Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  The broken remains of Stillman-Morgan Atherton Gillette, co-pilot of TWA Flight 3, made their way back to Burlington, Vermont. Alice Getz lived the glamorous life for a very short time and left behind fiancé Lt. Robert Burnett and ardent admirers Bud Ode and Bob Hix along with a shattered family, all of whom attended her burial mass at St. Patrick’s Church in Sheffield, Illinois. And Wayne Williams, recently TWA’s top pilot and a man with a successful present that was certain to become an even brighter future, had already earned scorn because of the spectacular way his ship had gone down. Capt. Williams was given a quiet funeral in Kansas City, and his shattered body was cremated, again, and shipped on to his widow, Ruby, in Southern California. Ruby decided to deposit the ashes of Wayne Williams, once known for a day as ace pilot Jimmy Donnally, in Forest Lawn Glendale where they would reside for eternity near what was left of Carole Lombard, Elizabeth Peters, and Otto Winkler.

  44. Skyrocketing

  Clark Gable knew he could stay at Menasco’s in San Gabriel as long as necessary, but after Otto had been laid to rest, he asked Al to drive him home. Reaching Encino on Ventura Boulevard, making the familiar left turn onto winding Petit Avenue, he steeled himself for that last right turn onto the winding, uphill driveway to the ranch.

  There in the stillness and quiet, he looked at the house, the garage, the stables, all still there. Just no Ma. Jean greeted him on arrival, and she had asked Gable’s permission to have others over, to ease the moment. He said OK, so Strickling and Mannix showed up, and Nat Wolff and his wife, and Harry Fleischmann, and some others.

  When Garceau was alone with Gable in her office with the door closed, she handed him the last in the series of love notes Carole had written, a note Jean had held back when the worst happened. The words in careful green ink reconnected his emotions and overwhelmed Gable, and what poured out was something he could never have expected or known he was capable of experiencing. This man who didn’t know how to cry when called upon to do so in Gone With the Wind, who had then been coached by Olivia de Havilland on the art of tears, this man’s man, felt the emotional dam fracture and when control left him, he wept. How awful it was, finally after 40 years, to have the head and the heart connected. She had done that; she had cursed him to feel his heart, and then she had gone.

  “It’s a dreadful thing to see and hear a strong man cry,” said Jean, who stood there awkwardly, “lending what strength and comfort I could muster until he was calm again.”

  Gable had endured the worst: the weekend, the funerals, and now the return to the ranch. He couldn’t spend the night there, not yet, so he drove up to Bakersfield with hunting buddy Harry Fleischmann to get his mind in order and prepare. After that, he settled back in at Encino, where Jessie, Juanita, and Martin shared Gable’s grief. Garceau kept her distance, and time passed in silence, each of the five of them joined by tragedy and yet separated by it. They remained alone with their thoughts, learning to accept the cavernous emptiness, the lack of screeches and shrieks, gags, kindnesses, and that cat-ate-the-canary smirk. The haunted man walked the farm and let the memories of her wash over him. It was all he had, memories. He would get in his car or on his motorcycle and drive to places they had lived, partied, or sought refuge. The Bel Air house, Santa Anita, restaurants, nightspots, friends’ homes. He would drive there and sit, alone, and remember, alone.

  He ate at her favorite restaurant, the Vine Street Brown Derby, and Benny Massi said, “He didn’t know nobody. He didn’t even recognize me.” At Drucker’s Barbershop on Wilshire, the formerly gregarious Gable made his usual once-a-week appearances, and said nothing. “He was despondent,” according to Harry Drucker.

  Others also experienced the depths of grief. Fieldsie, Allie, Teach, Talli, Billy Haines, Lucy, all felt such pain that it was a struggle to keep going. “When it happened, they all went off alone,” said Richard Lang of his mother Fieldsie and the rest of the Lombard gang. “It was such a loss to all of them.”

  Another kind of loss troubled United Artists, where To Be or Not to Be executive producer Alexander Korda faced a dilemma: What would the company do with this picture, which had been scheduled to sneak preview three days after the crash? As had happened with Jean Harlow, demand for Lombard pictures increased after death. “Such films generally have done exceptional business,” stated the Hollywood Reporter. The public wanted to see the departed star on the screen again, perhaps out of morbid curiosity, perhaps as a way to deal with personal grief. When theater owners requested prints of Lombard pictures, representatives of producing companies chastised the exhibitors for “ghoulishness.” Paramount opted to sit on its seven years of Lombard features. At the same time, Universal sent out old prints of the 1936 comedy Love Before Breakfast, and RKO put Vigil in the Night and They Knew What They Wanted back into circulation, hoping to squeeze a trickle of blood from these two stones.

  Dating back to the fight over the title, UA thought To Be or Not to Be represented a tough sell anyway. The German army’s rampage through Poland had been no laughing matter in 1939, so why should the public see it as a source of giggles now? If anything, Lombard’s passing would cast a pall over the proceedings. But the picture had to go out. United Artists understood the need to respect the grieving king, and also to steer clear of offending mighty MGM, which could easily accuse United Artists of cashing in on tragedy. The board of directors met in New York and decided to finish final editing of the picture and set it aside for two weeks before issuing a release date.

  Jack Benny, who knew he had made a hit thanks in large part to Lombard’s generous style of acting, now couldn’t bring himself to look at it, to see her up there on the screen, very much alive. When finally the picture premiered in mid-February at Grauman’s Chinese, after “a respectful period of time,” the Bennys were scheduled to appear on the red carpet to highlight the event. Instead, the Hollywood Reporter chastised Benny for driving around and around the block and never entering the theater. Mary Benny walked in alone and watched the picture, and afterward assured Jack that it was all right—it would be all right. Only then would he watch it through, in a projection room, in private. He told Louella Parsons afterward that he was thrilled Mary had liked it so much and that the reviews were positive. “I know how happy it would have made Carole,” he said, “and she would have wanted everyone to see our movie. I’m more glad for her sake that most people like it than I am on my own account.”

  By the third week of February, UA knew it had a hit. Lombard Fan Yen Skyrocketing ‘To Be’ read a trade headline. L.A. area box office was strong, either doubling usual returns or setting house records. By early March, To Be or Not to Be was proclaimed as “one of UA’s top all-time domestic grossers, and one of the top industry grossers of the year” and opening to “record premiere crowds at all situations throughout the country.”

  America could giggle at Nazis in Poland after all, if it meant one last visit in the dark with Carole Lombard. Once there in the picture palaces, audiences savored the biting send-up of Hitler and the Nazis, and gasped at a Lombard more radiant and self-assured than ever before. She had been right to do To Be, and her next two comedies might have put her back on top. Now, the script that had been written at Columbia with Lombard in mind, He Kissed the Bride, would be given to Joan Crawford, who volunteered to take the assignment and donate her entire salary of $112,500 to charities, including the Red Cross, the president’s Infantile Paralysis Drive, the Motion Picture Relief Fund, and the Navy Relief Fund. Joan owed that much to Clark Gable.

  Lombard and Crawford had always been rivals and never close, and Gable and Crawford had loved and hated over the years, since that first passionate affair, but Joan’s gesture now showed genuine respect.

  The other feature in the pipeline for Carole, My Girl Godfrey at Universal, would be produced in 1943 as His Butler's Sister, with the starring role given to popular young singer-actress Deanna Durbin.

  By the time He Kissed the Bride started shooting in mid-February, Gable was se
t to return to work on Somewhere I’ll Find You. He had driven all the places he could drive, including a solo car trip to Oregon, and replaced his tight-lipped silence with the beginnings of a new habit. He talked about her. All the time. To everyone. Said Delmer Daves, “That affectionate love of this girl would come through in his ‘remember when’s.’” Said Clark’s pal Andy Devine, “It was just that any time he’d run into you, it would make him think of Carole. He would talk about her—and only about her.”

  Gable was slowly moving toward acceptance as February wore on, acceptance of Lombard’s passing and of his own guilt in the matter; that last argument and the reason for it, Lana Turner. Yes, he was learning to accept, but his eyes would never look alive again and his hands continued to shake. Strickling said Gable had always been an ambitious man, but now his ambition was gone, never to return. As Jean put it, “He never reverted to what he was in the early days.” But he survived.

  45. Mangled

  On January 24, 1942, Congress released the results of its investigation into the disastrous Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, placing blame squarely on the onsite commanders, Navy Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Army Lieutenant General Walter C. Short. With war raging, with the new concept of rationing of sugar, butter, and other goods about to begin, the story of Flight 3 receded far into the background.

  However, the number of air disasters involving civilian passenger liners throughout the 1930s and into the new decade had caused Congress to set up a body to study these disasters, and the Select Committee on Air Accidents in the United States investigated the crash of TWA Flight 3, as did the Civil Aeronautics Board. These bodies interviewed TWA personnel who had interacted with the plane, including Las Vegas station manager Chuck Duffy, and maintenance men Ed Fuqua and Floyd Munson, as well as witnesses who had seen the ship fly over, such as Dan Yanich and Ora Salyer, rescuers including Jack Moore, Lyle Van Gordon, and Harry Pursel, and TWA and Western Airlines pilots—authorities questioned dozens of people in an effort to understand this mystery: On a clear night, a highly skilled pilot had flown his ship straight into a mountainside. True, there was no moon that night, and two of the three navigational signal beacons were extinguished because of blackout rules in place for a month, but somehow the flight crew had managed to avoid visual flight references in plain sight that included traffic on Highway 91 and the one beacon still lit in Arden. And Williams and Gillette seemed ignorant of a compass heading that directed them straight into the mountain.

  No “black box” cockpit voice or data recorders existed in 1942, and the instrument panel had been destroyed, along with all useful logs and other papers located inside the cockpit. Michael McComb of Lostflights Aviation Archaeology, an airline pilot who has investigated this accident among many others, said, “The plane was equipped with an early version of a flight recorder referred to as a flight analyzer. It recorded four things: airspeed, altitude, heading, and vertical velocity (up and down). They were not designed to be crash or fire resistant, so the information on the pen and ink card was probably destroyed in the fire.”

  In testimony before the Select Committee, TWA pilot William H. DeVries was asked for an opinion about the piloting skills of Captain Wayne Williams, with whom DeVries had flown. “He has a reputation as a very excellent flier,” said DeVries, adding when questioned that he believed Williams to be a “cautious aviator.”

  Two co-pilots who had flown with Williams confirmed his conscientious approach to the job. TWA co-pilot Paul Sydney Grave was asked if Williams was prone to reckless flying in mountains. “Well, he was far from being reckless in mountains,” said Grave, adding that Williams “was very receptive all the time. If I made any suggestions as to the carrying out of the flight, he was very glad to cooperate.”

  TWA co-pilot Paul Bracken called Williams “a very cautious, safe, and able captain” who “was very conscientious; and I’d say that he believed that rules were made for a purpose and they should be abided by.”

  Grave went so far as to say, “He was a very even-tempered person. He was not excitable at all. He had a great enthusiasm for his work.… I don’t believe you would find any person who was more calm in his work than he was.”

  But the press needed a cause for the accident and on January 28, a story broke that Captain Williams had been fired by TWA in 1933 for what the company called “infraction of company rules and regulations, however, this had no bearing on his ability or skill as a pilot fully capable of flying transport aircraft.” The press and public seized on this termination as proof of Williams’ incompetence. Records show that, yes, in his early employment with TWA, Wayne Williams had continued to pursue seat-of-the-pants flying that was fine for the Army and for mail runs, but not for passenger trips. But the blemish that had nearly ended his career and caused his termination from TWA involved labor unions. Williams had attempted to unionize the pilots and the company had fired him for it. Then the National Labor Board, newly formed under the administration of FDR, learned the true nature of Williams’ dismissal and quickly ordered his reinstatement. TWA was forced to take Wayne Williams back and put him on mail duty until such time that, with a scrupulous record, Williams resumed his status as a pilot of passenger aircraft. According to a TWA report, “From that time forward Captain Williams had logged approximately 8,000 flying hours and had been continually checked by his supervisors. The company has received many favorable comments from passengers in regard to his flying ability and general conduct.”

  Three days after the newspapers had been led to condemn Williams for negligence based on his 1933 firing, David L. Behncke, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, issued an impassioned statement that received much less attention in the press. In it, he pointed to a disturbing trend to “blame the pilot when he was dead and unable to defend himself or point an accusing finger at the actual cause or causes.

  “So far as the cause of the accident on January 16 is concerned, it will in all probability never be known, for the only people who actually know what happened are the pilots of the ill-fated craft, and they are dead and all their aboard-plane records are destroyed.” Behncke lamented the fact that the accident was being investigated so hastily and that the only way to truly get to the bottom of the crash was “a far more lengthy and thoroughly scientific study.”

  With a war on, with the crash scene so remote, and buried in snow, the federal effort pushed ahead as February began, looking at the plane itself for signs of sabotage or mechanical or structural failure. Because of the violence of the collision and the massive fire, no helpful evidence from inside the cockpit survived, and if the plane had been sabotaged, evidence of that had been compromised. The engines and propellers functioned at the time of the crash and the plane was under control—in level flight based on marks in the cliff and by the fact that the craft hadn’t even hit the treetops under the belly of the plane before it struck the mountain.

  It had been such a dark night on the 16th, one of the blackest Maj. Anderson had ever seen, and testimony conflicted about whether the mountain could be seen at all. Some eyewitnesses on the ground said that it could, others said it couldn’t. When asked about visibility of the mountains on a moonless night, Capt. Cheney, the man who had flown over the burning wreck, testified, “If the lights in the cockpit are kept low enough you can usually distinguish the mountains within a reasonable distance of them.” Of that night in particular, Cheney said, “We climbed to an elevation high enough to clear everything in the mountains and as we got close to it, we could make out the crest of the mountain, which was below us.... The snow on the mountain made it much easier to see the crest than it would have been any other time of the year.”

  Cheney’s mention of the lights in the cockpit led to investigation of TWA policy and standard practice related to the dimming of lights within the cockpit in darkness. The DC-3 windshield reflected light from the controls, reducing visibility of terrain outside the aircraft—like rugged, unlighted mountains. The investigation looked
at cockpit lighting. TWA chief pilot Waldon Golien was asked, “Does the reflection from the light on the co-pilot’s paperwork reflect on the inside of the pilot’s windshield?”

  Golien replied, “Yes, sir. If there are lights on the co-pilot’s side.”

  “What is the effect of this on the pilot’s forward vision?”

  “The effect is to reduce the pilot’s forward visibility,” said Golien. “I would like to add here that it has, for some time, been the practice of TWA co-pilots to use a small pencil flashlight cupped in the hand in such a way that the light used is confined to only the necessary writing area.” Golien previously noted that Williams had logged more than 200 hours of night flying just in the past four months, so he was well familiar with any windscreen glare issues.

  TWA and Western Air pilots were asked about use of the radio range, which broadcast a signal that pilots followed to know they were on course and away from high terrain. All the pilots flew by “contact” or Visual Flight Reference (VFR) and if the radio range was used at all, co-pilots did the listening on headsets. Flying on course gave a steady signal; flying off course gave a different tone. But the weather over Las Vegas in the Mojave Desert was nearly always clear, meaning the pilots found no need to use anything but the lights below for reference on night trips.

  The morning after the crash, Waldon Golien flew another DC-3 with a load and center of gravity matching Flight 3 along the same flight path to the scene of the crash and reported that the radio signal was functioning properly. “The signal received in the vicinity of the accident was distinctly an off-course signal,” Golien testified, “with no trace or indication of the on-course being in the near vicinity.” Was co-pilot Gillette monitoring the signal on headset? If so, how did he fail to alert his captain of impending danger?