Fireball Page 5

  No Man of Her Own became the only picture with both Clark Gable and Carole Lombard except for a silent comedy called The Plastic Age, starring sex symbol Clara Bow and featuring both Carole and Clark in bit parts. Clark didn’t meet Carole back then, but she had been among the throng of Los Angelinos mesmerized by Gable’s performance on the stage as a condemned convict in The Last Mile in 1930, and Carole and Clark certainly got along now as co-workers at Paramount. Clark Gable liked women, and Carole Lombard liked men. Each enjoyed the company of the other while making No Man of Her Own. Since both were married at the time, neither seemed to be interested in a “test drive,” and they parted friends after Lombard presented Gable with a ham emblazoned with his star portrait. It was a move made for the fan magazines and brainstormed by the team of Fieldsie and Selznick.

  By coincidence and not because of the temporary presence of Clark Gable, the marriage of Powell and Lombard finished the unraveling it had begun right after “I do.” The sexual libertine spawned by anything-goes Hollywood, and encouraged by her mother, the unconventional Petey, wasn’t shy in saying that she found the union less than satisfactory. Soon she headlined the article, “Carole Lombard Tells Why Hollywood Marriages Can’t Succeed” for a fan magazine. With the brashness of youth, she shrugged that it might be easy for the garden-variety housewife “to put a fence around her heart,” but in the picture business, a woman was constantly in front of cameras with desirable men by the dozen and required to “syndicate her charm.” With William Powell, a man 16 years her senior whom she called “Popsie,” she confessed to marriage making the walls press in around her until she found herself “breathless with the loss of freedom.”

  She also found her new husband lacking ambition for better work onscreen and believed that he had begun to “coast” at Warner Bros. When Harry Warner, the business mind, and younger brother Jack Warner, the onsite studio boss, hit rough financial waters and lost an astounding $14 million in 1932, they asked William Powell to take a 33 percent pay cut, down from $6,000 to $4,000 per week. He capitulated. Carole called him “lazy” in an interview, but Powell didn’t need to work so very hard; he was William Powell. For his part, Bill found living with Carole Lombard no picnic. She was always down with something, whether seasickness or pleurisy or flu, or more flu, and Lombard’s menstrual cycle was endless to the extent that she admitted maybe three days a month that were clear. “God has me built backwards,” she would say. “There’s only a couple of days a month I’m not bleeding.” When she wasn’t sick she was working at Paramount on one picture after another, and Powell rarely saw the woman who was supposed to be his wife. When he did, she wanted to hit the town, and suddenly the generation gap exhausted them both.

  The separation, with Carole moving back to Petey’s tudor-influenced home on Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills, was inevitable. Brimming with frustration, Lombard stated flatly that the Powell-Lombard exercise in marriage had been “a waste of time—his and mine.” Trouble was, they liked each other; they always would.

  Lombard kept working. She made a picture about racetracks called From Hell to Heaven with comic actor Jack Oakie, and then a paranormal spook show far ahead of its time called Supernatural, which dove deep into a tale of ghosts and possession. The thoroughly New Age Lombard, a believer in psychics and astrology, had no problem with the plotline of Supernatural, but found the professionalism of director Victor Halperin so vexing that at one point she reached out her arms and shouted to the heavens, “Who do I have to screw to get off this picture?” Since that day in 1933, this plea uttered by Carole Lombard may hold a record as the most quoted on-set line in Hollywood history.

  Despite a hurly-burly schedule of pictures at Paramount, Carole found time to engage the process of divorce from William Powell. She and brother Tootie took their first plane ride with a famous aviator named Roscoe Turner, from Los Angeles airfield to Lake Tahoe to set up six-weeks’ residence in preparation for a “quickie” Nevada divorce. Living at Tahoe at that time was a 13-year-old boy named Bobby Stack with a mop of wavy blonde hair. Well-heeled Bobby took one look at the blonde movie star 11 years his senior and fell in love. During her six weeks at Tahoe, Carole spent time every day with Stack, an avid skeet shooter even then and soon to become national champion. With young Bobby Stack as her coach, Lombard learned the ways of the shotgun. It was a skill that would pay off later as would her association with the boy who would grow up to be Academy Award-winning actor Robert Stack. Until the day he died, Stack would be in love with her and never attempt to hide it.

  Lombard’s day in court divorcing Powell had been scripted by Carole and Bill in tandem. She would agree to testify against Bill only if he signed off on every word, revealing an unorthodox level of respect and loyalty for two people ending their union. Before the judge she stated that William Powell had been cross and cruel, and in six minutes they became exes. She flew back to Los Angeles and grumped to her pals in the press, who wanted her to kid and vamp for photographs, “I’m not at all happy about this, you know, so I’m not going to give you a smile I don’t mean.”

  She went back to work on one Paramount picture after another and returned to Columbia to work as well. Then she met a man. Not a “lazy” older man like Popsie Powell, but an intriguing younger man on his way to superstardom, a man full of passion and full of himself. Before long their relationship would result in Freak Accident Number Three, and even a tough cookie like Carole Lombard would find herself shattered.

  5. A Long and Grim Weekend

  Just south of the Potosi peaks sat a collection of shacks generously called the “town” of Goodsprings, Nevada. Local miners and ranchers inhabited Goodsprings, including miner and former high school football star Herbert Lyle Van Gordon, age 27, who had walked outside to warm up his car in preparation for driving himself and wife Elizabeth to a town social when he heard an explosion on Potosi Mountain. He wandered into the patch of inhospitable, parched earth that comprised their yard and there saw the mountain peaks to the north aglow around what he figured to be Potosi’s saddle. Van Gordon was a quick thinker and ran to the phone to call the local sheriff and then hurried back out and stared at the soaring flames. He knew it was a plane; he had heard the humming engines right up until the sound of the explosion. Van Gordon’s first impulse was to rush to the scene, but he knew the looming mountain well enough to understand there was no point to such rash action in the dark of night. That mountain didn’t want people on it; that mountain would kill you easy as you please.

  Fifty miles to the southeast of Potosi, on a sprawling ranch called the Walking Box owned by a star of the silent pictures named Rex Bell, retired movie actress Clara Bow, who had lived a very hard life and now loved being out of the limelight, was drawn to a west-facing window where she saw a distant radiating light above the McCullough Mountain range. With her view obstructed by the near ridge she couldn’t see what was aflame, but the sky lit up in an orange glow that put her in mind of lights burning brightly for a movie premiere at Grauman’s Chinese. For Bow the memory was bittersweet, of happy years as queen of the movies and also of incredible pain and the nightmares that had accompanied her stardom. She thanked her stars every day that she could live way out here at the Walking Box deep in Nevada desert and not think of Hollywood and the old days, although think she did, endlessly, and the distant glow above the mountains reminded her anew of long-lost vitality. Clara’s young son, Rex Jr., noticed her staring outside and together they watched that haunting glow over the mountain ridge.

  Up in the McCarran Field control tower, Pfc. Tom Parnell still manned his post and all was quiet. Then he heard some chatter on the radio. It didn’t make any sense to him at first, but then he started to take notice.

  He heard TWA Control in Los Angeles calling Air Traffic Control: “I haven’t been able to contact TWA 3 on Silver Lake Check. Silver Lake is an authorized checkpoint—I mean, the required airways checkpoint, isn’t it?” crackled a voice on the radio.

  “T
hat’s right, yes,” said a voice at Air Traffic Control. It was a calm, controlled voice.

  A moment or two passed and Parnell kept listening. This time he heard the Las Vegas communications man. “I got a call from the Blue Diamond Mine near Arden Beacon that they heard a plane go over and shortly after a crash, and there’s a fire burning over in that section now.”

  Parnell grabbed his field glasses and looked southwest in the direction of the Arden Beacon. The terrain around Las Vegas was perfectly flat, and from the tower he could see clear to Potosi Mountain. Through the blackness off to the southwest he could make out a pinpoint of orange light, inconstant, oblong, larger and then smaller. It did indeed seem to be a fire, like the radio chatter had said.

  “I checked with TWA,” said the voice of the Las Vegas man on the radio, “and their Flight 3 cleared here at seven-zero-seven. There’s no reports since he left.”

  Parnell’s throat tightened as he continued to listen to the people in thin air trying to sort things out. He wanted to believe this was a coincidence and that the distant light had nothing to do with Flight 3.

  The tower phone rang and Parnell gave a start. He fumbled to answer. “This is the Las Vegas Police Station,” said the man on the phone. “We’re getting reports of a plane going over Blue Diamond and then some sort of crash. And now there’s a fire burning over that way. Whaddya know about any of that?”

  “TWA Flight 3 took off at 7:07,” Parnell managed. “Everything was fine at that time—”

  Vegas police cut him off and said, “Call you back,” and the connection went dead. Parnell called the Officer of the Day. The Officer of the Day called Major Herbert W. Anderson, second in command at McCarran Field. In a few minutes Anderson gathered crucial details. TWA commercial flight, Blue Diamond Mine, Army personnel on the plane. He acted at once, dispatching the post surgeon, the provost marshal, and 15 men to the mine to render aid. Then he grabbed the quartermaster, Major Taylor, and Taylor’s assistant and hopped in a car heading for the mine because this was an Army Air Corps matter and he needed to be out there. Little did he know just how long and grim the weekend ahead would turn out to be.

  6. Merely Physical

  Ruggiero Eugenio di Rodolfo Colombo had Americanized his name to “Russ Columbo” in the hopes of avoiding Italian stereotyping. The move had worked, and in mid-1933 Russ was the hottest young thing in music. All of 25, handsome as the devil, and a musical genius, Columbo took Hollywood by storm, having recently been announced for a featured role in a Fox musical called Broadway Thru a Keyhole. By now, Carole had established a pattern: She went after men who were prized. First there had been Howard Hughes, whose name was on everyone’s lips for Hell’s Angels in 1929. Then William Powell, a fresh screen sensation when they began dating in 1931. After their divorce, the new boyfriend was Columbia scriptwriter Robert Riskin, 11 years her senior and, according to Lombard, a different type of animal: a scholar. To keep up, she said, “I started in reading books. I don’t mean just bullshit. I mean book books. Aldous Huxley and Jane Austen. Charles Dickens. William Faulkner. Because Bob, he was an intellectual…and I felt I had to keep up.” They were seen at nightclubs; they were seen at the track.

  Lombard enjoyed the exchange of sexual energy with this type of power player. She liked “real men.” It was while out on a date with Riskin at the Cocoanut Grove that Lombard moved Columbo into the crosshairs. As big as rock stars are today, that’s what a number of romantic male singers or “crooners” were in the early 1930s, when the demand for radios exploded and a Depression-ravaged nation sought cheap entertainment. The love songs of the “big three” crooners, first Rudy Vallee and then Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo, went straight to the heart. Columbo was soon referred to as the “Valentino of the Air” and the “Singing Romeo.” And he earned these monikers with a rich baritone and torch-song lyrics capable of reducing women to puddles of desire.

  Eye contact that September evening at the Cocoanut Grove between Carole Lombard and Russ Columbo sent sparks careening off the polished dance floor. Bemused screenwriter Riskin made no effort to compete with Columbo and predicted that Lombard soon should expect an inundation of roses. The next morning, a dozen yellow roses hit Petey’s Rexford Drive doorstep, attesting to Riskin’s savvy and Columbo’s interest.

  But Russ Columbo had already become damaged goods by his mid-20s, not long out of a devastating relationship with a married singer named Hannah Williams Kahn. Letters from their affair reveal what appeared to be Hannah’s obsession with Columbo and hint at his for her. Embroiled as she was in a passionate affair with the Singing Romeo, Hannah headed to Reno for a quickie divorce and established residence in Nevada for the required six weeks at just about the time Lombard was there shooting skeet with Bobby Stack en route to divorcing William Powell. Kahn continued to write Columbo scorching love letters from Reno each and every day as he toured several midwestern U.S. cities with the Russ Columbo Orchestra.

  In one such letter, Hannah wrote, “It was simply heavenly hearing your grand voice again tonight. Oh honey, when I hear you say, I love you darling, I miss you so. I want you near me every second—it just breaks my heart. I can’t stand, dearest, just cannot stand it, that’s all. I must be near you always.”

  And then, just two days later, she took pen to paper again: “I’m so depressed. I doubt very much whether I shall be able to write a letter. Why oh why do we have to suffer like this? I promise you darling I’m going to do something desperate if it isn’t settled one way or the other. I’m a nervous wreck. Everything I eat makes me ill. I go to bed early but cannot sleep. What am I to do, dearest? ”

  The Hannah Williams Kahn love letters ran thousands of words but never varied from these two themes: I adore you and I will die without you. Russ loved hearing such words because Russ Columbo sought to be adored. Nothing pleased him so much as a woman’s attention. He expected it, because that’s what Mama had given him all his life. He was Narcissus, and did gaze into mirrors, and loved his Echo, whoever Echo may be at a given moment, to tell him how desirable he was.

  Hannah’s psychology became clear by her next action: In a move that stunned Columbo to the verge of suicide, she dumped the crooner for boxer Jack Dempsey, a turn of events nobody saw coming, least of all an earnest Valentino of the Air, who was known to possess a strong streak of childlike innocence. Evidence shows that Hannah had been two-timing Russ for the length of her stay in Nevada!

  Columbo canceled the remainder of his tour, retreated to Beverly Hills, and went cold turkey from his treacherous lover. He folded himself into his music and vented his frustration in song lyrics that remembered a woman who “promises faithfully to become your wife” until she writes a letter and says “she loves some other guy.”

  “So the tears start to fall,” wrote Russ, “and you threaten to quit, You’re thinking of suicide, and you’re having a fit, But you think you’ll keep going, tho it kills you inside, And just say you’re a new man, for the old guy has died.”

  In his own creditable way, Columbo soldiered on through the betrayal, with his large family and adoring mother circling wagons around him. Russ was the baby of a large brood, and his mother’s pride and joy.

  Hollywood writer Adela Rogers St. John summed up Columbo in a nutshell: “Russ was a very unusual man—a boy he seemed to me.” Fueled by his mother’s lifelong praise, Russ loved to be photographed as a hero in costumed poses, whether emulating a Valentino-like sheik or a helmet-clad military officer. Most often he was captured for the lens in the midst of overpowering a damsel, and in all cases his image was courtesy of close friend Lansing Brown, a Hollywood photographer of some reputation. Brown also knew and had photographed Carole Lombard, and soon the three would become involved in a fatal love triangle the depths of which Hollywood could not imagine or dare to bring to the screen.

  In small-town Hollywood, Lombard may have met Columbo four years earlier on the set of DeMille’s Dynamite prior to her dismissal, as Russ had played a bit par
t as the guitar-strumming character known as Mexican Boy. In truth Lombard and Columbo traveled along the fringes of the same circle. Lombard’s friend Sally Blaine, sister of Loretta Young, said she “used to go to the Grove just to sit and stare at the boy whose soft voice made one dream.” Blaine and Columbo became more than friends and there were off-and-on rumors of coming nuptials. In fact, Columbo got around, which made him all the more attractive to Carole. It was what she had imagined she was getting in Powell, the sexy seducer—except for the reality that Bill turned out to be, well, something of a lump.

  In terms of both style and sanity, Carole Lombard knew she had a lot to offer Columbo. She understood how damaged he had been by Hannah Williams Kahn. Carole loved the fact that Russ was young, vital, ambitious, and in a fresher phase of life than Powell. Russ’s skill as a lover, and his tales of other conquests, thrilled her, which was all part of Carole living on the edge with a man all the girls wanted. Right away she asked Russ to coach her through songs she must perform in the steamy Paramount melodrama White Woman with brooding leading man Charles Laughton and romantic lead Charles Bickford. She found it a handy excuse to be close to Russ during the workday, as Columbo was now just getting familiar with soundstages; he had just finished up work on Broadway Thru a Keyhole at the Fox studios near Beverly Hills.

  Lombard’s next picture at Paramount sent worlds colliding. She starred with Bing Crosby, Columbo’s bitter rival (although Der Bingle would later claim that he and Russ were “great pals”) in a musical called We’re Not Dressing that was notable for an incident on the Paramount soundstages. When Crosby gave Lombard a stage slap with camera rolling, something inside her snapped. The resulting melee demonstrated a dark side to Carole Lombard—she tore into Bing Crosby like an uncaged lion, striking out with blinding fury until he was cowering in a corner and minus toupee. Crew members finally pried her off.