Fireball Read online

  Dan Yanich looked over at the silhouette of the plane and its wingtip running lights, one red, one green, and thought it a majestic sight, a big twin-engine number that he figured to be a bomber or a DC-3. TWA and Western Airlines planes flew out of McCarran Field up at the northern edge of Las Vegas, but so did all manner of Army planes; whichever this was, it was flying south- southwest, maybe toward Los Angeles. Because of the war and the new blackout rules, far fewer lights burned in the area at night, including signal beacons for air traffic. Dan could see the signal beacon due east over at Arden, and it seemed as if the plane flew right over it. But the beacons high up on 8,000-foot Potosi Mountain to the south no longer flashed their comforting beams at night. He could see Potosi’s black mountaintops jutting up high in the distance, standing blacker than the velvety sky above. Very high, treacherous mountains they were, where even the prospectors didn’t go because of the cliffs and the loose footing and the boulders. Snow blanketed those mountains all winter and gave them a picture-postcard appearance, but make no mistake: One wrong step up on Potosi Mountain, or any of those mountains, and even the surest-footed man would be found only when buzzards pointed the way in the spring.

  The Army fliers didn’t seem to mind the blackout and its darkening of the beacon lights, and the pilots of those big silver passenger planes didn’t seem to give a care about new rules either. Didn’t they fly by radio beam anyway? This pilot wasn’t any different. That big plane climbed like it meant business, cutting purposefully through a skyful of stars that sparkled faintly behind high, light cloud cover.

  Inside the Blue Diamond Mine business office, purchasing agent Ora Salyer sat cleaning up some figures in his books and heard the plane roar overhead. Planes simply didn’t fly so near the diggings at night, and so it was notable when he heard this one now. It was close enough and demanding enough that he gave it some notice, especially when he could feel vibration from the engines in his desktop. He half wondered what this plane’s story was and in what direction it was heading. It had to be an Army plane, it just had to be. When the machines weren’t running, the only sound in an hour’s time might be the howl of a coyote. This was, after all, unforgiving country, part desert and part jutting mountains. Cactus grew in the parched earth, and Joshua trees, and yucca plants, and not much else. Hearty folks lived hereabouts—one had to be hearty to get by in southern Nevada. Then the sound of the plane receded, and Salyer’s mind went back to his figures.

  Yanich had moved on through the diggings down toward one of the conveyor belts, which were still in operation this late in the evening. Salyer kept at his bookkeeping, in the stillness of a perfectly ordinary, cold, and deepening January night.

  Ten or so miles due south, off an old mining road in the foothills of Potosi Mountain, Charlie and Ruth Hawley had finished pitching their tent and now warmed themselves by a roaring campfire in preparation for spending the night in a desolate spot with high hills on either side. They were in the process of cutting firewood for the remainder of the winter and had half-loaded their pickup truck when darkness settled in.

  They sat in the quiet, the only sound the crackling fire, and stared into the flames. Ruth was about to retire to the tent when she heard a plane flying low overhead. The sound was loud enough that both looked skyward into the starry night but could not see an airplane.

  “They’re coming after us, Charlie,” said Ruth deadpan, as she climbed to her feet.

  “Well, they have to be wonderin’ ’bout a fire in the middle of nowhere, I suppose,” said Charlie. “We have to be the only people for miles.”

  “Not flying very high up, is it?” she said of the plane matter-of-factly, and left her husband by the fire. He kept looking heavenward.

  “For the mountains, no, it sure ain’t,” Charlie murmured, but his wife was already gone. “Not high up at all.” And then the plane came into view directly over their fire with a high-pitched mountain lion’s growl that shook the ground, a rumble he could feel in his bones. The engines seemed to be working hard, very hard. And no, the plane wasn’t as high up as a man would expect.

  Charlie Hawley had a perfect view of it, looking straight up into its belly, and the entire time he watched, the plane seemed to be turning left, left, left. Not much of a turn, but a little—enough to be noticeable. He could see the twin glow of lights streaking forward from the plane, and he could feel those angry engines.

  Inside the tent Ruth was too damn cold to go back outside and watch some airplane. She buried herself under her bedclothes and contented herself to wait out those loud motors and a vibration deep enough to rattle her teeth.

  Charlie watched the plane fly on over yonder hill, and then the sound of the engines grew distant and the echo spread out and no longer sounded quite so angry.

  Ruth began to relax a little as the bedclothes around her body warmed. She kept listening to a now-more-agreeable set of airplane engines out in the distance. It was almost peaceful. She had never been on an airplane; she didn’t figure she ever would be on one. But somebody was up there heading someplace, and that was the sound of their progress, that plane now some distance downrange. It was kind of comforting, the thought of people around, even if they sat way up there flying around in the sky.

  Then the sound stopped. Not as if it had faded away. It just stopped. Angry engines one second, and nothing the next. As if a light switch had been clicked, the engine noise was replaced by the dead silence of Potosi Mountain at night.

  Strange, thought Charlie. The whole thing with that airplane: strange. Now all was still, so very still, when just a few moments ago there had been such commotion.

  Ten miles north of the Hawleys, Dan Yanich had a different view. Yanich had seen a flash out the corner of his eye, and the ground trembled under his feet; the desk before Ora Salyer vibrated a bit more. Seconds later Salyer heard the faintest of rumbles in the distance. Like far-off thunder, except that it was a clear night and there weren’t any storms.

  Salyer was used to the reports of guns from hunters as he sat in the office, or from the Army boys practicing on the range to the south. It was always difficult trying to figure the origin of a gunshot or an explosion in the surrounding mountains, but whatever he had just heard tonight, and wherever, it seemed to be very distant but also sizeable, as if maybe the Axis had dropped a bomb or dynamited the Hoover Dam.

  Salyer scrambled up from his desk and slipped outside, joining Yanich there as the watchman frowned toward the south and said, his accent thick, “I think dat airplane maybe drop a flare.”

  Salyer stared off into the blackness to the south, and knew at once that this was no flare. He gaped at a fireball with flames licking upward into a high and spectacular orange beacon on Potosi Mountain. The view of both Ora and Dan was unobstructed, and that fire burned like something out of a nightmare, like something biblical, the flames reaching up what must have been hundreds of feet into the black sky, glowing yellow and orange, their light refracting off the smoke above, which gave the radiating effect of a halo. All around the fireball at center, the snow on the mountain glistened like gemstones, and Yanich saw the effect as utterly beautiful. They could make out trees burning as well, despite the fact that a storm had just dumped a couple feet of snow on the peaks of Potosi, also known as Double Up Peak, also known as Double or Nothing Peak, and Table Mountain. It had lots of names because people respected it; it was a deadly place.

  They wondered what in the world…

  But deep down they knew, and their stomachs turned over: the growling plane that had flown past. Something had gone wrong with that plane. It didn’t seem plausible because of the ferocity of the explosion and that fire up yonder, which seemed to burn much brighter and hotter than the aggregate of one airplane. It made no sense, yet something had set the jagged peak of Potosi aflame. And that big plane had just flown over. Only one explanation made any sense: It was an Army plane loaded with munitions.

  Salyer ran inside and called the police station over i
n Las Vegas. All of a sudden, this particular Friday evening had become anything but ordinary.

  4. The Long Road

  Before letting a staff physician begin the task of sewing her daughter back together, Bess Peters had asked questions as Carole sat with the blood still oozing. If you sew her up like you would a cut on an arm or a leg, what will it look like? What about this plastic surgery business they’re talking about? What can this type of surgery do that you can’t do? Who are these surgeons and where can I find one—there’s no time to lose!

  When the hospital staff produced no ready answers, Bess got on the phone and worked her contacts and friends of friends. Finally, she was led to a plastic surgeon whom she managed to reach. She explained the situation. The doctor agreed to hurry in and operate, and he gave instructions by phone to the ER staff regarding preparation of the patient and operating room so that all would be ready when he arrived.

  Four hours of experimental cosmetic surgery without anesthetic: Jane Peters turned Carole Lombard paid this exacting price when advised that there was one chance, and a slim one, of saving that ingénue face from permanent disfigurement. The surgeon must sew with tiny stitches into a fully awake and alert patient to keep the facial muscles in proper position.

  She endured stitch after microstitch as the number of minutes went into two digits and then three. Through the length of the procedure and despite constant pain, she didn’t crack or allow her jaw to slacken. At surgery’s end, the doctor warned her not to get her hopes up; the odds were very long. He instructed her not to move her head—for six months. It must be strapped down for that length of time. The dressings would change but not the position of that blonde head if she were to have any chance to save her looks—and doctors told her to prepare for the worst: She was through; she would have no career in front of the camera.

  Lombard traveled a long road to recovery, head lashed down, a liquid diet, with the doctor visiting daily to rub olive oil into the scars. Carole admitted that early on she wanted to die. She didn’t want to be deformed. She didn’t want to live without the dream of stardom that had taken hold deep in her brain, the thrill of seeing Gloria Swanson on a street corner; the imaginings that she was Gloria Swanson; the intoxication of meetings with John Barrymore. But then her focus shifted from the likelihood that the surgery wouldn’t succeed to the chance the surgeon had given her and the notion that maybe it would. The chance, the new dream, involved rising up and out of her bed and getting on with life at full speed. At faster than full speed. Carole read biographies of great actresses, movie magazines, and plays, and kept her mind active every day. Along the long road to recovery, her ambition deepened.

  She always had been a high-energy girl who could never sit still, and now was forced to turn the energy inward, to healing, to wisdom. In the end, an inch-long scar dug up through one eyebrow, and the hair would never grow there. An inch-and-a-half-long scar resembling a misplaced dimple remained on her cheek, and a scar drew its way across her upper lip that “like Elizabeth Taylor’s mole, only accentuated her beauty,” said close friend Alice Marble. Carole would bear these scars for the remainder of her life. In some ways they would define her, force her to grow up, gaze into the mirror, and accept the possibility that she might never make it to the top in Hollywood. As she would phrase it to Garson Kanin, “Another inch, half an inch maybe, a turn of my head and my whole fuckin’ career could’ve been over.” But she had had that inch to spare and she had not bled to death, which had been a real possibility. She had survived, this time. The “fireworks explosion” had come without warning. In a second her life had changed, so who knew when the end would need to be faced? It was a strange sort of maturity for a girl turning 18, but it also caused her to make the days count for something.

  Lombard biographer Larry Swindell credits Bess Peters with raising her daughter to be an independent thinker and a take-charge personality. The two had always been close but now formed a bond to see Carole through the crisis of losing all the ground she had made in Hollywood. Barrymore dropped her from The Tempest; Fox canceled her contract. Back on her feet and trying to find work around town, she learned how far and wide the news had traveled about her disfigurement. She was in a literal sense “damaged goods,” with studio bosses and directors fearing that her talked-about facial scars would look like the transcontinental railroad and some sort of freak show on a big screen.

  Lombard knew better. She sought advice on makeup and on lighting, fixed her hair into a bob that lessened the visual impact of the scar on her cheek, and kept making the rounds, taking any bit part that would get her on movie sets and earn her a paycheck. She managed to land a quick scene in the spectacular motion picture, The Johnstown Flood, starring action star George O’Brien and ingénue Janet Gaynor. She hung out with her friends again, and dating, and visiting her haunt of haunts, the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard with a group of friends her age that included the well to do and would-be stars and starlets. “They were drinking and smoking and fooling around,” said Carole Sampeck, director of the Carole Lombard Archive Foundation. “That’s what they did.”

  It was here, through the social side of the business and not the pavement-pounding side, that Lombard got her break. Former schoolmate and actress Sally Eilers, also 18, had a tip that Mack Sennett, king of the two-reeled comedies, was looking for a new girl for his Bathing Beauties concept pictures that had been invented by Sennett director Eddie Cline. Sally, who had been a classmate of Carole’s during a weekly stint at the Nolkes Dramatic School years earlier, where both learned to walk and talk like ladies, was going to see Sennett and wanted Carole to go along.

  Mack Sennett, a towering man of six-foot-two, was one of the founding fathers of Hollywood. He had formed his Keystone Production Company in 1912, which included screen comedians Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Charlie Chaplin. The bumbling, stumbling Keystone Kops were Sennett’s brainchild, and soon he joined the other founding fathers of Hollywood, D.W. Griffith and Thomas Ince, in forming Triangle Films, where he first worked with the great silent star, Gloria Swanson. By the time Lombard met him he was making Bathing Beauties comedies, and continuing to perfect a model of 18-minute, two-reeled short subjects that would be followed by Laurel and Hardy and then the enduring surrealists, the Three Stooges. Comedy short subjects had evolved into a critical part of an evening’s picture-show entertainment, along with serials, newsreels, and full-length features.

  When Carole Lombard met Mack Sennett, she had never played comedy, and he didn’t know if she had a funny bone in her scrawny, five-foot-three-inch body. This was Sennett’s concern—could the girl play comedy? He shrugged off the scars in her cheek, lip, and eyebrow because they weren’t shooting drama here with any sort of reliance on close-ups. When a member of the troupe slipped on a banana peel or took a pie in the face, it needed to be a wide or a medium shot. Sennett relied on those shots; only the reactions needed to be anything closer, and these were just full-on close-ups of the talent and not the romantic type of clinch close-ups that Lombard need worry about.

  All she wanted, she told him, was a chance, and Mack Sennett gave it to her at $50 a week. It was even less than her modest Fox contract had paid, but it was paying work in the picture business for a scarred-up has-been who had just turned 18, and she gladly took it. After all, movie queen Gloria Swanson had gone on from Sennett to make great pictures like Zaza, Stage Struck, and many others.

  Lombard fell in with a comedy troupe that was more like a family and included girls who were pretty, older, short, and fat. Sennett needed them all for his physical brand of comedy, and Lombard attached herself to the “fat girl,” Madalynne Fields, just a year older, very tall, and naturally husky. The teens remembered each other from high school, hit it off immediately, and formed a friendship that would endure. Carole had become a nickname fiend. Nicknames were fun and verbal shorthand for a girl who had lots of words to say all at once. Fred was Fritz and Stuart w
as Tootie. Then her mother, Bess Peters, became “Petey” or “Tots,” and now Carole gave Madalynne Fields the innocuous nickname of “Fieldsie,” calling to mind a benign spirit. But the son born to Fieldsie 10 years later would caution, “Mother was not one to be dominated,” said motion picture and television director Richard Lang. “I called her Captain Bligh when I was growing up.... Mother was 6 feet tall and weighed 250. Being heavy’s a very personal problem; when you’re making a living off your infirmity, it gets to you after a while.”

  Sennett knew there was humor in pain, whether emotional or physical. If anything, he found Lombard too glamorous for his players. He ordered her to gain some weight—Sennett liked his girls a deal curvier than natural athlete Lombard. Depending on the role, her hair and wardrobe would be winsome or not, but she emerged in his two reelers as a personality that the camera loved. Audiences found her engaging as a heroine who overcame every comedic obstacle. By the end of their time together, Lombard had become Sennett’s most versatile and valued player. One publicity photo of a scantily clad, sultry-looking Carole contained a caption that typified the selling of the ingénue at the time, and the ongoing problem with spelling her name: “Miss Carolle Lombard is smiling. Why should she not? She has been chosen by Mack Sennett to act greater parts in his newest comedies and that’s something. Wasn’t Gloria once a Bathing Girl?”

  Lombard would go on to make a steady line of Sennett pictures in the next two years. She would get paid to “work” when all she really did was hang out with a gang she grew to love, much of her time spent on the beach, a Bathing Beauty in a swimsuit. Between takes she paced incessantly, gabbed uncontrollably, growing into her personality. The Sennett shorts taught her timing, how and when to react, and how long to hold her take. She learned how to underplay, and overplay, depending on the situation. She learned about physical comedy from masters.