August 18 | 19 Movies
When Carole Lombard died in a plane crash near Las Vegas on January 16, 1942, Hollywood lost one of its favorite people, and the world was robbed of a unique comedic talent. She was born Jane Alice Peters on October 6, 1908, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her grandfather was the co-founder of the Horton Manufacturing Company, which made half of all the washing machines in the world by 1924. Frederic and Elizabeth Knight Peters were well-off members of Fort Wayne society, but the marriage was strained by Frederic’s debilitating, rage-inducing headaches, the result of a devastating elevator accident in 1898. Elizabeth, known as Bess, took her daughter and two older sons to California on a vacation that became permanent, settling in Los Angeles. There, Bess met other affluent people, including members of the Hollywood community, who often told her that Jane was pretty enough for the movies. The girl needed no convincing, she was movie-mad before she was out of elementary school, later remembering “standing at the corner of Hollywood and Vine watching my idol, Gloria Swanson.” In 1921, director Allan Dawn saw Jane Peters playing outside and cast the 12-year-old in a small role in the now-lost A Perfect Crime (1921). Although she loved the experience, she didn’t appear in films again until she left school at 16 for a contract at Fox and changed her name to Carole Lombard.
Life was good for her in October 1925. She turned 17, was making $65 a week and had worked with big stars like Buck Jones and Edmund Lowe. The legendary John Barrymore wanted her to costar in Tempest (1928) and Howard Hawks had cast her in a small part in The Road to Glory (1926), a film about a woman fighting to recover from a car accident. Unfortunately, life imitated art when Lombard was in an accident soon after. Her face was badly cut when the windshield shattered, and she nearly bled to death before being rushed to the hospital. Bess Peters used her contacts to quickly find a plastic surgeon, rather than let the attending doctor simply sew her up. For four hours, Lombard endured surgery without anesthetic because the doctors mistakenly thought that if she was sedated, her facial muscles would permanently droop. She later told her They Knew What They Wanted (1940) director, Garson Kanin, that although she was left with scars that were sometimes visible on screen, she’d been lucky. “Another inch, half an inch maybe, a turn of my head and my whole fuckin’ career could’ve been over.” Still, she would not be working with John Barrymore, her contract was dropped by Fox and the doctors ordered her not to move her head for six months. The ordeal left her determined to learn everything she could about makeup and lighting so she could hide the scars and get back to work. It also left her with the knowledge that every day could be her last, and she was going to make the most of every second.
After recovering, she was hired to be one of the famed Bathing Beauties of Mack Sennett’s comedy shorts. Sennett didn’t care about Lombard’s scars because closeups weren’t important to him, he only asked that she be funny. For two years, Lombard made lasting friendships and learned comedy from some of silent film’s best comedians. But, when talking pictures arrived, it was time for her to move on. She landed at Pathé, run by Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of future president, John F. Kennedy, who gave her a one-year contract at $400 a week in October 1928. The following year, she was having a romance with Howard Hughes and desperate to be in his film, Hell’s Angels (1930), but Hughes soon ended the affair and cast Jean Harlow, instead. To add to her disappointment, she was soon dumped by Pathé after the studio signed Constance Bennett who didn’t want competition from other pretty blondes. Lombard was picked up by Paramount for a seven-year contract starting at $375 a week at the beginning of the Great Depression. At Paramount, she fell in love with one of her movie crushes, William Powell, who she was cast opposite in Man of the World (1931). Powell fell too, and they were married in June 1931. He was 38 and she was 22. His friends thought she was a gold-digger who was using him for publicity, but although the marriage didn’t last long, their close friendship remained for the rest of her life.
Lombard’s films from 1931 to 1934 like No More Orchids (1932) never lost money, but they were unremarkable because she wasn’t given a chance to show the extent of her talent. While forced to appear in her only horror film, 1933’s Supernatural, she famously complained, “Who do I have to screw to get off this picture?” That same year, she would play a librarian opposite her future husband, Clark Gable, in No Man of Her Own (1932), but while they were friendly, there was no chemistry off-screen. Her life and career would change when on loan to Columbia, where Howard Hawks cast her as temperamental stage star Lily Garland, with John Barrymore in Twentieth Century (1934). Hawks thought that the real Lombard was wonderful and hilarious off-screen, but her acting was stiff and “phony.” Her first scenes with Barrymore weren’t good, and Barrymore privately complained. Taking her aside, Hawks asked Lombard to react onscreen the way she would in real life. If she didn’t, he said would replace her. Lombard let loose, screeching and kicking and being melodramatic - everything Hawks wanted. Barrymore later inscribed a photo to Lombard, calling her “the finest actress I ever worked with - bar none.” Twentieth Century was not a box office hit, but it completely changed the critics’ opinion of her as a dull but pretty clotheshorse, with Modern Screen writing that Lombard’s performance “so far [outshone] her former acting that it is surprising.”
After a summer spent on loan at MGM, playing a mobster’s widow in The Gay Bride (1934), Lombard took her mother and best friend to the mountains near Los Angeles for Labor Day. She had just arrived when she received a phone call telling her that her boyfriend, singer Russ Columbo, had been accidentally shot. By the time she reached Los Angeles, he was dead at the age of 26. Eerily, Lombard and Columbo had both felt that something terrible was going to happen in the weeks leading to his death, and Columbo had even seen his priest and made a new will right before he died. While Lombard was devastated by Columbo’s death, she doubled down on her belief that life could end at any minute and she had no time to waste. In the aftermath, Carole Lombard reinvented herself as a screwball, onscreen and off. She made headlines with her outrageous parties, including renting out the entire Ocean Park amusement pier in Venice, California, where painters and carpenters rode the fun house rides with stars and executives alike. One of the most unpretentious stars in Hollywood, she was known for treating everyone the same, regardless of their status. The screwball image was forever cemented when she appeared as wacky heiress Irene Bullock in My Man Godfrey (1936), a part she got thanks to William Powell, who personally requested her at Universal. It earned Lombard her only Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and is the role for which she is best remembered.
Paramount threw her into more comedy roles with her frequent co-star, Fred MacMurray, like a woman stranded in Panama who falls in love with a musician in Swing High, Swing Low (1937) and as a habitual liar in True Confession (1937), reuniting her with Barrymore, who she insisted be cast in the part after his alcoholism had badly damaged his career. She then left Paramount to become a freelancer, making her only Technicolor film, Nothing Sacred (1937), playing a small-town girl who pretends she is dying in order to get a trip to New York, and what she considered the worst film of her career, Fools for Scandal (1938) at Warner Bros, as a movie star visiting France in disguise. Its spectacular failure caused Lombard to return to drama, playing a woman who falls in love with the unhappily married Cary Grant in In Name Only (1939), a wife and mother with James Stewart in Made for Each Other (1939) and the unlikely role of a sacrificing nurse in Vigil in the Night (1940). Although she was, at one time in the late 1930s, the highest-paid woman in Hollywood, none of these films came close to the success of My Man Godfrey, so Lombard once again reevaluated her choices and went back to what she knew best: comedy.
Lombard began dating the married-but-separated Clark Gable in 1936, and it would be her longest relationship. For Gable, she renounced her glamorous party girl ways, gave up her elegantly decorated home, more than a few friends and adopted the activities Gable enjoyed, like fishing and hunting. Although she knew he was chronically unfaithful, they were married during the filming of Gone with the Wind (1939), which Gable reportedly made only to earn enough money to divorce his wife, Ria. They settled down on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley and raised livestock, and Lombard took some time off to try to start a family. After reportedly suffering a few miscarriages, she went back to work - and to comedy - playing a woman who learns she is not legally married, in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) with Robert Montgomery, the only Hollywood comedy Alfred Hitchcock ever directed.
In late 1941, she starred in (and unofficially co-produced) Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) with Jack Benny and Robert Stack. Making a film with an anti-Nazi message was a brave act while there was a strong isolationist movement in the pre-war United States. The film was still in production when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7th, and the next day, Lombard heard President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declaration of war over the radio. She immediately cabled Roosevelt, who she and Gable had met at the White House the year before, and offered their services. Roosevelt advised them to aid in the war effort from Hollywood, and Gable was asked to help organize the Hollywood Victory Committee. Always nervous in crowds, Gable asked Lombard to go on the first war bond selling tour in his place, while he filmed Somewhere I’ll Find You (1942) with Lana Turner.
Lombard threw herself into it enthusiastically and went to Indiana with her mother and Gable’s good friend and MGM press agent, Otto Winkler, who had been best man at their wedding. After beating her $500,000 goal by selling $2 million in war bonds in Indianapolis on January 15th, Lombard wanted to cut the trip short and go home. Rumors had reached her that Gable was having an affair with Turner, and there was supposedly a serious argument about it the night before she left. They had made up over the phone and by telegram, but Lombard was anxious to return. Against her mother and Winkler’s wishes, Lombard wanted to fly, rather than take a train, so she and Winkler tossed a nickel to decide, and Lombard won. The three boarded TWA Flight 3 in the early hours of January 16th, Gable decorated the house, invited friends over to greet her that night and left for what is now Burbank Airport to pick them up. Minutes after the overloaded plane made its last (and unscheduled) stop in Las Vegas, it went badly off course and flew straight into Potosi Mountain, killing all 22 aboard. Carole Lombard became Hollywood’s first casualty of World War II. Although he would marry twice more, when Clark Gable died in 1960, he was interred alongside Carole Lombard.
