Fireball Page 9
Following completion of Hands Across the Table, Lombard proceeded to another screwball comedy with Fred MacMurray called The Princess Comes Across.
After making 10 pictures at Paramount in his first year there, the lanky MacMurray had ascended to star heights at the studio and was offered Dressing Room 1. After a quick tour he declined, muttering, “Too big. I’d rattle around.” He was the kind of guy to pair with Lombard—a couple of working-class stiffs—and MacMurray would remain her friend to the end, and beyond.
It didn’t matter that their boss, Ernst Lubitsch, was fired right about now as head of production at Paramount. Lombard had found her place in Hollywood and it was in comedies, in being the loud but lovable one in the group. Thus ensconced, she began to prepare for the first event of the 1936 Hollywood social season, January’s White Mayfair Ball, which would be held in Beverly Hills for an exclusive 300 movie-colony A-listers.
The Mayfair Club had been created by the Hollywood moguls for movie people, and toward the end of 1935 Lombard was acknowledged by the group for her imaginative recent social events and asked to serve as hostess for the kickoff Mayfair event of 1936. Unspoken was a vote of sympathy for Carole as something akin to comeback player of the year in the wake of the Columbo tragedy.
The White Mayfair Ball was a prestigious event, held this time at the large and elegant Victor Hugo restaurant at Wilshire and Beverly Drive in tony Beverly Hills. At the time of the ball, on January 25, 1936, Carole Lombard was a veteran of 57 pictures and 16 months past Russ’s death. She decked herself out in white chiffon and went on the arm of Cesar Romero, busiest escort in town and also a friend who wouldn’t mind the fact that she was official hostess and out of pocket for most of the evening.
The 1936 White Mayfair Ball would be scandalized by the fact that an attention-whoring Norma Shearer infuriated hostess Lombard by showing up not in dress-code white but in form-fitting scarlet, a move that would be memorialized in the Warner Bros. picture Jezebel two years later. But even that became nothing in terms of the 1936 White Mayfair Ball. No, this night would become famous when a slightly drunk and technically married Clark Gable made an overture to a tipsy Carole Lombard, and the hostess and the Hollywood stud suddenly disappeared. They were spotted rushing off to his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. And so on a chilly January night in 1936, Carole Lombard’s fireball life would begin its final segment.
11. Flight 3 Is Down
In the village of Goodsprings, Nevada, south of the base of Potosi Mountain, local mine employee Lyle Van Gordon and his wife Elizabeth continued to stare up open-mouthed at the glow of the fire high above them in the northern sky. Lyle’s given name was Herbert, but he had opted for his middle name early on and was glad he had chosen Lyle when tearing up the local gridiron a decade earlier. “Bull” Van Gordon he had been called back then. Lyle was a man of action, barrel chested, quick tempered, and just now his skin crawled at the idea that a plane had crashed up there in wilderness. He had heard the plane fly over, and then he had caught the sound of the muffled explosion on impact. He stood transfixed as the glow of the flames rose high in the northern sky, and Elizabeth watched with him; she had taken hold of his considerable bicep in her hands and squeezed as they shivered together in the night, from both the cold and the thought of the poor pilot up there. Lyle was another who figured it was a military plane with at most a pilot and co-pilot. All day long he heard the Army planes flying over and the distant pop-pop of gunnery range activity.
After a while Elizabeth went inside their shack when she heard 18-month-old Nancy crying over something or other, and Lyle’s mother-in-law, known to all as “Gonga,” wandered out and stood with him, watching. It was while talking with Gonga that Lyle began to think: big mountain, small crash site, deep snow. How would rescuers ever find the site come daybreak once the snow had smothered it? So he set down a broomstick pointing straight at the flames. It was just about then that he and Gonga heard that other plane come into range. They watched it circle the fire on the mountain, once, and then twice. It didn’t hang around too long before skedaddling off toward the northeast.
Such a cold January night, and yet Lyle’s blood boiled; there were people up there on that mountain and he wanted to help them. He needed to act. He didn’t know that the pilots could have survived, but he didn’t know otherwise, either, and if they had bailed out or crawled away from the fire, they wouldn’t last long up there in the snow and cold.
But the hell of it was, there were no roads up to the peaks of Potosi. There never had been, because there was nothing up there worth getting to. Anybody going up after that plane would be blazing a trail and praying to be able to find the crash site. Lyle had been working the local mines as a geologist, and he knew that area well enough, up the cliffs above Ninety-Nine Mine Road. He had never had reason to go all the way up, but he already knew as he stood there and watched the fire consume all the gas and oil the plane had carried, that he would be going up after it. After another half hour the phone rang. In a moment Elizabeth called him inside to talk to one of the cops who said there was a rumor that it wasn’t a military plane but a DC-3 full of people that had gone down and that one of the passengers on the plane was the movie star
Carole Lombard. Lyle had to find a chair and sit down and think about that one. He remembered seeing her in the picture show over in Henderson. Some comedy with, who was it? Robert Montgomery.
He hung up the phone, walked back outside, and began to pace the brittle desert by the Van Gordon shack and think, think about what he would need to take with him. A thermos of coffee, of course, sandwiches, a knife, a length of rope. He paused to look up one last time at the dying fire, then he went inside and started to gather his things for tomorrow and what he suspected was going to be the toughest day of his life.
Twenty miles away on North Seventh Street in Las Vegas, Chuck Duffy had finally sat down for supper at his home when the phone rang. It was McCarran Field calling to say that Flight 3 was down in the mountains southwest of Las Vegas, that there was a fire visible on the mountain. Oh, God, no, he thought. Not that plane. Not her and all those other people. The crew—the Army men. A chill raked his spine and he sat there a long moment before his mind would work again. He looked at food he no longer wanted and said he’d be right there. On the drive back to McCarran he could see the little point of fire on the opposite mountaintop more than 30 miles away. Brush fire? No, not in deep snow. Somebody’s bonfire? On Potosi Mountain? Who was he trying to kid.
No, the unthinkable had somehow happened, and Flight 3 had bought the farm up on the mountain, and only by some miracle were any of the souls aboard her still alive. Maybe it had been a crash landing. Maybe they had scrambled out before the fuel caught and that was their fire for survival. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
He grabbed his phone and called TWA in Burbank. “Flight 3 is—” the words caught in his throat, “—down west of here. What do you want me to do?”
Silence deafened at the other end of the line. Finally, he heard a breath, and the voice at the other end of the line said, “Nothing. It’s being taken care of. The only thing I would like you to do is not to allow the information to be released. I’ve already told that to LQ.”
LQ was code for Las Vegas Communications Center. “OK,” said Duffy. He thought of Carole Lombard, and her party, and the flash of bare leg. Carole Lombard. He forced himself to focus. “We have to launch a ground search. You know—survivors will—”
Pause. Muffled conversation. “Not right away,” said the voice.
Duffy gave his own pause. Why on earth wouldn’t they get rescue parties going right away? Now? This made no sense to him, and he could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead and under his arms. He finally said, “Then you’re saying that everything is under control?” He found bitter humor in his own question, as nothing seemed to be under control.
“Yes,” said the voice, “Burbank has it under control.” There was a click, and that was that.
He was born William Clark Gable in 1901 in a hellacious section of eastern Ohio, a rural place of endless hills and hollows and a few terrible hairpin roads. His mother, the former Addie Hershelman, had died when Clark was 10 months old of a debilitating illness that began at childbirth. And here right away was the event that marked him. Clark Gable, known from birth as “Billy,” became motherless before he could walk, before he could talk, before he was even done breastfeeding. In a sense he would always be cut off and distant from everyone, particularly women, bearing the pain of abandonment by his mother silently and stoically.
His father, William Gable, was the kind of hard man that Gable would sometimes portray: two-fisted and no nonsense. But unlike those Clark Gable movie characters who turned out to possess extraordinary depth, or developed it by the last reel, Will wasn’t warm as fathers go. Will remarried quickly, in part to assure that the baby boy would be cared for, and how Jennie Gable did care for her adopted son, loving him unconditionally but unsuccessfully because of that distance he brought to every relationship and especially the stepmother relationship, perhaps some instinct for self-preservation so he would never be hurt again by the level of abandonment felt by a 10-month-old infant.
He matured early into a broad-shouldered, reticent teen who worked various jobs, including some in the oil fields with his father. He also worked at a lumber company and as a mechanic and at other odd jobs, but settled on acting because it allowed him to be other people who could project emotions he never would; who lived happy and successful lives and were heroes and who loved deeply and got the girl. In fact, he got a girl of his own, a slightly older woman, very pretty, petite, dark haired, named Franz Doerfler, from a stock acting company that he joined in the northwestern United States. Billy Gable and Franz Doerfler were deliriously happy but always broke. In fact poverty and hunger were frequent adversaries of young Gable, and his complexion was so yellow, perhaps from jaundice or hepatitis, that people pitied him. The lack of money he experienced in the late 1910s and early ’20s would scar him forever and produce a tight-fisted money grubber.
He proposed marriage to Franz in 1923, but she refused to accept until he could assure a steady income. Instead she urged him to seek out a drama coach, a woman named Josephine Dillon who could improve Billy’s skills so he might earn a living as an actor. Before long, 40-year-old Dillon became 23-year-old Gable’s lover, and all of a sudden Franz Doerfler was out. For the first time Gable loved and left a woman, a practice he would repeat often as he climbed the ladder of success and forever sought the approval of the mother-type he had missed in infancy.
Josephine Dillon helped Gable get rid of his too-high-pitched voice in favor of more of a growl, and she helped him relax a furrowed brow that made him play older than his years. The Clark Gable of later Hollywood was in large part the invention of the earnest acting teacher. Billy learned from Josephine how to be a master of affectation, and soon the quiet fellow with no discernible personality had reconstructed himself into what appeared to be a force of nature. In gratitude, Billy married Josephine and then rebilled himself as Clark Gable and hit the road seeking acting jobs in the theater. The character she had created became something of a Frankenstein’s Monster, and his carousing far from home caused her to write at the time, “Thank God I’m not in love with him.”
Thank God indeed, because Gable divorced Josephine in 1929 and married up very soon, this time to Maria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham, three times married, one time widowed, aged 46 and extremely wealthy, having married up herself at every opportunity. Known as Ria, she fell for the Clark Gable created by Josephine Dillon the way all women seemed to, hearing that growling voice and instantly reaching the melting point. Yes, they fell for the voice, and the smirk, and the vibe, and the broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted frame that displayed clothes just so. But there was always distance and vulnerability in his eyes, and vacancy in his attention. Some translated this as lack of intelligence. Many a woman found Gable as the ultimate in cool, yes, but also as a man that needed rescuing.
Clark worked hard to learn to act on the stage and appeared in plays all over the country and in bit parts in the movies, including Clara Bow’s 1925 picture, The Plastic Age. But Gable didn’t make much impact until he appeared as Killer Mears in The Last Mile on the stage in Los Angeles in 1930, at which point he became the next big thing. Suddenly a famous agent, Minna Wallis, came calling and from there his picture career took off. Maybe the scales balanced out when the motherless guy landed a contract at the best possible movie studio in Hollywood, Metro Goldwyn Mayer. He rose meteorically after his teeth had been fixed and eyebrows plucked, and after he had grown fully into unusual facial features including wide-set eyes and a round face with prominent jug ears. Then he had everything going for him that Dillon had instilled, plus everything that MGM re-engineered. Suddenly, Gable had star power.
He met Howard Strickling, a top man in the MGM publicity department, a fast thinker and a fast talker, and stutterer, whose first impression was, “He was the biggest guy I ever knew, and I would say one of the most powerful.”
Musical star Betty Garrett met Gable at MGM years later: “He walked into my dressing room and just literally filled it up—at least that’s how it seemed to me. He was bigger than life: his head, his hands, everything about him was bigger than life. And he really did exude something that was so powerful.”
Part of Gable’s power emanated from his ability to turn the tables on people he met, to deflect attention from himself. He would make strong eye contact and begin asking questions of everyone, co-workers, members of the press, everyone. “If you walked in and started talking to him,” said Strickling, “before you knew it you were talking about yourself.”
“He was a great listener if you found a subject he liked,” said Gable’s pal, Steve Hayes.
When asked what it would have been like for a woman to meet Gable, actress Ursula Theiss described it this way: “He would have made you feel twice the woman than you think you are, because he did like the ladies. Intellectually, you might have expected more of him, but you would have been charmed…. He would have given all the attention you expected, and more.”
To which Gail Strickling added, “He flirted outrageously!”
Underneath Gable’s charisma, that million-dollar smile and those sparkling gray eyes, was his desire not to have attention directed at what he knew to be a wounded, vulnerable soul. By now he was obsessively clean. He could sleep on a set of sheets only once, even at home, and he showered three or four or five times a day. However clean he got, it was never clean enough. He liked things to be tidy all right. For example, he did not wish to discuss his loving stepmother, discarded back in Ohio, or his fiancée, discarded in the great northwest, or his first wife the acting teacher, discarded and in poverty. In a few more years, he would similarly not discuss his bastard child, who wasn’t merely discarded but unrecognized while Gable walked the earth, or in his will.
At the beginning of his MGM career he was typecast and playing all manner of gangsters like Killer Mears, but then the public demanded that the new star branch out. He worked long hours six days a week at the studio and returned with nothing left for Ria and her two older children by a previous marriage. The same ambition he had experienced in 1923 still burned a decade later. He started to make money and hoard money, and he joined a new crop of “movie stars” of the era of talking pictures, who were in reality outcasts much like Gable and had managed to find the right time and the right place to be successful.
Among them was 24-year-old Joan Crawford, a hard-working leading lady who had struggled her way up from silent westerns to become a new queen of MGM melodrama. Joan was a straightforward woman who sought control on her pictures by seducing her director and her leading man and taking very, very good care of them. Crawford played big on the screen but she stood all of five-one. The physically powerful Gable could have broken Joan in half but instead fou
nd in her a kindred spirit who was, like him, a wounded soul and a believer that career was all. He thought she was a beautiful woman; she thought he was a beautiful man. She was also on the Hollywood A list, and Gable was ambitious. Their love affair would foreshadow much that occurred in 1941 and ’42. Gable lost himself in the role of romantic lover, as did Crawford, who called it all “glorious and hopeless,” with these two self-involved souls enacting what was for each the most passionate of scenarios: perfect humans, he the prototype male, she the prototype female, meeting and making glorious, perfect love.
As Joan said of their studio sessions making Possessed in 1932, “All day long we’d seek each other’s eyes.” But Ria was a respected woman in Hollywood, and so MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer ordered the Gable-Crawford liaison to be nullified—at least they concurred that it would be nullified. But they continued to make pictures together and rumor was they continued on as lovers.
Not long after the “official” termination of the Gable-Crawford affair, MGM loaned him out to Paramount in central Hollywood for a little picture called No Man of Her Own, pairing Clark Gable with a dame about Crawford’s age—and another gal he figured for a sexual athlete. What else could he think with the way the woman swore and carried herself. She never even wore a bra for chrissake! Carole Lombard was married to William Powell at the time but wasn’t shy about telling everyone, and loudly, that they were great friends and lousy spouses and already she spouted the business about how Hollywood marriages couldn’t last. Gable still had eyes for Crawford and smarted from Mayer’s dressing down, so he finished the little picture at Paramount with his pants buttoned and went on his way. Gable wasn’t ready for Lombard; Lombard wasn’t ready for Gable.