Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  It was the time of technological advance. A young man of 25 named Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris in May 1927 in a single-wing aircraft. Six pilots who had tried previously died in the attempt, but “Lucky Lindy” did it and claimed the Orteig Prize and its $25,000 cash award for flying the Atlantic. Now “air mail” was zipping across the sky in planes, and it was envisioned that soon humans would be zipping across the sky as well, flying as paying passengers from city to city. Like on a train, but faster. Much faster.

  Hollywood felt the crushing embrace of technology thanks to the four Warner brothers when sound came to previously silent pictures through the voice of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. Soon after Jolson drove audiences to a frenzy with his unexpected line, “…you ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” Sennett’s empire crumbled, and Lombard nearly found herself in limbo once again. But with the resourcefulness of cliffhanger serial star Pearl White, Carole managed to grasp a lifeline by landing a role at Pathé Pictures in a film called Show Folks, and once on the Pathé lot, Lombard attracted the hormonal interest of Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a U.S. president and two U.S. senators, and in 1928 a president himself, of Pathé Pictures. Kennedy brokered power in Hollywood at that time, and in the course of his dealings the “family man” had begun a well-documented affair with none other than Gloria Swanson.

  Kennedy arrived on the Pathé scene with the studio foundering. His strategy for salvation: follow the Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios model and develop a young stable of stars for the sound era.

  Carole Lombard, then 19 and wise in the ways of Hollywood, managed to land a meeting with the big man in his office, but then Boston-born-and-bred Joe Kennedy had no reason not to meet with a good-looking and ambitious young starlet, if only to see what might develop. He was then 39 and possessing the same hot blood that would get his sons in trouble decades later. The official version of the meeting had Lombard giving Kennedy what-for. When they began discussing a possible contract, Lombard’s past biographers maintain that Kennedy said she needed to lose the weight Sennett had ordered her to gain. In turn, so the story goes, she offered that Kennedy could also stand to drop a few pounds. It’s a less-than-credible yarn.

  “I’ve always been uncomfortable with the Kennedy story,” said Lombard expert Carole Sampeck. “It just doesn’t make sense. She may have had the chutzpah then, as a basic part of her personality among friends, but you don’t go for a job interview and set out to antagonize your potential employer. She wouldn’t be throwing her professional weight around then, simply because she didn’t really have any at that point.”

  However she arrived at a deal, Lombard walked out of Kennedy’s office with a one-year (with options for more), $400-per-week Pathé Studios contract that took effect on her twentieth birthday, October 6, 1928. According to such contracts, the studio had exclusive rights to use that star or to loan the star to another studio, usually in trade for a player with a similar contract. During the next year, in a succession of pictures at Pathé and a couple on loan-out to the Fox Studios, she worked through the transition from silents to sound with her parts showing a general progression toward importance.

  During production of a picture called The Great Gabbo on the Pathé lot, Carole stopped by a set and watched the famous Prussian director Erich von Stroheim at work. The bald-headed Hussar, proponent of the casting couch, watched Lombard right back: “Today I went on von Stroheim’s set,” she reported, “and got myself introduced as if I were just a poor little girl trying to get along. Von didn’t know me from Eve and offered to give me a few days’ work as an East African tart—this is if I looked the part well enough in one of the costumes they had. It was a riot.”

  Lombard couldn’t take von Stroheim up on his offer since she had already begun work as the top-billed female opposite leading man Robert Armstrong in a newspaper crime drama called Big News, so she didn’t tart it up for the horny Prussian. Not that she would have minded—work was work, and work could never be too plentiful. Luckily, Joe Kennedy picked up the option on her contract for a second year and soon assigned her to Cecil B. DeMille, known even then as Hollywood’s director of spectacular motion pictures. Epics. His body of work would ultimately include not one but two versions of The Ten Commandments. DeMille was in 1929 preparing his first talking picture, called Dynamite, to be made at Pathé Studios. Lombard’s role wasn’t big, but it was a DeMille picture and therefore the part could be important.

  Another famous man also wanted Lombard. Howard Hughes, just a couple of years Lombard’s senior, had been laboring on his World War I flying epic Hell’s Angels for two years with a Swedish leading lady. As Howard waited weeks and months for just the right weather to stage his flying sequences, sound replaced silence and suddenly the Swede’s part needed to be reshot with an actress who could speak English well enough to be understood in the United States. Hughes saw a photo of Lombard and requested permission from Pathé to test the ingénue for Hell’s Angels.

  As usual, Howard got the girl, converting his gangly social awkwardness and lack of conversation into a bad-boy asset that made women want to satisfy him in any way possible. Of course, the bad boy’s wealth didn’t hurt, or the power he wielded in Hollywood. Whatever Carole’s level of sexual sophistication prior to the onset of summer 1929, she certainly knew the ropes by Christmas. She fell hard for Howard Hughes and dearly wanted that part in Hell’s Angels.

  It was a time when Hughes ruled the skies, gobbling up every stunt pilot and flyable airplane in southern California. More than 2,000 miles away, Lieutenant James Doolittle was making aviation news of his own. A week after bailing out of his plane in an air race over Cleveland, Doolittle advanced the science of flight by years when he took off from Mitchel Field on Long Island, flew his plane, and landed safely on instruments alone as guided by radio beam. The feat enabled commercial passenger flight in any weather because now pilots could either fly “contact,” using ground references, or on “instruments,” relying on their gauges and headsets to successfully navigate and land passengers and cargo. Thirteen short years later, this same James Doolittle, then an Air Corps colonel, would mastermind the first United States air raid on Tokyo, Japan, just four months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

  Lombard the voracious reader might have seen a story about Doo-little in the newspaper. It’s more likely she had her hands full with life at a studio the size of Pathé Pictures. Somewhere in this period, during her time under Pathé contract, Lombard adopted the salty vocabulary of a dockworker, and according to her brother Fred Peters, she did it deliberately as a way to level the playing field with the men then in charge, most of whom were wolves at the least, with some unashamed sexual predators thrown in. In short, she intended harsh language to shut down unwanted advances and she wore it like a suit of armor. Her friend Jill Winkler once asked Lombard about the swearing. Carole replied, “Oh, that’s not me swearing, honey. That’s Carole Lombard. Jane Peters would never dream of using language like that.” Carole believed that Jane Peters couldn’t hold her own in Hollywood, whereas brash Carole Lombard could. As she once admitted in an interview, and it was a telling statement, “I try to be what people want me to be.”

  Said Margaret Tallichet Wyler, former actress and wife of director William Wyler, of Lombard’s four-letter vocabulary, “Even then I understood that it had begun as a defense mechanism. She could tell stories about crazy parties as a very young girl, where she had been tossed into the wildest of surroundings. I felt then and feel now that it was a defense she built up not to be as vulnerable as she probably was.” Wyler referred to Lombard’s colorful language as “working jargon” and said, “I don’t remember her talking that way when she was with her mother and brothers. You didn’t feel that it was something she was born with. It was a tool she had adopted.”

  At Pathé, she began work on Dynamite and ran afoul of the autocratic C.B. DeMille right away. On this first production with bulky, uncooperative sound recording equipment, the direc
tor and his art director, Mitchell Leisen, proceeded with great uncertainty about capturing audio for their picture. DeMille shot one scene with Lombard but didn’t like her voice or delivery. He also didn’t care for her comfort on the set or the self-conscious foul language. Particularly the foul language and her you-bet-your-ass-I-belong-here attitude annoyed him. Such an attitude didn’t fly on a DeMille soundstage.

  Said Lombard to the press, perhaps hopefully, “…I’m getting accustomed to C.B. I’ll say we get along just fine now, but at first I was awed by him.” But Cecil B. DeMille never shared that awe and dumped Carole Lombard from the cast of his first “talking picture.” In another few months, soon after the stock market crash of 1929, Howard Hughes dismissed Lombard from consideration for Hell’s Angels when he beheld the even younger, blonder, ambitious young actress named Jean Harlow, face unscarred, who was working in two-reeled comedies for Hal Roach. Lombard was dumped, not just as DeMille actress but as Hughes girlfriend. Suddenly, the young starlet could claim the distinction of being fired by two Hollywood titans in succession. Upon reflection, she decided that both rejections cut as deeply as the glass of that exploding windshield.

  Then Joe Kennedy made it a clean sweep. He wouldn’t admit it and blamed the bad economy for failure to pick up the option for Carole’s third year at Pathé, but in truth Constance Bennett, a new young, blonde star had come aboard from Broadway, and the studio needed to divest itself of other, similar blondes. So great was the resemblance of Lombard to Bennett that for the next 80 years and counting, photos of Constance Bennett are sometimes confused with photos of Carole Lombard.

  It was now the beginning of 1930, and Lombard found herself out on the street once again, but not for long. The girl with the easy-to-like personality had friends, contacts, confederates, and spies all over town. In short order, she made a lavish western with recent Academy Award winner Warner Baxter at Fox Studios and then secured a featured role in a comedy starring the popular and boyish leading man Buddy Rogers at Paramount Studios on Wilshire Boulevard in Hollywood. It was here that Lombard found a new home and would sign the most important document of her career, a standard seven-year studio contract that started her at $375 a week just months after the stock market crash known as Black Friday had wiped out lives and fortunes. She was now, and would remain for quite a while, the exclusive property of Paramount Pictures.

  By this, her fourth studio contract, she knew how to pitch herself and how to bargain. She was a well-connected and politically savvy veteran of motion pictures and the Jazz Age. Having been a tomboy all her life, aligned closely with her brothers, she sported male sensibilities regarding everything from business to sports to carnal knowledge. She was building her brand organically and now had become a Paramount Player, and a highly eligible and active bachelorette, at age 21 while still living at home with Petey and Tootie.

  She counted among her lovers in the early Paramount days a young scriptwriter named Preston Sturges, who had done the screenplay for one her pictures, Fast and Loose. The highly intelligent, well-to-do, 10-years-older Sturges fit Lombard’s bill, as did fading publishing mogul Horace Liveright, 25 years her senior, with whom she had a short liaison before Paramount dismissed him.

  Said Lombard, “I rapidly outgrew even older boys and gradually my escorts became men. Mature men. They were the only ones who could talk my language....”

  At her new studio she appeared in a few light comedy features before stepping up to an “A” or major studio picture called Man of the World, starring one of the hottest leading men in Hollywood, William Powell.

  The arrival of sound in motion pictures had provided audience access to his caramel voice, suave delivery, and self-assured manner. Powell now began a string of pictures that would cast him as a jewel thief or other provocateur, or a tough-guy detective. In just three more years he would first play the most successful character of his career, Nick Charles, opposite Myrna Loy’s Nora Charles in The Thin Man mystery series at MGM.

  Sparks flew between Lombard and Powell from the first rehearsals, and a healthy infatuation catapulted them to the nearest bedroom. He was almost 40; she was 22, making pictures by day and playing the field by night, and determined not to marry. “I think marriage is dangerous,” she told him. “It spoils beautiful friendships that might have lasted for years.”

  Anchored by a magnificent Paramount Pictures contract negotiated by his Hollywood superagent, Myron Selznick, Powell had the means to woo Lombard, and he didn’t kid around with that wooing. Soon, she learned the true power of the mature man, if not with the imported perfume or the diamond-encrusted jade cigarette case, then surely with the Cadillac for Christmas. She tried to tell him: Sex was fine, but couldn’t they agree to leave marriage out of the discussion?

  She worked steadily and knocked off three more pictures at Paramount, and then was cast with Powell again in another romantic drama, this one called Ladies’ Man. The fact that the young ingénue and the older sophisticate were now constant companions and obvious bedmates earned space in fan magazines and newspaper columns, and Lombard, now so obviously a sucker for the rich and the powerful, was sunk. The wedding took place at the end of June 1931, and the happy couple sailed off for a Hawaiian honeymoon. And then things went to hell right away.

  Lombard got sick on the boat, either from working too hard for too long or from the nerves of being a bride. Or was it the boat? Or was it her own prophecy that they shouldn’t marry? She stayed sick the length of the honeymoon with revolving ailments. When they returned to Hollywood, she remained ill with viruses of various sorts and pleurisy—she got what there was to get.

  That was one problem. Beyond that, William Powell’s closest friends included Hollywood’s old guard of silent stars and their wives, some of whom had made the transition to sound pictures, and some of whom hadn’t. None of them took to the plain-talking Mrs. Powell; the lightweight; the golddigger with the foul mouth. Then other difficulties presented themselves. Paramount Pictures hit the skids, and some of its stars went public with accusations that the studio had been cooking the books. Those genial Marx Brothers found the situation quite unamusing, and Groucho, Zeppo, Harpo, and Gummo hopped a train east for a reckoning with the New York bosses. Soon one of Paramount’s biggest stars, William Powell, flew the coop for a lucrative $6,000-per-week contract at Warner Bros. of Burbank negotiated by Myron Selznick. Suddenly, Bill and Carole were no longer workplace comrades with a standing date for lunch.

  In a deadly logical career move, Carole filled the void left by Bill’s departure from Paramount by hiring as an accountant/personal assistant/secretary not some bookish prude but pal Madalynne Fields. Fieldsie’s career as the “fat girl,” the only movie work she was ever going to get, had died with the Sennett Studio, and Fieldsie was now out on the street. Seen with her sleek, blonde best friend, Fieldsie became the “what’s wrong with this picture” aside and seemed harmless enough. But Fieldsie possessed a shrewd business sense and kept razor-sharp sets of numbers. “She handled all the accounts,” said son Richard Lang of his mother’s lifelong affinity for balancing the books. “She had taken accounting somewhere along the line. Her checkbook wasn’t a checkbook; it was a huge ledger. Every year she would demand from the IRS a letter saying everything was clear, and she’d frame it and hang it on the wall.”

  It would be misleading to call the hiring of Madalynne Fields as Lombard’s secretary the first of what would become many of “Carole’s Causes”—the democratic spreading of love and generosity around town, the democratic helping of the down and out. Lombard benefited in many professional and personal ways from having Fieldsie close by as confidante and bodyguard.

  Lombard also acquired another business partner at this time, or to be precise, Myron Selznick acquired Lombard as a client primarily because he represented William Powell, which made the signing of Lombard a favor to a successful client. The first thing Selznick did was to solidify Lombard’s deal at Paramount. In effect, she now held a no-c
ut contract that didn’t need to be renewed by option. Paramount was now married to Carole just about as legally as Bill Powell was. These three unlikely confederates—Carole, Fieldsie, and Myron Selznick—soon became one of the shrewder cartels in Hollywood.

  And they would need to be. Just after popular melodrama queen Kay Francis followed William Powell’s path from Paramount to Warner Bros. because she sensed payroll might not be met, Paramount went bankrupt. A new regime assumed power and started making hard financial decisions. Lombard, a modest star but hardly a household name, was saved from unemployment only by the new ironclad contract that Myron had just negotiated for her. Paramount started shopping her around town to see if another studio wanted to assume her contract, but the attachment of a shark like Myron Selznick to Lombard’s name assured lukewarm interest. She ended up on a one-shot loan-out at the Columbia studios on nearby Gower Street and portrayed a hooker in a risqué pre-Code drama called Virtue, which co-starred Mayo Methot, who would meet and then marry struggling actor Humphrey Bogart a few years later.

  Pre-Code pictures include movies like Virtue, which featured a tawdry plotline and women in stockings and garter belts who “would do anything to get ahead.” Lombard had already gained a reputation for going braless onscreen, acquiring cult status at the grindhouses for nipples poking through slinky dresses and displaying lots of leg. Fieldsie and Myron had caught on to what the public wanted from Lombard and advised her to play it sexy onscreen. The result: Carole had never enjoyed a certified hit; neither had her pictures lost money, which was saying something in an America gripped by a deepening Depression.

  Back within the walls of Paramount, she portrayed a librarian in a romance called No Man of Her Own opposite MGM’s 31-year-old sensation, Clark Gable. A sort of Music Man without the music, No Man of Her Own concerned the reaction of the single, repressed librarian to a new con man in town. Gable’s vibe at this early point in his Hollywood career was enacting a growling tough guy, usually named Ace, or Rid, or Rod, and this time Babe. It was his first picture after making MGM’s sensational Red Dust, a sexy and saucy pre-Code picture that had teamed him with Jean Harlow, the blonde bombshell who had stolen Howard Hughes from Lombard.