Devlin had gone up the mountain on horseback with a posse of cowboys, including the old Piute Indian, Jim “Tweed” Wilson. They rode over one mountain, down into a valley, and up a second sharp rise to where they could see smoke from the fire built by Moore and Bondley. Devlin said that the group “went as far as the horses could go. Then we tethered the horses, and started up on foot, and about several hundred yards up, why, some of the party started dropping out, and then perhaps a thousand yards farther up to really rough going, why, the rest of them built a campfire and dropped out.”
Devlin and Dan Campbell from Goodsprings pressed on because Devlin believed that if the situations were reversed, and Winkler was down here and Devlin up there, Otto would have done the same thing.
Devlin and Campbell climbed until they reached a vertical wall and clawed their way up that, at which point the terrain finally relented, and they found a long, gentle snow-covered slope leading straight to wood smoke and finally to a roaring campfire. Devlin said of Jack Moore and George Bondley, “I believe only one of them had a coat, and they had two sandwiches, and two tangerines, and a small piece of cheese for food. It was getting dark around that time. They had no blankets.… I identified myself to them, and told them I would like to take a look at the crash, and I assured them I would touch nothing, and perhaps 150 or 200 yards to the left of their fire, I came upon the crash.”
Tom Devlin stood there and the enormity of the moment hit him. He had covered the crime beat for years, so he had seen some awful things. He had stared down at shotgunned bodies, at strangulation victims, at gun-to-the-mouth suicides. He had slipped and fallen in pools of blood at car crashes; he had smelled the rot of dead vagrants under bridges. He had seen it all. Now he saw this.
He couldn’t believe the utter violence reflected in twisted airplane spread all over. Some of the scrub cedars in front of him still burned; they rocked and popped in the wind and their odor was pungent. From where he stood on an elevation with the wreck below in a sort of a bowl, he could look across and see suitcases and a pile of something on the ledge at the top of the oil-smeared cliff, 75 or 100 feet above all the other debris, as if the plane had hit with such force that stuff was vaulted up. He could see bodies on a lower cliff, and down in the snow. He thought he could see some more inside what appeared to be the mangled fuselage, but he couldn’t be sure. He didn’t want to be sure. He knew Otto was in there somewhere, and he didn’t care to remember his friend this way.
“What’re ya doin’ here, Wink?” said Devlin aloud, to no one. The snow deadened his voice, and it sounded so strange in his own ears. “This is no place for you, my friend.” The wind kicked up and blew acrid smoke his way. It smelled of oil, and of flesh.
He stared into the blackened carnage. “I wish we could vamoose, go down the hill, and get a drink.” He paused. “I’m buyin’.” The wind blew again and the pines groaned high above. Devlin thought of a hundred happy moments with Otto Winkler, and the tears flowed down his face. He swiped at them with his gloved hands and by the time he turned back, he was stone-faced again. Reporters had to be that way.
Tom Devlin walked away from the wreckage, wading through his own tracks in deep snow.
He found his companion, Dan Campbell, waiting with the guard. Dan had given Devlin time alone with the man he had come to find. Devlin and Campbell savored the warmth of the big fire for a few moments, but it was at least 3:00 now and the sun was sinking, and if they wanted to get off the mountain they would have to head back right this minute. Devlin looked at Moore and Bondley, two very tough men to take on this duty, with one jacket between them, little food, and a long night ahead. He thanked them for their kindness in letting him walk over. He said that he knew a guy on the plane, and they said they were sorry. Tommy offered them the coat off his back in exchange for some moments with Wink and they declined.
Then he and Campbell headed back down, leaving Jack Moore and George Bondley to their vigil, all alone in two feet of snow, eating their meager rations by calculation, eating snow for water, and endlessly feeding their fire to keep from freezing. They had no fear of looters or villains of any sort, not up here, not making that climb. Nor were there wolves or coyotes or bears and, in fact, they saw evidence of no creatures up here at all, not even jackrabbits. It was a sad place to be, and when the wind blew, the pines would groan and crack as if to lament the recent tragedy and the poor humans ground to pieces in that airplane. The heat from the fire would lure the men to doze. Then their discomfort would snap them back to consciousness, and their empty stomachs would protest. They’d scoop up some more snow to eat and doze again and repeat the process through an endless night. The fire remained a demanding companion, a greedy consumer of timber that kept them in motion for more wood, more wood.
It was strange that just across the way there were 22 people at their final rest, including the famous movie star, Carole Lombard. Jack and George had wandered over now and again at various times while it was still light, after Devlin and Campbell had shuffled off, and viewed the wreck, viewed the carnage, everything frozen up now so that the smoldering odor of seared flesh, what they had smelled when they reached the site hours earlier, had gone. They gazed up at the belongings hanging from the branches of the trees. The sight brought sadness to them to the point that they had to retreat again. Such a way to end your life, way up here in this godforsaken place.
The long solitary hours made them wonder if they might perish up here with the others, forgotten by the people down in Las Vegas, where there was civilization. They had been hoping that TWA or the Army would learn of them from Van Gordon and the others and drop supplies. The sound of every plane in the distance renewed hope, but no supplies came. They could see the lights of the city far off, and they imagined their homes, their warm beds, their warm wives, and the meals they should have eaten but hadn’t.
But Moore and Bondley had not been forgotten. A powerful force formed down at McCarran Field as feds and TWA men converged on Vegas: The Civil Aeronautics Board had scrambled men from Kansas City, Atlanta, and Los Angeles; men like Warren Carey. A postal inspector headed north from L.A. and another southeast from San Francisco; the FBI sent men. A contingent from TWA flew up from Burbank.
At dawn on Sunday, January 18, this army of men set into motion, and the trail blazed by Lyle Van Gordon and Jack Moore suddenly became well-traveled. Corduroy was laid to strengthen the mining road. A bulldozer cut a new road up the long rise by the course that Gable had taken the day before. A series of ropes were tied off along the line of ascent to help the soldiers and investigators hoist themselves up, and marks were put in the trees to guide the way.
A posse of 60 men set off to conquer the mountain, all heading up there to try to find some way to make sense of something horrific and so seemingly random. The feds and airline officials and reporters in the massive group had one overriding question they all wanted an answer to: Why?
33. Unfixable
Edgar J. Mannix, age 49, had done the bidding of Louis B. Mayer as an MGM vice president for years to the extent that he had acquired a nickname, “The Fixer.” Mannix had the look of an aging prizefighter about him, or, as Ava Gardner described later, “He had a face like a raw potato in shades, that’s how I still remember him.” Mannix’s body was thick and New Jersey tough; he was a one-time bouncer at Palisades Park who had drifted into the movie business and served Mayer and MGM as equal parts henchman and business associate. The man at MGM he most resembled was Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion. But there was nothing cowardly about Eddie Mannix.
Gable liked Eddie as a drinking buddy who could really put away the booze. Mannix had stepped in and helped to fix a lot of bad situations for Metro over the years, none worse than the pistol-to-the-head shooting of Paul Bern not long after Bern had married Jean Harlow. According to some researchers it was murder, covered up by Mannix and Howard Strickling to protect MGM’s property, the girl affectionately known around the lot as The Baby. Then had come the shockin
g death of Harlow herself with its medical malpractice and the slow poisoning of the Baby’s delicate body.
Not that Eddie merely protected MGM in cold-blooded fashion. “If Mannix felt that a loyal employee had signed a contract that paid him less than he was worth,” said Louis B. Mayer biographer Scott Eyman, “Mannix would tell them to pick up an extra $100 for expenses from the cashier’s office each week. Nothing was ever put on paper about such arrangements; they were just Mannix’s way of doing business.”
Now, ensconced at the El Rancho Vegas with Gable, Mannix found himself amidst a mess that he didn’t quite know how to figure. The new Gable-Turner picture, Somewhere I’ll Find You, had two days of film in the can, and there was no question it would go dark. God only knew when Gable could pull himself together and return to work at Culver City.
Of more immediate concern was the fact that Gable’s wife, not even a Metro employee, mind, still lay inside the smoldering wreck of a plane on a mountaintop nobody could get to. The cops kept talking about a plan, but from where Mannix stood at the El Rancho, nobody actually had a plan, and the whole time Gable was drinking himself stupid until finally, mercifully, later on Saturday he had passed out.
Early Sunday morning Gable regained consciousness, looking almost dead himself, and finally agreed to eat something. Then, Clark heard that investigators were organizing to hike up the mountain, and he growled that he was going along to get Mrs. G. That’s what he called her this morning, Mrs. G. He would find her for himself, and he was already saying he wasn’t leaving town without her. In fact, he wasn’t leaving town without all three of them, Ma, Wink, and Petey. He was a funny kind of haywire this morning, pasty skinned, unshaven, his eyes swollen and bulging in their sockets. He had a tremor, the kind that comes with a high fever, and it took two hands for the king to get a cup of coffee to his mouth. That scene in Gone With the Wind, the one where an unshaven Gable had cried in front of Olivia de Havilland, that was nothing compared to Gable this morning. No, he wasn’t one for tears, but he was quiet, hung over, and strung tight. Strickling had been correct that the best thing was to give Gable some distance, but not leave him alone.
Howard Strickling knew the score about Clark Gable: “The most wonderful and the most beautiful and the greatest thing—the only real happiness he ever had in his life—was gone. ’Cause they had planned for years. They had plans on how she was going to do this and how he was going to do [that] and... they had it all planned out.”
At best Gable was now adrift and the question of the moment was, would Clark even survive this?
Now, the MGM men had to head off this new disaster because what if Gable went up there and fell off the goddamn mountain, and there would go the studio’s biggest star and most important financial asset. Simply put, Clark Gable was worth millions to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Over the course of his career to come, 20 million at least and probably more.
Mannix, Strickling, and Wheelwright were all in Gable’s room trying to reason with Clark that there was nothing he could do now that it had been determined there had been no survivors, so what would be the point of even trying that inhuman climb? In fact, why would he want to see his wife in the condition they would undoubtedly find her in? Why not remember her as the beautiful girl she had been in life? No. Gable wouldn’t cooperate. No, he needed to be up there and he needed to see to her recovery and—
“I’ll go,” said Mannix. Two simple words that headed Clark Gable off at the pass.
“Eddie and I will both go,” said Wheelwright without even a decent beat that the script called for.
Mannix had to wonder if either of them could really climb up there; he had heard nothing for the past 36 hours other than how brutal and unforgiving that mountain was. He wasn’t a kid anymore and his waist had been growing and parts were sagging that hadn’t sagged before, but he wasn’t the Fixer for nothing, and this is what he did at MGM and what he would do now.
He and Wheelwright didn’t even shop for appropriate clothes better suited for the outdoors; they just set out for Goodsprings and the base camp where they found a steady stream of men heading up toward the cliffs; dozens of men dressed warmly and carrying as much in the way of provisions as they could lug on their backs. The place crawled with feds, Civil Aeronautics investigators, postal inspectors, FBI guys, and Army personnel, not to mention TWA men, reporters, photographers, miners, cowboys, and of course, the coroner.
It was an experience the MGM Fixer would never forget, and he spent it clawing at the earth, coughing up his lungs, gasping for air, climbing ropes, clinging to trees, and toppling over against rocks. His leather gloves did nothing in that cold, and he lost the feeling in his fingertips. It was four hours straight up and by the time he had ascended above the last of the cliffs, his clothes were torn to what seemed like ribbons.
Then all that he had just experienced seemed like nothing, because he had reached the crash site and even a Jersey kid who had seen his share of stiffs could not be prepared for what met his watering eyes now, at just about noon on Sunday, January 18.
34. I Still See It in My Dreams
Just ahead of 10 A.M. Jack Moore and George Bondley, the two lonely, hungry, freezing guards of Flight 3, had finally been relieved. Army men arrived first and gave Moore and Bondley biscuits and Spam to eat, and they accepted it willingly before stumbling back down the way they had come for the sleep of their lives. On the way they dodged men of all shapes and sizes, men with the luxury of ropes and ladders, and saw in the faces of the newcomers the same physical punishment, the same shock, that they had experienced on the previous day’s climb.
Army personnel with loaded rifles now took position around the crash site, at the top of the cliffs above, on either side of the wreck, and in the ravine below. Inside their newly created perimeter, the various functionaries went to work. The CAB men got their first look at the shattered plane and the cliff. There was no telling why this catastrophe had occurred until they understood how it had occurred. What was the attitude of Flight 3 as it struck the cliff? Was the ship in level flight? Were its engines working? What was its airspeed?
The TWA men had questions of their own. A definite flight path existed for the run from Las Vegas to Burbank. Fly south past Goodsprings and then bank south-southwest so that the highest terrain encountered would be 5,800 feet. And at a cruising altitude of 9,000, there was never a problem. But for reasons no one could understand, Flight 3 had taken off and flown due southwest, directly into the highest peak between Vegas and Los Angeles. From McCarran Field the mountain was clearly visible 33 miles distant; from the mountain, McCarran Field and Vegas were clearly visible 33 miles distant. So what the hell had been the problem? It became imperative to locate the flight plan of the pilot and co-pilot, which would have been kept in the cockpit and might explain how Capt. Williams had been so far off course. TWA also wanted to locate the engines and propellers so they could tell their story about the operation of the drive systems at the point of impact. If the motors worked at impact and if it had been Williams alone making a mistake, liability would be entirely on the company, and that would displease Mr. Howard Hughes. But if an engine were nonfunctional or a propeller had failed, then there would be blame to go around.
The postal inspectors stepped carefully around bodies and body parts to recover U.S. mail that had been carried on the plane, and there had been sacks and sacks of it. Some had been consumed by the fire, but some of it had been placed in the rear baggage compartment, and this clump had been thrown clear. The collection of this mail would begin after the entire area had been photographed and crash debris located and marked.
The FBI representatives had the most sobering questions to ask. They were physically visible to the press that day and yet their work was invisible; while newspapers reported the names of all the other feds involved, the FBI men weren’t discussed at all because their big question could impact national security: Was Flight 3 sabotaged? This was wartime and the nation had already been struck
a cruel blow at Pearl Harbor, and the activities of fifth columnists were known in some cases and unknown in others. The plane had been serviced in Albuquerque, only a few hours’ drive from the Mexican border, and the Nazis were quite active in Mexico, just beyond U.S. reach. FBI men had already set to work checking the identities of other passengers who had left the plane on previous stops and might have planted a bomb. They studied one man in particular, violinist Joseph Szigeti, a man with a heavy European accent who seemed all too willing to surrender his seat to airmen in Albuquerque.
The FBI also wanted to know how secure the plane had been upon refueling in Las Vegas. It remained on the ground for 31 minutes, leaving plenty of time for disruption to occur. Was it mere coincidence that this plane had gone down carrying 15 vital U.S. Army Air Corps personnel and a Hollywood star on official government business for the war effort? Mr. J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation very much wanted to know the answers to these questions.
But the crash scene presented a worst-case scenario. The growing contingent stared at the steep ravine carpeted in wreckage, pieces as long as 15-foot wing sections and 20 feet of empennage, and as small as a dime, smaller, after the catastrophic explosion of the plane against the cliffs. John Collings, TWA superintendent of operations out of Kansas City, stared in awe at the twisted, blasted, mangled remnants of aluminum and steel and the bodies and pieces of bodies spread out before him. “This is the most completely obliterated crashed plane I have ever seen,” he murmured.
On Saturday, the bodies had not been touched once Moore had determined that all were dead. But right away on Sunday morning Clark County Deputy Coroner D. G. Lawrence faced a horrifying reality with the first bodies he reached: Against all reason, there might have been as many as three survivors of the crash of Flight 3, if only help could have gotten there in the first hour—those three fliers who had been thrown clear into deep snow after the plane had broken in two amidships. It was conceivable that they had been concussed on impact and one or two may have kept breathing after the crash, only to boil from the heat of the fire or freeze as night clamped down upon the scene.
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