One can only speculate about the parts she might have played. Dead at 33, she’d already starred in several films which have gone on to become classics.
Carole Lombard is almost as exciting a star today as she was 70 years ago. That is, her movies are as much a pleasure to watch as they undoubtedly were when they first came out.
Her signature films include My Man Godfrey, To Be or Not to Be, Twentieth Century and Nothing Sacred.
Her enduring appeal has, of course, much to do with her droll, comic approach to her best roles and her sexy likability onscreen. She also had the dubious advantage of dying early while wed to Hollywood’s biggest male star (see below).
Her fairytale marriage to fellow superstar Clark Gable is legendary.
She was Gable’s third wife while he was her second husband. (Her husband No. 1 was William Powell.) She and Gable preferred country living and purchased a 20-acres spread in Encino in the San Fernando Valley. Property was fronted by a white-brick-and-frame Colonial. A homey place with a room set aside for Gable’s collection of rifles.
Their marriage lasted from 1939 until her death in 1942. Clark Gable wasn’t that much older than his bride. She was born in 1908 in Fort Wayne, Ind.; Gable was born seven years earlier in Cadiz, Ohio.
Lombard had been appearing in a series of successful War Bonds rallies in the Midwest when her return flight back to California ended when the airliner slammed into the side of a mountain in Nevada. Lombard, her mother and some 20 other passengers were killed. Gable was devastated.
Both she and Gable had had “pasts.” Translation: In the very much traditional classic Hollywood tradition, they got around a bit.
In response to one of our an earlier Lombard postings, an informed reader, identified simply as Vincent, contributed the following:
Not many are aware of it, but apparently one of (Howard) Hughes’ bedroom conquests was Carole Lombard, around 1929; in fact, it’s believed she lost her virginity to him. In “Screwball,” Lombard biographer Larry Swindell wrote as such, but had to dance around it a bit, describing Hughes but not mentioning him by name.
Vincent also contributed this:
George (Raft) and Carole Lombard (one of many actresses he was intimate with; Lombard reportedly told close friends that Raft was, in the bedroom sense, the best lover she ever had) made two dance films together: “Bolero” (a big hit for Paramount in early 1934, including a scene where Carole dances in lingerie and stockings!) and the less successful “Rumba” a year later.
As we said, Lombard conveyed an effortless sexiness onscreen. She coulda had a truly outstanding career. But there was Gable.
I think I’m one of the few people who actually prefer Carole’s dramatic films over her comedies. But either way, there is no denying she had talent.
“But there was Gable…” and it is said that he first met CAROLE LOMBARD on the set of BEN HUR in 1924,when they were both ‘undiscovered’ mere extras.
The 1976 GABLE & LOMBARD bio-movie, was a mediocre attempt at showing their life together, as it followed the usual HOLLYWOOD simplistic glossed-over tradition of looking at itself.
Carole chose her roles carefully, sometimes just one a year, but by the late thirties she was raking in $35,000 a week as one of HOLLYWOOD’s highest paid actresses. She was briefly married to William Powell, referring to him as, ‘the only intelligent actor I’ve ever met.’ A few years later, in 1936, they teamed up on-screen to make her best picture, MY MAN GODFREY. Carole was Oscar-nominated for it, but lost out to Luise Rainer in The Great Ziegfeld. She enjoyed a lengthy affair with crooner Russ Columbo, but it was tragically cut short when he accidentally shot himself dead while toying with an antique Civil War pistol. Even though she would later famously wed Clark Gable, Carole maintained throughout her short life that Columbo, NOT Gable, was indeed the love of her life.
In her final film released in 1942, TO BE OR NOT TO BE… Lombard’s final film, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and co-starring Jack Benny, a satire about Nazism and World War II, was in post-production at the time of her death. The film’s producers decided to cut part of the film in which Lombard’s character asks, “What can happen on a plane?” out of respect for the circumstances surrounding her death.
By all accounts, Carole Lombard should not have been on this plane in the first place. She had been advised to take a train home, given problematic weather and wartime fears, but insisted on flying instead. She had been strongly urged to return to Hollywood by rail, she had found herself unable to face three days on the ‘choo-choo train.’
The crash was surrounded by mystery at the time. Why did an experienced pilot crash into the mountain, observers wondered? Was it just an accident? Or, given that the U.S. had been attacked at Pearl Harbor just a month earlier, was it something even darker? Had Lombard, the war-effort activist, been sabotaged by German spies?
Another mystery was why Lombard really decided she had to fly. One theory indicates that her hurry to get home was due to a possible affair between her husband and Lana Turner. According to Fireball: Carole Lombard & The Mystery of Flight 3 author Robert Matzen, “At the end of January 15, 1942, she decided she had done her duty – and now it was time to take care of Carole Lombard by getting home to her carousing husband by the fastest means possible. That meant air travel, something expressly forbidden because of the fear of accidents in wintry weather or sabotage by Hitler’s spies. To which the response was predictable: Kiss my ass.”
Matzen mentions that he spoke with a 94 year-old Albuquerque woman who was one of the four passengers ‘bumped’ off Carole’s fateful flight in 1942, to enable the actress, her mother and agent to board. She is the only person still living who had the good fortune to be removed from the passenger list. Carole had used her considerable charm and beauty to get her party aboard the plane that evening.
Carole’s death really knocked Gable about psychologically. As head of the Hollywood Victory Committee, it was he who suggested her as his replacement for the bond-selling tour that cost her life, because he had movie commitments. He also knew that she only chose to fly back to Hollywood, instead of taking the train, because she did not trust him working with Lana Turner. The two stars were making SOMEWHERE I’LL FIND YOU at the time. Everyone knew that the stunning Lana was a notorious man-eater. And Carole knew her husband well enough to expect him to readily offer himself as a meal. As we know, in her haste to get back as soon as possible, she took a plane that flew into a mountainside outside Las Vegas, killing everyone on board.
Racked with guilt and grief, Gable joined the USAF and flew as a turret-gunner in B17s over Germany for a year, participating in at least five missions, maybe more. And they were not ‘milk runs’ either. Sources say that either Goering or Hitler offered a sizeable reward for his capture. Well, maybe. Veterans who served with him debunk stories that he had a death wish because he had not gotten over his wife’s death. By all accounts he was a reliable, level-headed crewman. He resigned his commission in 1944 because he was too old for combat (he was nearly 44). One of the many myths about Gable claims he suffered his fatal heart attack because he insisted on doing his own stunts on his final movie THE MISFITS. That was just not true. He had a stuntman for all of them. In fact, he had a heart attack while changing a tire on a jeep, followed by three more in hospital. The fourth one finished him in seconds.
So maybe HOLLYWOOD’s ideal couple, fairy tale marriage wasn’t so…
CAROLE LOMBARD was probably the most gutsy, outspoken and down-to-earth movie star to ever come out of HOLLYWOOD. More gutsy, and probably even more manly than the ‘King’ himself.
Carole Lombard, birth name Jane Peters, AKA The Profane Angel, The Hoosier Tornado and the Queen of Screwball Comedy, has so many great and often both profane and profound quotes…
“I think marriage is dangerous. The idea of two people trying to possess each other is wrong. I don’t think the flare of love lasts. Your mind rather than your emotions must answer for the success of matrimony. It must be friendship — a calm companionship which can last through the years.”
“When it comes to your personal life, such as love and romance, girls should take a tip from the men and keep their affairs to themselves. Any man worth his salt regards his private life as his own. To kiss a girl and run and tell would mark him as a cad. Why doesn’t that apply to girls also?”
When asked about her love life with ‘the King’, she replied…
‘He’s a lousy lay. A few inches less and they’d be calling him ‘the Queen of Hollywood’.
On another occasion she was asked why she thought her career finally took off after several years in minor features…
‘I think it was adding that fucking ‘E’ that did it’, she laughed. One of her lovers, George Raft, walked into her dressing room as she was casually peroxiding her pubic hairs! ‘Relax, Georgie’, she said. ‘I’m just matching my collar and cuffs.’
This is the anniversary of her death.
Let’s postpone the titillating talk about losing virginity and other salacious details for another day, huh?