Kanin developed a crush on Lombard, like they all did. He wrote about her in one of his books and attempted to preserve for posterity the Lombard he knew:
“Don’t be too hard on me,” Carole said one day, when we were having difficulty achieving the necessary effect. “I’m pretty tired. I’m getting on, you know.”
“Getting on, for God’s sake. You’re what?” I asked. “Thirty-four? Thirty-five?”
“Why you son of a bitch no good dirty bastard,” she said. “Thirty-one. I’m thirty-one.”
“You’re thirty-two,” I said.
“Oh, you knew that, huh?”
“Certainly. I know all about you.”
“So if you knew I was thirty-two, why did you say thirty-four?”
“I wonder that myself, Carole.”
“I know why,” she said. “It’s because you’re nothing but a goddamn—man.”
Another man, the famous Clark Gable, knocked her up again, and another miscarriage deepened her feelings of confusion over her aspirations—could she be wife, mother, and viable screen star? Could she even carry a pregnancy to term? She had always suffered heavy and long-lasting menstrual flows, and with her latest problems conceiving, a desperate Lombard sought help. She was referred to Dr. Richard W. TeLinde at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. TeLinde was then gaining a national reputation for his work in the field of gynecology. Trouble was, Lombard didn’t want the world to know her business, particularly this business, and here Howard Strickling and Otto Winkler stepped in to create a story that Gable would need to travel east to see about an old injury to his right shoulder dating back to production of the 1936 disaster epic San Francisco.
After the Gables’ quiet Christmas at home, Winkler announced that they were heading east on December 26, 1940. They arrived in Washington, D.C., on Saturday the 28th, saw the sights along the National Mall and then toured Mount Vernon, where, according to Jean Garceau, “Carole had the best time of all.” Lombard liked George Washington’s style and wanted to take some Early American decorating ideas back to the Encino ranch.
“I knew this was going to cost me money,” groused Gable.
The Gables accepted an invitation from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to sit in on his Sunday evening, December 29, “fireside chat” radio broadcast on national security, what would become known to history as the Arsenal of Democracy speech. It was a long, grim monologue about the threat of the Axis powers, Germany, Japan, and Italy. Roosevelt discussed the raging Battle of Britain, and said in small part, “If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun—a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military.”
FDR’s tough talk to jolt Americans out of their isolationist malaise hit Lombard hard. She had been anti-war up to that point, but it was difficult not to see the handwriting on this particular wall, especially coming from the one man in the world she admired above all others.
The mood at the White House brightened later in the evening when FDR and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt questioned Gable and Lombard “closely about the film industry and their careers,” reported Garceau. “He was most interested, for he was aware of the publicity Carole had garnered in 1937 when she paid 85 percent of the $465,000 she earned that year in state and federal income taxes and announced that she was glad to do it because she was proud of being an American.”
The next morning Gable and Lombard were driven to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where they reported for study. By now Strickling and Winkler had managed to bungle the fabricated story, which started to unravel when the “shoulder injury” would require Gable to be hospitalized three or four days. In one release to the press the shoulder injury occurred “several months ago,” and in the next it was traced back to 1933. Somehow word leaked that Lombard was undergoing examination as well as Gable, leading the press to all new questioning. On Thursday, January 2, it was announced that Gable would have a tooth extracted to solve his “shoulder problem”; as reporters stood bewildered on that account, suddenly it was announced that Lombard would undergo a surgical procedure that same day, January 2. The dilation and curettage performed by Dr. TeLinde, his specialty, cleaned out tissue remaining from her early 1940 miscarriage and, she hoped, restored Carole’s ability to conceive.
By afternoon that same eventful Thursday, Howard Strickling was denying that Lombard was having any sort of medical procedure, but she did, as confirmed by the fact that Lombard and Gable returned home less than a week later, but embarked Thursday, January 9, on a month-long hunting trip to Mexico during which, friends said, Carole jumped Clark’s bones at every opportunity in earnest attempts to get herself in the family way once again.
19. Road King
At 3:30 in the morning, 45-year-old Warren Earl Carey, lugging his worn suitcase, pushed open the lobby door of the Hotel Amarillo and stepped to the curb. In the dead quiet a cab sat there waiting and the driver hurried out, took Warren’s suitcase, and set it on the front seat of the cab. The cabbie opened the door, and Carey eased his weary body into the back seat. There wasn’t much to do at noon in Amarillo, Texas, let alone at 3:30 A.M.
The cabbie climbed into the car and closed his door. “English Field,” Carey forced himself to say, and the cab pulled away from the curb. Carey had gotten a few hours’ sleep in an otherwise brutal passage toward his home in Los Angeles after a safety conference in Washington, D.C. Flying was such a dicey enterprise these days, airlines flying here and there but often late. Recently, many flights has been delayed or diverted due to various security issues related to the war—restricted airspace, blackouts and signal beacons darkened, commandeering of civilian flights for troop movements, and spot fuel shortages. Now he held a ticket on American Airlines that would take him to Boulder City, Nevada, to catch a ride home to Los Angeles. Home. Home and Wilma awaited. He smiled at the very thought.
“Sad thing,” called the cab driver over his shoulder. “Very sad.”
Warren tried to engage his mind. He found the exercise like trying to turn over an automobile engine on a frosty morning. His mind was as foggy as it should have been in the middle of the night after skipping from time zone to time zone for days. He couldn’t figure out what this man was going on about. “You say something’s sad?” Carey let out. “What’s sad?”
“Why, the crash,” said the cabbie in surprise, as if Carey should have known. As if everybody should have known. “The plane crash out in California somewhere.”
Warren Carey awakened with a jolt. “Oh? A plane crash? I hadn’t heard,” he said, sitting up at attention, propping himself forward to hear.
“Oh, yeah,” said the driver. “Some TWA plane went down in some mountains. Nobody knows where. That actress was on the plane. You know, the funny one. And a bunch of Army boys. From what they’re saying, it looks bad.”
Actress? Army boys? Carey wanted his mind to catch up, to rev into coherent thought but found it tough. Even through the cotton of his thoughts, Carey could imagine what lay ahead. All crashes were bad, all broke your heart, especially when your livelihood meant stepping into the middle of it and making sense of the nonsensical.
“Say, what takes you to the airport in the middle of the night?” asked the cabbie.
“I’m heading home,” said Carey, and then corrected himself. “I was heading home, but I’m not now.”
“You a businessman or somethin’?”
“Civil Aeronautics Board,” said Carey. “Senior safety man.”
The cabbie shot him a hot glance in the rear view mirror, and in the last faint lights of town before they headed into prairie, Warren Carey saw something in the cabbie’s eyes. Sympathy, or awe, or something.
“Tell me wh
at you’ve heard about this crash,” Carey said. “Where? When? Anything you’ve heard.”
“I saw a newspaper at the coffee shop,” said the cabbie, “and heard some radio reports. A plane full of people and that actress, Carole Lombard, went into the mountains, oh, where was it. California—Nevada—somewhere near the border in rough country. They’re out hunting for the plane right now.”
It was no wonder that Carey hadn’t heard; they wouldn’t have known to reach him at the Hotel Amarillo because he hadn’t known he’d be there. He looked about him at the ink-black Texas night. “How about stepping on it and get me out to English Field? I need to make some calls, find out what’s going on.”
“Sure thing, mac,” said the cabbie, and the intake of gas into the Road King’s six-cylinder engine smacked Warren Carey’s back against his seat, and they flew the rest of the way to the air field.
20. A Flame to Many Moths
Carole Lombard still couldn’t get herself in a family way. Said the Gables’ friend Buster Collier of Carole and Clark, “They spent a lot of time in the sack and tried every position to try to get pregnant.” Carole entered 1941 in the third year of a career swoon. She witnessed the release of her two most recent RKO dramatic pictures and recoiled in horror at the results. Vigil in the Night, an overwrought hospital drama, lost an astonishing $327,000, and the Kanin-directed They Knew What They Wanted, about love and deceit in the California wine country, lost almost as much. Lombard and Kanin should have listened to the advice of Orson Welles, who warned they might ruin their picture. Once again the career waters had grown treacherous.
Even in the midst of her slump, Carole remained viable and desired as one-half of the most perfect couple in Hollywood. She had always been a competitor, and despite quotes to the press about retiring to raise a family, the failed attempts at conception, not to mention failed dramatic pictures, left her stuck in Encino at the farm more than she wanted. She conveyed to a reporter what burned in her blood: “There’s been a lot of talk about me retiring from the screen, and I’ve thought a lot about it. There have been times when I thought I wanted to, but the only thing that could bring that about would be a baby. Even then, I really couldn’t quit. I’ve said I could, and now I know better. This business is in my blood. I don’t mean acting, I mean making movies. God, I love it.”
She found herself unable to stay away from the set. Said Garson Kanin of making They Knew What They Wanted, “On days when she wasn’t required, she would drive in anyway, all the way from the Valley. The first time she turned up on one of those days, I panicked, certain there had been a mistake.”
“What’re you doing here?” I asked. “You’re not called today.”
“Piss off!” she said. “I’m on this picture.”
Said Kanin, “She wanted to be around, to stay with the feel of things. She did not want to lose the momentum of the work.”
Or as Lombard would describe when asked of her aspirations, “I grew up in Hollywood, and this is my culture. But produce [pictures], maybe, and don’t laugh. If I had my choice of being anybody else, I think I’d rather be David Selznick.”
The Hollywood of 1940 limited women to certain crafts—some wrote scripts or doctored them; others worked in wardrobe, hair and makeup, or script notation. Most often women in Hollywood worked in offices as secretaries and typists. But Lombard now considered moving behind the camera as a producer or even a director and spoke openly about “women emancipated from masculine domination” and “a different social order brought about by economic independence.” It was all part of a Petey-influenced, progressive nature that would take Hollywood by storm a couple of generations later.
Carole’s restlessness had become common knowledge around Hollywood, where her absence was felt at all the old haunts. “Where, oh where, has the Carole of yesterday gone?” a writer at Modern Screen magazine asked. “…The Carole of the press gatherings, the portrait galleries, the Venice Pier, the Carole who was Hollywood’s favorite Party Girl—what has happened to her? Days past you never had to look twice to find her. In headlines, at preview microphones, in most anyone’s front parlor. She was always there, and conspicuously. But now Carole is the needle in the Hollywood haystack.”
The “party girl” had also grown weary of Gable’s constant taking, taking, taking, and unwillingness to give an inch. Rumors of separation found their way into print and onto radio, where a report by the closest thing to a shock jock in Hollywood at the time, Jimmy Fidler, particularly stung.
Now more than ever she threw energy behind her causes. She had struck up a friendship with young RKO contract player Lucille Ball, who had been kicking around the studio in smaller parts in “A” pictures and larger parts in “B’s,” for five years. RKO had made some important pictures and introduced Astaire and Rogers to the world, but more often made bad business decisions that resulted in red ink. Ball would later quote Lombard as advising, “Tell the sons-a-bitches to give you a break. You’ve got something. Tell them I said they’re missing the boat again.” Lombard advised Ball to follow the comedy path and gave her the playbook on “studio behavior,” from how to negotiate off the casting couch to how to drop names. When Lucy married Desi Arnaz at the end of November 1940, the Gables threw a champagne supper party for the newlyweds at Chasen’s on Beverly Boulevard, and visits by Ball and Arnaz to the ranch in Encino would influence their decision to establish a home in the San Fernando Valley.
Yet Lombard was at sea and shopping for good scripts with no success. At just the wrong moment, sashaying onto an MGM soundstage and into Gable’s life strutted a 5-foot-3, blonde-headed bundle of raw sex all of 21 years old named Lana Turner, co-star of the new Gable picture, Honky Tonk. Lana had been dubbed the “Sweater Girl” for obvious reasons and had already proved in Hollywood to be as easy to conquer as the Maginot Line.
Turner was an insecure girl who sought approval through sex, behavior practiced by Gable from his teens on. So potent a female was Lana Turner that Lombard found it difficult to look the other way this time; Carole found Lana too young, too blonde, too perfect, and way too much on the make. Lombard understood because she had been Lana Turner not so long ago—an up-and-coming young starlet wielding formidable sexual power over the ruling male population of Hollywood. This wasn’t another Virginia Grey, some sweet lost soul who recognized in Gable a kindred spirit; Lana Turner was trouble, and Lombard went to battle stations.
Carole and Lana butted heads because they now shared feelings of insecurity; Carole over passing 30 childless, her career sliding, and Lana over a lack of self-worth and hunger for validation. Said fellow Hollywood bombshell Ava Gardner, “Lana pushed too hard with men and pushed them away. I guess she felt needy somewhere inside.”
Lana would never admit to an affair with Gable but in her memoir, she owned up to a fear of Carole when she told of rehearsing a clinch with Gable on the Honky Tonk soundstage. It was a moment they both enjoyed; Lana called it “a wonderful chemical rapport” with Clark Gable, lips to lips, for director Jack Conway’s assessment prior to committing the scene to film. Conway called a break. Lana said she “turned around and froze. There was beloved Carole Lombard.” The piercing stare of Lombard’s icy blue eyes devastated Lana, who fled the soundstage.
When Lombard saw how effective the appearance had been, she kept showing up on the set and unnerving Turner until MGM brass asked the fireball to knock it off.
A chagrined wife looked on as Honky Tonk went box office in blockbuster style and assured a follow-up. Meanwhile, Carole’s latest release, the comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith, had scored in the black, and that’s what mattered to Lombard, the bottom line. Alfred Hitchcock had attracted her to the property; Hitchcock was hot after his massive success with Rebecca, and Carole knew enough to ride coattails when she could, and even to exploit Hitch’s attraction to blondes, which everybody knew about. He was an absolute sucker for the dames.
On the Hitchcock soundstage she had done her usual part to keep the on-s
et proceedings light, as when she directed Hitch’s obligatory cameo—a simple stroll in front of a department-store building, walking through the frame. She asked him to repeat the walk over, and over, and over. He could never get it quite right, or so she kept telling him. It was good-natured payback for the director who had recently and famously said that actors were no more than cattle to be herded.
When the comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith performed well at the box office, Carole admitted to herself that she did best in comedy and that’s where the public accepted her. She saw reason now to hope for a career revival and decided to make herself more attractive to prospective employers. She instructed her new agent, Gable’s good friend Nat Wolff, to offer her at a discounted rate and negotiate for a percentage of the net profit (if any) for the picture. Lombard had dreamed up the idea of profit participation a few years earlier, reasoning that a lower up-front salary and a cut of the profits would be a win-win for anyone hiring her. It landed her work all right, even if recent pictures had stunk up the joint. In another decade profit participation would be all the rage, particularly at Universal International, and make independent players like James Stewart a fortune.
For appearing in a new picture called To Be or Not to Be, about to go into production at United Artists, Wolff got Lombard a salary of $75,000 plus 4.0837 percent of the net profit from the picture. After that, she would make a comedy at Columbia called He Kissed the Bride, and then a picture at Universal with what she felt was tremendous potential, a sequel of sorts to My Man Godfrey entitled, appropriately enough, My Girl Godfrey about a woman so desperate to audition for a Broadway producer that she becomes a maid in his household. Comedies one and all.
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