Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  Lt. William Hunt of the Army Air Corps began the collection of bodies, leading his detail from McCarran Field. Already Eddie Mannix had visited Maj. Anderson at McCarran to urge in the strongest possible terms that the first bodies removed from the scene must be Carole Lombard and her mother, Elizabeth Peters. Eddie Mannix was a jovial enough man on the surface, but something sinister lurked just beneath the surface. Not even a major in the United States Army was going to say no. It would not have mattered in any event, because MGM corporate out of Culver City had already been heating up the phone lines with Washington to ensure that the remains of Mrs. Gable and Mrs. Peters were given all due respect. Studio bosses were, after all, practical men, and they needed their asset Clark Gable back within the arms of the studio family, and his terms for leaving were clear: Ma, Petey, and Otto must be with him when he departed.

  One of the civilian volunteers that day working on body recovery under Lt. Hunt’s direction was Harry Pursel, a wholesaler from Las Vegas. “When we first arrived, there were several bodies lying clear of the wreckage,” he said of the Army personnel, some of which had no obvious signs of injury, “and which we picked up.” The first of these bodies lay in deep snow—those that the coroner thought might have survived the crash. Then up on the cliffs a bit, the team recovered two more Army men who had been splattered onto rock. All five were wrapped in brown army blankets and laid aside, and then the task grew more difficult and the search for Carole Lombard more focused.

  The recovery team climbed up the steep slope and crossed the fire line from snow to charred earth, the result of the three-hour gasoline and oil fire of tremendous ferocity that had been seen for miles. Inside the fire line were five more charred bodies, more or less intact, and it seemed as if they too had spilled out when the plane cracked in two. As grisly as the idea would have seemed even a day earlier, Lt. Hunt fell to all fours and examined each body, and it appeared from their military-style buttons, attire, and general body features that all five were Army Ferrying Command personnel. But it was getting harder to make a determination.

  Harry Pursel helped to characterize the nature of the crash when asked later if seat belts were still fastened around the passengers. He responded, “You couldn’t find any belts.”

  Warren Carey, chief investigator for Civil Aeronautics Board Region Six, had finally made his way from Amarillo to Fort Worth to Los Angeles, then had gotten home, showered, dressed, and climbed in his car for a six-hour drive through the desert to reach the base of the mountain. Then he had climbed to this spot: the ledge above the wreckage. There he sketched the large and small pieces of the plane and the contours of the land, marking with an X the bodies as they were recovered. The feds were doing all they could to preserve the evidence for later determination of what the hell had happened up here 36 hours earlier.

  Mannix had struggled onto a scene unlike anything from motion pictures. Wheelwright had fallen out of line and Eddie was alone now, barely holding himself upright by hugging pine trees and gasping for a decent breath in the thin air of 7,800 feet above sea level as he watched the military personnel, federal agents, and civilians crawl over the junkyard of a scene like ants swarming an anthill. He saw the Army guys wrapping some bodies in brown blankets and Mannix had to scramble over and ask Lt. Hunt, had they found Carole Lombard? No, came the answer.

  It was ominously quiet except for the constant clinking of metal. Shattered aluminum met every footfall, tumbling against rocks and more aluminum in a constant, maddening tinkle, like nightmarish wind chimes. It was the only sound most of the time, as the men were too tense, too focused to utter a word, working as they were in a human butcher shop. Each knew he must do the one thing he didn’t want to do: Search every dark place, every crevice, every shadow and examine each victim to locate the once-beautiful, once-vibrant, and once-very-much-alive Carole Lombard.

  The search team struggled up the 45-degree-angled mountainside of loose shale, limestone, and twisted metal and approached the cliffs where the plane had impacted. They knew the exact spot because the smashed nose of the plane stuck out from the rock. To the left of them in a twisted mass of aluminum lay the fuselage and only parts of bodies could be seen there, ground to bits large and small, and the search team didn’t want to think about the task of dealing with that. Instead they stared at sections of the right wing leaning against the base of the cliff. They headed toward the wreckage to attempt to move it but were stopped. The Civil Aeronautics men wanted more photos, so the searchers stood down while a series of photos were taken of the scene.

  Finally, the search detail reached the center section of the right wing. Painted in black on the silver aluminum of the 10-foot wing section laying against the cliff wall were the giant letters NC 1946.

  Among the reporters on the scene was 26-year-old Gene Sherman of the Los Angeles Times. Sherman had a way with words that he would use to cover the war in the Pacific on the front lines in 1944 and 1945 with his column “Pacific Echoes,” and he would earn a Pulitzer Prize a generation later for his coverage of drug trafficking between Mexico and southern California. Sherman painted a chilling picture of the mountaintop that Sunday morning: “The totally demolished, luxurious Douglas DC-3 ‘Sky Club’ presented a grim, sorrowful picture on its rocky resting place. Wreckage was scattered in a radius of 500 yards and some of the victims were strewn around the waist-high snow. Bits of the plane, personal effects of the passengers, including handkerchiefs, overcoats and other apparel, were strung from the branches of stunted pine trees like macabre Christmas ornaments.”

  Associated Press photographer Ira Guldner said, “The big ship was shattered to pieces against this big rock cliff. Some of it still clung in a crevice. Bodies of the victims and oil made dark splotches on the white snow. Some of what we saw is too gruesome to talk about.”

  “As fast as we located the bodies,” said Pursel, “we would take them and wrap them in the blankets and prepare to take them out.”

  Gruesome work indeed. A cowboy named Tommy Young, one of the civilian volunteers, described the task facing the Army detail of Lt. Hunt and the civilians that January Sunday: “There was just parts of bodies everywhere you looked, everywhere. At first we tried getting bits that went together, but reached a point where we was just grabbing pieces and stuffing them into bags.” Army blankets weren’t effective for pieces of bodies. The most convenient receptacles available were mail bags hauled up the mountain by the postal inspectors to secure mail that had survived. Of the collected remains, said Young decades later, “Some went down the mountain with two left legs in the same sack. I’ve never seen nothin’ like that before or since. I still see it in my dreams sometimes.”

  They climbed the steep slope, so steep the men fell and stood upright and went down again, landing on wreckage, bodies, and parts of bodies. The higher they climbed, ever closer to the point of collision, the bodies grew more indistinct, smaller pieces or burned torsos or bodies crushed by impact. Ahead of them now rose the jagged cliff, burned black in places from the fire, and splattered in other places with oil.

  Against the cliff lay parts of wing. Prior to moving the wing the men found five victims who had been hurled forward by the force of impact and gone straight into the cliff at nearly 200 miles per hour and then dropped to the base. So many sacks of potatos.

  Pursel and Pat Clark, owner of the El Rio Garage in Las Vegas, worked with the Army detail to lever aside a section of wing to see what lay underneath. There they found three bodies. One of these appeared to be male, and two seemed to be female. A general commotion ensued, not something uttered in a shout but nonetheless communicated on some inaudible frequency among the assembled men on the mountainside, like the vibrations that accompany an earthquake. Men drifted or skittered across the steep surface and stumbled or slid or fell to congregate in a single spot, looking down at two burned bodies on the rocky earth. “Some of the bodies seemed to have almost been cremated,” said a reporter. One of the two they beheld near the wing h
ad been burned beyond all recognition but had a smallish appearance that they guessed to be female. The other that lay beside her had also been subject to the funeral pyre, but there was something about it, something distinctive and familiar and oh, so repulsive, for the grievous damage done. Scorched by the fire, multiple fractures to every bone of her body, including the skull.

  “I don’t think she was over five feet from the wall of the mountain,” said Pat Clark. “She was buried in the snow.”

  The body was carefully turned over. Underneath her Pat Clark found a half-charred envelope and retrieved it. He held in his hand crumbling bits of paper that fell apart by the second. It was, said Gene Sherman, standing alongside Clark, a belonging of Carole Lombard, “schedules of her personal appearances to promote the sale of Defense Bonds in her home state of Indiana, correspondence between her and her studio and data on a radio program to have been given on behalf of Latin-American countries.” Pat Clark dropped the papers and fragments of papers into the gloved palms of Lt. Hunt, who recognized their importance, looked up, and saw Eddie Mannix. Hunt called Mannix over. They looked down on what was left of the poor souls found under the wing. A fire that had risen hundreds of feet had burned above them for three hours, and yet the aluminum wing and the snow had shielded the remains to some extent. The one body, Mannix could make nothing of. It was little more than blackened bones, but the other—

  The left arm was missing and the head clung to the body by just a thread of blackened tissue. Ralph Wheelwright would identify the body later at the mortuary in Las Vegas and said he could imagine, despite multiple facial fractures, “the general contours of her face.” Hints of that square jaw and high forehead remained, although seared into leathery relief. Eddie Mannix would make the identification of the mortal remains of Carole Lombard by “her hair. The top of her hair was still on her.” And a patch of it remained blonde. PR man Howard Strickling—who spent Sunday keeping a weather eye on Gable and did not climb Potosi—would call it “a single wisp of blonde hair,” but there was nothing quite so poetic to be found on the mountainside this day.

  They all stood there, all the recovery men, in a circle in the oppressive silence and shivered in the cold. Somebody thought to ask for a silent prayer for all those on board the crashed airliner, and especially for a brave woman and patriot, Carole Lombard.

  Mannix only now remembered: her wedding ring. Where was her wedding ring? Gable would want that, but the left arm was gone. He looked about him at utter chaos, utter destruction. There was no telling where the ring had ended up.

  Impossibly, something red on the torso of Lombard’s corpse caught Mannix’s attention. It was a jewel. A ruby, part of the matching diamond-and-ruby clips that Lombard always wore attached to her clothing. Everybody who knew Lombard knew those clips; they had been part of her look since Gable had presented them to her and went with her to all social occasions. Mannix reached down and as best he could, as carefully, his fingertips numb, he retrieved the quarter-sized fragment and slipped it in his pocket.

  Suddenly, the most important search was over. Carole Lombard had been found and confirmed dead, and the newspapermen in the group made a mad dash down the mountain to communicate the news as the Army detail and civilian volunteers went on with the task of gathering up bodies, a chore they would relive in nightmares for the remainder of their lives.

  35. The Fatal Flaw

  Fiction about the recovery effort at the crash site of Flight 3 endures today, all of it generated by Howard Strickling, proving his reputation as the top publicity man at MGM. Strickling would write that Mannix had stopped at a way station on the mountain to telegraph news to Gable of the identification of Lombard. Strickling then invented a touching scene in which MGM man Don McElwaine approached Gable in his room at the El Rancho. Strickling’s version, run verbatim by the press, stated:

  “Bad news?” said Gable to McElwaine.

  “I’m afraid it looks hopeless,” McElwaine replied.

  “God,” moaned Gable.

  “What,” asked McElwaine, “are you going to do?”

  Gable shook himself, as if to shoulder away the shock, and replied that he would remain here until the bodies of his bride, her mother, and Otto Winkler, his press agent and close friend, were brought down.

  Strickling also broadcast far and wide that Gable had been a rock for all of his pals who had journeyed to Vegas and congregated at the El Rancho, and even had befriended rescuers and offered to buy dentures for a toothless old prospector who had helped to search for the plane.

  But Gable did not “shoulder away the shock” because Gable was too occupied being in shock to function on Sunday, January 18. In a warm and quiet bungalow at the El Rancho Vegas, Eddie Mannix told Gable that he had seen and identified Carole’s remains. Then he placed in Gable’s hand the piece of jewelry he had recovered. Gable looked down at it, at only a battered fragment of one of the two clips, which spoke of the violence of his wife’s death. It brought to mind once again the question he had been asking for almost two days: Had she suffered? Did she know?

  Mannix had been where the plane had crashed and he had heard enough from the experts crawling over the scene to be able to meet Gable’s gaze and tell him, “She never knew what happened.”

  The king nodded and eased over to the window to gaze at the peaks of Potosi Mountain far off to the southwest. Eddie and Ralph had been up there and seen everything and now Ma really was dead. The hunk of gold and gemstones, heavy in his hand, proved it. He had been crazy to hold out hope anyway, but that’s what a crazy mind will do, imagine your wife stumbling through the snow for help after the crash of her plane, but this wasn’t Lost Horizon and people didn’t walk away from scenes like that. People died in scenes like that. Ma had died, and now she was gone and she wasn’t coming back. Ahead was just blackness. Imagining the barn and the fields without her, the house without her, the station wagon—life itself without her. She was just gone, and it seemed all of a sudden like forever that he had even seen her, heard her. It wasn’t even a week ago, that Sunday night when they had fought, screamed, slammed doors, hated, and been so goddamn sure of themselves that they hadn’t even said good-bye. He knew he had hurt her, as she had hurt him. The two tough guys had mauled each other and retired bloody to their corners, as they so often did. Last Sunday. Now it was Sunday again, and they would never have another chance to maul each other because Ma was gone for good. She had placed a curse on him by leaving this earth without saying good-bye, without properly making up, and there was nothing he would ever in this life be able to do about it. Oh, sure, they had exchanged telegrams, they had spoken on the phone, and he had sent flowers. But she was up on that mountain and gone because she had been too impatient to get back home and make up, or get back home and check up, and that was the end of it. Dead and gone.

  It had never seemed that her impatience might be a fatal flaw. He had seen it many times, in many ways. She was a charge-ahead-and-take-that-hill kind of a girl who feared absolutely nothing, but a little fear now and again would have done her some good. She didn’t seem to fear Lana because she would show up on the set and glare right through Lana and just be there, and the girl would go to pieces, but maybe Ma feared Lana after all because she felt compelled to be there on the soundstage in the first place and menace the poor kid.

  He stared off at the snow-capped mountain, the one that had killed his wife. There it was, no mistaking it, standing there in the glare of late afternoon sunlight. Mannix and Wheelwright were trying to warm themselves and were feeling every scrape and bruise from their trip. Before heading down from the crash scene, Mannix had spoken with Lt. Hunt, and it seemed clear that the two bodies discovered together were Carole and Mrs. Peters, and they were being brought down the mountain right this minute.

  But 33 miles distant at the crash scene, all was not going well. There simply was no easy way to get the bodies out. With the mountain’s inhuman angles and sheer drops, they couldn’t be taken out the wa
y the men had come up. A team of cowboys and prospectors had determined that the only course was to hoist the bodies up the cliff to the peak of the mountain ridge where horses and mules would haul the remains along a circuitous route that traversed dangerous precipices and eventually eased down the mountain and met with trucks four miles off.

  Carole Lombard’s body was placed delicately in a brown Army blanket, as was that of Elizabeth Peters. Both were bundled securely, and after hundred-foot ropes were dropped from the heights above, the blanketed bodies were lashed to these ropes and then hoisted by a team of men to the waiting horses and loaded on their backs. Carole Lombard had loved horses and ridden the range in Encino; now her last ride would be frozen and ponderous aboard careful animals led by men on foot, stepping gingerly at the edge of thousand-foot drops. The remains of seven Army Air Corps personnel, those least mangled in the crash, were lifted up the same way and also loaded on pack animals for the somber procession down the mountain. The rescuers found it to be tense, exhausting work that produced fear and frostbite as darkness closed in.

  By the end of the day, with guards poised to spend the night at the scene, 13 crash victims remained, although Lt. Hunt already knew that he wouldn’t be able to produce 13 bodies. To reach a final count of 22, he was going to have to match 22 of something, whether it was heads or left feet or some other parts, because the simple fact was that he couldn’t scrape together anything approaching 22 complete bodies after a crash like this.