Fireball Read online

  Up ahead Cheney could see the illuminated Beacon 24 and knew that below him sat the village of Arden. Flight 10 skimmed over some scattered lights below. Such a beautiful machine to fly, the DC-3 was. The two 1,200-horsepower Wright Cyclone engines hummed at his fingertips, so responsive to the controls. Just one of the Cyclones would keep the ship afloat, but he had the luxury of two, and he often wished he could let his wife sit in the left seat, or his kids, just once to let them feel the perfection of the Douglas-crafted flying machine and all the power he had at hand.

  He flew over Beacon 24 and now could see the lights of Las Vegas way ahead on the broad plain of desert floor surrounded by mountains on all sides. But the highest and most daunting of those mountaintops, Potosi Mountain, was already past Western 10’s position, and Cheney was happy to have that granite giant safely behind him. He settled his ship into a power glide for the final approach to Vegas.

  “Western Air Dispatch to Western 10,” came a call over the radio.

  “Western 10,” said the co-pilot.

  “Hey, listen,” said Dispatch, “we’ve got a request from KCT to check out a fire in the vicinity of Potosi Mountain or Spring Mountain. Can you handle?”

  KCT was TWA Control in Burbank. Cheney cut in and said, “Dispatch, we are on final approach to Las Vegas.”

  “Understood, but need you to check out a fire.”

  Cheney and his co-pilot looked at one another. “Can you confirm—a fire?” said Cheney, not quite understanding. They both strained to look hard left out the side cockpit window, and sure enough, up on one of the peaks at a distance of maybe 12 miles they saw steady sheets of flame rising from some source on the mountaintop.

  “That is affirmative,” said Dispatch. “A fire on Potosi Mountain. Please report by interphone when you arrive Las Vegas.”

  It was by no means routine to take such a request with a load of passengers on board, and Capt. Cheney suspected what this was about. He banked left and boosted the RPM to 2,050 for a climb back to 9,000, heading toward the visible flames. At an air speed of 190, Western 10 approached the peak of Potosi Mountain. Cheney was wary of this beast of a mountain and at a distance of five miles switched on a landing light, which threw forward nicely and would provide a visual reference of the approaching cliffs. In another mile he flicked on the other landing light, giving him twin spots on the mountain and the fire. At 9,000 he was safely above the peak and made sure he remained in level flight.

  With the fire directly ahead and below him, he dipped to the right, then back to the left to see what was aflame. On first inspection Cheney thought he was looking at a good-sized bonfire, as if a college fraternity had convened on the lonely mountaintop and dug a campsite out of the deep snow. But his view was all too brief, so he banked left at about 20 degrees and came in again, giving the fire a wide berth of a quarter mile.

  Cheney dimmed the lights of his control panel to provide an unobstructed view out the side window. At night, the glow could bounce off the windscreen and the side windows—one of the few things that pilots didn’t like about the sleek DC-3s.

  With landing lights on, Cheney banked in as low as he could over the spot and now could see, down in what appeared to be a ravine below the mountain peak…

  …exactly what he had hoped not to see: a glint of silver metal. He gaped down at the tail section of a DC-3, upside down in the snow on a steep mountainside below the main fireball, spots of flames licking up off of its gleaming aluminum at a high cliff wall. His training took over, and he locked his attention on the task at hand.

  In a moment the radio crackled: “Las Vegas calling Western 10. What is your position?”

  “Western 10, circling in the vicinity of Spring Mountain.”

  “What is your ETA to Las Vegas?”

  “Eight minutes,” said Cheney and banked away from the fire and back toward Beacon 24.

  “Be advised,” said Vegas, “you have Western 11 southbound approaching your position.”

  In a moment Western Flight 11 was on the radio. Cheney recognized the voice of Captain Marshall Wooster, another veteran pilot. It was evident there had been talk in the station about the situation on the mountain because of the nature of Wooster’s message: “Eleven to Ten. We are southbound over Las Vegas at 4,800.” And then Wooster added, “Uh, see anything?”

  Cheney let out a breath. “Yeah,” he said into the microphone. He forced himself not to think about his unsettled stomach.

  “Where?” asked Wooster.

  “You’ll see it when you get a little closer,” said Cheney as he headed due east to pick up his normal approach and steer well clear of Flight 11 as it made the normal passage south and then banked southwest once it had cleared the mountains—the flight path that TWA 3 should have taken but for some reason hadn’t.

  Arthur Cheney now understood the directive to report over the interphone and not to put anything out over the airwaves. His report would wait another six minutes until they were wheels-down and at the blocks.

  But between the calls flooding the Las Vegas police station about a fire on the mountain and the fact that Flight 3 still hadn’t passed into California airspace, Burbank Air Traffic Control already knew exactly what the situation was.

  8. Inflexible Fate

  It would be difficult to imagine a freakier freak accident than the one that killed Russ Columbo: shot through the eye by a ricocheting bullet discharged from an antique percussion-cap pistol that the owner didn’t even know was loaded. But that was apparently what had happened because there was the crooner on the floor of Lansing Brown’s library in his modest little Los Angeles bungalow on Lillian Way, just off Melrose, and over there was the mark of the ricochet on the mahogany desktop. Brown’s parents had been in the next room and were witnesses that the house was otherwise quiet and the two men were alone and, claimed the elder Mr. and Mrs. Brown, not angry with each other.

  Columbo had had a lot on his mind this Sunday afternoon. His beloved mother had just suffered a stroke, and the family reeled. Lansing, Russ’s best friend, had not showed up at the sneak preview of Wake Up and Dream, and a hurt Columbo wanted to know why. Con Conrad the songwriter and former Svengali of Columbo’s life was again pressing Russ for money. And of course the subject du jour was, as always, Pookie Lombard. Every single conversation Lansing and Russ shared for a solid year had ended up with an analysis of Lombard and her latest display of cold feet. Russ Columbo was a man obsessed. Lansing Brown was Russ’s advisor and therapist as William Powell was Lombard’s. Paranoid, sensitive, easily wounded, Columbo pressed Brown endlessly for answers to his romantic troubles with the far-too-practical actress. Today was no different.

  Lansing Brown gave a chilling account of the moment of violence. “All of a sudden,” he said, “there was a deafening explosion. You have no idea how terrific it was.”

  He had put a cigarette in his mouth and then struck a match on the hammer of one of two pistols on his desk. What were the odds that there was a percussion cap on the pistol in the first place, or a slug in the barrel? What were the odds that, even though the pistol wasn’t even pointed at Russ, that said slug, traveling at extreme low velocity, would strike the desktop and bounce into the one place that could prove lethal: Russ Columbo’s eye socket? Had it hit him anyplace in the body with bone underneath, a superficial wound would have resulted and nothing more, but the lead ball punched through his eye and just far enough into his brain to cause a mortal wound.

  He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors saw the case as hopeless. Today, extraction of the bullet could have been attempted; then, it was impossible. In that time his close friend Sally Blaine arrived at the hospital to sit by his bedside until the last moment. Columbo lingered for five hours, and then expired. Carole, Petey, and Fieldsie packed up and started home. Fieldsie drove, Petey in the front passenger seat and Lombard in the back with her Alaskan Husky named Pookie, a gift from Columbo.

  Carole said, “I knew on the way down the very instant
Russ died. My dog, which loved Russ, was sitting in the back of the car. Suddenly he began to whimper. He crawled over to me and put his muzzle against my neck. Later I checked on the time—Russ had died in that very second.”

  Despite the outlandishness of the death of a 26-year-old singing sensation just entering the prime of life, the idea that the shooting had been intentional was looked at and dismissed. A reconstruction of the event, the position of the two men, and particularly that ricochet mark on the desktop, seemed to indicate just how mundane a moment it was. Mundane and horrifying.

  Carole Lombard’s psyche was shattered. She was beset with equal parts grief and guilt. She had withheld; she had backpedaled; she had carried doubts. And when the end came, and she sensed it coming, she was hours away and could do nothing, not even say good-bye. Now he was gone for good, this boy in a man’s body, this innocent in heartless Hollywood.

  Lombard hated funerals and vowed not to attend Columbo’s. What could it help? But in the end she knew it was her obligation to Russ, to all the good things, and no amount of sidestepping would get her around it.

  Three thousand people turned out for the funeral of Russ Columbo at the imposing, Spanish mission-styled Church of the Blessed Sacrament on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Lombard put obvious agony on display as she sat through the funeral mass with Columbo’s large family. Afterward, his body was taken to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale for interment in the Great Mausoleum.

  She said nothing to the press until she granted one interview about Columbo, and one only, to young stringer Sonia Lee, then still a newcomer to the job of reporting in Hollywood. Lee was an early beneficiary of Lombard’s generous heart and would label the interview “amazing.” It appeared in Movie Classic magazine under the title “We Would Have Married—” and in it, Carole gave many clues concerning her reticence, which resulted from Columbo’s obsessive nature. Said Lombard, “Russ and I loved one another. Eventually, I believe, we would have married. How soon, I don’t know. His love for me was the kind that rarely comes to any woman. I never expected to have such worship, such idolatry, such sweetness from any man.” The use of the word eventually was key. That Columbo level of idolatry had early on and many times thereafter given her pause. “He was completely content to sit of an evening and just watch me—without saying a word, without moving. He had no life apart from me. He was lost if we were not together.”

  She talked about the sensational sex in veiled terms, and offered an oblique reference to Columbo’s emotional immaturity: “I loved Russ not only as a man, but as a mother would love her child.”

  She also indicted Lansing Brown for his failure to support Russ at the premiere of Wake Up and Dream, which became the catalyst for Columbo’s death, as the fragile Russ had been forced by his nature to confront Brown about his failure to show on this critical night: “Russ depended on Lansing’s judgment and considered his criticism extremely valuable,” reported Lombard. “He had said to me, ‘If Lansing doesn’t get back in time to call me tonight, I’m going over to see him tomorrow.’”

  Lombard also mentioned her intuition in the interview as she recounted her drive to Lake Arrowhead on the day before Columbo died. “…On the drive from Hollywood,” she recalled, “I almost turned back twice. It seemed as if something were calling me, telling me not to go up there. I dismissed my fears as foolish.”

  Most important, in this interview Lombard explored her own belief system, which would be applied on January 16, 1942. “I am convinced,” she told Sonia Lee, “that if he had not met his death through that ricocheting bullet, he would have met it some other way—in an automobile accident, perhaps. His number was up.” She summed up by saying, “I believe that everything that happens is determined by an inflexible Fate. I believe that Russ’s death was pre-destined. And I am glad that it came when he was so happy—so happy in our love and in his winning of stardom.”

  Those who knew Lombard, Fieldsie and others, would make similar statements eight years later.

  The man who held the pistol, Lansing Brown, would never recover from his involvement in the death of Russ Columbo. Lombard ultimately urged him toward self-forgiveness. Carole also participated in subterfuge for Russ’s frail and incapacitated mother, who was never told of her son’s death. Instead, a lavish European tour was dreamed up, and Russ would send her letters from exotic locations that spoke of his latest successes, while his remains settled into a crypt in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Glendale.

  9. Jimmy Donnally Lands His Plane

  Pawnee, Illinois, sat smack-dab in the center of the state. Looked at from north to south on a map or from east to west, Pawnee represented the bull’s-eye in the middle. In June 1930 Pawnee made headlines because of a boy who stood in a field. He stood there every day after school for months watching the horizon for a hero he had read about in a storybook, a brave and virtuous pilot named Jimmy Donnally.

  Each afternoon when a particular green-and-silver biplane thundered over the Castle family farm just outside Pawnee, eight-year-old Charles Castle held the perfect vantage point because his farm sat on high ground, and he positioned himself right under the flight path so he could hear the roar of the engine and feel its pulse as it growled overhead, savoring the vortices created by the plane that would swirl down around him and tousle the field grass. His special thrill was seeing the pilot, seeing Jimmy Donnally in his open cockpit, goggles down and scarf flapping as he rocketed past on his daily rounds.

  At lunch one Saturday, Charles decided to take a chance and get his mother’s opinion on what he was sure he already knew. “Mother,” Charles began in his high, thoughtful voice, not making eye contact and pushing baked ham and scrambled eggs around the plate, “I wonder if that pilot carrying the mail over our house isn’t Jimmy.”

  Careworn, 41-year-old Maude Castle looked over her shoulder at the earnest Charles, sitting between younger sister Nell and younger brother James. On the inside she smiled; on the outside she said, “It may be, son.” She said it with gravity to match that of her boy. “It may well be.”

  Wow! thought Charles, who eagerly scraped up all the eggs in gulping bites and downed some fresh bread whole and drank some milk that had come straight from the family cow, then banged out the screen door to take up his post. Maude could see him out there on the gentle rise where Sam had planted wheat this year. Charles was always in sight, never a worry, because that spot was where the plane would go over and when on this morning it finally did, Charles leapt and waved and shouted so loud that even she could hear it near to a quarter mile away, and then for Charles the day had ended, and he would slink back to the house with his shoulders slumped, and he would do his chores and then get ready for bed, already anticipating tomorrow’s flight.

  In coming weeks Charles convinced his mother to make him a flight uniform like he imagined Jimmy would wear, and Charles himself crafted wings—all proper pilots wore a pin in the shape of wings—out of cardboard. One night at bedtime he said his prayers differently. He rattled off names of family members that God should bless, and then paused and riffed, “God? I need you to help me on a big adventure, maybe the big one of my whole life. I want to meet...” he stopped to think. He thought so loud that Maude could hear it. Then he continued, “I want to meet, to be friends with, and to fly with Jimmy Donnally.”

  Maude’s heart skipped a beat and she thought, Uh-oh. She knew then that her boy was rising for a fall, thinking foolish thoughts about some airmail pilot swooping out of a storybook and down out of the sky to gather him up for a ride in some damn dangerous plane.

  Every day Charles shouted and waved, and every day the plane passed over the Castle farm, the flight path varying, but the indifference of that pilot constant.

  At a subsequent lunch over sandwiches, the conversation was less positive. “Mother?” Charles began. “Jimmy don’t see me, Mother. If he did I know he’d come down in the big pasture.” More days passed, and finally Charles knew he must sit down and write a le
tter. His careful pencil carved:

  Dear Jimmy:

  I see you go over every day in your airoplane. I see you if you didn’t go I would almost cry.

  I love to watch you fly by. Some day won’t you come down and take me up in the sky with you I want to fly like you. Will you please Jimmy? Do you know where my Daddy’s pasture is—the big one? Could you come down there?

  Have you a boy? What is his name? How old is he? I will be nine (9) years old groundhog day. Did you bring Santa Claus to my house Xmas in your plane?

  I’m looking for you to come see me every day Jimmy. Good-by Jimmy.

  And he signed it boldly: Charles Castle.

  There was something magical about a child’s innocence that could make a mother do crazy things, and as she kept an eye on Charles up there on the wheaty rise, Maude Castle sat down and penned a hasty letter of her own, this one to the Springfield newspaper. It read, “You try and find Jimmy for my little Charles. Jimmy pilots that big green and silver double-winged plane. I know there must be more than one pilot, but Charles insists that ‘Jimmy pilots all these ships.’ When you find him please send him this letter from Charles.”

  Maude stuffed her letter into an envelope along with his and sent both off to Springfield, and then she waited as the overflights continued. The weather grew bad, and Charles worried aloud about Jimmy’s safety.

  Weeks passed, and then came a wrapped package by the rural route mail carrier. “It’s Jimmy, Mother!” Charles shrieked as he bounced off every wall of the farmhouse carrying the parcel under his arm like a football. “It’s Jimmy!”

  He tore open the package and there found a stiff-backed photograph of a confident, smiling young pilot in goggles. The photo was inscribed, To my friend, Charles Castle, and there was the signature, Jimmy Donnally. An accompanying short note asked if Charles really wanted a plane ride; if so, Jimmy could meet him at the Springfield airfield. Not only had Charles’ prayers been answered by God, but so had Maude’s, by the Illinois State Register newspaper in Springfield.