Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  George explained to the sleepy-eyed Native American what was going on, about the plane and the crash and the strangers at the door. After a moment, the Indian said, “The only way you can get up the mountain is on horses.”

  With that, George relinquished his four horses to the Army-led posse, and his Indian, and one of his cowboys. Then Willard went back to bed, wondering what in the blazes was really going on, but not really caring because sleep soon overtook him and that was it for the night.

  14. Somber Hymns and Cold Marble

  In the 1930s women were coming a long way, baby. In 1931, just 11 years after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote, Jane Addams became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for her work benefiting the poor in Chicago. A year after that, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly the Atlantic Ocean, and a year after that, Frances Perkins became U.S. Secretary of Labor, the first woman to sit in the cabinet of the president of the United States. In the 1930s about one in four women in America worked at a job outside the home, meaning that three out of four were “homemakers” and central to holding families together during the Great Depression. Carole Lombard counted herself in the minority, and by 1937 reigned as one of the highest-paid women in America and spoke stridently of her beliefs that the sexes were different and yet equal.

  Carole Lombard and Clark Gable would find 1937 to be a tough year. First came a federal trial against a woman named Violet Norton from the United Kingdom who tried unsuccessfully to extort money from Gable. She claimed he had impregnated her in 1923 and brought to court a 13-year-old named Gwendoline to prove it, with the only problem being that Gable wasn’t in the U.K. in 1923 as Violet Norton claimed. For the first time, Franz Doerfler emerged from the shadows of Oregon to testify on Gable’s behalf, and given the circumstances of his abrupt 1924 Doerfler-dumping, it proved to be an uncomfortable day. FBI files reveal that Gable was a frequent target of blackmail and extortion, and that he followed a regular process of turning letters and other evidence over to the studio, which would then contact the FBI.

  The other watershed event of 1937 was the death of the blonde bombshell, Jean Harlow. She had been Gable’s pal since they broke in playing supporting roles at MGM in The Secret Six in 1930 and since then had made huge hits together like Red Dust, China Seas, and Wife vs. Secretary. Fireball Lombard and passively sweet Harlow made for quite a contrast, and Lombard wanted to dislike the girl who was Gable’s friend and had become William Powell’s lover, but there was no disliking the sweetheart that everyone called “the Baby.” Harlow possessed a gentle, acquiescent soul and proved entirely lovable.

  Bill’s relationship with the Baby mirrored Carole’s with Russ, but in reverse: Columbo and Harlow were the earnest pursuers, and Lombard and Powell the wary prey. Bill Powell liked Jean Harlow just fine as a girlfriend, but he balked at marrying again, a situation that came to a head soon after the March 4, 1937 Academy Awards when My Man Godfrey was shut out despite five nominations and the Powell-Harlow comedy Libeled Lady lost for Best Picture. But Powell had appeared in three Best Picture nominees, the third being The Great Ziegfeld, which did take Best Picture. Gable and Lombard and Powell and Harlow had spent the evening together, celebrating and commiserating. Harlow was just over a serious bout of influenza and soon would have trouble with her wisdom teeth, and her man. William Powell was adept at attracting blondes but had trouble keeping them around because he tended to grow aloof. Powell did a lot of taking and little giving, much like Gable, which occasionally caused trouble for Lombard as well.

  Later in March, Harlow underwent surgery to extract her wisdom teeth and, according to her biographer David Stenn, almost died on the table. Her health never recovered. She began another picture with Gable, the horse racing romance Saratoga, and struggled through the month of May 1937 on the set, her looks sliding by the day and her energy shot, until finally she was forced to retreat to a sick bed. At the beginning of June she was critically ill at home on Palm Drive in Beverly Hills when Gable visited. Leaning down over her bed, he took in the foul odor of disease and would later say, “It was like kissing a dead person, a rotting person. It was a terrible thing to walk into.”

  According to Stenn, Harlow’s home became a “virtual hospital” of equipment and nurses so that Harlow’s domineering mother could continue efforts to control the situation. But Jean Harlow’s body was shutting down due to chronic kidney degeneration that Stenn traces back to a 1925 bout of scarlet fever. Now a secondary kidney infection spread. Jean Harlow was doomed. Bill Powell, who legend says adored Harlow, failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation until the end. Jean Harlow died on June 7, 1937.

  No one could believe it. The vibrant, sexy, 26-year-old, box-office queen of the movies was gone, not from a horrible accident or a violent crime. She had simply withered up and died.

  It was still spring, the time of year when Southern California became paradise with beautiful weather and the landscape an explosion of blooms. But Hollywood mourned, and braced for a funeral unlike anything since Valentino. With the Columbo interment all too recent, Carole Lombard wanted to avoid Forest Lawn at all costs. Life was for the living, not the fallen. And as much as Lombard courted the press, and encouraged fandom, she resented the intrusion of reporters and fans at such events. It made for another compelling reason to stay away.

  She wasn’t alone in dreading the Harlow funeral. Despite the fact that Clark Gable looked on the Baby as a sister, which was rare for a male always on the prowl, he also didn’t want to attend the funeral because that was Gable’s nature, not to want to do things that others wanted him to do, even things he knew he should do. Louis B. Mayer demanded that Gable go because to do otherwise would imply disharmony at MGM, and that was not allowed. Yes, Gable would go, and since that was a fact, then Lombard would be there to support her man.

  Gable and Lombard believed they had already paid their dues with this type of Hollywood spectacle when they had attended the funeral of Irving Thalberg less than nine months earlier. Always in poor health, MGM’s “Boy Genius” had died at just 37 years of age, a turn of events that rocked MGM more profoundly than any earthquake. As much as Gable owed to Thalberg, he still didn’t want to go to that funeral, and neither did Lombard. But both attended, along with all the other heavyweights in town.

  Photographs tell the story of the couple’s Forest Lawn morning spent at the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather Chapel attending the service for Jean Harlow. Gable wore a black suit, as did Lombard, who covered it with a black fur cape. In one photo they walk down the path from the chapel after the service. His hand under her right arm guides and protects her as they look ahead with frowns on their faces, no doubt scrutinizing some sacrilegious act by the press or a crazed fan. In an hour Harlow would be interred in a crypt in the Great Mausoleum, mere yards from the remains of Russ Columbo in one direction and Irving Thalberg in another. Harlow’s tomb would be marked simply, Our Baby, and a guilt-ridden William Powell would sit with her often and soon develop colon cancer and suffer terribly.

  The death of Harlow, piled on all the other deaths of young Hollywood people, changed the playing field for Lombard and Gable. The fatalist Lombard had no use for spectacle, especially at funerals, and murmured to Gable in the limousine after the Baby’s service that when Carole died, no public unpleasantness must occur. Oh, she knew she never was and never would be a blonde bombshell and box-office sensation in Harlow’s class. Sex sold, and Jean Harlow was so sexy that she made nearly every line of dialogue into the Kama Sutra. Lombard was, well, Lombard, and whatever that was, it involved celebrity and her death would invite the morbidly curious. She told Gable that when her time came, the service must be brief, simple, and private. Pragmatist Gable groused at such talk; he was years older and he would go first. But she extracted a promise from him that day, and he would be bound to honor it a lot sooner than he ever might have imagined.

  Just to prove the fragility of life in general and famous women
in particular, less than a month after Harlow’s death, hotshot pilot Amelia Earhart, age 39, and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the South Pacific in her Lockheed Electra airplane during a spectacular failure of an attempt to circumnavigate the earth by air. Losses like Earhart were the price paid by society for great advances in aviation. On the plus side, a new commercial airplane called the DC-3 was changing the lives of the well to do, including the Hollywood set. Suddenly they could travel anywhere, seemingly everywhere, not in terms of weeks or days but by the hour. Those dreaded personal appearances in Salt Lake City and Des Moines and Fargo no longer needed to be endured by train but could be checked off the list via the amazing new DC-3 with service that included the Sky Sleeper with fold-down seats and the Sky Club with full meal service and other comforts. All at once the glamorous air travel promoted in RKO’s musical Flying Down to Rio moved from fantasy to glorious reality.

  For Lombard, 1937 wasn’t all court cases, somber hymns, and the cold hand of death. Professionally, she was rolling. She made a musical drama at Paramount, Swing High, Swing Low with Fred MacMurray that would go on to be highly profitable. Tongue in cheek, she referred to Swing High, Swing Low as her “come-back picture.” But as the reporter noted upon hearing the statement, “Every picture Carole makes is her ‘come-back picture.’ She discusses her ‘return to the screen’ as if she had been off it for years.” This from a woman signed to make three pictures in 1937 alone. It was shtick; it was always shtick with Lombard, who was her own best audience. Sometimes it didn’t matter if those around her got the humor as long as she herself laughed. If Carole got the joke, that was enough.

  Before Swing High, Swing Low wrapped, Lombard sat on a Paramount soundstage for an interview with a newspaper reporter. The reporter was ushered in by a 22-year-old brunette office assistant named Margaret Tallichet who said in her buttery voice and Texas drawl, “My job was to take these visiting people out to the sets. I’d introduce them to the stars so they could get their interviews. As I recall it, this was one of the first times I had done this. I didn’t know the protocol, whether I was to sit with them or go back to my office. So I stayed.”

  The reporter looked at Tallichet and said to Lombard, “This is a pretty girl. Don’t you think she should be in pictures?”

  Lombard said later, “Something about her struck me as unusual. Her personality, rather than any exceptional beauty.... I had the sudden hunch that this girl, if given a little help, might go places.” Indeed there was nothing spectacular about Tallichet’s looks; what captured Lombard’s attention was the girl’s sweet disposition and that lilting Texas flavor to every word she spoke.

  Carole leveled her ice blue eyes on the startled publicity assistant. “Yes I do,” said Lombard, “and I’m going to do something about it.”

  Tallichet remembered, “And it wasn’t a week until she did.”

  Carole arranged for the girl she nicknamed “Talli” to sign with up-and-coming agent Zeppo Marx, whom she knew from his days working on the Paramount lot with his three better-known brothers, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico. In one of those lucky coincidences that seemed to happen around Lombard, her latest cause caught fire thanks to David Selznick’s epic in the works, Gone With the Wind, still two years from cameras rolling. Selznick’s head of publicity, Russell Birdwell, known as “Birdie,” saw in the Lombard-grooming-Tallichet story an opportunity to prove to David Selznick his abilities as a publicity man.

  “At Carole’s behest,” drawled Tallichet, “Zeppo took me to Selznick International and introduced me there. I got one of those stock contracts. Selznick was pleasant; I was terrified. I was a jelly of fear.”

  Birdwell asked his boss to let Tallichet do a walk-on with a line of dialogue in the Selznick picture then in production, A Star Is Born. Birdwell’s press release labeled the girl Lombard’s “discovery,” and while the publicity man only sought placement in the papers, Carole’s interest was genuine, and ongoing.

  Lombard invited Talli to the Bel Air farm, and also to Petey’s house in Beverly Hills where the newcomer met the Peters crowd. Carole gave Talli a boost inside Paramount’s walls by being seen with her often, arms locked, carrying on. Lombard, probably at Birdwell’s urging, served as Tallichet’s makeup girl when it came time to shoot her A Star Is Born walk-on, but the final gesture was all Carole. Said Tallichet, “I remember going with her to see John Engstead shoot a series of still photos of her.” Engstead was, with George Hurrell, among the most sought-after portrait artists in Hollywood. As they chatted during the session, it occurred to Lombard that Engstead portraits would benefit Talli, so Carole made the appointment and paid for the session.

  “She was kind and generous, unbelievably so,” Tallichet drawled years later with undiminished astonishment. “This combination of energy and generosity.”

  David Selznick soon sent Margaret Tallichet off for a year of dramatic lessons and when she returned to Hollywood, she met and fell in love with director William Wyler. Her film career would consist of a half-dozen pictures, only one of which is remembered today. Tallichet played the endangered female lead in Stranger on the Third Floor, a thriller made at RKO in 1940 starring Peter Lorre in one of his creepiest roles. It remains a cult favorite, although Tallichet was loath to remember Stranger afterward and lived out her life better known as Mrs. William Wyler in a marriage that produced four children and endured until William Wyler’s death in 1981. It was a path that Lombard set Talli on, and the would-be ingénue remained forever grateful.

  15. Hoping Against Hope

  By 9:00 on the night of January 16, 1942, telephone lines were lit up all over Las Vegas. The police had now received calls from the Blue Diamond Mine, from men working the trains in Arden, from several other citizens across the Las Vegas area, and from the constable down in Goodsprings. Las Vegas police sent a response team directly to Blue Diamond where police cars, ambulances with doctors and nurses, and even an army truck roared in with sirens screaming over Blue Diamond Road to the mine itself, and Dan Yanich and Ora Salyer could but watch the parade of rescue vehicles careen up the treacherous access road and pull to a stop in their facility. The pair stared blankly and pointed at a distant blob of flame 10 miles off to the south in the deepened night and observed shocked reactions of the responders.

  Some of the first would-be rescuers stayed behind, including Las Vegas Mayor Howell “Hal” Garrison—also the local undertaker—and others headed back to town. One of these was Clark County road supervisor Jack Moore, who also served as a deputy sheriff. Back in Las Vegas, Moore entered a police station buzzing with activity, men drinking coffee and poring over maps, smoking cigarettes, many offering opinions about where the plane was and how it should be accessed. Faces were drawn and gray, and the name Carole Lombard hung on the air as Moore nudged his way through the crowd.

  After seeing the flames from the Blue Diamond, Jack Moore had a good idea where the plane was up on the ridges of Potosi Mountain, and he figured that the only way to get to that spot was by way of Goodsprings. Now, he learned new information: A pilot had just flown over the crash scene and landed at the airport. Moore dashed north to the terminal and had to show his badge to gain admittance at the outer gate. As he climbed out of his car he could still see a pinpoint of flame on the distant mountain. He rushed into the TWA and Western Airlines station at McCarran Field to find that pilot.

  Capt. Art Cheney and some airport men, including Chuck Duffy, stood around a map and Cheney was pointing at the site of the crash when Moore walked up. The spot under the pilot’s finger was well southwest of Arden and above Goodsprings. In other words, it was the no man’s land of Potosi Mountain. A fellow in the group who serviced the airplane beacons in that area was adamant: The only way in was over the Goodsprings Road to the old Ninety-Nine Mine Road. It was rough going all the way by any sort of vehicle, and at some point that road would be washed out and impassable. Then God help anyone continuing on by foot and then trying to climb the cliffs to the place wh
ere that plane probably went down. According to Capt. Cheney it was in the saddle of the mountain up near the peak, against sheer rockface.

  Jack Moore piped up and asked if there was any road at all to the peak of the mountain. “Nope,” came the answer. Moore wasn’t a supervisor and a deputy for nothing. He was a man who got things done. He searched the room for a phone, found one, and called the sheriff’s office and asked that a message be forwarded to Sheriff Ward, wherever he was, and to Mayor Garrison out at Blue Diamond. Moore said both men must be told that the plane hit Potosi Mountain above Goodsprings and that Deputy Sheriff Jack Moore would be taking a party in by that way. By Goodsprings. He hung up the phone.

  “Well, boys,” said Moore, “that’s our play.” He grabbed Deputy Sheriff George Bondley and a couple of other fellows. They stuffed as many sandwiches and tangerines, then in season, in their pockets as would fit and then grabbed some flashlights, shovels, and rope, threw these in the trunk of Moore’s car and then they piled in. Robert Griffith of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce came rushing up and asked to go along. Moore hesitated—this was a businessman—but he said OK, and with the four other men he sped off toward the highway for the trip south to Goodsprings.

  Ideally, he could grab a Caterpillar tractor to blaze a trail when the road ran out, but there wasn’t time. Nobody knew if there were survivors up on the mountain. That Western Airlines captain had painted a grim picture, but nobody knew for sure if any of the passengers on the plane had spilled out into deep snow before the explosion. The drifts up there could hit 15 or 20 feet in places and any survivors could freeze to death pretty fast. It had already been three hours since impact had been reported. Three long hours, way too long, and help was still hours away, he knew, because Jack Moore was the help and here they were, speeding along but far from their objective.