How could he think about the past week and not conclude that everything happening now was his fault? Ma wanted to get home as fast as possible and that’s why she had taken the plane. She had been ordered by the government not to take a plane because of what might happen, and she had taken the plane and it had happened. All because of the fight they’d had and her frustration with him, sometimes wanting to split his skull because he couldn’t communicate with her like she needed him to because he didn’t know the words to say. They had fought about Lana, but was it really about Lana or about Ma being sick to death of the way he was. She would say: If only she knew what to do, what to say, how to hold him, what to bring him, how to please him; if only he would tell her what he needed, she would do it for him, but he didn’t know how to say what she needed him to say. If he wanted a scotch and soda he could ask, but anything deeper just brought disconnection.
The dawn kept not coming. He loved his liquor, and here he stood next to a building full of the stuff, and all he could manage was lighting one cigarette with the other and pacing, in silence, alone, with five of the closest people in the world to him just a few yards away in surrounding rooms. Inevitably, he thought about Otto, his go-to guy, because how many times on this long evening and night had he wanted to get Wink in to take care of things, but Wink was with Ma. It was a train wreck of awful.
Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore and threw away his cigarette and stormed outside and demanded to be taken to Carole Lombard, and taken right now. His friends tried to pull him back into his room, but he wrestled free and demanded: Take Me to My Wife. Right This Minute.
He found himself in a car, with Mannix on one side and Wheelwright on the other. The car was moving, driving south along the highway, in the black of night with Ernie Hawes of the El Rancho at the wheel. It was a long drive, very long and very dark, in a large vehicle full of people, and he was seated in the back seat between the MGM men who seemed to be holding him down so he wouldn’t lose his mind and start flailing his arms. He didn’t know what to do. How did one deal with a situation like this? With a wife missing and presumed, what? Dead? A best friend minding the wife and also lost? There were no rules and nobody who knew what to do, and he was among those people not knowing, and it unnerved him.
The car finally turned off the southern highway and headed in another direction, west, he figured. There was no telling about the scenery with the blackness on either side of the car but the road made lazy bends this way and that, and finally they reached lights from a town and pulled up at a sheriff’s station. There were mountains behind the town, high peaks, and he knew that only because the grip of night began to slacken, and the faintest light hit the peaks.
There was some conferring outside the car, and Gable sat and waited, and then a car pulled out in front and led Hawes up a dirt road, a frozen dirt road, in the dark. On they went, the two-car caravan, and the road grew rougher. Gable drew breath in and out, and far off he could hear murmured words, muffled voices, men not wanting to displease the king because he might lop off their heads, but the car was moving, which was the important thing, and Gable had to figure that every foot of ground they covered was getting him closer to Ma. The car progressed behind the sheriff’s car ever slower up this bad road that kept getting worse until the jarring and banging of the car on the road brought some focus, with the car retching violently and his big, hard head hitting the ceiling again and again. It was as if he was being slapped, as if someone was smacking that face distorted with rage and fear back into the features of Clark Gable until he was once again inside himself and could breathe. Things started to make sense and he, Clark Gable, would have to feel his way through and determine how he should act and what he should do next. The terror lay in the fact that his wife had taken on the role of handler, and when his wife wasn’t around Wink was the handler, but now she wasn’t here and neither was Wink; they were out there someplace, in the dusky gray of morning, and he needed her back at his side so she could help him figure out what to do, and when to do it.
The veil of night lifted during that torturous car ride to reveal the desert of Nevada, the rugged terrain, the brown earth, the cactus, the Joshua trees, and off to his left, a mountain. A very tall mountain. Very tall. The tallest of all that were in sight, and nearly straight up, practically a wall right beside the car rising, how high he didn’t know—two thousand feet? Three thousand?
Ernie Hawes’ car rolled to a stop with a high-pitched squeal of brakes, and after all that pounding, the vehicle had aged since they had climbed inside an hour or more earlier.
The sun was up now and it was cold, dry cold, and their breath was visible in clouds of vapor. Gable stood beside the bad dirt road with a few parked vehicles and men about, rough customers in cowboy hats, some Indians, and some older prospector types, and sheriff cars and police cars, men conferring, campfires, maps, activity. Horses, maybe a dozen of them, stood snorting and protesting, and it took him back to the ranch and riding with Ma over their 20 acres as they would gaze off at the San Gabriel Mountains.
Through the course of the night, it had seemed at times that nobody cared about the plane and its passengers, that everyone was just killing time, but here he beheld a tremendous caring, a tremendous dedication and love. Maybe there was room to hope after all.
The policemen kept talking to him, explaining, their voices calm, respectful. They were handling him, but that was OK because he was used to being handled and liked it because it meant he had less to do himself and less to think about and fewer decisions to make. The plane was above them, they told him, above the cliffs directly ahead. They pointed high, past a prominent rocky outcropping almost directly up that caught the morning sun and gave a glow that looked like angels but was really the sunrise light hitting cactus that grew out of the ledge. It was beautiful in the light, and maybe it was a sign that Ma was up there alive. Waiting.
Just past that ledge, they told him, they figured the plane was resting. It was such a tranquil word. The plane was resting.
Minute by minute his moods swung. He wanted to get up there; he had to climb, but they told him to be patient and to wait. Time passed, with the cold so many needles penetrating skin. Finally, he told anybody within range that he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he heard Eddie Mannix’s voice in his ear saying to calm down, to let the professionals do their job. He always had paid heed to Eddie; Mannix was a dangerous man, he knew. He heard Strickling in the other ear in that rat-tat-tat way of his, stuttering through it. It’ll be all right, Clark. You belong to MGM, and you can’t go climbing mountains when you aren’t dressed for it and you don’t have a horse to ride. Look at all these men. This is their job, not yours.
But to Gable nobody moved fast enough. Everything was happening so slowly, as if in a bad dream, and he needed things to move faster. Goddamn it, he was going to climb up there, and he was going to find his wife.
That’s exactly what he did. Clark Gable broke free of the men who would have held him back, and he started up the well-worn trail that everyone else was following, that everyone nodded toward. He hiked up, up, ever up a long rise. There were times the trail took him into a dry wash and he climbed boulders, and pulled himself up by dead tree limbs, but his progress was generally up toward Ma. Dead limbs speared him and he slipped on the rocks, but all of a sudden he had crossed the snow line and climbed on. After the time waiting in his car in the parking lot in Burbank and the time waiting on the plane and the time waiting at the El Rancho, now he was doing something with his body, his flesh and his bones, and it was wonderful. It was incredible. It was a feeling to tell Ma about when he found her. Wouldn’t she be proud of her husband? He cared enough to climb a mountain.
Overhead, he heard an airplane, flying low in the sky, a steady hum of a sound overhead. All of a sudden the altitude hit him, and the smoking, and the lack of a meal. Gable was gassed. He stood in a chasm with rocks ahead, and rocks to the left, and rocks to the right, and giant cliffs looming a
bove. He panted. His eyes watered. He ached from the climbing that he only now realized he had done. He looked around and was in the middle of nowhere. He leaned against a rock to catch his breath, waiting for his head to clear. Slowly his senses returned. Mannix, Wheelwright, and the cops caught up with him. The two MGM men gasped for air, doubled up, dressed in blazers and fedoras, dress pants and dress shoes way up in the wilds of Nevada.
The sun was higher in the sky. It was late morning somehow, but nothing made any sense and hadn’t for hours and hours. The policemen stood by, but nobody interfered with Gable because maybe they were putting themselves in his place and thinking, what if it were my wife up there? No force in the world could hold me back.
As they all collected themselves, there was activity ahead. They could see men struggling downward from the mountain, civilians, descending through the snow, slipping, sliding down the sheer slope. The police officers rushed forward, half to meet them and half to catch them before they slipped past. They weren’t far off, 60 feet maybe, but they were out of earshot, exchanging words, vapor trails of information and effort in the air. The men kept talking. The three from MGM really felt the cold now because if they stopped for even a minute, the air knifed inside any exposed spot in outer clothing and ignited the sweat clinging to flesh underneath.
With those cliffs rising high behind them, the police officers approached the civilians. The cops didn’t look like handlers anymore. They were not smiling. Their faces were tight and their lips were pinched.
A policeman matching Gable’s height stopped before him. “Look, the plane has been found, Mr. Gable. There are men up there now guarding it, and there are parties on the way.”
If only the cop would stop speaking. If only the Hollywood men could be allowed to hold on to some hope a little longer, and in their minds she could be alive a little longer. After all, they lived in a world of make believe. Please, just let her be alive a little while longer. But they knew what was coming next and, oh, just not to have to hear it. Police officers moved in around Gable, a physical presence to hold him up if needed. Just in case. Everyone was still so respectful, every minute. Respectful and so poised it was enviable.
“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. There are no survivors.”
31. The Entire Gang Showed Up
Asked when he had learned about the crash of Flight 3, Robert Stack said, “I was walking out of the Hollywood Palladium. I was with my date, and we had been dancing. I heard a newspaper crier on the street corner. It was the Los Angeles Times, and he was calling out, ‘Carole Lombard in Plane Crash!’” Stack’s eyes filled with tears remembering it. “I saw it in a newspaper headline,” he said, “and I couldn’t believe it.”
All Hollywood learned that way, as the stars and the technical people of the studios spilled out of the Trocadero, Ciro’s, Club Mocambo, Grauman’s Chinese, the El Capitan, and all the other nightspots in town. With a war on, with so many men about to go away to fight, the partying now had purpose. More than ever before, people sought getaways.
In all cases the story was the same. Bundles of newspapers hitting the street. “Jack and I had had dinner with some friends at Chasen’s,” said Mary Benny, “and had sat talking until the wee hours of the morning. When we got outside to wait for our car, the man who put the papers in the small news rack in front of Chasen’s was just delivering the Saturday edition.” There screamed that headline and, said Mary, “I thought Jack was going to drop right there on the sidewalk.”
Another Mary, Mary Johnson the human computer who had been bumped in Albuquerque, caught the next flight out to Burbank five hours after Flight 3 took off without her and again sat beside Genevieve Brandner, who also had been bumped from Flight 3. On the way into Burbank, Genevieve listened to the radio with an earphone and heard about the crash as Mary slept beside her. Genevieve rushed back to tell the hostess on her flight, who instructed the girl to be silent about the news until the plane had landed so as not to create a panic.
At touchdown Genevieve roused Mary Johnson and told her what had happened to Flight 3. After they got off the plane, Mary remembered, “The two of us and the other two who had been bumped [Joseph Szigeti and Florence Sawyer] just kind of huddled together in the airport, in complete shock.”
Said Margaret Tallichet Wyler, “I just couldn’t believe all that vitality was gone. All that vitality, and beauty. It was just terrible.”
“I went to my room like a sleepwalker,” said Alice Marble, “and slumped in a chair, dry-eyed, staring into space. This couldn’t happen. Losing Carole was like losing a sister. We had such a wonderful kinship, an intuitive understanding of each other. I loved being with her because she was caring and fun, and had become my closest confidante.”
Famous (some would call him infamous) Hollywood columnist Jimmy Fidler said, “It came suddenly, flashingly, as the woman herself had always come and gone in life: Carole Lombard killed in air crash. It came so abruptly that not until hours later did its full impact strike Hollywood. For at first, you see, the movie colony did not believe the news flash. ‘Carole Lombard dead?’ people echoed. ‘Impossible! She’s too alive!’”
Despite the evidence, the film people clung to hope, because nobody could believe it. Carole Lombard couldn’t be dead, not this girl so full of gags, full of mischief, screeches, and squeals. Not the party girl. Not the girl so intent on paying her taxes, the girl who took over public relations at the Selznick Studios one day under a sign that read, DANGER: LOMBARD NOW AT WORK.
Within six hours the story had crossed the wires to every corner of the nation and beyond. Newspapers screamed the headline in three-inch letters. Radio brought every available detail of the location, the passengers, and the search, and despite all the facts, for Clark Gable and the Galahads who had climbed to rescue her while clinging to boyish hope, there never had been hope, not from the moment that Arthur Cheney had piloted his Western Air Express DC-3 over the crash scene and reported the blaze and the terrain.
So now Gable knew. Mannix, Strickling, and Wheelwright led him back down the mountain, and all of a sudden he had gone from the strapping and broad-shouldered hero of the movies, from Rhett Butler, to frail and disoriented. He had gone from not knowing to knowing. It took a while to lead him back to the cars, and they made the long drive down to Goodsprings and back to the El Rancho Vegas.
They got Gable back in his room, and nobody wanted to leave him alone; they took turns staying with him. He was mostly quiet but would murmur things, now and again, like a reflex, softly, to break the quiet.
“Ma’s gone.” And, “Who would have thought?” And, “Do you think she suffered?” And, “Why her?”
He asked for liquor and they brought it to him. He drank. He ate nothing, but he set about consuming as much of the liquor in stock at the El Rancho as humanly possible, and he smoked, and he looked out his window at the ragged, snow-covered peak of Potosi Mountain plainly visible to the southwest. She was up there, with Otto and Petey. How could this have happened?
He heard that Jill had become hysterical when given the news. He heard that the entire Gable-Lombard hunting gang showed up at the El Rancho. Freddy and wife Elizabeth had driven up. Fritzy, Ma called him. Suddenly, the motor hotel in the middle of nowhere crawled with people who loved Clark and Carole, and he would see none of them. He stayed in his room and grieved.
Jack Benny had been up all night and entreated his brother-in-law, nicknamed Hickey, to drive him to Vegas. They set out with Jack in a stupor, mumbling about Lombard. They drove 85 miles to San Bernardino and in frustration Hickey said, “Look, Jack, there’s absolutely nothing you can do. Even Clark is just waiting. We might be in the way!”
Jack thought it over. “OK, Hickey,” he said. “Let’s turn back.”
Spencer Tracy had also gotten wind of the situation, packed a bag, the most important cargo being three bottles of Chivas Regal, Gable’s favorite. Tracy hopped in his car and didn’t turn back. He drove six hours through the Mojave De
sert to be near the friend he called “Big Moose,” knowing there was nothing he could do but offer moral support and maybe share some drinks.
By now Major Herbert Anderson, second in command at McCarran Field, had received several official requests for assistance in the form of Army trucks and personnel to secure the crash site and begin to recover bodies. He conferred with the sheriff and then detailed 21 men under the command of Lieutenant William B. Hunt with four trucks to proceed up Ninety-Nine Mine Road at 5:30 A.M. Sunday. The men would climb to the site, relieve the two guards up there now, and lead the recovery effort of the crash victims who had been aboard Flight 3.
32. Groaning Pines
Thomas J. Devlin worked for the Los Angeles Examiner and Tommy was on a mission. Devlin had heard about the crash and driven up to Vegas not because of Carole Lombard. Yes, he knew Lombard and felt bad for her and her mother, but Devlin sought his pal from the city beat, Otto Winkler. Devlin had followed the progress of the bond tour in the papers and planned to meet up with Wink afterward and maybe write a story about the former newsman and the movie star pitching war bonds and stamps.
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