Newsreel cameras turned in front of her as she called into the microphone, “Let’s give a rousing cheer that will be heard in Berlin and Tokyo!”
After a demonstration of incendiary bombs, the dignitaries and throng of onlookers moved inside, under the stained-glass dome of the State House Central Rotunda for an hour of bond selling. Since it was the nation’s first event, and there was no telling how a nervous public would respond, the goal had been set at a conservative $500,000 in sales of war bonds and stamps. But the line of people eager to interact with Carole Lombard Gable had formed in the cold for more than seven hours, and hopes suddenly ran high.
Life magazine would later describe the event inside the State House as “jammed and hectic,” with Lombard desperately handing out slips of paper to a delirious throng as Myron Davis snapped photos. Each slip was a receipt that bore her picture, her personal printed thank you, and the stamped signature Carole Lombard Gable, bordered by red stripes and blue stars.
After an hour she was led out of the State House with action still brisk and taken back to the Claypool for another flag-raising ceremony in the wintry air to open new recruiting stations for the three branches of service, Army, Navy, and Marines.
A wardrobe change in her suite followed, with Lombard pulling on the black strapless number created by Irene, along with black opera-length gloves and a whisper-delicate length of black lace about her hair and shoulders. Then Carole, Petey, and Otto were driven to the governor’s mansion for a formal tea and reception, and then on to New Jersey and Ohio Streets, site of the Cadle Tabernacle, temple of popular evangelical radio personality Howard Cadle. The cavernous venue held 10,000 and was jammed past its limits for Lombard’s 7 P.M. appearance. She told the crowd in an impromptu speech that the cost of war would be very high, “but the peace it will bring is priceless.”
Eugene Pulliam walked onstage to announce that Lombard had spearheaded sales of bonds that day not in the amount of $500,000, their initial goal, but in the amount of more than $2 million! The crowd went wild. Lombard stepped discreetly away from the microphone to lead those in attendance in a shaky rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, a tune that she admitted terrified her. She had said in Chicago she would be lost if attempting that standard and said “the crowd would have to carry it.” The crowd did, and her eyes welled with tears. Myron Davis captured the moment of a straight-backed Lombard and 12,000 Hoosiers singing the National Anthem together, and finally her marathon day drew to a close.
She was led offstage and the VIPs endured one last mingling session. Prior to the Cadle Tabernacle event, Lombard had no intention to fly home. The plan remained to board the train the following morning, but someone she met at the tea or the Tabernacle offered to find her a ride aboard an airliner, perhaps military officials in attendance who greased the skids and granted her priority status for a plane trip west.
Finally, the party of three stepped into a waiting car and retired to the Claypool for one final photo op with reporters. When all the press had gone, at about 10 P.M., Carole turned to Wink and said something he simply couldn’t believe: “We’re flying home.”
23. Gleaming Silver
The foot of Potosi Mountain amounted to bad terrain, littered with boulders and cactus. The rescue party led by Jack Moore and Lyle Van Gordon spent an hour and a half climbing along a ravine in the cold, and soon they crossed the snow line.
Van Gordon kept picturing a forlorn band of survivors atop the mountain, bandaging each other and waiting in the snow beside a pitiful makeshift fire. Certainly, if there were Army men on the plane they would have constructed a fire right away and offered Miss Lombard an overcoat. Sure, the burning mountaintop had looked terrible, but it might have been a crash landing, and perhaps the survivors had struggled clear of the wreck, or been thrown clear, before it caught fire.
At last they reached the top of the dry wash and now stared at three rows of cliffs directly ahead, each divided by patches of loose earth and pines. In all, the cliffs shot up 2,000 feet. It didn’t even seem possible to climb all that way, but they started up anyway and found long stretches where the earth was loose under the snow. Somebody would take a false step and down they’d go, on stomachs, sliding 30 or 50 feet at a time. But each man would find his feet again and on they struggled, hanging onto boulders, some of them providing a moment of secure footing—before giving way and bouncing toward the men climbing below. “Look out!” would call those above in warning to the other climbers. In places, the men moved tree to tree or rock to rock. They slipped, they fell, they clawed on.
Soon Lyle Van Gordon assumed a long lead, but then Bull had been capable of rushing for 300 yards in a single high school football game, so it was no wonder the others were fanned out behind him for half a mile. Van Gordon stayed out ahead, moving to the pounding of his heart, to the heaving of his chest, his rhythm steady up the nearly vertical mountainside of earth and rock. The snow became ever deeper, dry, powdery snow that had drifted this way and that and was inches deep in some places and over his head in others. All the men learned as they went to use the trees and rocks to pull themselves up, and when there weren’t any trees or rocks, they clawed at the frozen earth just inches in front of their faces. As long as they kept moving they stayed warm, but if they stopped, the cold knifed into their flesh. Blood soaked through the knees of their pantlegs and stained the snow red. Dead branches on the pine trees speared them and tore at clothes, and feet kept slipping out from under them and they slid down precious feet and precious yards on their bellies and smacked into rock, only to scramble up again.
Another hour of visceral effort later, they hit the jagged promontory at the front of the mountain. It couldn’t be much farther, they thought, gasping, but they couldn’t know because the boulders and pines obscured their view. They crossed into another dry wash full of fallen timber and renewed their ascent. Or tried to. They found themselves boxed in by a ledge above, so they retraced their steps and crossed the terrain higher and moved into the ravine. When they paused to look back, they saw Nevada stretched out into the distance clear to Las Vegas 30 miles beyond. On any other day they would have remarked at the spectacular view.
Suddenly, Van Gordon could smell smoldering wood. His imaginings about the band of survivors moved front of mind and his body tried to respond, his legs pushing forward in the deep snow, muscles aching. He glanced behind and none of the other searchers were in sight. He saw only his own breath forming clouds in the dry mountain air near 8,000 feet. He felt sweat accumulating under his coats. Lyle didn’t want to admit it, and he knew the others would feel the same, but he was nearly played out and would soon need to sit down and rest, but knew he couldn’t because then the cold would close in and take him.
Through watery eyes, he saw a disturbed patch in the pristine blanket of snow 15 or 20 yards ahead. He didn’t know how far off it really was. Everything was a blur. He staggered over that way, chest burning, reached down into the snow, and pulled out a jagged piece of aluminum a foot square. One side of the fragment showed a row of rivets. He looked up above him at a hellish confusion of rocks and fallen timber; through the rough terrain in the morning light, maybe 75 yards up above, he saw something silver gleaming in the rising sun.
“Hey!” the Bull called up into the ravine rising high above. His voice deadened into the fresh snow. “Is anybody up there?”
Nothing.
“Hellooo!”
He listened and heard only the rushing breeze, and the creak of distant pines. He never imagined he could be so alone anywhere in the world. He hadn’t felt this alone deep in the Nevada mines, but he felt alone now, as some powerful, invisible force pulled him up and up through some of the most unforgiving terrain in the Western Hemisphere.
24. The Coin Flip
Carole’s pronouncement about flying home froze both Otto and Petey. Elizabeth Peters had made it her business never to step onto an airplane in her life. The idea of sitting in a seat with nothing under her for th
ousands of feet terrified Tots, and her daughter knew it. But using the previous day’s flight from Chicago to Indianapolis as a precedent, Carole saw only one goal now: to get home as fast as possible.
Ever since the exploding windshield, ever since the bullet in the eye, Carole Lombard had been a live-for-now kind of a gal, and she’d be goddamned if she would crawl back to Encino on a train when pretty silver planes criss-crossed the skies overhead, planes that would carry the three of them home in 17 hours instead of 72. Wasn’t that what the ads said: coast to coast in 17 hours? What good was a half million a year in income if you couldn’t actually use it when needed? And brother did she need it now.
Wink dug in his heels. He had been told by everyone not to take any airplanes. Gable had told him. Wink’s boss at MGM, Ralph Wheelright, had told him. Wheelright’s boss, Howard Strickling, had told him. Strickling’s boss, Howard Dietz, had told him. Otto had already risked way more than he wanted by flying the short hop from Chicago to Indianapolis with Carole the evening before. And now he was doing Lombard’s evil bidding again, looking at flight options to southern California against the orders of all his superiors and the workings of his own brain and its premonitions.
Way back before leaving Los Angeles, Carole had looked him in the eye and promised she would take the train, and she knew why she must: Commercial passenger air service was less than 10 years old and risky enough, and the danger existed of sabotage by enemies that may have infiltrated the United States and been drawn to the nation’s first bond rally. In addition, whistle-stops had been planned for the return trip, and these were important opportunities to help the war effort. But Carole wasn’t in listening mode; she meant business, and Otto knew if he crossed swords with the fireball now he wouldn’t win, any more than he had won a couple of weeks earlier.
Wink was too bone-weary for a confrontation. He didn’t like to argue anyway; he had made his living at MGM accommodating the stars, not making trouble for them. And Wink wasn’t exactly alone as he sat in their suite at the Claypool at 11 at night, suffering sheer exhaustion of the day. Petey sat there in horror as well and could only look on as Otto dragged himself off to make inquiries with the Indianapolis airport about flights west.
Lombard paced her Claypool Hotel suite a dozen, 50, 100 times, a Coke in one hand and a cigarette in the other, before Otto came back looking gloomy, with pencil scribbles on the back of an envelope. The information she had supplied to Wink courtesy of the military brass at Cadle Tabernacle had led to three seat reservations on TWA Trip Number 3, a Sky Club out of LaGuardia by way of Columbus that would be stopping in Indianapolis in a few hours, at about 3 A.M., and then flying on to St. Louis and points west, getting into Burbank at 7 P.M. Friday evening local time.
Carole hopped in glee and smiled a genuine million-dollar smile. Burbank yet! Pa could motor over Ventura Boulevard, pick them up, and everybody could be sleeping in their own beds by 9 or 10 Friday night. Carole reminded Otto that he could see Jill two days sooner! And, Petey—
Petey sat there hurt, terribly hurt by her daughter’s betrayal but much more, frightened at seemingly innocent words Otto had said: Trip Number 3, arriving at 3 in the morning. Petey happened to be a student of numerology and knew 3 to be a hard-luck number. Theirs was a party of 3. Carole was 33 years old. Oh my God, 33 years and 3 months. This was bad, bad, bad.
“Totsie—” Carole began.
What was Petey to do? She had nothing but pure love for this girl, joy in watching her and listening to her and marveling that this is my child, the pure acceptance of the dynamo her kid had become and the pride of what she would accomplish next. Yes, pride in Jane Peters-turned-Carole Lombard, a thoroughly modern woman making her way in a man’s world with both fists clenched and ready to fight. And it was this same hard-charging attitude that Petey faced now, this monster she had created.
Carole didn’t know about Otto’s premonition, or about Petey’s dread about 3s, but there was no missing their devastated faces. She tried to lighten a deadly moment. She offered to flip for it with Otto. She must have felt the weight of the offer—flipping for something this important when both these people sincerely wished to get home slowly and steadily and when calling it wrong meant the torture of that deadly train. But Lombard might lose too, and get home in three days while Pa was back there with her.
She told Otto to call it in the air. If he called it right, they’d go his way. If he called it wrong, they would fly.
Otto considered his options and he had none. He could get on the phone with the feds, or with his boss of bosses, MGM VP Eddie Mannix, or with Gable, and in all cases he would be turning stool pigeon on Carole, and he knew he couldn’t do that. Clark and Carole were family, and if he betrayed her now, she wouldn’t forgive him for the rest of their lives.
“Tails,” he said without enthusiasm.
She flipped the coin. It came up heads. She enjoyed the Lombard happy moment, that silly grin with tongue visible through teeth and the fast applause, and they all changed clothes out of their formal attire; Lombard slipped into a pale pink suit with a fur over it. In 90 minutes, they sat in taxis headed for the Indianapolis Municipal Airport, which turned out to be a small, three-story art deco structure on the southwest edge of town.
Inside the building, Mr. and Mrs. James C. Todd of Indianapolis overheard Tots say to her daughter, “Carole, don’t take that plane.” Carole kept walking toward the gates, where exhausted Life photographer Myron Davis sat on a wooden bench waiting for his flight to Chicago. Davis was dozing with his head back against the wall. He had spent a long day trying to keep up with dynamo Lombard. Here he was, a kid, and he had no idea how she managed to be that up. How did anyone maintain such a high level of energy?
He sat there on the bench, half asleep, he would remember later, “when I sensed somebody come in and sit next to me. I felt a fur coat pressing against the side of my leg. Well, of course I knew it must be a woman, but I was so surprised when I opened my eyes and here was Carole Lombard sitting right next to me! We were so close together it was almost like we were boyfriend and girlfriend. I was so startled that it made her laugh, and then I laughed, too.
“So we just sat there and talked about a few of the day’s events. I thanked her for being so cooperative and letting me follow her around and do my thing. And she said, ‘Well, I was happy to do it, Myron.’ ...It was a very sincere personal exchange between the two of us thanking each other for working on a job that we both thought was necessary for the country at that time.”
He remembered Mr. Winkler and Mrs. Peters being quiet and gloomy, and that, “Carole and I were doing all the talking and laughing.” But why shouldn’t Carole be happy? Two million in sales in one day, and now she got to go home, and in a hurry.
25. The Computer
Mary Anna Johnson’s job title read simply, Computer. Long before computers were electronic devices, people were computers—those who computed—and at Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, California, Mary worked for the National Advisory Council for Aeronautics, NACA, computing data from wind tunnel tests on new aircraft designs. She had been one of four girls hired for the job straight out of the University of California. At a time when most young women didn’t even consider going to college, Mary earned a degree in chemistry that got her foot in the door at NACA. Then she applied for a posted job as the aeronautics librarian and got it. In October 1941 she headed east for three months of intensive training in Washington, D.C., so she could take that new position at Moffett Field in the administration building just constructed.
Now, she was returning home after three months of DC life that included some great memories, the most thrilling just weeks earlier at the White House during the ceremony to light the national Christmas tree. In this time of national crisis, so soon after Pearl Harbor, Mary had gone to see FDR and there he appeared on the balcony of the executive mansion. And who was that right behind him? The shocked crowd realized it was Winston Churchill waddling out aft
er FDR. He flashed the V for victory sign he had invented, which drew a terrific response from a mob of surprised Americans who didn’t know Churchill had entered the country.
Now, Mary sat aboard TWA Flight 3 over the blackness of the Ohio night heading west. Flight 3, a 10-month-old DC-3 with the number NC 1946 painted on its right wing, had lifted off from LaGuardia at 11:17 P.M. and made a quick stop in Newark, then landed in Pittsburgh at 2:18, in Columbus, Ohio, at 3:50, and in Dayton at 4:49. Airborne again, Mary struggled to sleep at 10,000 feet. She knew they would land in Indianapolis in less than an hour, meaning that sleep, when it came, would be brief and fitful at best, but that was life aboard the DC-3, then described as a “giant airliner” with 21 seats for passengers as well as a galley for the preparation of meals. In reality it was, as Mary noted later, “cramped.”
Flight 3 touched down in Indianapolis at 5:24 A.M. and was blocked at 5:27, an hour and a half behind schedule because of the requirements of air mail service. Air mail was a big deal, and Flight 3 was an air mail run, picking up the latest priority mail at every stop along its flight path.
On the ground in Indianapolis, Mary noted commotion. The hostess announced that a VIP was coming aboard, the Hollywood actress Carole Lombard. Carole and two other people, a worried-looking man and an older lady, boarded the plane and Miss Lombard sat just two rows in front of Mary! The nice-looking man sat directly in front of her! Mary’s ticket read Burbank, California, and from there she would fly to San Francisco, which meant she was going to fly as far as Carole Lombard was. Which meant that Mary Johnson was going to be in Burbank when Carole Lombard met up with her husband, Clark Gable. The thrill of it shot through Mary: However many hours in the future, I’m going to see Clark Gable when he meets up with his wife!
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