Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  36. The Complication

  Jack Benny did not perform his scripted Sunday night program, the most listened-to radio show in the nation. Big-band music filled the slot. The news of Lombard’s death had shattered the gentle comic—he and Carole were due to meet up at the sneak preview of To Be or Not to Be, which he knew during production would be “the best picture I ever made.” The preview was to have been Monday evening at the Academy Theater in Inglewood. Now it would never happen, and Benny shared the nightmare of Gable, Robert Stack, and so many others.

  Benny could never talk about the death of Carole Lombard; it was too personal. The closest he could come was to speak of her in his memoir, of a New Year’s Eve party at the Benny home given by Mary Livingston. Benny had fallen asleep during the festivities and awoke at nine o’clock the following morning. He said: “The party was still in progress, although only four revelers lingered on. They sat on the floor sipping champagne. They were telling stories and laughing their heads off. The four people were Honey and Don Ameche and Carole Lombard and Clark Gable. They had never left. Mary couldn’t have been happier. It was the best New Year’s Eve party I’ve ever been to. All six of us went into the dining room and had popovers and scrambled eggs and bacon and the most delicious coffee you ever drank.… It was a real good party.”

  That was long ago in a different world, a world without Joshua trees and cactus, parched earth and killer granite. At 9:00 on the evening of Sunday, January 18, Carole Lombard’s burned and mangled body lay on a gurney next to another bearing the remains of Elizabeth Peters. Seven other bodies, including the Army boys who had been tossed into the snow, lay on the floor at the Garrison Mortuary at 515 Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas. No photographers were present out of respect to the live king and his dead queen, although reporters milled around the front of the building and shared notes, smoked, drank coffee, and waited.

  Within the city, Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling exerted pressure on Clark County authorities to keep the process moving to get the bodies officially identified and released for a return to Los Angeles, while MGM corporate did the same from Culver City. To achieve this feat, an inquest must be conjured up for the two sets of remains. Strickling had tracked down the dentist who had worked on the teeth of both Carole and her mother and had their dental records flown directly to Las Vegas in anticipation of the identification process.

  Forest Lawn Glendale was on alert for a funeral service to take place on Wednesday, and the thought was to inter Carole and Petey in the Great Mausoleum, a magnificent edifice with a stained glass mural of the Last Supper and an 80-foot spire. The structure, half church and half fortress, nestled into a Glendale hillside, and here rested for eternity the remains of Marie Dressler, Russ Columbo, Irving Thalberg, and Jean Harlow. It was the “in” place for the Hollywood crowd to be laid to rest.

  At 10 P.M. Sunday, Deputy Coroner Lawrence convened a hearing at the courthouse to officially identify Carole Lombard and establish a cause of death. Three citizens of Las Vegas sat in as jurors, and a stenographer took the oath and prepared to take statements. Present were Roger Foley, attorney for TWA, Eddie Mannix and Ralph Wheelwright, Mahlon Brown, Coroner of Las Vegas Township, Maj. Anderson of the Air Corps, and Harry Pursel of the rescue party.

  Mannix had been asked to go to Garrison’s Mortuary with Wheelwright and identify the body one more time. Ralph asked the attendant if he might cut a lock of Lombard’s hair for Gable and the attendant supplied scissors. Wheelwright placed the unburned snip of hair in an envelope, but then realized that the shock of it might put Gable over the edge. He didn’t tell Gable what he had done; later he would place the envelope in the care of Jean Garceau.

  At the inquest, Mannix stated how he had made the initial identification on the mountain, principally from her blonde hair and the shape of her face. Harry Pursel was asked to explain the process used to retrieve the bodies from the crash site and to confirm that, yes, these two had been found under the wing of the doomed plane. Wheelwright testified that Carole Lombard’s personal papers had been found near the body. Then the coroner’s staff confirmed that the dental charts of Carole Lombard of Encino, California, matched the teeth of the body in the next room. The panel decided on language stating that Carole Lombard had met her death “as a result of injuries sustained in a crash of a TWA liner en route from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.”

  Carole Lombard was agreed to be a native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and, said the panel, “about 32 years of age.” Somewhere Lombard was smiling because she had managed to shave a year off, one of her inside jokes, as admitted to Garson Kanin.

  Back at the El Rancho, Howard Strickling kept close tabs on Clark Gable during the stated time of the inquest. The king still refused to see the many friends who had traveled to Las Vegas. Only Spencer Tracy was allowed in, and the two of them sat quietly and drank. Tracy was the perfect companion on an occasion like this, a gruff man, a hard drinker, and a cynic who could curse the fates right along with his devastated friend and mean every word of it. But underneath the hard shell was the sensitive soul who could charm on the screen. Tracy was a friend or he would not have driven 350 miles through the desert to find Gable, and Clark needed a friend right now more than he could admit or even understand.

  Over at Garrison’s on Fremont Street, attention had turned to the formality of identifying Elizabeth Knight Peters, poor Petey, mother of Carole Lombard, and establishing a cause of death. Then both bodies could be released into the custody of Clark Gable and shipped back to Los Angeles by train the next morning, and Mannix and Strickling could be shed of this godforsaken desert town. No offense against Gable and his dead wife, but life had to go on and after a certain time Gable would return to work and sooner or later find himself a new wife and hopefully make several hit pictures. Of course, Mannix would never say this to Gable’s face because Gable had big fists capable of breaking jaws, but to Mannix, business was business and this most definitely was business.

  The entire process to declare Carole Lombard dead at the courthouse had taken about 15 minutes, and now there was a lull and some murmured conversation. Most everyone was exhausted; almost all the people in the small room had made at least one trip up the mountain in the last 36 hours.

  Deputy Coroner Lawrence eased up from his chair with a grimace, shuffled into the hallway on stiff legs, and there a man from Garrison’s awaited. In a minute Lawrence came back into the inquest room. There had been a complication, he explained. The dental records didn’t match—the body brought down the mountain with Carole Lombard was not that of her mother, Elizabeth Peters.

  This was the last thing Mannix wanted to hear, and the epithets resounded through his brain. Another goddamn day in Las Vegas, Nevada, waiting for the yokels to scrape up more bodies and bring them down the mountain. Sure, he had liked Otto Winkler just fine, but Mannix would have had no problem boarding the train with Lombard and Peters and letting Otto trail along later. Poor Wink was long past giving a damn. Mannix could assign Wheelwright or somebody to stay with Jill Winkler for the transport back to Santa Monica. Business, you know. Mannix always believed you played the hand you were dealt, so at around 11 P.M. he shrugged his burly shoulders, peeled himself off the hard wooden chair, smoothed his rumpled pant legs, and led Ralph Wheelwright into the cold air of Las Vegas, where Ralph had to deal with the press and catch them up on the inquests. But as Mannix lit a cigarette he could content himself with the fact that at least he didn’t have to climb a mountain the next morning, which meant he would sleep well that night.

  37. Just a Few Yards Apart

  Monday’s edition of the Hollywood Reporter featured a black wreath along with portraits of Lombard and Winkler and the simple headline, Goodbye Carole. On page 2 was written, “Carole Lombard died in the line of duty. She was the first casualty of show business in this world war. She was in active service on a mission in defense of the United States—selling Defense Bonds—when death suddenly overtook her in the skies. Caro
le and 21 others who died on that Nevada mountainside are all listed as Soldiers of Their Country.’” A half-page box on page 5 purchased by the Screen Publicists Guild bore the inscription, “We salute OTTO WINKLER for gallant civilian service to his country in the line of professional duty.” Across Hollywood, in all the soundstages, a five-minute silence was observed in their honor.

  Back at the crash scene, work went on. The various investigative teams, feds and TWA corporate, had spent Sunday puzzled over the crash of Flight 3 and on Monday the mystery deepened. Wright Aeronautics, manufacturer of the two 12-cylinder Cyclone engines on NC 1946, sent Clyde Burkett up to the scene from North Hollywood, and he arrived on Monday morning to inspect the engines for signs of failure. By that time most of the bodies and body parts remaining on the mountain had been collected and laid in neat rows at the edge of the ravine away from the crash. Still, Burkett had to step gingerly around a pudding of crash debris mixed with spatters of blood and bone and tissue fragments as he was pointed to the right engine, which lay up near the cliff wall in front of the right wing.

  Burkett could not believe the ferocity of the crash as reflected in twisted metal covering the mountainside as far across and down the steep slope as the eye could see. He found two blades of the right propeller still attached to the hub and trapped under the right wing. The blades were bent in such a way that it was clear the right propeller was spinning at the instant it hit granite. Burkett let out a sharp breath—that solved 50 percent of the problem right there, because if an engine had failed and Wright was found to be at fault for this crash, there would be hell to pay with all the airlines, not just TWA, and with the families of the passengers and the United States Army. He found the third propeller blade from the right engine half melted 10 feet away by the cliff wall.

  Burkett looked around the frozen mountaintop for the left engine, but it was nowhere in sight. He asked one of the Civil Aeronautics men if he had any idea where the left engine might be found, and the CAB man led him across the ravine, past the inverted tail section, past the center section of the left wing, across and down a mountain slope so steep that Burkett just sort of butt-slid where he wanted to go. Walking was difficult; breathing was difficult. Just being up there was oppressive because of the obvious violence of what had happened, the fire and destruction and death. As much as anything, the pall for most of the men on the mountain had something to do with Carole Lombard. Many of the newspaper reporters and photographers had known her in life and could call to mind a story—a break she had given them, an exclusive, or the time she had touched an arm or given a hug or made eye contact and somehow managed to convey to a guy a feeling that was indescribable. To these news people she was as sexy as it got. Not painted-up, lacquered movie-star sexy but flesh-and-blood Real Woman sexy. And everything she did, everything, was at top speed. She moved fast, talked fast, thought fast, cussed fast. Nobody could keep up with her, but then nobody really tried; they were all too drunk from just being around a dish like Lombard.

  Now every newspaper in every home in the land and on every newsstand in every town screamed headlines about the dead movie star and ran her picture, and here in this hellish foreign place was where it all had happened. Where fireball Carole Lombard had finally come to rest in another kind of fireball.

  Burkett also found it a dangerous place as he stepped around twisted, jagged fists of metal higher than his head. He had to watch what he grabbed onto and what he scraped against. Finally, a good 75 feet from the right engine he saw the strange sight of the left engine and nacelle, propellers and hub still attached, lying face down on the steep incline looking for all the world like a beached whale. How the heck that one-ton monster had ended up way down here he couldn’t imagine. He looked up at the cliff directly above. Either the explosion had knocked it down here, or, more likely, it had ricocheted off the cliff and been hurled this far away. Basic physics: action, reaction. A long portion of the left wing had tobogganed down the hill 30 feet past where Burkett and the CAB man stood and now rested against pine trees, but the engine and nacelle had broken off and come to rest here. Uphill from the spot, the engine had bled parts—cylinders, pistons, valves, and gears. And there was a long smear of oil.

  The CAB man stood by waiting for Burkett’s assessment of the left engine, and Clyde edged down through the snow past the length of the nacelle to the propeller hub facing down the mountain. The left engine propeller blades showed the same deformities, the bending and scraping of spinning metal against rock. Both engines were in full operation at the moment of impact, no question about it.

  Up at the base of the cliff, TWA chief pilot Waldon Golien stared at the scars in the scorched cliff wall, indentations where the left wing, the left propeller, the nose, and the right wing and propeller had struck. He looked back over his shoulder at Las Vegas through clear, cloudless sky, and could, and could not, imagine what had happened. Flight 3 had power-climbed up from McCarran carrying a heavy load of passengers and cargo and flown on a beeline to this spot. The left wing had hit the cliff first and levered the fuselage into the cliff in sort of a bang-bang, which meant that the flight crew and passengers had forewarning of, what, a split second of what was about to hit them? The result was spread out below him in a junkyard of aluminum and steel. What he couldn’t figure out was what had possessed Wayne Williams to assume this course. The Sky Club was seven, eight degrees off the standard course out of Las Vegas—everyone knew you headed south and then turned southwest over Goodsprings to Silver Lake and Daggett. He knew Williams to be a good pilot. Hell, Williams’ left-seat time surpassed Golien’s by 3,000 hours! And Golien had personally checked Williams out on this route and the other routes and landed with him at Vegas and took off with him for Burbank and checked him out there as well. He knew this pilot to have a steely eye and a rock-steady hand, and the crash made no sense at all.

  Across the 33 miles of clear blue desert sky, as Golien puzzled and pondered, Clark Gable stepped out of his El Rancho bungalow into the harsh, low sun of Las Vegas in January. Strickling had convinced him that he had a duty to perform, to pick out caskets for Carole, Petey, and Otto. So yes, now that he knew what he must do, he appeared in a dark suit and tie and hid behind sunglasses, and Mannix and Strickling had warned that a photographer would be present at the El Rancho but it was a good one and wouldn’t intrude. Strickling knew that tasteful photos of a grieving Gable would be golden for box office, and so he had permitted the action.

  Mannix and Strickling led Gable to a car where they were driven up Highway 91 three desert miles to the Garrison Mortuary. Nearby loomed seedy casinos, but Gable didn’t see them. He and his handlers arrived at the mortuary quickly and slipped inside anonymously. Las Vegas mayor and local undertaker Hal Garrison, who had led a futile search for the plane less than three days earlier, met them and personally led Clark Gable through the showroom of caskets, explaining the various price ranges. Gable reasoned that she wouldn’t be kept underground—the Great Mausoleum had already been decided upon—so there was no reason to spend extra money on frills. Gable made his choice, three sharp-looking gray steel caskets, and then he was asked the most difficult question of his life: Do you want to view the body of your wife and spend some time with her?

  Suddenly, Clark felt the electric jolt that Ma was here, that they were close, just a few yards apart, and that she was dead. Dead. Which meant that she wasn’t here at all; the woman—wife, friend, lover—was gone. He remembered the words of Mannix and Strickling, what was it, 48 hours earlier? Gable chose to remember Ma in life and not in death. No, he had no interest in spending time with the body. He was whisked out of the mortuary and back into the car for the drive south to the El Rancho.

  Back at the motor court, Gable had an idea, and the king summoned his friend Al Menasco to take him on a drive out in the chilled desert. Menasco was a pilot in his 40s that Gable met during production of one of his pictures, Test Pilot, in 1938. Today a pilot would be especially important to Clark, one
of those joyriders who took to the skies, like that captain who had steered Flight 3 into the cliff. Al was the kind of man who knew things, an engineer, a World War I veteran, and maybe he could help Gable to understand what had happened.

  Strickling was startled by the request for a drive in the desert but figured he should support the decision because Clark Gable had finally decided to do something other than sit and stare. Strickling and Ernie Hawes watched Clark and Al climb into Hawes’ car and pull out, heading south on Highway 91.

  Al took it easy on the drive. They followed the signs pointing the way to the Blue Diamond Mine and pulled off the road within sight of the entrance to the facility. Before them loomed the twin-peaked mountain that Gable knew so well now, knew by sight, the mountain that had swatted Ma out of the sky. It stretched up so high that it looked close enough for him to reach out and touch, but really it was 10 miles off past the desert flatlands and beyond the foothills, this snow-covered giant mocking Gable as he stood by the side of the road with cars whooshing past. His mind was with her, and he didn’t stop to consider the sight that might greet passers-by, the king of the movies standing by a car in the desert, lost and helpless and anything but heroic. He was just a man now, chopped into little pieces by grief, standing there humbled by that goddamn mountain as if its mighty grip had crushed his knuckles and driven him to his knees.

  He stared and he stared—they said the plane had hit in the saddle of the mountain between the peak on the left and the one on the right. They said you could see the spot, the ravine and the burned patch of earth and melted snow, and he squinted the famous Gable squint and tried to see, and it was then he felt as much as saw a movement out of the corner of his eye, half hidden by the rim of his sunglasses. He feared photographers; he feared fans pressing close for an autograph. He looked to his left.