Warren Carey, one weary investigator after days in airports, in his car, and on the mountain, had looked over the crash scene all day Sunday, then Monday, and now stood there again, marveling at the destruction.
Carey had always wanted to learn to operate a flying machine, God knew why given the devastation now before him. He had gotten his chance in the Army in World War I. Now in middle age he still held a captain’s reserve commission, although he’d been flying commercially since 1928. He had accrued 4,300 hours of left-seat experience by the time he stood on Potosi Mountain. Carey knew he was a decent pilot, yet the captain who had flown Flight 3 into this mountain, Wayne Clark Williams, had piled up three times Carey’s cockpit hours. It was inconceivable that a man this experienced could make such a fatal error, and yet pilots did steer their planes into hills and mountains and even flat fields because it was just too easy to become confused up there. Just a split second’s error could be fatal.
Carey had gone over this wreck for three days with Safety Bureau Inspector Jack Parshall out of Kansas City and George Cassady, chief of the air carrier branch of the CAA out of Santa Monica. They didn’t want to rush to any judgments, and they certainly didn’t want to put the finger on an innocent pilot. They were just making observations and gathering facts, and what they knew so far was, as Carey would later report:
Inspection revealed that the aircraft had, while in full level flight, collided with the lower part of an almost perpendicular granite cliff approximately 90 feet high on the northeasterly slope of, and approximately 500 feet below, the 8,304-foot summit of Potosi Peak. This cliff was 33 air miles southwest of Las Vegas Airport, the point of last departure. The aircraft was completely demolished at impact.
Examination disclosed the nose section of the aircraft telescoped and impinged upon the face of the cliff. All instruments and cockpit controls were demolished or destroyed by the fire which followed the crash. The right wing tip outboard from the aileron recess was telescoped inward by contact with the projecting ledge of rock. The right center section with fuel tanks, completely melted, lay at the base of the cliff. The left center section with fuel tanks, demolished but unburned, also lay at the base of the cliff below the point of impact of the nose section. The outer left wing with ailerons attached, the whole completely telescoped, lay approximately 75 feet down the rock slope at the base of the cliff. Its leading edge bore clear impressions corresponding to newly broken projecting rocks on the cliff face. The points of impact of both the left and right wings, clearly visible on the rock wall by fresh breaks thereon were in a level position compatible with the position of the nose section which remained at point of impact. The tips of several pine trees located on the rocky slope approximately 50 feet from the base of the cliff were slightly below the point of impact. None of these trees were broken. None bore any indication of contact by the aircraft.
Both engine nacelles were completely demolished and fresh breaks in the face of the cliff indicated the point of contact of each engine.
The right engine, with nose section demolished and propeller detached, was found on the slope under the right center section. It was badly shattered and its aluminum parts were melted. Its propeller with two blades remaining in the hub was found nearby. These blades were broken and scarred as by contact with solid object. The third blade was pulled out at the hub and completely melted.
The left engine, following impact, rolled approximately 40 feet down the rock slope. Engine and nacelle had been driven backward into the left center section at impact before breaking clear. The rear portion of this engine was demolished. The propeller with blades attached remained in place. All three blades were broken 12 to 24 inches from their tips and scarred as by impact with a solid object. This engine was also damaged by oil fire.
The fuselage was shattered and destroyed by fire with the exception of the empennage which was found inverted approximately 30 feet down the rock slope. The left elevator and stabilizer were torn off but found in the wreckage. So far as could be determined all control wires were intact.
Landing gears were bent and distorted beyond any possibility of accurately determining their position before impact. That portion of the wing flaps remaining on the right center section were retracted.
Fresh oil blotches covered the face of the cliff to a height of 73 feet above the point of impact of each engine.
Baggage and miscellaneous small parts of the aircraft were thrown over the top of the cliff 75 feet above the point of impact. Bodies of victims were in general found to the right of the point of impact. The bodies of four victims, all army personnel, were thrown clear of the burned area.
All radio equipment and instruments were completely destroyed and owing to the demolition of the aircraft it was impossible to determine any settings or readings at time of impact. However all component parts of the aircraft were found and nothing was discovered which indicated engine or mechanical trouble prior to impact.
Warren Carey, Waldon Golien, and their colleagues covered the crash scene from every angle for days, in the snow and cold, and their minds worked every moment. They made mental notes of every boulder, every tree, every piece of wreckage. Flight 3 had crashed on a night with what Western pilot Arthur Cheney called “unlimited visibility.” The doomed airship had two engines under full power and hit the cliff so level that not even the treetops just down the slope were touched when it flew over. Its cockpit had been completely destroyed so that no flight plan could be found and no gauges could be read. Its flight crew had radioed his wheels-up time, but then nothing that might have indicated trouble.
According to witnesses on the ground, this plane had flown with great assurance and full acceptance straight into the highest peak between Las Vegas and Burbank, a snow-covered mountaintop that both the pilot and co-pilot should have seen from miles off. That pilot had flown over the north-south road out of Las Vegas, Highway 91, which would have alerted him that he was going the wrong way. Pilots flying the Las Vegas to Burbank run at night used headlights on the highway to know they were flying safely south and past the mountains. Fly along Highway 91 to Goodsprings, then bank south-southwest, and safety was assured. Instead, Williams had flown not due south but rather southwest over the highway and over the town of Arden, and its signal beacon warning of the mountain ahead. Even if he and Gillette had seen the mountaintop at a mile’s distance, a simple banking maneuver would have taken them back to McCarran Field in 15 minutes. But there was no indication that they even thought to act.
Flight 3 was off course by miles. If Williams had flown south to Goodsprings, a cruising altitude of 6,000 feet would have gotten these people home. Hell, if they had been flying 500 yards farther to the left, they’d have missed the mountain. Carole Lombard would have met her husband. The Army fliers would have been safely back in Long Beach. The flight crew would be in the air today. Instead, all now amounted to statistics down at Garrison’s Mortuary. Warren Carey wanted to know what had happened. He felt an obligation to those people, and to every man and woman who would next step into a DC-3. If it was pilot error, he wanted to know; if it was mechanical failure, he wanted to know; if it was sabotage, he wanted to know. The bodies had been removed, but he still saw reminders. A lump of tissue here, a bloodstain there. Each bit of their corporeal selves gave them life again, and suddenly they looked over his shoulder, putting questions into his head, nudging him here, coaxing him there, and day upon day at the crash site, he wanted to know the answer. What happened on TWA Flight 3?
41. The Under Side
Louella Parsons reported on Wednesday, January 21, that Madalynne Fields and her husband Walter Lang waited at the Encino Ranch for the return of Clark Gable and that “comfort to Fieldsie is the belief that Carole would have chosen to go as she did—when she was on top.”
All around this little pocket of drama in the lives of Hollywood people and the families of the other crash victims, a much larger drama gripped hundreds of millions: world war. Air, sea, and groun
d forces of the United States and its allies learned about the wages of this new conflict the hard way, going head-to-head with Japanese imperial forces in Malaya, Burma, and the Philippines. A new name grabbed headlines, General Douglas MacArthur, and geography-challenged Americans scrambled to atlases to learn the whereabouts of a place called Bataan, where a quarter of a million crack Japanese troops under Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma seemed ready to wipe out MacArthur and his defenders of Bataan province. Off the U.S. east coast, from dozens to hundreds of souls a day went to Davy Jones’ locker on defenseless ships of all sizes courtesy of German U-boats that often came within easy view of beaches from Long Island to Florida. War carved vicious wounds the length of the American heartland, from San Francisco and Los Angeles, where attacks were rumored daily, to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, lately known as Torpedo Alley.
Who had time to stop for long to ponder a dead movie star? Two days earlier, Pittsburgh editorialist Florence Fisher Parry acknowledged how wonderful Carole Lombard had been in life, particularly the size of her heart in proportion to a diminutive body, but, said Parry as she witnessed the furor of the press to cover the plane crash, “There was something bizarre, almost frightening, in this exhibition of sensationalism. It seemed incredible that the people of this country, plunged as we are in a life-and-death struggle for survival—let no man call it less—could let ourselves exhibit such disproportionate emotions! We are at war,” she declared. “We need every trained flier. Fifteen of these airmen, most of them officers, died in the crash that killed Carole Lombard. Look at the newspaper headlines. What about them? Our sons, lovers, husbands?”
The Army boys on Flight 3 had lived and breathed right along with Carole Lombard, but Hal Browne, Bob Crouch, Fred Dittman, James Barham, Ken Donahue, Charles Nelson, Stu Swenson, Dave Tilghman, Ed Nygren, Bob Nygren, Al Belejchak, Fred Cook, Milt Affrime, Marty Tellkamp, and Nicka Varsamine had indeed largely passed into glory as an anonymous list of casualties in a new war. A high officer of the Ferrying Command who agreed to speak to the press on condition of anonymity said, “They were eager to go anywhere, any time. They were the cream of the crop.”
One reporter who asked for a quote about how the Army personnel had been overlooked drew this response from the officer: “All of these men were top-notchers. Their deaths are a big loss, felt by all of us. They were some of our oldest crews. They were doing a tremendous job.”
Clark Gable didn’t need any reminding that 19 others had been aboard that plane beyond Carole, Otto, and Petey. He knew what the families must be going through. Gable also knew damn well there was a war on and that events related to Flight 3 were newsworthy. He could see the reporters and photographers in his peripheral view, and he despised them now as he had always despised them. Luckily, most feared him so they kept their distance, and if they didn’t fear the king, they certainly gave a wide berth to MGM’s fixers, Mannix and Strickling.
At the same time as bombs were exploding in the Philippines and torpedoes in the Atlantic, early on a business Wednesday in Pomona, California, a train pulled into the station. Very early. Several grim men in suits stepped off a passenger car with no fanfare. At the center of the group, Clark Gable hid behind sunglasses and moved within the ranks of the other men with the efficiency of the Secret Service. They whisked him into a waiting limousine and drove him off. Just behind, three wooden shipping crates, each containing a gray steel casket, were unloaded from the train with alacrity, slid into three hearses, and driven off in the wake of Gable’s lead car.
The nondescript procession headed west, over the Arrow Highway to Arcadia, home of the Santa Anita race track, one of the places that Clark and Carole loved to frequent. The idea of where they were, Santa Anita, was driven home for Gable when the procession picked up Colorado Boulevard—how he and Ma loved to take his convertible to Santa Anita with the top down and speed and laugh their heads off back in the carefree early days of their courtship.
At long last the procession reached Forest Lawn Glendale, and the limousine pulled in at the offices just inside the main gate. For Gable, the memories were inescapable: Thalberg’s funeral, and Harlow’s, and Carole’s passionate reaction to both. Her desire for no such spectacle if she went first, how quiet she had been, quiet and sad. Was sad the word? That day for Harlow, there was also fury, confusion, and hurt, all mixed with sadness in a combustible cocktail within Lombard’s five-foot-three body.
Gable walked into a Forest Lawn office and there Jean Garceau laid eyes on her boss for the first time in five days. She would remember “one of the saddest moments of my life. I was shocked to see the change in him. He seemed to have aged years, was hollow-eyed with grief and loss of sleep.”
Forest Lawn’s representatives offered Gable a private end-of-corridor vault like Harlow had, and Thalberg. He was told of the prestige and of the security that these spaces offered. He asked for the cost. He was given a number. No, he wanted three wall vaults anywhere that offered consecutive spaces so that Carole and Bess could rest together and later he could rest next to Carole. Someplace that people couldn’t have easy access. He was asked if he had a preference of locations within the Great Mausoleum. He said anywhere with some privacy. Oh, and anywhere away from Russ Columbo.
Then Gable was presented the option, by official Washington, of a military funeral complete with flag-draped coffins, caissons, and a 21-gun salute.
Said Jean Garceau, “I was privy to Carole’s will and knew of her desire for a simple funeral, with expense kept within the bounds of good taste, and no publicity. She’d even specified the order of service and the Bible texts to be read. Quietly, I outlined her wishes to Clark and he quickly vetoed all other funeral suggestions, ordering things as Carole wanted them.” Garceau’s confidence in Carole’s wishes allowed Gable to turn down the DC offer of a military funeral. He knew what his wife wanted, and it wasn’t a high-profile burial with guns a-blazing.
Final decisions were made, crypts were chosen, and easy as the king pleased, the service was set for 4 P.M. that very afternoon, January 21. Gable shook hands with the Forest Lawn staff and walked outside into an overcast Wednesday morning. He continued to hide behind sunglasses and stepped into a limousine to be driven to the home of Al Menasco in San Gabriel. There he counted out three hours before returning to Forest Lawn for the simplest funeral service in the history of Hollywood stardom. In the meantime, Fred Peters’ wife, Elizabeth, had been asked to supply white gowns in preparation for the burial of her mother-in-law and sister-in-law. Elizabeth secured these garments and brought them to Forest Lawn Glendale, and as her son Fred would say decades later, his mother helped prepare the bodies for burial, but, “there were no remains in the coffins. They put gowns in the coffins. That’s what was buried in the graves.”
Elizabeth had expected to see bodies in those steel-gray caskets, but met instead remains that had been devastated and lay in body bags. She did not assist in placing a gown on Carole’s body, as per the Lombard will, or on Petey’s body, but rather set gowns on top of the bodies inside the caskets, which were then closed for the last time.
Several dozen people, each having received an engraved invitation, passed a police checkpoint at the bottom of the long drive inside Forest Lawn Glendale and gathered at the hilltop Church of the Recessional for the twin funerals of Carole Lombard and Elizabeth Peters at 4 P.M. on Wednesday, January 21, 1942. Gable was driven by limousine up a private drive to a side church entrance and slipped into the eight-pew private Family Room, which directly faced the sanctuary at a 90-degree angle from the congregational seating area. It was an old tradition, the Family Room, and offered total privacy in grief.
As he sat down, an organ played softly and the view devastated him: Right there 10 feet away sat the steel gray caskets of his wife and his mother-in-law, in a V shape and draped in blankets of gardenias. About the altar sat dozens of floral arrangements of different shapes and sizes—vivid bursts of color in a bombardment from every corner of motion
pictures. Gable sat with his father, William, and stepmother, Edna. Howard and Gail Strickling sat on a pew nearby. Gable conversed with no one before or after. The organ stopped playing. Reverend Gordon C. Chapman of Westwood Community Methodist Church began to speak.
Attendees in the church chamber included Fred and Elizabeth Peters; Stuart Peters; Carole’s girlfriends, Fieldsie, who was with her husband Walter Lang, and Dixie Pantages Karlson, accompanied by her husband Phil; Jean and Russ Garceau; William and Diana “Mousie” Powell; Myrna Loy and her soon-to-be ex-husband, producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr.; Zeppo and Marion Marx; Spencer and Louise Tracy; Carole’s new agent Nat Wolff and his wife Edna; Clark’s close friends Al and Julie Menasco and Harry and Nan Fleischmann; Jack and Mary Benny, who sat with Ernst Lubitsch and his wife Vivian; Fred and Lillian MacMurray; Gable cronies Buster and Stevie Collier, Phil and Leila Berg, Norris “Tuffy” Goff—who was Abner of Lum and Abner radio fame—and his wife Liz, and Andy and Dorothy Devine; Eddie Mannix and his common-law wife Toni Lanier; and Louis B. Mayer. There were also many of Petey’s friends in attendance. A dozen members of the press “came not as newspapermen,” said United Press correspondent Frederick C. Othman, “but as friends and mourners.”
Said a reporter, “There was no music. Miss Lombard would not have wanted it. Floral tributes, including two large United States flags made of red and white carnations and blue cornflowers, lined the chapel. None of the bouquets bore cards.… The Reverend…said a brief prayer. He read the 23rd Psalm, then a poem.” The poem, by Grant Colfax Tullar, was one of Carole’s favorites:
My life is but a weaving
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