Fireball Page 10
A divorce (Lombard’s), a shooting death (Columbo’s), an Oscar (Gable’s), a separation (also Gable’s), and three-and-a-half years later, both were ready. They struck up a conversation at the Victor Hugo during the White Mayfair Ball, sparks flew, and neither looked back from that night on. Lombard had matured quite a bit, and Clark found a lot behind those topaz blue Lombard eyes that hadn’t been there while making the little picture at Paramount. Carole seemed to respect him for the Academy Award he had earned for It Happened One Night, and she also took the time to notice that little boy’s vulnerability underneath the big star’s sex appeal. Clark liked the fact that they looked good together because publicity was everything in Hollywood and the candids would be socko, but much more than that, he found in her an answer to life’s romantic mystery that he hadn’t known previously, even with Crawford. Back then he had thrown himself into passion understanding that it was all make-believe. Now, at the White Mayfair Ball and beyond, he found Lombard to be quite a different animal from Miss Joan Crawford. Crawford was all pretense, all the time. Joan was full of shit—he knew it and she knew it. Lombard showed ambition, sure, and just by way of casual conversation, he realized she was a walking, talking issue of Box Office magazine. Still, Lombard managed to be as down to earth as the lemon trees, and she had this odd quality to her that he couldn’t begin to figure out, but it was a quality he liked. A lot. Carole Lombard had the capacity to love, not like a sucker, not like some doormat. She was an honest-to-God warm human being. Somehow, a real live woman had managed to survive in Hollywood and he had found her.
For a while Carole kept quiet about Russ Columbo. He could tell the relationship had scarred her. She described Columbo as a boy in a man’s body. Well, Gable had been bedroom-hopping Hollywood for five, six years now and knew damn well that he was all man in a man’s body. He didn’t even have to work at being great shakes in bed because he knew that dames found him perfectly beautiful to look at and touch and be close to and surrounded by. He wore his Clark Gable suit like armor and enjoyed its protection from having to reveal the real him.
Gable held a dark secret tight to his breast, something he seems never to have revealed even to Lombard. Gable was a father, having engaged in an affair with actress Loretta Young while on loan-out to Fox for the Alaskan adventure Call of the Wild in 1935. It was a long, cold location shoot, and the two stars found a great way to pass the time, with only one complication, a baby girl named Judy who was born after Loretta Young dropped out of sight for several conspicuous months after Call of the Wild wrapped. Later the single Loretta would decide to “adopt” a baby to make her life complete—her own infant daughter Judy. For such a delicate little girl, Judy Lewis would represent an enormous skeleton in Gable’s closet. He would never acknowledge his paternity despite an uncanny facial resemblance and a smoking-hot trail of circumstantial evidence. His conduct regarding his own daughter showed an unsettling ability to shut people out, no matter who they were or how obligated he should feel. He had always been a scrapper who did whatever it took to survive. Whatever it took. Gable always saw poverty as being one or two bad pictures away, or one or two paternity suits away. He had been poor, and now he was rich and successful. No power on earth could take away what belonged to Clark Gable.
A related realization knocked Lombard over. She didn’t see it coming, and she couldn’t resist it. Clark Gable was a big kid, a lot like she was a big gee-whiz kid herself. He liked toys, the simplest guy things. She could give him gold cufflinks and that would be nice; but a passing motorcycle? That produced a gleam in his eye. Gable’s hard life, and his struggles, had led to appreciation. Of Gable with Lombard, Howard Strickling said, “It’s the first time I think he ever really played in his life. He’d had a very serious life when you stop to think about it—his early life, his father, his stepmother. He had to make his own way. Nobody gave him anything on a silver tray. He earned every dime he made.”
Gable had never seen anyone like her—a dame this naturally energetic, this naturally up. “She laughed all the time,” said Hollywood director Delmer Daves, and soon Gable was laughing right along with her.
Says Richard Lang of the Gable that emerged, “He had great fun; he laughed. He was a great kidder. That’s why they always had fun and kidded each other.”
Looking back on the pair, Loretta Young said, “They were always way up in the air or way down—they were real people.”
True, Lombard was damaged goods, and so was Gable, but together they made one spectacular package and after the 1936 Mayfair Ball they became an item. In fact they became the item in Hollywood, just as Pickford and Fairbanks Sr., and Valentino and Negri, and Crawford and Fairbanks Jr. had once been the item in Hollywood. The press ate up the unexpected romance of MGM’s top heartthrob and Paramount’s glamour girl. Clark and Carole protested endlessly that they wanted nothing but a quiet life together well out of the spotlight, yet somehow managed to find their way in front of every news camera within range of Southern California and grab every possible headline for five full years. They couldn’t resist it. They knew they sparkled and got a kick out of the reaction they earned together. They were seen at the fights, at the tennis matches, at Santa Anita for the horse-racing, at nightclubs, at her place, at his, shooting skeet, hunting in the wilds, at movie premieres (his, hers, and others), and at awards ceremonies, with candids of the couple plastered across articles in fan magazines, and newsreels plastered across the silver screen.
They became known for gag gifts; she wanted a kitten so he bought her a cougar cub. He liked high-end automobiles so she bought him broken-down jalopies. When they fought, and they fought often, she got into the habit of sending a peace offering of live doves, and the move always worked—but the caged doves piled up at her place and had to be cared for.
Their careers boomed, especially that of Gable, who made hit after hit. But Lombard got lucky as well, not just at the Beverly Wilshire that first night with Gable, but at Universal, which requested her for the screwball part of a lifetime in a hot property called 1011 Fifth Avenue, a novella written by Eric Hatch of The New Yorker with script adaptation by Hatch and Morrie Ryskind, pedigreed comedy writer by way of work on three of the Marx Brothers’ best pictures. The part came Lombard’s way in circuitous fashion. Universal wanted William Powell on loan-out from MGM. Powell said he would agree to make the picture only if Lombard was his co-star. When offered, she said yes in a heartbeat for two critical reasons: ex-husband Powell remained her closest male friend in the world. More important, her entire party spree had been built around rebranding Carole Lombard as a madcap comedienne, and she found the part in 1011 Fifth Avenue to be as good as, or maybe even better than, Lily Garland in Twentieth Century.
The resulting picture, renamed My Man Godfrey, was a send-up of the upper class in Depression-plagued New York City, the daffy Bullock family with Lombard as flighty daughter Irene to former Broadway star Alice Brady’s equally mad mother. Set against the two are the growling, put-upon father played by Eugene Pallette and Irene’s canny, scheming sister played by Gail Patrick. Godfrey, portrayed by Powell, is a society guy who drops out of sight after a bad romance and ends up living with hobos at the pier. Godfrey is “found” by the Bullocks during a high society scavenger hunt, and they retain him as their butler, thinking they’re giving him a break. Irene falls for Godfrey, with screwball consequences, of course, but the writers imbued Godfrey with such heart that he soon brings the flighty Bullocks down to earth, which enables them to discover their own souls. Upon release in November 1936 My Man Godfrey would become one of the most revered pictures of the 1930s and earn six Academy Award nominations in the critical categories of Best Actor (Powell), Best Actress (Lombard), Best Supporting Actor (Mischa Auer), Best Supporting Actress (Brady), Best Director (Gregory LaCava), and Best Writing/Screenplay (Hatch and Ryskind). All this from a studio, Universal Pictures, most famous for Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy.
For the second time in three ye
ars, Lombard had been in the right place at the right time. Suddenly Academy Award-nominated, she became a hot commodity and returned to Paramount for several star vehicles that took her through the completion of her seven-year deal in 1937. Myron Selznick then began shopping Carole around town. His reasoning was sound: Why tie yourself down to one studio when you could freelance and have them all bidding for your services? Myron parlayed her popularity into a contract with the Selznick Studios (operated by his brother, David O. Selznick) that kicked off with the biting comedy Nothing Sacred, filmed in Technicolor and featuring Lombard to great advantage as Hazel Flagg, a girl misdiagnosed with radium poisoning who, when thought to be dying, accepts a trip to New York and becomes a media sensation, only to later be exposed as a fraud. The screenplay by Ben Hecht featured what the London Spectator pinpointed as “a fundamental distaste for humanity” and included a dig at American culture with every scene, with enough of a surrealist touch added by director William A. “Wild Bill” Wellman to boost it into the screwball zone.
Wellman was a man’s man who disliked actors because all they could ever do was pretend to be manly, although he did appreciate Clark Gable’s genuine masculinity when the two had worked together a couple of years earlier. But then, as Wellman remembered of Gable, “We had trouble on Call of the Wild, big trouble, on top of a mountain. He wasn’t tending to business, not the business of making pictures. He was paying a lot of attention to monkey business, and I called him for it, lost my easy-to-lose temper, and did it in front of the company.”
Wellman was referring to Gable and Loretta Young. But far from embarrassing Gable, the confrontation before not a friendly MGM crew but a 20th Century Fox location crew, strangers all, proved that Wild Bill was Gable’s idea of a director, tough as nails and no nonsense, and Wellman said that Clark was “a nice guy, and my kind—not too nice.”
Wild Bill disliked actresses as a rule—they were delicate, primping prima donnas who too often held up production, but Lombard won him over on Nothing Sacred. Production went well enough that at the cast party, Lombard talked Wellman into a straightjacket where he remained for the party, resulting in zany news photos and a fistful of press releases generated by producer David Selznick’s publicity hound, Russell Birdwell.
In typical fashion, Selznick kept adding lavish ingredients to his tidy and sadistic comedy until the production cost for just 75 minutes of running time bulged to $1.3 million, meaning that the picture was assured of losing money and did, despite a stout $1.1 million in domestic box office. Lombard always devoted time to reading the trades—The Hollywood Reporter, Box Office, Variety—and cared deeply whether her pictures made money or not.
One fact she readily accepted: All the publicity around Nothing Sacred and the fact that she had appeared in a Technicolor production proved a tremendous boost to her name recognition and earning potential. She was now, to use modern vernacular, trending.
She resonated with ticket buyers in part because her pictures represented social commentary; her blossoming career had its foundation rooted in a scathing examination of the morals and hypocrisy of the nation and the need for social consciousness raising. In Twentieth Century she had portrayed a shopgirl turned actress who had lost all semblance of self, in My Man Godfrey the dizzy rich girl who failed to see the suffering all around her. In Nothing Sacred she played the innocent fool manipulated by the press into a darling of fickle masses. In all cases what the character lacked was a soul, which had been infused by fade out. Lombard confirmed the difficulty in playing these roles, saying of Irene Bullock, “Irene in Godfrey was, I’d say, the most difficult part I ever played. Because Irene was a complicated and, believe it or not, essentially a tragic person.”
The trade paper Variety agreed. In comparing the roles of Carole Lombard and William Powell in My Man Godfrey, Variety said, “Miss Lombard’s role is the more difficult of the two, since it calls for more pressure acting all the way.... It’s Powell’s job to be normal and breezily comic in the madcap household, and that doesn’t require stretching for him.”
In fact, the characters that Lombard portrayed in all of these critical successes were flawed figures who survived only by crafting alternate realities. It was all part of that “new energy” she had tapped thanks to director Howard Hawks, a surrealist formula that aligned with her own unusual life and set of surreal friends and lovers.
Soon after hooking up with Gable, Lombard found it necessary to ditch her high-profile Hollywood Boulevard party house for an address in labyrinthian Bel Air, where lived far more shrubs and vines than people. She found a brick and stucco, Tudor-influenced one story with a barn along with orange and lemon trees and signed a lease for three years; by paying in advance she earned a $300 discount, which didn’t mean much to Carole but it meant the world to the practical Fieldsie.
Carole ordered new stationery with an address that read simply “The Farm,” and she knew that disorienting Bel Air with its infernally winding roads and hedgerows would provide some breathing room for the lovers.
Lombard the rescuer/nurturer proceeded to populate the Farm with Fieldsie, who continued to live with Carole, and with animals: six doves, two ducks, Edmund the rooster, Ellen and Eleanor the hens, several dogs, three goldfish (unnamed), and Josephine the cat, who came with the house. While making a picture, Carole kept to a strict routine, just work, study, eat, and sleep. When not on a production, she stayed up to all hours talking to Fieldsie or playing with the animals. Her biggest animal and rescue effort, Clark Gable, also became a more-than-part-time resident of the St. Cloud Road address of Carole Lombard.
13. The Plane That Fell
Calvin Harper, the head loader at the Blue Diamond Mine, never figured to punch out at the end of his shift and embark on an errand of mercy, but Ora Salyer had taken a call from the Clark County sheriff and soon there Harper went, down into Red Rock Canyon to the Wilson Ranch to round up some horses for the rescue party that would soon set out to reach that plane on the side of Potosi Mountain.
Harper drove down a long, dusty road to the ranch and rapped his knuckles against the screen door of the ranch house. The house was dark; it was going on 10 at night.
Inside the house, 52-year-old Willard H. George stumbled half asleep to the door and opened it to behold a young man who was wide eyed enough and breathless enough that it made George cautious. “I’m from the Blue Diamond Mine,” said the fellow through the screen door. “Have you got any horses?”
George was foggy in the head and had to think a moment. “Yes, I have horses.” The sound of his own voice awakened him more than he wanted. “What do you want them for?”
The young man said the strangest thing. He said, “Well, the sheriff telephoned and said there was a plane fell on the mountain up here, and they want some horses and some riders to go up there.”
George processed the information and ciphered up what he knew. “Well, I have four horses and two riders.”
“OK, thank you,” said the young fellow, who hurried off.
Alone again and in the dark, Willard George started to really think about the evening. He had seen a plane, right at bedtime, a plane that had acted strangely. He had figured there would be a freeze tonight so he was out draining his radiator to keep it from turning into a block of ice. Standing there in the dark he had seen a plane fly over, or rather it was the engines racing at top speed that drew his attention; they were really roaring. He wondered what in Sam Hill a plane was doing this far north of the beam. Willard George knew the routes the planes took; the San Francisco planes flew right over the ranch house, back and forth. The Los Angeles planes flew six or eight miles south of the ranch. But this plane had followed neither course; it had meandered across the sky dipping and swerving like a porpoise and then crossed over behind the sandstone butte and George hadn’t seen it anymore. He figured that the plane had made the grade and crossed the mountains, so he drained his radiator and prepared for slumber on a night that called for warm bedclothes and
retiring early.
Inside the house he had recounted the view of the plane to his wife, Florence, and figured it to be an Army ship from McCarran. “I never saw a plane set so peculiar as this plane out here,” he told her. “It was doing all kinds of things.”
A little later he had seen a glow in the southern sky and remarked, “If this was back 40 years when I was a kid, I would think it was the Indians in the mountains building a big fire because in the fall of the year they would go up to gather pine nuts and build big fires and roast the pine nuts.” But this wasn’t the turn of the century; this was the beginning of 1942 and a civilized age, and Willard had seen a strange glow in the sky and not known what it was; neither had he much cared, so he had gone to bed.
Now Willard H. George was wide awake, and on instinct he climbed into his clothes from the day, thinking about all he had seen this night, when there came another knock at his door. This time the screen door separated him from the same young man, this time accompanied by Army officers in uniform.
“I’m Major Anderson from McCarran Field,” said a fellow in a fancy green uniform with an official-sounding voice. Out beyond the porch, George could see some other men that he didn’t know. He figured them for tourists.
“How do we get up there?” asked Maj. Anderson, pointing up in the direction of Potosi Mountain. “On top of that?”
George took a moment to grasp what the stranger was asking. “There is nobody can find the way up there,” he said patiently. “You’ve got to have a guide.” The officer named Anderson said again that a plane had gone down and they needed to reach a spot up on the mountain.
“Just a minute,” said Willard George. He nudged past the men on his porch and shuffled out across the parched earth to the bunk house of the Wilson Ranch and there roused his Piute Indian boy, Jim Wilson, who wasn’t a boy at all but a wiry old man, age 75, who was nicknamed “Tweed,” a quiet, ancient fellow and an old hand with the horses from back in the day when Indians were wild and ruled the range.