day and Washington made one thing clear: No star could travel by air because of the vulnerability of airplanes in general and the susceptibility to sabotage in particular.
But who was on hiatus right now? Who could go on tour? Suddenly the kickoff effort wouldn’t involve just any star, but Chairman Gable’s wife, screwball queen and freelance actress Carole Lombard, whose new picture had wrapped and was due to sneak preview on Monday January 19, 1942. Both Carole and UA jumped at the chance to get her name in newspapers pending the sneak preview, final cut, and release of To Be or Not to Be.
The Monday screening back in Inglewood gave Carole just enough time to take a train to Indiana to sell war bonds in the capital of her home state and return by train to arrive Sunday night January 18. When Lombard asked Gable to accompany her on the trip, he told her no, that unfortunately he was due to start a picture that week and could not leave town. But it was more than that. Gable’s old fear of public speaking and public events precluded such a thing, and she knew it. It was his private prison and there he was stuck in it with no thought of getting out, but his wife the “great ham” had no such reservations.
Carole shopped for a traveling companion. Fieldsie couldn’t go and neither could Allie. But Petey was game as long as no airplanes were involved. Tots hated the very idea of flying, as her daughter well knew. So Carole readily agreed, saying she had been told not to fly anyway, and the round trip would be by train.
As an independent, Carole employed no publicity people, so MGM took over press duties for her tour, which was announced to the public on January 7, 1942, in a simple paragraph that appeared somewhere between pages 6 and 10 of American newspapers. Lombard would be taking the City of Los Angeles streamliner over the northern route out of Los Angeles and change trains in Chicago for her final destination of Indianapolis. It was an item that achieved traction in three markets: Salt Lake City/Ogden, Utah, because these cities were on the train route and under-appreciated by Hollywood; Chicago for the novelty of a Lombard visit; and Indianapolis because Carole was a Hoosier—no matter that she had left Indiana at age five. She was a double-barreled attraction—a sexy, glamorous movie star and much more important these days, wife of Clark Gable, s
tar of Gone With the Wind and by far the hottest actor in the picture business.
Around New Year’s, dark clouds appeared on Carole’s horizon. She would leave for Indianapolis the morning of January 12 and not return until early on January 19, while the picture that would keep Gable in Hollywood, the one starting to shoot on January 14 while she would be in Chicago, 2,000 miles away, would co-star none other than Lana Turner. With the government edict barring air travel in place, Carole had no choice but to endure three days of train rides in each direction while her Lothario husband enjoyed the freedom to entertain any local troops of his choosing.
21. Fool's Errand
From his pickup truck, Lyle Van Gordon kept glancing up at the cliffs to his left as he led Jack Moore’s trailing car off Goodsprings Road onto the horrendous Ninety-Nine Mine Road and inched along a rocky, rutted, washed-out path barely wide enough for a mule, let alone a car. This was desert, which meant that roads held up longer than they did in other places of the country, but maintenance was spotty at best, and it took more than two hours to drive north over these bad roads within narrow cones of headlights, the drivers turning their wheels this way and that to avoid bottoming out while watching for mule deer as the Van Gordon and Moore vehicles crept along. The sun finally started to rise at about the time they ran out of road at a deep, rocky washout. Van Gordon pulled to a stop, and Moore did the same, the stillness oppressive as the men climbed out of their vehicles and slammed shut the doors. The group of rescuers stood in the dusky emptiness of morning and looked about.
Cottonwood Pass was a spooky place at the best of times, the walls of the canyon dotted with yawning openings that carried picturesque names: Double Up Mine, Pauline Mine, Rainbow Quarries, Red Bluff Mine, Snowstorm Mine. Some had been worked in recent times and others not for 50 years or more. Mining always was and always would be a tough life the way they did it in Nevada, and bodies of men entombed in some of those old shafts proved it.
Van Gordon, Moore, Bondley, and the others gathered their supplies and started out. Above them 2,000 feet or more, somewhere on that wild mountain, lay the downed plane. They started up the road past the place it had washed out and walked a good half mile until they reached a jagged ravine. Nobody was saying anything, but their labored breathing said a lot. They had gradually, over the course of the 11-mile drive, ascended steadily up into the foothills of Potosi Mountain and kept a brisk hiking pace heading toward the cliffs. Already they felt the cold and the altitude approaching 6,000 feet above sea level.
The light was gathering into something helpful as they made their way up a long rise through heavy brush beside the ravine. Cactus grabbed overcoats and pantlegs, so the men were forced into what was clearly a dry wash that would become a torrent of runoff during storms. This was rough going as well, the gully strewn with boulders, some of them 10 feet high, offering the men nothing to hold on to. Suddenly, knees and heads were cracking against rock, and they might as well have been crawling toward the plane for the progress they were making. But Carole Lombard was up there, a beautiful, vulnerable woman and a great movie star who epitomized Hollywood glamour. Hearts pounded. Carole Lombard. They couldn’t believe it. Here, in Nevada, and in trouble. The horrific thought of it haunted all the men: There were people, women, directly above them on that mountain. And so on they went up this seemingly endless, boulder-strewn crevice, toward cliffs that they hadn’t yet figured out how to climb.
22. The VIPs
Otto Winkler had cut his teeth in communications working for the Los Angeles Examiner as a reporter on the city beat. A roundish little guy with slicked-back dark hair, Otto had accomplished the nearly impossible task of making many friends and no enemies while working with the cops, the D.A.’s office, and the publicity departments of the studios, because much of the crime and corruption in L.A. involved stars or studio employees. Hollywood people would get into scrapes; Otto would keep things hush-hush as needed. He didn’t mind because he liked to do favors. Otto liked people and was always digging into his pocket for a dime for somebody down on his luck, doing what he could to make a life better, or at least a little less miserable. Fellow reporter for the Examiner Tom Devlin chided his friend every day, it seemed, because there would be Winkler on skid row giving some bum a ride or lending his coat to some hooker who had been beaten by her pimp at 3 in the morning. “What’re ya doin’ here, Wink?” Tommy would say. “This is no place for you; let’s vamoose.” Devlin couldn’t believe the size of Otto’s heart, and he admired the guy for always being stand-up, whatever the circumstances.
The studios noticed sharp guys like Otto, writers who could find the lead and not bury it, slant a story, and bang it out in minutes. And Otto could be trusted. When in April 1937 Clark Gable had been dragged into court on a paternity charge by deranged Violet Norton, Wink had written it up for the Examiner to such a favorable degree to Gable that the star asked MGM to hire the reporter. At age 34, Otto Winkler became the personal publicist of Clark Gable. Boy, was Wink now on the inside, toiling at the brawniest studio in Hollywood and working with the most beautiful people. Devlin and the old gang, the reporters and the city detectives, really gave it to Wink now but all in good fun because if anybody deserved a break like this, it was Otto Winkler. Not that Gable was easy. Gable wasn’t easy at all, and he wanted Winkler within arm’s reach every waking studio day and Wink never let the boss down.
In 1939 when MGM needed to settle “this Gable mess” once and for all by marrying off Gable and Lombard, it was Otto Winkler thrown into the fire, ordered by MGM publicity chief Howard Strickling to find a suitable spot for a quickie elopement.
Recently, Otto had met a girl, a good-looking blonde named Jill Keeling who worked at the studio. They were head over heels for each other and began talking marriage. Jill looked enough like Carole Lombard to double for her, and in fact, she had. Jill stood five-foot five, two inches taller than Carole. Jill had danced on Broadway and opened a dance studio, then found work at Warner Bros. dancing in Golddiggers of 1937, and at Paramount in College Holiday. Her dancer’s athletic body matched Carole’s tennis-lean frame, and Jill even had the same blue eyes, as vivid a blue as the clearest summer day.
“He was the love of her life,” said Jill’s niece, Nazoma Ball, of Otto and Jill. “She’d given up her career to be with him.” It was the second time around for both Jill and Otto and the second time was always better. The bugs were worked out and it was a fresh start, a new opportunity to do things right.
MGM publicity boss Howard Strickling had an idea: What if the studio gave Otto and Jill an all-expenses-paid elopement so they could sneak off to Arizona and conduct a dry run for Gable and Lombard at the quietest, most out-of-the-way spot in the desert where two people might marry on the sly?
Otto and Jill sped off to Arizona and tied the knot on March 18, 1939 at Prescott City Hall. But the fact that Prescott even had a city hall, and a swelling population of 6,000, rendered it inappropriate for a clandestine anything. On a meandering drive back through the Mojave, in the general direction of home, they found a tumbleweed town called Kingman near the western border of the state. Here, Wink decided, was a hitching post fit for a king.
Ten days later, when the Gone With the Wind shooting schedule called for a break—after Gable had shot the scene with Vivien Leigh where Rhett leaves Scarlett and party in the wagon and goes off to fight in the war—Gable prepared for a wedding. The newly minted Mrs. Jill Winkler stood in front of Otto’s Hermosa Beach cottage, down near the ocean, and watched Lombard and Gable squeeze into the interior rumble seat of Jill’s new blue DeSoto, her husband’s wedding present. Gable wore hunting clothes, fedora, and sunglasses, and Lombard remained in hair curlers and wore no makeup. Jill stuck a picnic basket in Carole’s lap and watched Otto drive them off.
“They were so madly in love,” said Jill. “I had never seen two happier people.”
For the next few days, Jill maintained the subterfuge, running errands in Carole’s convertible,
blonde hair tied in a scarf, hiding behind sunglasses, looking for all the world like the queen of screwball going about her weekly routine. The ruse worked. While the Hollywood press focused on a star-studded junket to the premiere of Fox’s Alexander Graham Bell in San Francisco, Carole Lombard became Mrs. Gable in Kingman. But it proved costly: Gossip columnist Louella Parsons had carefully cultivated a friendship with Winkie and thought that when Gable and Lombard made their move, she could count on the scoop. But Otto knew who buttered the bread and it wasn’t the woman nicknamed “Lollypops.” Parsons spat nails over the incident, and in her mind Otto Winkler ceased to exist.
Gable, on the other hand, admired Wink more than ever for outraging Louella, and with the king on your side, did it matter if you had one gossip-columnist enemy? The coming of war made Otto glad that the family name had been changed from von Winkler. His heritage was Bavarian, but Winkler was safe enough a name for a true-blue American.
Otto and Jill had moved from Hermosa Beach to Wink’s family home at 1106 North Wilton in L.A., the house his parents had left him when they died. Not long after, Howard Strickling told Wink of a piece of property across Louise Avenue from the Stricklings in Encino, just a mile from the Gable ranch. Otto had made the purchase, and Carole paid for a set of architectural drawings that she supervised with the girl Winkie called “Jilliepants.” It would be a love nest built for two and hopefully more. By now Jill wanted to open a restaurant with her sister Hazel, and there was endless talk of the dreamed-of place Otto dubbed “Jillie’s Chili Joint.”
In early January 1942 when the idea of a bond sale in Indianapolis came up, Gable was happy to endorse such an idea—as long as he didn’t have to go. He asked Wink to accompany Ma as point man, and Otto hesitated on any number of grounds. He didn’t like to fly; he wasn’t an event planner; Lombard wasn’t even one of the MGM players on his roster, or an MGM player at all! But Otto had gotten where he had gotten by saying “yes” to the stars and never “no.” Sure, Gable took it for granted, but this was no time to make waves.
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