Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  Mary proclaimed to a reporter in 2002, “I’ve always been lucky.” She said in 2013, as the last remaining passenger who had ridden aboard Flight 3 on its last day, “I was on government travel. I could have said, ‘I have to stay on this plane.’ But I didn’t. I’m not that aggressive.”

  46. If I Can Do It, So Can You

  Carole Lombard and Elizabeth Peters shared many experiences—including dying—and, prior to that, the writing of wills. In the summer of 1939 both had updated those wills, Carole because of her altered marital status, and Petey because she had moved from Beverly Hills with Tootie to a nice home on North Saltair Avenue in quiet Brentwood. Petey left everything to her three children to be divided equally; Carole, knowing that her brothers would be taken care of by Mother and figuring she would have a long life ahead with Clark Gable, left everything to her husband.

  Announcement was made on January 29, 1942, that Petey’s will had been read and that her sons would share equally and also claim their sister’s portion of an estate valued somewhere in the six figures. Two days earlier, Gable had filed four insurance claims, two to Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company for policies Carole had taken out in 1934 totaling $75,000, one with John Hancock for $25,000, and another with Equitable Life for $10,000.

  Carole’s agreement to accept less salary in exchange for a percentage of To Be or Not to Be, the picture with the name that wasn’t box office, ended up netting her estate, and therefore Gable, $57,307 when audiences flocked to see Lombard on the big screen one last time.

  The money was little consolation for the loss of Ma, yet it was his legally and Clark Gable never met a dollar he didn’t like. Along those lines, Gable now severed ties with Fritz and Tootie; he had just plain disliked Fred from the start; Stu was tolerable enough as a drinking buddy but not the kind of company that Gable would choose to keep had it not been for Carole. In the eyes of Ma and Pa, the wills of Petey and Carole had been written strategically and the boys had gotten all they were going to get.

  One day Stuart’s new wife Virginia telephoned the ranch and Jean took the call. She handed the phone to Gable and after a short, brusque conversation, the king slammed down the receiver. He told Jean that the boys expected to be given Carole’s clothes, so he hung up on Virginia.

  Clark Gable chose not to initiate contact with either brother for the remainder of his lifetime. They had unknowingly hit a nerve—upon his return to the ranch, Clark had closed and locked Ma’s bedroom with all the contents inside, and he wasn’t about to touch it for anyone. As much as the crypt at Forest Lawn was a tomb, so was Lombard’s bedroom at the farm, a tomb like those for the pharaohs in Egypt. All that Carole would need for the afterlife remained intact and ready, from her jewelry to her furs, hats, dresses, shoes, purses, hairbrushes, compacts, and lip rouge. Where she had last set them, that’s where they would remain—just one more little way Pa could be close to Ma.

  In the days after her death, Clark made pals with Carole’s dachshund, Commissioner, a dog he had never liked. Clark also continued to feed and care for the doves. Otherwise, he remained a man alone, drifting about Hollywood. When Lucille Ball occasionally heard a motorcycle coming up Devonshire Drive in Chatsworth, she would know the king was stopping by to talk about the queen for a while, and she would accommodate him. She felt that he was a man in trouble and might do himself harm, that he rode that bike “so recklessly,” and so she would encourage him to leave the bike parked there so she could drive him where he needed to go. He didn’t care; sure, whatever.

  Gable returned to MGM to resume production of Somewhere I’ll Find You with Lana Turner. MGM contract stars Robert Taylor and Franchot Tone were two who experienced shock at the change in Gable, describing him as “bleary-eyed and haggard.”

  When Gable blanched at the now-ironic title of this picture, MGM changed it to Red Light, then later changed it back. The story remained a typically sassy MGM action romance covering the outbreak of the world war. Gable stumbled around the soundstages, a man lost, his confidence shot, trying too hard to cover his grief. His performance was shrill, and in every scene his eyes revealed death and mourning. On the Culver City lot he was hit with a double-barreled dose of reality because yes, Ma was gone, but so was Wink, the man always present at MGM to serve him. Said Howard Strickling of Gable’s life in the happy old days, “He’d expect Otto down [on the set] every morning because Otto was his pal. Sometimes Otto would go down on the set and if Clark was busy, Otto would almost cry. They had a great devotion, these two.” Gable realized in hindsight what he had had prior to January 16, what he had so taken for granted, and what he had lost, not only a one-in-a-million wife, but a one-in-a-million best friend in Otto Winkler.

  Gable finally learned of the existence of the lock of hair that Wheelright had cut at the mortuary. Pa asked Jean to have a locket created that would hold strands of the hair and the fragment of diamond-and-ruby clip recovered at the crash site. He intended to wear it around his neck every minute, day and night, so he could keep Ma right next to his heart.

  Everyone on the MGM lot deferred to the grieving man and kept a respectful distance, including Lana. But she refused to experience any guilt over the fact that Clark and Carole had quarreled over Gable’s fascination with Turner. Lana later shrugged at the thought and said, “No one forced Carole to take the plane. It was her decision and her decision alone.”

  Joan Crawford sensed Clark’s crushed spirit and invited him over to her home in Brentwood. He went, every night, and sought solace in his once-and-again lover’s arms. Crawford was Crawford; there was no one else like her. An original, like Lombard, except Joan was all pretense and sweeping gesture. But oh, how she could comfort him with that silken, sympathetic voice and talented body.

  He drifted through the months on a sea of booze. He knew he was no longer the man of the Gable brand, and so did MGM. He just didn’t give a damn anymore. The studio desired that its cash cow would remain in Hollywood for the duration of the war, but Gable didn’t want to make pictures; Gable wanted to die, and the best way to accomplish that was to enlist and go to war in airplanes so that if he got it, he would go down like Ma and be close to her in one final way.

  Of Gable’s subsequent enlistment in the Army Air Corps, the same branch as those 15 fliers lost with Lombard, Richard Lang said, “I don’t think that Clark was patriotically impelled; I think he was suicidally impelled, as if to say, if she died I want to as well.”

  Jill Winkler was similarly lost without her Winkie. Jill’s niece Nazoma quit her job at a movie theater in North Hollywood to care for Jill. Said Gail Strickling of Jill, “She couldn’t accept this thing. She kept going into these awful relapses.” During a low point, Jill escaped her niece’s attention and drove to a cliff above the ocean, where she contemplated suicide. “She was sitting there thinking, should I do this or not,” said Nazoma, “and was planning to do it when she heard Carole’s voice: ‘No, Jill, no! Don’t you do it!’ So Jill backed away and came home and no longer contemplated suicide. ‘No,’ she told her niece, ‘Carole doesn’t want me to do that.’” Lombard’s forceful presence would come to Lucille Ball in a similar way. In 1951, a 39-year-old Ball seemed to have worn out her welcome on the big screen and considered a last-ditch, highly doubtful move to television. Her doubts vanished when Carole Lombard appeared in a vivid dream and said, “Honey, go ahead. Take a chance. Give it a whirl.”

  Gable made sure that Jill Winkler would have a roof over her head and paid for construction of a ranch house in Encino on Louise Drive directly across the street from the Stricklings and just a mile from the Gable ranch. Otto had purchased the lot, but Gable paid for construction, using his own money or under-the-table funding from TWA. Officially, airline president Jack Frye was notified on October 17, 1942, by internal memo that, “The passenger liability claims of Lombard, Peters, and Winkler have been settled for a total of $40,000.” This shockingly low number did not reflect the July 1942 published results of the House investigatio
n, which ascribed blame for the crash and the “appalling loss” to Wayne Williams. The House also blamed the Labor Board for reinstating the pilot back in 1933.

  The fact that the Lombard, Peters, and Winkler claims were settled together indicates MGM’s involvement representing the estates on Gable’s behalf. For some reason, Clark had signed away his rights to sue the airline, and had encouraged the attorneys for Peters and Winkler to do the same. These actions hint at an under-the-table solution to the claims between MGM and TWA that would keep the matter out of newspapers. Said Howard Strickling, cryptically, “Clark refused to make any settlement until they did the right thing by Jill.”

  On August 11, 1942, almost seven months after the crash of TWA Flight 3, Clark Gable drove his motorcycle the mile's distance from the ranch to Jill’s newly completed house on Louise Avenue where Jill and her niece Nazoma sat eating breakfast; just two turns separated the Gable and Winkler homes. Clark was one day away from being sworn into the Army, and he said to Jill, “Honey, I’m going over there and I don’t give a damn if I come back. But if I do come back, you and I will get married.” It was something to bank on for two lonely souls adrift, knowing there might be a haven out there somewhere, beyond the pain.

  The next day, Clark Gable enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army Air Corps. A deal had been pre-arranged between the War Department and MGM: Gable would complete Officers Candidate School in 13 weeks and then ship out to Europe, where he would shoot a feature documentary to recruit machine gunners to serve on heavy bombers. He was now 41 and looked all that and more after seven brutal months of grief and drinking. Now he fell in with young men half his age who possessed many times his vitality. The old Gable would have sought favors and cut corners; the new Gable played by the book and began to garner respect. At the end of October he graduated as Second Lieutenant Clark Gable. A little more than two months later, he earned aerial gunner wings and, some months after that, promotion to captain. Each accomplishment provided some satisfaction—Ma would be proud—but never happiness. The capacity for happiness had left him.

  He shipped over to England with the 508th squadron of the 351st Heavy Bombardment Group, 1st Air Division, Eighth Air Force. In May he took his camera up on a B-17 bombing run over Belgium. An enemy shell shot up through the bottom of the fuselage and out the top, missing him by an inch. He went up again as soon as possible. He would go on to shoot thousands of feet of Technicolor film for his documentary about life in a bomber, flying missions more dangerous than anything concocted by MGM. He kept Ma right at hand in that locket he wore around his neck. John Lee Mahin, the man assigned by MGM to look after Gable in the service, said Clark would often touch the locket, which was, he murmured at one point, “All I have left of her.”

  During his time in England, many men in Gable’s group died. When they did, he took it personally. “He would write wonderful, compassionate, connected letters to the families of comrades in arms who had died,” said Carole Sampeck. “I’ve seen some of them. Just beautiful. He could have been spending his time going out and getting laid; that ability to connect with people was something that Lombard gave him.”

  By October 1943 the Eighth Air Force could no longer stand life with a king in its midst. He was a captain but without the military experience to command, and the commotion produced by his presence was counterproductive to an effective war machine.

  The Army packed Clark Gable up and shipped him home to Los Angeles. He arrived in a smartly tailored Army Air Corps uniform with a chest full of medals and ribbons, and cans and cans of Technicolor film ready to make his movie. There he learned from General Hap Arnold that there was no longer a need for a film to recruit aerial gunners. The Army had plenty now, which meant that Gable must find another angle for a film that nobody really wanted or needed. Disillusioned, forced to face life after combat at an all-too-tranquil ranch, he set to editing a feature documentary that he knew had become obsolete. It starred the commanders and fliers of the 351st and included Gen. Arnold along with shots of Bob Hope and Frances Langford entertaining the troops in England. Gable collaborated on the editing at MGM and narrated the hour-long picture, which carried the final title of Combat America.

  In January 1944 Captain Gable in Army uniform attended the launch of a 441-foot, 10,500-ton Liberty freighter called the S.S. Carole Lombard at the port of San Pedro, California. Irene Dunne christened the ship, with Fieldsie as matron of honor. Louis B. Mayer and several politicians spoke. Gable was asked to give remarks but as usual declined and stood there weeping as the ship slid into the water.

  A new Gable emerged from the process of grief and wartime sacrifice. No, he would not marry Jill Winkler; neither of them really wanted that. He stayed close to Fieldsie for a time and every six weeks or so she would host a party, where the king hung out with Lombard’s pals Cesar Romero and Fred MacMurray as well as Ty Power and John Payne. “All actors are children,” said Richard Lang, an observer of this gang of five. “The ego and self-importance are always there. I saw them relaxed and they were letting off steam.” Gable never lacked feminine companionship, whether it was producer Joan Harrison, model Anita Colby, or the woman people figured he would marry, actress Virginia Grey. Everyone knew he had changed, and always the same words described him. Sad. Isolated. Haunted. Alone.

  No longer a boy, now a man; no longer self-involved, now the product of five years with Carole Lombard. “It was unbelievable how both characters changed,” said Jean Garceau of those five years. “He was pinch penny and worried about everything. She had great assurance and was very generous…. They rubbed off on each other.” No one understood just how much, especially Gable, until she was gone.

  “It was an epiphany that he had,” said Carole Sampeck. “The good part of her lived on in him. She couldn’t even get him to really communicate, to give of himself while she lived, but all of a sudden, he got it.”

  Even acerbic Orson Welles would describe Gable as “…terribly nice. Just a nice big hunk of man.”

  Early in 1945, with Clark a retired Army major, he cracked up his car on Sunset Boulevard; the king was DUI in the middle of the night and taken hush-hush by Strickling’s people to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where Gable spent days recuperating from a laceration and concussion. His doctor happened to mention another MGM patient at the hospital at that time, contract player Susan Peters, a rising star in the studio system who had been paralyzed in a shooting accident the New Year’s Day just past. It was clear she would never walk again, and her spirits were low. The old Gable might have felt sympathy for a moment and then gone on with his day. The new Gable went further and asked to see her.

  “I must have startled him,” said Susan Peters of Clark Gable, “for at that time I was a bag of bones and had my hair in pigtails which I am told made me look a sharp 12. I was almost completely hidden by strange bottles, tubes, lamps, and other weird hospital gadgets. But if he was dismayed he certainly didn’t show it.”

  They chatted for a while. The next day Gable sent her flowers.

  When she finally returned home from the hospital, MGM arranged for Peters to write a series of articles for Photoplay magazine entitled, “My Hollywood Friends,” and late in 1945 she called Gable asking for an interview. The king had turned down the entire legion of Hollywood scribes since Lombard’s death. He simply would not talk to the press or consider talking. But after almost four years, to Susan Peters he said yes and just before Christmas drove to her house in Malibu. There he sat, poised and patient, for questions from the wheelchair-bound waif, who brought up the touchy subject of his wife’s loss. Peters described Gable’s “loneliness when he spoke of Carole Lombard…, their fishing and hunting trips together and the wonderful times they had. He was leaving on a fishing trip the next day. Fishing trips aren’t the same any more but above all he wanted to be away through the holidays.”

  Flash forward another three years when Gable would seek out a woman named Nedra Etting, whose husband, popular singer Buddy Clark, h
ad been killed in a freak air crash in Beverly Hills. When asked why he had contacted Etting, he explained that he could understand what she was going through. Said actress Ursula Theiss: “I remember Clark telling me about this incident of getting together because both of them were in the same boat. Nedra taught him to turn on the television and look at some old movies of Carole, because she [Nedra] was able to listen to her husband’s records. So this is the way they helped each other.”

  In the old days, Gable had been a lot more fun, a big kid, a giggler with Lombard, and now he had developed a compassionate streak that would indeed have made Ma proud—never more so than at the holidays in 1944. Alice Marble had been married to an Army pilot for a year, had gotten pregnant, and then suffered a miscarriage after a car crash. At the Battle of the Bulge, Alice’s new husband was shot down and killed in Belgium; she received word during the singing of Christmas carols at a party with friends. Telegram in hand, one that read, “We regret to inform you…,” she walked to her room and swallowed a bottle’s worth of sleeping pills. She was rushed to the hospital and barely survived.

  Back at the ranch, Clark Gable learned of Allie’s plight from Teach Tennant. In the old days Carole would have coached him on what to do, but now Gable didn’t need any coaching. He acted on new instincts.

  In her hospital room, Alice Marble lay there grieving for her husband, believing there was no reason to go on. Life was over. Husband gone. Unborn child gone. The one person who might have been able to understand was Missy Carole, Allie’s benefactor who had shared all her confidences, who always knew the right thing to say, the right thing to do, and the right advice to give. God bless. Angels keep.